Because he was unshakeably principled as a communist and anti-imperialist, and during his leadership the USSR posed the biggest threat to the global system of capitalism that the world has ever seen. He could not be reclaimed for the purposes of anti-communist propaganda like Trotsky nor relegated to the status of a mere theorist like Marx or an idealist revolutionary like Lenin is sometimes (erroneously) portrayed. Stalin achieved too much in practice for the building of socialism, while the victory of the USSR in WW2 under his leadership gave socialism an immense prestige boost around the world.
In short, he scared the bejeezus out of the bourgeoisie for what he represented and what he could have inspired in people across the world had he not been smeared with the lies of Khrushchev and the anti-communist propaganda of the West (frequently borrowed directly from Nazi anti-Soviet propaganda), so they vowed to forever destroy his image and make sure no one like him would ever arise again.
Sadly, this ploy worked. Thanks to Khrushchev’s speech of lies you even had other principled communists (at one point even Che Guevara believed some of the accusations leveled at Stalin) around the world start to doubt what they thought they knew about Stalin and the USSR which caused a worldwide crisis of confidence among communists and a massive split between those parties who accepted the Khrushchevite lies and those who didn’t.
Meanwhile in capitalist societies anti-communist indoctrination raised entire generations to internalize the belief that Stalin was equivalent to Hitler and the USSR another Nazi Germany, which destroyed their communist parties as effective political forces and made sure that most remaining communists and socialists would have an almost instinctual aversion to the Marxist-Leninist line and practical revolutionary politics.
This led to Western communists retreating into the realm of purely academic Marxism as an economic and not a revolutionary theory, or into all sorts of schools of pseudo-Marxist radical liberalism (like the “Frankfurt School”), anarchism, ultra-left deviations, or just straight up defect to social democracy.
But i will end this on an optimistic note and remind everyone of what Stalin himself said:
“I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.”
Very well put. It’s almost as if he knew he was going to be a scapegoat.
Another point i would like to add on is that Stalin was used as a scapegoat for all the contradictions that were resolved, many times harshly, during the early development of the USSR, the transition from a semi-feudal society to socialist society was not without it’s contradictions.
In a similar fashion to how crimes done by imperialist interests are pinned on “corrupt individuals” and not the nature of the system.
So the argument in that link is “everyone else was homophobic too so it’s okay”, and I need to stress that that is not unshakeably principled behaviour. That is an example of shaken principles. If your defence of Stalin is “he was only as bad as the capitalists”, he’s still shit.
judging a character by today’s standards is not only bad faith but a terrible argument.
While I’m not entire sure whether such claim is true or not (or even if Stalin had any say in that), you have to understand that material conditions back then were much different from today’s.
Does this “redeem” the CPSU in this regard? Not really, no, they should be criticized, but to claim Stalin was a terrible man because of this one policy (that he either had no say in or had no real power to change if he wanted to) is just bad faith. Stalin was not the king or god emperor of the USSR.
Because he was the most successful politician of the era. The successors to Stalin in the USSR were not nearly as competent and needed to undermine the figure of Stalin to legitimatize their incompetence, instead of rising up to the challenge they chose to smear Stalin through the secret speech.
The west also needed to undermine Stalin because he was very popular worldwide because of his success during WW2 against Nazi Germany and the development of the USSR, so they did their part in the smearing by reducing Stalin to Hitler through encouraging scholars to write about it, the reducto ad hitlerum, a strategy that would be so effective that would be used on every single enemy of the west moving forward.
The book to read on this is Domenico Losurdo’s “Stalin, history and critique of a black legend”.
The book to read on this is Domenico Losurdo’s “Stalin, history and critique of a black legend”.
An excellent recommendation and essential reading imo. So much red scare propaganda is based on the Stalin bad narrative and this book dismantles that narrative with actual, material evidence. Something that Khrushchev and the anti-communist propagandists never offered.
he was too based
The economic growth and societal transformation under Stalin (in particular under his Five Year Plans from 1929-1955) registered the fastest growth in the history of humanity that has never been surpassed.
Not even China with all its achievements came close to what transformed the USSR from a poor feudal backwater of Europe into a space-faring nation within a single generation. And the USSR achieved all this while being isolated and without relying on cheap labor (workers rights were on par with Western European standards) and influx of foreign capital.
If you’re a Western capitalist, you’d be worried too. A country full of illiterate peasants and barely electrified, is now threatening to overtake us because of communism?
Khrushchev reversed much of Stalin’s policies that worked and marked the beginning of an end to the greatest socialist project of the 20th century.
https:// www. cia . gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist party structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
Most Americans have no idea how the Soviet Union operated and if they knew it would seem like a much better system than US representative democracy. A generic feature of Orientalist racism is the idea that Asiatic cultures are inherently drones being controlled by despots, something we see with every other negatively-stereotyped Asian country and portrayed in every sphere of life from their workplace to their families and politics. Russia is regarded as more Asian than European by the white supremacists pushing that propaganda. The west reinforced it because it can’t forgive Stalin for ending the holocaust or building a rival superpower out of the country everyone else was trying to destroy, nor could they compete with a society that invests in its citizens and says the poor can become scientists. It purely exists to rob the basic idea of autonomy from anyone who isn’t white.
now, talking seriously, orientalism doesn’t apply only to asians, it is for everyone in the third world, because it works with only two categories, the west and “the rest”.
when the cuba revolution happened, fidel appeared on forbes as the most wealthy person in the world, following the orientalist script that leaders have a ridiculously ostentatious lifestyle they simply put cuba gdp as fidel’s net worth.
