On 4/26/05, Paul Stenquist <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The ruling party of the USSR certainly considered themselves communists. Whether they lived up to the ideals of communism is another thing.
I don't know on what you base that comment, Paul. I don't know what they "considered" themselves, but they were neither communists nor Marxists.
The arms race wasn't a plot. No one was pleased when the Soviets
learned to make nuclear weapons.
I imagine the Soviets weren't pleased that the only other superpower to come out of WWII had The Bomb and they didn't. Can't blame them for wanting one of their own.
The growth of the US economy following
the war was far more a result of consumer demand than military expenditures.
Did I say it was? The post-war boom was certainly fueled by pent-up consumer demand. I'm saying that, among other things, the Cold War was a very convenient way for the arms industry to continue to rake in huge profits after WWII ended.
Communism was quite the rage in the US during the thirties. Most weren't afraid of it before the war.
Agreed.
But when the Soviets became aggressive about spreading their sphere of influence after the war, Americans became apprehensive.
You're looking at this from the US viewpoint, Paul (and I can't blame you for that). From the Soviet viewpoint, however, things look a bit different. They just fought a war almost singe-handedly against the war machine of Nazi Germany, with more casualties than any other country. For years Stalin had been begging for some help, for a Western Front, while Churchill and FDR sat on their hands. The Allies did nothing to help the USSR during much of WWII. Then, here come those same armies, marching across Europe. All Stalin wanted was "buffer states" between Western Europe and the USSR. He (rightly or wrongly) considered Western Europe to be buffer states for the US, and part of the US sphere of influence. He also wanted a share of defeated Germany, which isn't so unfair, is it?
How can you say Stalin didn't try to export the revolution?
Because he didn't. Trotsky wanted communism to be a world-wide
phenomenon, with each country having their own grass-roots revolution
of the proletariate. Eventually the whole world would be communist,
and we'd all be happy. (so he thought) Stalin said, "No, we can't
promote these revolutions now, our economy is in the tank, due to the
fact that the West won't trade with us, and takes every opportunity to
sabotage our economy. We have to concentrate on our own problems
before we can help a world-wide revolution." And that's what he did. Very brutally, of course (he was an evil dictator after all), but
that's what he did.
I think that a lot of Eastern Europeans would strongly disagree.
There were no revolutions in those countries. The Soviets invaded
them and installed and maintained puppet regimes. That's not anything
near "exporting revolution". The people in those countries knew there
had never been a popular revolution; that's why they never supported
the regimes, and why those dictators had to rule with an iron fist. If anyone tried to go against Soviet orthodoxy, the tanks rolled in. Think Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
And the Soviets certainly considered China and North Korea within their sphere of influence.
The USSR and China had their falling out in '57 or '58, and they've been pretty wary of one another ever since.
Whether communism was a genuine threat to western democracies may never be known, but it's easy to understand why it was frightening fifty years ago.
My whole point was that the USSR was not communist. It was nothing close to communist. It hadn't been since the early '20's (if at all). You can call it communist, but it wasn't. The real question is whether the USSR was a threat, which it certainly was. OTOH, the US was a threat to the USSR. Kripes each country had enough nuclear weaponry pointed at each other to wipe out the world hundreds of times over. It's a good thing Kruschev blinked in '63, because if he hadn't, we might not be sitting here today discussing this as civilized adults.
I'm not defending the USSR, who were one of the most brutal regimes the world has ever seen. The gulags, the pogroms, the KGB, the state-induced famine that killed something like 30 million in the Ukraine, the repression of free-speech and of freedom of religion (because even though I'm an atheist, I'm all for people being able to believe that they want to), systemic persecution of Jews, the list goes on and on.
The Soviet system was evil. But it wasn't communist.
That's all.
I know we shouldn't talk politics on the list, but as I'm not promoting a particular political viewpoint, but rather discussing history, I actually don't think I'm being political. Okay, stop laughing. I really think that. I know many of you don't believe me, but it's true. Stop laughing now! <vbg>
But I'm going to stop now. I'm happy to discuss this off-list from here on in.
cheers, frank
In USSR they they had just forgot that the subtitle of the Marx's "The Capital" is "Critique of political economy". So the religion, named "economy" (described by Marx and an object of critique in his philosophy) became reality in the Solviets as the "true religion" of the communist state.
luben
