Word: stalinization
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David Landan's arguments for the relative helplessness of Stalin in the face of the great problems the Soviet Union faced in the wake of the Civil War are a cruel misinterpretation of what went wrong in history's first socialist revolution...
Landan claims that "much of the onus for the oppressive social and political atmosphere in the Soviet Union today must necessarily rest with Stalin's successors." Who then was responsible for crushing the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, where revolutionary sailors called for implementation of Lenin's own slogan of "All Power to the Soviets" and were massacred by troops sent by Lenin and commanded by Trotsky? Who shifted the practice of the Third International from prompting international revolution to defending the national interests of the Soviet government and attempting to change the course of other revolutionary movements by executive fiat...
...Little Chiang," as he is known on Taiwan, draws such attacks partly because he has long managed to remain a mysterious figure. He went to Mos cow when he was 16, where he joined the Komsomol and studied guerrilla tactics but later broke with Stalin. He rejoined his father in China in 1937, bringing with him his Russian wife Fanina, and from Taiwan has directed guerrilla activities against Red China...
...have grown horrified by much of what he had wrought. From his sick room he railed against the strangulating Soviet bureaucracy and denounced the "Russian chauvinism" that he saw crushing the rights of national minorities. In his testament, which has never been published in Russia, he wrote that Stalin "concentrated boundless power in his hands, and I am not certain he can always use this power with sufficient caution." In a final postscript to his will, he vainly pleaded that Stalin be removed as general secretary of the party...
Inexorably, the question arises of Lenin's responsibility for the horrors of the Stalin era. Probably the essential difference between the two leaders was that Lenin considered coercion as a temporary weapon in Socialism's struggle against its enemies, while Stalin applied it as a method of everyday rule. Yet the fact remains that Lenin created the instrument of power that allowed Stalin to do as he did, and he formulated the principle that ultimately made all of his successor's crimes possible: "Our morality is completely subordinated to the class struggle." Here is the 20th century...