Honestly, I'm not sure why you'd keep reading and linking to someone who spouts drivel like this:

But that's not the main point. I wholly reject the premises of your argument: that Stalin was comparable to Hitler, that the Ukraine famine (or the many other Stalinist and communist crimes) was a crime comparable to the Holocaust, and that people who misguidedly minimise or defend the terror under Stalin are comparable to Holocaust deniers. In fact, I would claim that this position is itself the subtle and respectable face of Holocaust denial: Holocaust relativisation. 'So Hitler killed six million? Stalin killed sixty (or forty, or twenty) million!' It's the great lie of our time, conclusively refuted by the Soviet archives - though the truth, God knows, is horrifying enough. To tell you the truth, I am personally more anguished by the raw numbers from the archives than by the many speculative and wildly inflated figures I have read over the years. I'm not, however, going to argue over numbers or details.

Yes, let's not quibble over numbers. The fact is that millions died due to deliberate starvation by Stalin's regime. This is "the great lie of our time"? What's the lie? The number killed? Macleod doesn't want to talk about numbers. So he talks about a "great lie" and about it being "conclusively refuted", but he's so incomprehensible I can't tell what exact lie he's referring to and exactly how it's refuted.

It certainly sounds as if he's saying that 60, 40, or 20 million dead are gross exaggerations, but then he turns around and says he's "anguished by the raw numbers". What, if not 20 million, does he think the "raw numbers" are?

Macleod vacillates between arguing that the Soviet Union wasn't really all that bad after all, and seemingly excusing any wrongdoing as necessary evils (necessary to defend themselves from conquering armies and to "drive and dragoon their empire into the twentieth century".

The very paragraph you quote seems to be excusing the police state paranoia and savage brutality of Stalin's tactics (such as his "blocking detachments", groups of soldiers whose sole job was to shoot deserters) as necessary.

As I've said elsewhere, they had to beat their ploughboys into swordsmen. And if they chose that, there would be those who would flinch, those who would panic, those who would revolt and those who would betray. There was no way of knowing in advance who these might be. There was no benefit of the doubt to be given doubters. One slip could be fatal. There was not an inch to be given.

So see? Stalin had to terrorize his own hapless soldiers and citizenry. The price was too high; the risks were too great. There was no other way.

Sorry...but this stuff is garbage.

I keep reading and linking to him because I find him interesting. If he bores you, don’t read him, and don’t read my posts about him. Like I said, there’s a lot in there that I can't make myself agree with.

My only position on the Stalin vs. Hitler debate (since from a historian’s point of view the Soviet Union isn’t my area and the middle twentieth century isn't my period) is that it’s stupid, pointless, and usually put to bad ends.

But in regard to what I quoted, Derek, let me ask you this: Do you think that the people of the former Russian empire would have been better off under the Nazis? If not, how — starting from the political, technological, military and economic position of Russia in 1917 — would you have prevented that from happening without resorting to any of Stalin's methods?

If he bores you, don’t read him, and don’t read my posts about him.

I didn't say he was boring. Inflammatory, outrageous, morally obtuse. But not boring.

Do you think that the people of the former Russian empire would have been better off under the Nazis?

Of course not.

If not, how — starting from the political, technological, military and economic position of Russia in 1917 — would you have prevented that from happening without resorting to any of Stalin's methods?

Are you honestly arguing that brutal oppression and draconian tactics are the only way to defend your country or wage a war? The only way to deal with unruly peasants is to starve them to death? The only way to mobilize an army is to put guns at their backs?

Are you honestly positing that the only way for Stalin to successfully defend the homeland was to starve millions of Ukrainian peasants?

Desperate times call for desparate measures, huh? Good grief.

No, no, depends on the army, and of course not (for Christ’s sake).

Actually, I’m not arguing anything, I'm asking a question. And I’m not asking it about my country or a war. I’m asking about the actual state of Russia between the wars and the actual German invasion.

You’ve got one of the most backward countries and most demoralized armies in the world. You’ve only got a handful of years before the most lethal war machine yet seen in the history of the world — an “army from the future,” as MacLeod says, from your perspective — comes over the border.

What do you do? Not what do you not do, but what do you do?

The short answer is: I would try to lead my country in a way that would not go against every ideal I believe in.

I'd more than likely would have made decisions that led to our defeat. I don't know. I don't claim to be an expert on the economic, military, and industrial capabilities of the early Soviet Union. But any commander has options.

One presumption that seems as if it's being made on Stalin's behalf is that he had no other choice (as if he were motivated purely by what would save the motherland, and not monstrous ambition, paranoia, hatred, and spite). His goal was the starve the Ukrainians into submission, not to prepare as effectively as possible for a German invasion. How many resources, both in terms of human lives and wheat crops alone were squandered by such slash and burn social policy? Stalin was not only instituting cruel and sociopathic policy, he was weakening his ability to combat the Germans.

But even if the decision were one that came down to cold equations, personally I'd rather die fighting for the values I believe in than compromise them all. If you were the leader of a country under seige from a superior adversary, would you advocate the slaughter of everyone over a certain age (say, 70), on the grounds that they are nothing but a drain on resources?

Personally, I'd rather die trying to defend them.

But again, this presumes that Stalin was motivated by what was best for his people overall. Ironic that Macleod rationalizes and defends Stalin's policies, even as they clearly undercut the most basic precepts of socialism. "To each according to his needs" certainly did not seem to apply to the Ukrainians. More like "Sorry, but you peasants are all fucked...we've got a war to fight".

This is why MacLeod is a tankie -- a Trot who tails Stalinism. Stalin's meat-grinder industrialization was only tangentially related to the rise of Nazism, however his "socialism in one country" and his direction of the Comintern to declare social democrats "social fascists" certainly made room for fascism to rise.

Hyperindustrialization and one-man management was the destruction of the revolution, and not at all its defense. How can we tell? Because Stalin cooperated with the Allies in the destruction of post-war communisms that weren't under his direct control (Greece and the Korean peninsula are the most prominent instances).

What do you do when your nation faces the army of the future? Well, if you're a Marxist you realize that such an army is only built on the destruction of the working class as a political force and its inslavement to a fascist regime -- and you work to help those workers overthrow that regime. You don't cooperate with it, then replicate it to defend against it!

I don’t think, regardless of what everyone’s goals were back in ‘17, you can really make sense of the history of the Soviet Union except as a Russian nationalist project. The tragedy is that it took so long for the Left elsewhere to figure that out.

But I'm just a bourgeois intellectual — what do I know?

(And if I want to look at that MacLeod quote I pulled out from a political perspective rather than a literary one, the fundamental problem is the word “rulers.”)

And if I want to look at that MacLeod quote I pulled out from a political perspective rather than a literary one, the fundamental problem is the word “rulers.”

And I'd say the fundamental problem with the quote is that it hypocritically rationalizes brutal and genocidal behavior antithetical to the core tenets of the belief system the author supposedly embraces.

David - I think you're right about the Soviet Union after 1924 or so being fundamentally a Russian nationalist project. It wasn't, at first; there was a strong belief that socialist revolutions were going to sweep the world in the aftermath of the Great War. But once that failed to materialize, the Soviet government had a serious problem on its hands: socialism was supposed to follow the collapse of capitalism, but Russia had never experienced capitalism, and so wasn't economically or socially prepared for socialism (according to their own political theories!). Moreover, it was believed at the time that socialism - as opposed to social democracy - could not work in one country in isolation; it required a worldwide scale. So how do you make "socialism in one country" work, especially when that country is largely pre-capitalist, not post-capitalist? This is a problem the Soviets never resolved in a way that was ideologically consistent.

Over the course of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the protection of the Russian nation became conflated with the protection of the Revolution. This fact should have been brought home quite strongly when the various communist movements in other countries were told, after the pact with Germany, to make peace with the fascists. There was no way in which such an action was reconcilable with the goals of socialism.

Similarly, much of what conservatives in the west decry as the evils of Stalinism were simply the evils of the 18th- and 19th- century tsars wrought on a wider scale. Population transfer as a means of political control? Prisoner camps in Siberia? Starving one's political enemies to bring them to heel? Catherine the Great did all of these, 150 years before Lenin came along. Stalin took this abusive statecraft to new heights, to be sure, but all of the mechanisms he used had long histories within the Russian polity. He was not an innovator, in that sense, in the way that Hitler was.

aphrael mostly nailed it. I'd perhaps quibble with the year the revolution was lost and subsumed entirely into a statified-bourgeois project (after the end of the '27 Chinese attempt at revolution and the creation of the first Five Year Plan in '28).

It's worth noting that revolutions and revolutionary periods did emerge in Germany, Italy, Hungary, China and other countries in the wake of October, but none of them were able to achieve a victory. It wasn't a foolish belief that revolution could happen, but victory was never assured. Lenin himself said something like "If Germany has a revolution, our revolution will stand. If not, it will be destroyed." By 1928, he was proven right.

Nick - I have no attachment to 1924 per se; it was a date pulled out of the recesses of memory. 1927 would do just as well. It's also worth noting that it was a *gradual* process; there's no clear line you can point to.

Note MacLeod's latest self-critical post, where he acknowledges that his paean to Stalin had nothing to do with elemental Marxism and much to do with the coarsest sort of British nationalism.