:de: Controversial Lenin statue unveiled in Germany's Gelsenkirchen

[Balto1]

This is why communism just can’t stack up to capitalism, it only takes five years for 100 million to die under captlitalism.

 

[Kaninchen]

The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.

You know the phrases about teaching fish to swim or grandmothers to suck eggs?

 

[Regular_Atheist]

It will be hard to respond to all of this in a way that’s concise, you could write books on it.

What do you think of Lenin’s ordering the execution of thousands?

I think the Bolsheviks understood the importance of maintaining political power, and I think that without the Red Terror it is reasonable to think that the Bolsheviks may have lost that power. There had been assassination attempts on Lenin prior to the start of the terror, and the Bolsheviks had seized power in circumstances where the vast majority of the country were members of the peasantry, a class that is inherently hostile to socialism. The NEP was eventually introduced as a concession to this class, something that Lenin noted as a development into ‘petty bourgeois capitalism’, an economy based on small-scale commodity production rather than the decommodified society that communism would be. We also have the example of ‘Soviet Hungary’ where the essentially communist government led by Bela Kun was brought down by Hungarian nationalists and social-democrats, and it’s hard not to see this as partly the result of leniency.

Kronstadt?

A product of peasant opposition to the Bolshevik government and the communist programme. It’s clear that this was a factor in the implementation of the NEP, as the sailors called for the defense of the peasant commodity economy. I think the Bolsheviks probably did believe they were a credible threat to the revolution (the White general in exile in Turkey, Wrangel, wanted to use them as a springboard for invasion, and I believe so did another anti-Bolshevik group in exile that they eventually made contact with, maybe SRs). Overall though it was a symptom of the fact that the conditions in Russia at the time were not conducive to socialism, and that the Soviet Republic was essentially forced to develop into capitalism. The only thing that could have relieved it was the international revolution.

Or are all those justified for your imagined revolution?

I’m not a wannabe tyrant or a latent historical monster. I’m not optimistic enough to believe in major social revolution anytime soon, and I do not fethise violence or political oppression. Lenin and the Bolsheviks weren’t tyrants though, they were part of a class dictatorship implementing the programme of a specific class, and I don’t see why they should have jeopardized this by sharing power with hostile forces. At best they were good communists who understood Marx and the necessity for political power, at worst they were victims of circumstance. The revolution was essentially degenerating from the moment they took power given that it was isolated and took place in a peasant economy, and the country that eventually emerged was a bourgeois state like any other. The USSR held back the communist movement internationally for decades given that it held control of the Comintern, an organisation that was originally attended as a vehicle for the world revolution but quickly just became a vehicle for Soviet foreign policy.

 

[StudentMI]

Well thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut. Sorry for the confrontational tone with the imagined revolution line.

 

[ATraveller]

This is why communism just can’t stack up to capitalism, it only takes five years for 100 million to die under captlitalism.

Can you provide a credible source for this claim? Preferably a source where one can actually examine how the figures were obtained and the mathematical models used to produce this claim.