Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cleared Smoke. The triangular division that Marxism is so prone to became evident even before Lenin's death in 1924. The right wing of the Central Committee was led by Bukharin, who wanted an even wider application of the NEP; the center was dourly controlled by Stalin; and the left followed Trotsky and the flamboyant Zinoviev. When the smoke cleared, Trotsky was again in exile, Zinoviev and Bukharin were dead, and Stalin was in power...
Before he died, Lenin carefully considered the man who was to succeed him. Joseph Stalin had risen to the post of first party secretary from his beginnings as a terrorist and holdup man for party funds. In his political testament, Lenin warned in vain against making Stalin his successor, because he considered him too rude and too ambitious...
...Stalin had as much right as Khrushchev to claim Lenin's heritage, perhaps more. Although he added his personal despotic flourishes, Stalin had learned about terror, about dictatorship, about the total disregard of human life or ordinary human decency, from his master Lenin. In one important respect, Stalin did greatly enlarge upon a force present in Lenin's life only embryonically-Russian nationalism...
...purging Trotsky, Stalin sounded much like Khrushchev attacking Mao. Trotsky, like Mao, talked about an immediate drive for world revolution; Stalin countered with repetition of Lenin's concept of "socialism in one country" and the idea that Mother Russia must be developed first as a guide and model for the world revolution. For the sake of Soviet foreign policy, he calmly sacrificed the interests of foreign Communist parties-notably including the Chinese party itself. In all this, Khrushchev closely resembles Stalin, even though he took the momentous step of denouncing Stalin's oppressive form of dictatorship...
...nation states to call for a real world order, but it failed even to begin to create one, or really to come to terms with nationalism. Even though in many areas Communism uses nationalism as a vehicle, the two remain essentially inimical. The supranational loyalty to Moscow, which Stalin enforced through sheer power and terror, was artificial. Moscow is not the Third Rome. What started under Stalin, continued with Tito's defection, and goes on ever more intensely under Khrushchev, is the reascendancy of nationalism over Communism, of self-interest over ideology...