Talk:Joseph Stalin

Stalin Talk Archive 1

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This article is very week on industrialization, collectivization, and the establishment of the Administrative Command System (ACS), which is the term used by Western specialists to refer to the system of economic planning founded by the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan. It also completely ignores developments between 1945-1953, which are, of course, quite noteworthy since we see the beginning of the Cold War. It's easy to chronicle the nature of Stalinist terror with excruciating detail and cite estimates on causalities, but this leaves readers with a faint understanding of the actual scope of Stalin's impact on Russian history, which is evident to this day in the structures of Russia's economy, political institutions, and culture. While much improved over the past four months, this article is still on the superficial and sensational side. 172

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I quite agree this article was appauling when I first set eyes on it, I've tried to improve it, but I'me not that good at writing history. G-Man

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G-Man:

Don't say that. You've been doing a fine job. You've been adding valuable and detailed factual content and quality analysis. My comments were directed toward all contributors, especially myself. I had been adding content but wound up neglecting the article. That’s why I’ve been trying to steer you toward filling in the gaps that have been left by myself and other contributors.

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Alas, it's been far too long since I read any Soviet history, so my memory for detail has gone. But at least I can trim out some nonsense. Here is the first para to go:

The rapid growth in the number of industrial workers living in cities meant that more food was needed. Stalin believed that this could be achieved by collectivising agriculture.

This cannot possibly be true. You have almost 5 million people killed in WW1, then a long-drawn-out and very bitter civil war with more millions dead or emigrated, fields ruined, machinery destroyed, and then you take some of those peasants and transport them to the cities, where they can only eat as much as they can buy (no slipping an extra handful of grain into your pocket when no-one is looking once you work in the iron foundary instead of on the farm), and you can factor in a major increase in food production because the armies are no longer marching all over the place shooting at each other and disrupting farming. In short, a food shortage caused by the number of industrial workers living in cities is clearly bunkum.

This next lot is harder to deal with.

opposed by peasants who in many cases destroyed their animals rather than hand them over to collective farms. This produced a drastic drop in food production and widespresd famine. Stalin blamed this fall in production on Kulaks or rich peasants, who he believed were counter-revolutionaries deliberately sabotaging food production, although there were very few peasants who could be described as rich, and there was very little evidence that there was any organised sabotage. Stalin was determined to wipe out any opposition to collectivisation. Under this pretext the peasants who opposed collectivisation faced enormous repression from Stalin's regime. Many peasants who opposed collectivisation were branded Kulags and accused of sabotage, although most weren't Kulaks but were poor peasants who were innocent. Many hundreds of thousands of peasants were shot or sent to Gulag prison camps. In some cases entire villages were wiped out.

There is stuff there that clearly has to go back into the entry. As it stands, however, it is balderdash. If "there was very little evidence that there was any organised sabotage" how do we explain all those destroyed animals? We need to do something about the bleeding-heart "poor peasants who were innocent" stuff. The basics of the tale are in the above ... somewhere. 172? Is this your field?

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Good job Tannin for identifying these shortcomings. I'm not responsible for posting these two paragraphs, but I should've spotted them earlier. I've just gotten too timid to work on an article pertaining to such a controversial subject these days. After all, as you vividly recall, last December I was accused of being the last unreformed, unreconstructed, and unrepentant Stalinist alive just because I wanted to chronicle the industrialization and urbanization of the Soviet Union in this article.

The first paragraph that you're pointing out is actually correct; it's just unclear to the point of being misleading. Stalin was factoring in the expected boost to the urban population caused by the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan. There weren't really any food shortages, just predictions of food shortages after the drafting of the first Five Year Plan.

The second paragraph is largely fine except for this sentence: "although there were very few peasants who could be described as rich, and there was very little evidence that there was any organised sabotage." Kulaks did sabotage crops and did hoard their crops, despite the unfactual claims of this article, hoping for an end to the forcible seizure of surpluses. This is not an unrealistic expectation in light of the fact that less than a decade eariler in 1921 the party had caved to agrarian pressure and abandoned the unpopular agricultural policies of War Communism. What would've stopped them from caving again? No one knew how resolute Stalin was at this point. And the peasantry was also coming out of a market economy, and, of course, in a market economy withholding supplies is what producers do when the opprotunity cost of selling them off at a certain price (under collectivization it's 0!) is too high.

I also agree that the article should not object to defining the kulaks as rich peasants. Relative to the standards of their society they certainly were an elite middle class of farmers. They're not rich by the standards of contemporary Russia, with its multi-billionaire media oligarchs who accumulated huge sums from illegally pilfering state assets and parlaying them in Swiss, Caribbean, or Cypriot bank accounts, but they were distinguishable from most peasants.

I'd recommend that you make the necessary adjustments. There are still a handful of users who think that I'm a Stalin apologist for the December edits. Also, you could work on the tone. It reads like propaganda.

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I do apologise, I confess I wrote the aformentioned bits, I was trying to counter the pro-Stalin bias of this article that existed before.

The point I was trying to make was that the term Kulag was a loose term used by Stalin to describe anyone who opposed his collectivisation policies, which included poor peasants as well as rich ones.

Collectivisation was opposed bitterly by most poor peasants, not just by Kulags.

The current revision of this article gives the misleading impression that collectivisation was welcomed by poor peasants which it most certainly wasn't.

The line

Stalin's regime moved to force collectivisation of agriculture. For landless peasants, this meant an opportunity to take an equal share in the labour, and in its rewards..... sounds like stalinist propaganda to me

G-Man 4/5/03

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Notice above that the key word is landless. In some respects, the above statement is true and not propagandistic. Many landless peasants did support the onset of collectivization and not every peasant in a collective farm was miserable. After all, conditions varied greatly from farm to farm.

Now some who supported collectivization might have begun to regret the process, since supporters of the regime themselves were often victims of state terror, especially when they failed to meet production targets. Though not a peasant, even Stakhanovich, the hero worker who inspired the Stakhanovite movement was sent off to the GULAGs (for some reason not involving production quotas, of course!).

The majority of Russians today who lived through the Stalin era remember his leadership very fondly. This article also has to explain that phenomenon, which would seem contrary to so much else. Any attempts to do so do not constitute a "pro-Stalin" bias.

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Yes but your forgeting that the generation who lived under Stalin were bombarded for most of their lives with endless all-pervasive propaganda about how wonderful Stalin was, so its hardly surprising that people remembered him fondly.

Even some of the most intelligent, intellectuals, scientists etc, were taken in by the propaganda.

And secondly I dont believe the line that their was any significant support for Collectivisation amongst the peasantry. As even for the poor peasants it meant the complete break up of a centuries old way of life, and co-ersion into an alien system, where they had no control over their lives.

Collectivisation was a blatant attempt by the Soviet regime to expropriate as much grain as they could to pay for the import of industrial machinery from abroad, and had nothing to do with the welfare of the peasants.

If any evidence is needed of the complete disregard the Soviet regime had for the welfare of the peasants. Between 1931-33 at a time when millions were starving, the Soviet Union exported millions of tonnes of grain on world markets. G-Man

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G-Man:

Please don't pick up the Lir/Vera habit of quoting people and attributing something to them that's way out of context. Tannin and I are not concerned with writing a piece either sympathetic or critical of Stalin. We just do not want to turn this historical article into a partisan debate on Stalin's legacy.

My comments, and Tannin's comments earlier, did not express any support of collectivization whatsoever. In response to your comments, I merely pointed out that landless peasants (please, please this time take note that the key word is landless) were often broadly sympathetic of the program, depending on other complicated local concerns, and that this program was officially carried out in their name.

My statement on the talk page that the majority of elderly Russians remember the Stalin era fondly does not suggest anything about the legitimacy of Stalin's legacy. You pointed out the role of propaganda, which was an important aspect of Stalin's regime, and a very complex topic in itself, considering Stalin's master manipulation of Russian political culture. Propaganda, however, was one of many factors.

All in all, you're underestimating the high level of support Stalin enjoyed from many classes within the Soviet Union, which was not always entirely attributable to propaganda. Just as the atrocities that you have documented were brought to fruition, the Soviet Union was perhaps witnessing the most all-encompassing improvement in day-to-day living standards among the ordinary populous within a generation ever before in history, at least in terms of access on the aggregate to basic amenities, health, education, and modern luxuries. The Soviet Union also covered a huge geographical expanse, one sixth of the globe, so keep in mind that conditions varied greatly. Some regions and classes fared better than others; and many were often unaware of the system of prison labor, largely well-hidden in isolated regions of Siberia, that contributed to these remarkable strives in industrialization.

I broadly agree with your assessment of Stalin's actual motivations, but this question is far more complex than you assert. Collectivization is also linked to his consolidation of power, his skill at playing many factions of the party and bureaucracy against each other, his fears that rapid super-industrialization would lead to urban over-population and famine, and even fear of the new middle classes of nepmen and kulaks someday poising a challenge to Communist Party rule. We don't need to endorce one argument or bring up one factor, as you seem to want.

On the talk page, you correctly noted that the Soviet Union exported grain even at the peak of the famines in the Ukraine. You're correct since collectivization and industrialization are inextricably linked. Exports of grain helped the Soviet Union to raise the cash to import technology necessary for the industrialization program. As an aside, it might interest you to look at the fairly high levels of grain output during the NEP years. The Soviet Union perhaps would have been able to export even more grain had it not collectivized agriculture. This leads to another complex question of whether or not Stalin had any idea that collectivization would lead to huge declines in productivity.

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Sorry I got a bit carried away in my last writing. I didnt mean to imply that you were biased.

But I'm a bit alarmed that Tannin's latest edits may be giving to much weight to the Stalinist version of history.

I agree that there may have been a degree of support for collectivisation at first from landless peasants. But there is ample historical evidence that collectivisation was opposed violently by most of the peasantry.

If evidence is needed of this. During 1929-30 so called "shock brigades" were formed, to cajole the peasantry into collective farms, and they usually used indiscriminate violence to achive this (it hardly suggests that the peasants were enthusiastic about collectivisation, if the government had to beat them into it) by 1930 about 60% of the peasantry had been driven to enroll into collective farms, In response to this co-ersion the peasants began slaughtering livestock. The government was so alarmed by this that they drew back and gave peasants the option of withdrawing from the collectives. and immediately well over half of those who had been enrolled into collective farms withdrew from them.

This was however a brief restbite because by 1931 an even bigger co-ersion drive was launced, and this time anyone who resisted it was branded as a kulag and either shot or exiled to siberia.

IMO Stalin probably believed in his own propaganda, that kulags were capitalist parasites who witheld food supplies for profit, and that opposition to collectivisation was organised by them (no one was going to dare to tell him otherwise) and he was surrounded by a load of yes men, who told him whatever he wanted to hear. He probably didn't have a clue what was really going on.

The whole colectivisation debacle was probably more the result of stupidity, poor communication and mis-understanding than deliberate malice.

G-Man

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172 what exactly do you mean by "this version is more detailed" you've removed all of what I've just written, which as far as I'me concearned was perfectly valid. G-Man

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That was an accident. I restored it just a minute prior to reading these comments. Sorry. I thought that you only removed content and changed the spelling of "kulaks" to mispellings. 172

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Oh okay then, do you think that what I've written is an improvement on what was there before. G-Man