For most folks in the west, stalin is considered to be a brutal authoritarian dictator who made a deal with the nazis to carve up europe into spheres of influence. It should not be surprising to anyone that a lot of anarchists hold to that view[…]
I’ll answer that statement from the end first (we’ll get to the rest down the line). It isn’t surprising that anarchists hold these views of Stalin and the USSR. After all, most of us in the English-speaking internet were raised in western countries, on internet dominated by westerners, all dominated by the cultural hegemony of bourgeois ideology. For the anarchist, there’s a two-fold factor here:
The soviet union was Marxist-Leninist, not anarchist
The overwhelming concensus is already highly negative, making it more difficult to defend for not much benefit.
The Marxist has to tackle the soviet union. We have to study every fault, every success. We often are the most accurately critical of socialism as it exists in the real world, because we have to deal with the sins of real life. If we are to affirm that socialism is good, and that Marxism-Leninism is the answer, we can’t just say “this time will be different!” And sweep aside the past, accepting bourgeois narratives. To do so would be historical nihilism. To do so would be to throw away the evidence of the tremendous strides made by socialism, proving it works.
The anarchist can simply agree with the negative framing of the soviet union, Stalin, etc, deny the successes Marxist-Leninists uphold, or minimize them, and they don’t have the rhetorical burden of dealing with the ghosts of the past. Unless an anarchist chances upon a hyper-fixation of soviet history, there simply isn’t a pressure there to learn more and try to put yourself in the shoes of the soviets and the Bolsheviks, understand why they did what they did, and dust off the decades of Red Scare nonsense.
However, this is a mistake. When affirming the bourgeois framing of the soviet experience, you uphold bourgeois cultural hegemony. Upholding bourgeois stances on leftist history hurts anarchists as well, just like TERFs harm femninism by cutting out potential comrades. The more bouegeois lies and viewpoints we uphold as true, the stronger their entrenched viewpoints are, and the harder it is for anarchists to struggle as well against that.
Now, to return to the beginning. Claims of Stalin (and I’ll group in the USSR, as they are often conflated) being an “authoritarian, brutal, dictator.” For starters, Stalin has been described as having a collaborative method of leadership, often seeking input from people outside the Politburo directly. Even CIA reports described him more as “captain of a team” than a lone autocrat. The soviet system of democracy itself required such a system. The publicly owned and planned economy had many moving parts, and necessitated cohesive yet collaborative decisionmaking. Workplaces had places to provide feedback and suggestions, which had teams dedicated to going through them. The soviet system of democracy was rich, comprehensive, and was how Stalin was elected in the first place. Bourgeois cultural hegemony posits that the soviet system wasn’t democratic, which is both false and affirms the idea that liberal, capitalist democracy is the only method that works.
Was Stalin a saint? By no means. As Nia Frome says in “Tankies”:
Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong,” although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism”, but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
If you read, say, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, you’ll find sober critique while juxtaposing it with anti-communist slander and contemporaries like Churchill that aren’t nearly as demonized, when the opposite should be true. Stalin was homophobic, there was excess, Stalin did make mistakes. However, he also guided the soviet union through their most turbulent era. Both his failings and successes need to be understood, along with the USSR’s successes and failings, as these are the legacy of working class movements.
As for Molotov-Ribbentrop, it was not a ploy to “carve up Europe.” Neither the soviets nor the Nazis expected the pact to stay, it was purely a measure to buy time, and any long-term agreements need to be understood as little more than posturing. In Poland, the Soviet Union went in weeks after the Nazis invaded. The Red Army stuck to areas Poland had recently invaded only 2 decades prior and annexed from neihboring countries like Lithuania and Ukraine, and the Polish government fled, telling the Polish soldiers not to engage with the Red Army (though some did).
The west declared war on Nazi Germany for their invasion, but since the Red Army had not “invaded” in the truest sense, but merely prevented the Nazis from taking all of Poland and subjecting it to the Holocaust, they accepted the soviets. To the contrary of the “Nazi collaboration” myth, the soviets had spent the last decade trying to get an anti-Nazi alliance going. To the soviet dismay, the western powers were already signing non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany, doing copious amounts of trade, and sanctioning the USSR. The soviets even offered to send 1 million troops, as well as armour, if Britain and France agreed, but they rejected it. Instead, the west sacrificed Czechoslovakia.
Returning to Stalin’s opinion on anarchists, it is best described as the Marxist stance on collectivization vs the anarchist stance for communalization, and how these differing viewpoints leads to ultimate division in the final analysis. It wasn’t that Stalin or Marxists in general cannot work with anarchists, the framing of anarchists as the “ultimate enemy” is more in that anarchists and Marxists hold opposite answers to the same question. Obviously anarchists are superior to fascists, liberals, etc, but none of them even attempt to answer the same questions as Marxists as anarchists do. Really, the whole work should be read, not just snippets, and only with broader context from other Marxist works.
In total, anarchists should uphold the soviet experience, and disprove bourgeois framing of Stalin and the USSR. This weakens bourgeois cultural hegemony, strengthening both anarchist and Marxist movements. I know this was long, but I hope it was at least interesting to read!
For further reading:
Demystifying Stalin
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.
Stalin's Major Theoretical Contributions to Marxism
I have come to communism because of daddy Stalin and nobody must come and tell me that I mustn’t read Stalin. I read him when it was very bad to read him. That was another time. And because I’m not very bright, and a hard-headed person, I keep on reading him. Especially in this new period, now that it is worse to read him. Then, as well as now, I still find a Seri of things that are very good.
I figured I’d give this a genuine shot.
I’ll answer that statement from the end first (we’ll get to the rest down the line). It isn’t surprising that anarchists hold these views of Stalin and the USSR. After all, most of us in the English-speaking internet were raised in western countries, on internet dominated by westerners, all dominated by the cultural hegemony of bourgeois ideology. For the anarchist, there’s a two-fold factor here:
The soviet union was Marxist-Leninist, not anarchist
The overwhelming concensus is already highly negative, making it more difficult to defend for not much benefit.
The Marxist has to tackle the soviet union. We have to study every fault, every success. We often are the most accurately critical of socialism as it exists in the real world, because we have to deal with the sins of real life. If we are to affirm that socialism is good, and that Marxism-Leninism is the answer, we can’t just say “this time will be different!” And sweep aside the past, accepting bourgeois narratives. To do so would be historical nihilism. To do so would be to throw away the evidence of the tremendous strides made by socialism, proving it works.
The anarchist can simply agree with the negative framing of the soviet union, Stalin, etc, deny the successes Marxist-Leninists uphold, or minimize them, and they don’t have the rhetorical burden of dealing with the ghosts of the past. Unless an anarchist chances upon a hyper-fixation of soviet history, there simply isn’t a pressure there to learn more and try to put yourself in the shoes of the soviets and the Bolsheviks, understand why they did what they did, and dust off the decades of Red Scare nonsense.
However, this is a mistake. When affirming the bourgeois framing of the soviet experience, you uphold bourgeois cultural hegemony. Upholding bourgeois stances on leftist history hurts anarchists as well, just like TERFs harm femninism by cutting out potential comrades. The more bouegeois lies and viewpoints we uphold as true, the stronger their entrenched viewpoints are, and the harder it is for anarchists to struggle as well against that.
Now, to return to the beginning. Claims of Stalin (and I’ll group in the USSR, as they are often conflated) being an “authoritarian, brutal, dictator.” For starters, Stalin has been described as having a collaborative method of leadership, often seeking input from people outside the Politburo directly. Even CIA reports described him more as “captain of a team” than a lone autocrat. The soviet system of democracy itself required such a system. The publicly owned and planned economy had many moving parts, and necessitated cohesive yet collaborative decisionmaking. Workplaces had places to provide feedback and suggestions, which had teams dedicated to going through them. The soviet system of democracy was rich, comprehensive, and was how Stalin was elected in the first place. Bourgeois cultural hegemony posits that the soviet system wasn’t democratic, which is both false and affirms the idea that liberal, capitalist democracy is the only method that works.
Was Stalin a saint? By no means. As Nia Frome says in “Tankies”:
If you read, say, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, you’ll find sober critique while juxtaposing it with anti-communist slander and contemporaries like Churchill that aren’t nearly as demonized, when the opposite should be true. Stalin was homophobic, there was excess, Stalin did make mistakes. However, he also guided the soviet union through their most turbulent era. Both his failings and successes need to be understood, along with the USSR’s successes and failings, as these are the legacy of working class movements.
As for Molotov-Ribbentrop, it was not a ploy to “carve up Europe.” Neither the soviets nor the Nazis expected the pact to stay, it was purely a measure to buy time, and any long-term agreements need to be understood as little more than posturing. In Poland, the Soviet Union went in weeks after the Nazis invaded. The Red Army stuck to areas Poland had recently invaded only 2 decades prior and annexed from neihboring countries like Lithuania and Ukraine, and the Polish government fled, telling the Polish soldiers not to engage with the Red Army (though some did).
The west declared war on Nazi Germany for their invasion, but since the Red Army had not “invaded” in the truest sense, but merely prevented the Nazis from taking all of Poland and subjecting it to the Holocaust, they accepted the soviets. To the contrary of the “Nazi collaboration” myth, the soviets had spent the last decade trying to get an anti-Nazi alliance going. To the soviet dismay, the western powers were already signing non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany, doing copious amounts of trade, and sanctioning the USSR. The soviets even offered to send 1 million troops, as well as armour, if Britain and France agreed, but they rejected it. Instead, the west sacrificed Czechoslovakia.
Returning to Stalin’s opinion on anarchists, it is best described as the Marxist stance on collectivization vs the anarchist stance for communalization, and how these differing viewpoints leads to ultimate division in the final analysis. It wasn’t that Stalin or Marxists in general cannot work with anarchists, the framing of anarchists as the “ultimate enemy” is more in that anarchists and Marxists hold opposite answers to the same question. Obviously anarchists are superior to fascists, liberals, etc, but none of them even attempt to answer the same questions as Marxists as anarchists do. Really, the whole work should be read, not just snippets, and only with broader context from other Marxist works.
In total, anarchists should uphold the soviet experience, and disprove bourgeois framing of Stalin and the USSR. This weakens bourgeois cultural hegemony, strengthening both anarchist and Marxist movements. I know this was long, but I hope it was at least interesting to read!
For further reading:
Demystifying Stalin
[8 min]
[6 min]
[30 min]
[16 min]
[42 min]
[38 min]
[9 min]
[5 hr 51 min]
[5 hr 25 min]
Stalin's Major Theoretical Contributions to Marxism
Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
History of the CPSU (B)
The Foundations of Leninism
Marxism and the National Question