The great purge was it really as bad as western historians say it was? Was it necessary and or justifiable?

Yes and he was right, the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore.

HOWEVER, just maybe that sowed seeds of animosity that wouldn't exist otherwise.

This is a pretty good analysis imo. Besides improving upon the cultural revolution, what other ways are better at combating revisionism?

no
also no

the USSR could have been a literal satanic dystopia and the burgers would still lie about it

I should add that while Mao's general approach was correct in that he wanted the checks on revisionism to come from below rather than above, the cultural revolution itself was also a major failure. Not only this, but it would have been unnecessary in a healthy inner-party democracy in the first place. The situation is really that simple imo, you don't need to bombard the headquarters if you can just recall shitty party officials and elect new ones without worrying about getting purged for factionalism because you supported a prominent opposition member. The problems with ML (and Maoism by extension) is that they don't allow for a wide enough range of criticism, or genuine democracy really. Thus the people cannot hold the party accountable.

This. Even if you think that Trotsky, Bukharin and co were plotting a coup, it seems clear to me that they wouldn't have done so unless they thought that there was no way to remove Stalin through legal means. I seriously doubt they would have done anything if Stalin hadn't killed inner party democracy by disbanding the left and right oppositions. The ban on factions was a mistake, at least without setting an automatic expiration or something. The greatest flaw of the Bolsheviks and 20th century socialism by extension was that they allowed what a should have been reserved for a state of emergency to become the normal conduct of socialist government.

but it literally happened because of how the government swapped out under everyone's feet. Stalin had to manipulate a bureaucracy that was already there before without his will.

The bureaucracy began to develop due to the needs and conditions of the civil war, and imo centralized planning lends itself to bureaucratization of the state (without cybernetics at least). However Stalin's response didn't solve the problem, and in the long run made things worse.

Hard to know for sure, possibly
Probably not
Some purging, maybe. That many? No

No, No, Maybe.
But was it Stalin? Take a look.
greanvillepost.com/2017/11/12/yezhov-vs-stalin-the-causes-of-the-mass-repressions-of-1937-1938-in-the-ussr-2/

If anything, it was too limited.

justification is a spook

Stalin was a real ass dude but he had some…issues that become increasingly worse with time. This however is not the main reason for the cannibalization of his own apparatus, the sad reality is that both Iosef and the autistic austrian hippie were constantly being played like a fiddle by british intelligence

There were two layers to the "great purge"; the legitimate purge of the Trotsky-Zinoviev left bloc, and the illegitimate Yagoda-Yezhov terror, carried out by fascist sympathizers who Stalin had executed for their crimes.

Stalin didn't allow Yezhov to do it. Once he found out what he was doing through Beria he had him executed.

Not at all
No
No

Yes, the great purge was horrible, but it's still going on. Every year another 10 million gets added to the total death toll of communism.

Stalin was right to purge the officer corps. It was full of czarists and reactionaries. A former white Russian general got spared, and what did he do? Betrayed the Soviet Union to Hitler, feeding the Nazi high command Intel and advising them on Barbarossa and misdirecting the red army counter attack efforts.

Purge was justified.

...

The USSR won the Winter War, and the Finns conceded more territory than was ever demanded by the Soviets

it's a common tactic among anti-communists to cry about "muh k/d" whenever confronted with the fact that they kept losing against communists.
whenever you bring up the Winter War, they say "t-the Finns killed more people though!"
whenever you bring up the Vietnam War, they say "t-the Americans killed more people though! a-and we like, completely fucked them up with agent orange and napalm! t-take that!"
whenever you bring up Rhodesia they say "t-the based whites killed more people though!"
i've even seen people say that "they didn't even wan't to win! they just wanted to test weapons and kill more people!"
it's pathetic really, they must be seething about getting cucked.

There is this thing called "tactical defeat, strategic victory" The USSR achieved it's strategic objective of putting a bufferzone between Finland and Leningrad and they did it with acceptable causalities, and thats what matters, life is not CoD with K/D ratios.

Yes but it was a military embarrassment and exposed the weakness of the red army. The Soviet should have roflstomped tiny Finland, but instead they won a phyric victory that showed the Germans that the Soviet Union was nowhere near prepared for a real war.

I think most people legitimately don't know that the Winter War was a decisive Soviet victory, they just think that Stalin ragequitted because Simo Hayha got a big K/D count, since that is all that is taught about the war in the West

This issue isn’t winning or losing, the issue is that is completely altered the perceived power balance between the Soviet Union and Germany.

which they ended up doing when they realised that it'd be much easier to just go straight for the capital.
yes they Red Army was so weak and unprepared that they completely steamrolled Germany and it's allies after the initial shock of Barbarossa.

if anything it was actually good because it gave Hitler the idea that the Soviets were actually weak and that they could easily take them on, which didn't end up happening since they lost the fucking war.

It’s not a roflstomp if you take 6 to 1 casualties, that’s a victory at massive cost.
Except that “initial shock” caught the USSR completely unprepared and drove all the way to the suburbs of Moscow. It took the Red Army three years to reverse what the Germans did in a few months, with way more casualties. This isn’t to say that “le dumb gommies Zerg rushed hurr durr” but the fact is that the Soviet logistical situation was abysmal, their officer corps was largely incompetent or in chaos after the purge, and that their victory was far from a steamroll. On the contrary it was a vicious and bloody slog, most of which was recovering from a highly successful initial attack that was successful because of the poor situation of the Soviet army, which was publicly exposed by the debacle in Finland.
Relatively speaking they were, in the sense that their actual ability to fight a war was very weak compared to their population, resources, and industrial capacity. The Russian Empire was chronically undeveloped compared to the USSR and the Germans never got anywhere near as far in WW1 as they did in Barbarossa.
Because the war was essentially unwinnable. The Soviet Union had vast material superiority in every aspect and that made up for the poor state of the red army at the start of the war. In addition as the war progressed, the red army became far better equipped and the officers got their shit together. By the end it was easily the best fighting force in the world, but that wasn’t the case in 1939-41.

Actually you are correct
When Stalin stoped LARPing as a strategist
The simplest tactic was the best
The winter war is not a good example of why the mill. purges were bad

You have brain damage my dude

...

Man you are seriously dumb as all hell and should close your mouth to stop embarrassing yourself.

Regardless of the issues of comparison between the first and second world wars, it’s obvious that the Germans wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did in 1941 if the Red Army had had its shit together. Unless you think that the Germans were just so vastly superior that they did it despite the Soviets having an adequate army.

I really don't think you know what you're talking about. Your analysis is petty and shallow and I think you should reconsider your opinion after performing more extensive research.

Even if you insist on not blaming the purge, I don’t know how you could possibly say that the Red Army was in adequate fighting condition in 1941.

I'm not blaming anything. I'm telling you that you are wrong. Because you are.

Wrong about what exactly? That Barbarossa was a huge blow to the Red Army and the USSR?

The former general had some great ideas that would BTFO the wehrmacht dudeJust use google

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We can't just say Stalin didn't have anything to do with the purge though

All I remember is a bunch of rich Jews died, good enough for me

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You working on killing Soros and Kissinger, right my nig?

ye

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you are a nigger

vidlii.com/watch?v=E2kmVgF0box

My fucking nigga!

based and redpilled

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SLING THAT SHIT BOI

and what could've been done to make it better?
keep in mind he had no other actual power beyond control of the military.

HASTA LA VISTA SIONISTA

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SLING THAT SHIT BOI
FUERA SINONISTAS

SLING THAT SHIT BOI

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No. There were overreaches by the NKVD but that wasn't Stalin's fault. First it was Genrikh Yagoda that fucked shit up until Stalin purged him and replaced him with Nikolai Yezhov who was even worse. After it became clear that Yezhov was going too far, Stalin had him purged as well and replaced with Lavrentiy Beria. Beria immediately got to work after and in his first order of business was reviewing all the arrests made under Yezhov. Over half of these people were released in due time upon reexamination of their cases with more being released gradually as Beria sifted through their cases and had them reviewed.
Probably yes for the most part. My professor for my Soviet history class informed us of the rampant corruption and sabotage going on during the Five Year Plans. There were examples of local party leaders using construction materials meant to be used for factories and worker housing to build upscale homes for themselves. Additionally, the threat of the Left and Right Opposition were both very real and needed to be dealt with. Trotsky wanted to start spreading world revolution before the USSR was industrially and militarily capable of doing so and Bukharin opposed rapid industrialization and wanted to keep fucking around with the NEP when rapid industrialization was crucial to the USSR's survival.
You need to understand how pressed for time Stalin was. In 1931 he stated to the party that the USSR needed to industrialize in 10 years or they would be destroyed. Operation Barbarossa commenced in 1941. Stalin did not have the luxury of time, things needed to be done swiftly and efficiently if the USSR was to survive. Was the time period pretty? Of course not, but you can't blame Stalin for it. He did his best and ultimately saved the Soviet people from destruction by the Nazis. There were growing pains of course, but most of those are not directly Stalin's fault and the blame should be properly applied to reckless shitheads like Trotsky and Yezhov who were fucking up Stalin's plans. The point is is that Stalin made the best out of a really difficult and disadvantageous situation and ultimately succeeded in changing the USSR from a semi-feudal, underdeveloped agrarian economy into a fully-industrialized, spacefaring economic and military superpower in the span of about one generation. His successes are so many and so great that Western historians will do everything in their power to discredit him.

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stalin did nothing wrong gang?

Dindu dunnfin

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you had me with your first post in this thread but defenders advantage is a thing. Aint you ever played risk bro?

Zhukov and Chuikov really probably ended up being the most skilled and capable generals of the war, counting all nations that fought.

Reminder: the whole idea of colectivization to stop the food shortages came by a trot
And trotsky supported it
marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1964/xx/collect2.htm#trotsky

Yeah for the most part. Stalin needs to be viewed in historical context for his actions to be understood. Its easy for fuckers like Robert Conquest to just take something Stalin did, exaggerate the death count, fabricate circumstances and present it to people as some horrible atrocity of Stalinism. Stalin was a major historical figure, he needs to be viewed in terms of the historical situation he was in. It's simple to say, for instance, Stalin took all the land from the kulaks but you need to understand that the kulaks were holding back the USSR from industrializing because they wanted to stick with using outdated technology to farm their small, inefficient shit plots which kept them from achieving the necessary food surplus needed to industrialize and prevented labor from being freed up in the agricultural sector to be sent to the cities to work in the factories like they were needed. If there was no external threat from the capitalist and fascist powers, industrialization could have been achieved with less turmoil perhaps, but, like I said, Stalin did not have the luxury of time and had no industrialized allies to help facilitate the process. Its remarkable he achieved what he did given all the pressure that was placed on the USSR.

I'm sure Stalin and Trotsky both agreed that gravity was real too. Just because Trotsky said something doesn't mean it was wrong. He was wrong about politics but collectivization was obviously the way forward and the next logical step to reaching socialism.

Did the domineering battle really greet the meat?

Not really

Lmao what? ☭TANKIE☭s can never seem to make up your minds. Stalin was somehow simultaneously a superhuman mega communist powered by the dreams of sleeping working class children who worked 16 hour days and shat rainbows, while at the same time being a figurehead with no real power who wanted to resign constantly. Stalin obviously had power beyond just the military, and what he could have done was democratize the country and keep the bureaucrats and revisionists accountable. Undemocratic governance is a cancer to socialism, it alienates the people and makes them fall easy prey to reactionaries, while making the leadership unaccountable and allowing for revisionism to fester and spread. It’s corrodes the revolution from both above and below. While there may be legitimate reasons to suspend or limit democracy and political freedoms in extreme situations, which is why I judge Brezhnev harshly for his authoritarianism but not Lenin. The key is to find a mechanism or some sort of middle ground that will meet the needs of a revolution or siege socialism without compromising the long term health of proletarian democracy.

I just don't understand why an intraparty political struggle is spun as some kind of great tragedy. Everyone knew what they were getting into.

anybody got any good books about the stalin years?

Honestly if they had just sit down and talked it over the Left-Opposition / Trotsky vs Stalin probably could have worked something out
But the Right-Opposition / Bukharin were just fucking wreckers though

Denying that Stalin began to amass power in a way that violated the soviet system and began to degrade democratic centralism is clearly historical revisionism

After WW2 with the exception of the occasional show meetings the Politburo met

read 10 days that shook the world before passing judgement on Soviet history and calling ME the revisionist, hypocrites.

What would an andecdotal memoir about an event that took place years before Stalin’s rise to power tell us about the period of Stalin’s rule?

the precedents which Stalin were forced under. ask yourself what you would have done in his position. the answer is “nothing different”.

You misspelled capitalism.

Sure buddy, and he also signed off 200 gorillion gulag sentences too.

Go home, your bait is too transparent >>>Zig Forums

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You have no argument either, just a claim. Moreover a cheap propagandist claim that only pseudo-leftist rad-libs believe… like Zig Forums users. Now please, go home >>>Zig Forums

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mhmm

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Nothing relating to communism was.

True but too many people here don’t seem to know the difference between “not as bad as western bourgeois propaganda says” and “not bad at all”.

How is leftpol different?

They're the community of radical liberals and the autistic anarchists who can't think past their own ideology. unlike Anarchist cat poster (>>2718389), who has reliably shown logical thinking and knowledge.

Ironic you say that since I like leftpol and I’ve been banished to there many times.

I can talk with you and not want to put a hole in my wall because I keep hitting a mass of denialists. I go there and got banned for mildly suggesting that the CNT wasn't perfect.

Every board has its fair share of retards.

Killing innocent civilians is wrong but you need to be honest about it.