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Sorry I forgot to clip my original post. Take two. This is a good example of the self-satisfied ignorance that abounds in Soviet scholarship these days. Assertions like these can pass as serious scholarship--even in respectable journals--only because few among contemporary academics are informed or disinterested enough to challenge them. Yet there is method in this ignorance. By arguing that Stalin was "intelligent" and a committed "ideologue", scholars like Montefiore and now Kotkin intend to prove that Stalin was a true representative of original Bolshevism rather than its perverter. Yet how can "consistency" be imputed to anyone who claimed that socialism could only be established on an international basis, and, contrarily, that it could be built in one country--all in the course of a single year (1924)?; who could pose as a friend of the peasantry, and paint Trotsky as the peasant's enemy in 1926, only to turn around and savage the peasantry in the brutal collectivization that began in 1928?; who could claim that capitalism was i n stable equilibrium in 1926, and claim, with no relation to the facts, that it had entered a "third period" of revolutionary upheaval in 1928? Weres any of these abrupt turns "ideologically consistent" because they were couched in pseudo-Marxist phraseology? Did it ever occur to anyone before Montefiore and Kotkin to call Iago or Richard the Third "intelligent" because their petty duplicity was effective in achieving short-term ends? And if Stalin was so true to the Leninist legacy, why did he find it necessary to finish off not only every living member of Lenin's general staff, but their wives and children? And can anyone who has read both Trotsky and Stalin, with his static formulae and leaden prose, seriously argue that the two were anywhere even remotely on the same intellectual plain? The mind boggles! Jim Creegan _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
