I agree with your reservations about the term Stalinism, I just don't have a better one.
I agree with about the good Czar with under Stalinism, but that is not an example of socialist democracy -- I don't think you think it is either.
jks
Chris Doss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Chris Doss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
--- andie nachgeborenendon't care if it isn't a Russian word, I don't think
the Russians understand the Soviet era any better than
Western specialists. Which isn't very well -- I speak
having been one once.
--
Well, the Russians (Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. etc.
etc.) do have the advantage of having lived there.
Then again they had poor access to information (as did
Westerners, in a different way.)
My problem is that 1) the word "Stalinism" is used for
a whole lot of different societies and periods, so
that Romania is treated as no different from the GDR,
or the Khrushchev era is referred to as "Stalinist"
even though he denounced the Father of the Peoples,
and 2) when the word is applied in the West it is
usually tied up with a bunch of misconceptions about
what life was actually like in those countries.
---
As rto Charles and Chris' point that Stalinist
repression was selective and popular and that the
regime took account of public opinion, of course. We
revisionist Sovietologists argued that point against
the totalitarianism school for 35 years. That doesn't
mean, however, that Stalinism was democratic or that
it was controlled by ordinary working people the way
most of us here would want socialism to be. That is
obvious too, don't you agree? I mean, as the Old Man
said, a worker's state wouldn't have a political
police.
--
Oh, the backing of the people for Stalin was more like
the backing of the simple people for the tsars or the
Pharoah than anything else. In the 30s, the USSR was
still a largely illiterate peasant country with little
access to information whose populace was used to
seeing the Leader as something akin to God.
Do you Yahoo!?
New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
