Re: [PEN-L] Soviet history

[Waistline2]

>>>The most interesting part of the review Louis cites is really the following one, where the reviewer talks about Haynes's book: "While reading this book I thought frequently of my nineteen-year-old son, a college sophomore. Radicalized by current events, like many idealistic youth, he is seeking a meaningful alternative (...) I may now well give him Haynes's book to read, not because I agree with its approach--I do not--nor because I find it the best and most thorough single-volume survey of Soviet history available; I would give that honor to Ron Suny's Soviet Experiment. But Haynes has managed, in a relatively brief work, simultaneously to capture the passion for change that motivated the original Bolshevik revolution with a coherent (if ultimately unsatisfactory) explanation of its long-term failure. (...) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=153541106927452 Some kind of education!<<<     Comment   Actually, "The Soviet Experiment" by Ronald Grigor Suny Oxford University Press, 1998 has been my desk text for figures and concise information on Soviet history and specific episodes concerning the national question in the last round of the rather tired "Stalin versus Trotsky" debates. Nevertheless, these are the raw figures used concerning incarcerations, political executions and flip flops in policy concerning marriage and women. Also very informative and sitting on the desk is "A State of Nations" edited by Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin, Oxford University Press 2001. The index and chronology of the Soviet Experiment is worth the price. Perhaps several months ago a writer at Marxmail requested information concerning death executions under the Stalin regime and this was the source material I sent directly to them. No one can undo the past and no one is required to justify the Stalin period one way or another. Socialism as a political transition in the form of property relations can in fact express a variety of constitutional forms and/or anti-democratic and military forms of political compliance. Slavery in America became and was a bourgeois property relations with a distinct form of "extra economic coercion."  Herein resided the inner antagonism - yet it did in fact exist. Not only could the slaves not enter the market as buyers but the form of labor was a tremendous block to incentive to develop the laboring process itself.    Without slavery my wife and I and all our children would not exist. I of course think that slavery - American style was worse than anything that existed in the Soviet Union from every point of view. The human cost was staggering.  Was the Stalin Regime brutal? Without question yes.   The bottom line lesson is determining who wins in the political contest. Melvin P.