Totalitarianist

You mean Yezhov. It was, in most cases, ultimately Yezhov's decision. However, history shows that Yezhov was right -- most of the time! Yezhov's flaw was not purging enough of them, as he himself said; Stalin's flaw was not paranoia, but on the contrary refusing to believe Yezhov -- the opposite of paranoia -- which eventually led to his execution.

lpetrich

First, I'm surprised that Mr. T has not flamed me for comparing Soviet prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky to Ann Coulter; I also add that he made Ken Starr look like a rank amateur.

I wonder what Mr. T's point is.

The first of the great purges started when Genrikh Yagoda was head of the NKVD, an earlier name for the KGB. Those purges started as a "response" to the assassination of Party official Sergei Kirov, and included the show trials of several important officials, like Kamenev and Zinoviev, who confessed to taking part in various evil plots -- with no other evidence offered(!)

But that performance was not quite satisfactory to Joseph Stalin, who wondered why Bukharin got off the hook, and Yagoda was deposed and found guilty of various anti-Soviet plots.

His replacement, Nikolai Yezhov, was nastier, with his purges being remembered as the Yezhovshchina (~ "Yezhov thing"), but in 1938, Stalin decided to replace him with Lavrenti Beria.

Who directed his tender attentions to the Soviet Army, which suffered a massive purge. And unlike the others, Beria lasted for the rest of Stalin's life, though he was executed by Stalin's successors.

WWII and its aftermath apparently occupied enough of Stalin's attention to keep him from being paranoid about his citizens, but his old personality emerged in 1952, with his charges of "killers in white coats" on the loose -- the supposed "Doctors' Plot". He died the next year, rather mercifully ending plans for yet another big purge.

Finally, I close with this amusing collection of official Soviet vituperation.

seebs

No, my question stands. How does the existance of enemies disprove paranoia? Paranoia is a disorder whether or not you have enemies.

Furthermore, as I pointed out, it is quite clear that the majority of the people killed were not credible threats to the state. This suggests strongly that they were killed out of irrational fear.

Totalitarianist

The show trials were fair. Consider D. N. Pritt, [i]a British Member of Parliament and the King�s Counsel who actually attended the Show Trials ! Pritt wrote an essay about the show trials. It contained in a pamphlet entitled, "The Moscow Trial Was Fair". Although Pritt was not defending the purges, he did defend the courtroom procedures used during the trials.

Unlike the historians who wrote about the show trials such as Deutscher (who takes every word of Trotsky as a holy and unquestionable truth, and is excessively, needlessly skeptical of anything Stalin, Yezhov, et. al says, and from whom all our 'facts' of history with regard to Stalin come), Pritt was actually an eyewitness of the Show Trials, unlike such historians. This, in addition to Pritt's profession (unlike said historian), boosts Pritt's credibility considerably. Let us see what one historian, Panaggio, has to say about Pritt:

"Pritt was astonished, as an English lawyer, at the freedom and vivacity with which all prisoners were allowed to converse with co-defendants during the trial without objection from the Court or prosecutor. At times, according to Pritt, "quick and vivid" debates occurred between the prosecutor and up to three prisoners, all talking together, which would have been forbidden by rules of procedure in England and the U. S., which allow only one witness to speak at a time in direct answer to a single question put by counsel or the court. Pritt found this a "striking novelty," and described the Public Prosecutor Vishinsky�s speeches as having "vigor and clarity." Pritt says Vishinsky rarely looked at the public or played "for effect." This is in contrast, once again, to Deutscher�s transparently snide characterization of Vishinsky�s speeches as "chameleon-like." Vishinsky said "strong things," according to Pritt, recommending the defendants be "exterminated." But, Pritt points out - as Deutscher and King could or would not (another omission) - that "in many cases less grave many English prosecuting counsels have used much harder words." It is conceivable that this kind of Russian (and English) courtroom rhetoric is unknown to Deutscher and King, which would be stunningly naive for historians (King is basically a photo-journalist), perhaps evidencing some sort of academic or professional isolation, but nonetheless contributing heavily to their mistaken characterization of Vishinsky�s conduct of the trial as "unfair." But is it conceivable that King and Deutscher are not aware that even in modern American courtrooms, the nouns and rhetoric used by prosecutors in referring to defendants in alimony or traffic violations cases are not the same as that used by prosecution in cases of high treason in time of war, serial sex crimes against women, hate crimes against minorities, etc.? Individuals of ordinary sense would naturally expect the lexicon of apt, permitted prosecutorial epithets to be widely divergent in these different kinds of cases even without having witnessed actual criminal cases of each degree (misdemeanor, felony, and high treason). The best that can be said of King and Deutscher is that they suffer from all-too-typical "paradigm blindness." It is not believable that they could have forgotten that Kamenev and Zinoviev were not on trial for motorcar violations."

Totalitarianist

"How does the existance [sic] of enemies disprove paranoia?"

Are you serious? It is not paranoia to react rationally to millions of enemies. It is paranoia only if the enemies were fictions of his mind. And they were not. Stalin had literally millions of enemies. Also, read number eight of my original post -- or read the whole thing, for evidently you have not read it.

lpetrich

The Moscow Trials were a travesty of justice -- there was never any material evidence offered to indicate the defendants' guilt; the only "evidence" was their "confessions".

And I wonder why Mr. T, as I call him, makes such a hero out of Stalin. Let's check out Stalin's record:

He had gone to a seminary to become a priest, because that seemed to be the only high-quality career available to him. He dropped out to become a Marxist revolutionary, but some of the seminary's rhetorical style rubbed off of him.

He was never very charismatic, but he was good at behind-the-scenes work, and he got himself into some convenient posts in the Party hierarchy. Despite Lenin's warnings about him, he maneuvered himself into the top in the late 1920's.

He then declared war on several segments of his citizens. First was private farmers, who understandably were unwilling to go along with his collectivization schemes. Then the Party, who suffered a series of horrible purges, which extended even to high-level officials. Then it was the Army's turn to get purged, high-level officials and all. And it was unlikely that those millions of purge victims were all wreckers and enemies of the Soviet people; by the 1930's, there were no notable opposition movements.

In 1939, after supporting "Popular Front" coalitions with leftists who were not orthodox Communists, he turned around and signed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, helping himself to parts of eastern Europe. And for two years, he stood by as the Nazis invaded and bombed western Europe -- while trusting Hitler enough to completely blow an opportunity for conquering Germany.

But in the summer of 1941, Hitler turned his attentions eastward, and Stalin allegedly had a nervous breakdown. And in his attempts to rally the troops, Stalin got desperate enough to revive the Russian Orthodox Church. He had an additional way of rallying them, however; he stationed special troops behind the lines whose job was to fire on retreating front-line troops.

And he won, though at an enormous cost of Soviet-soldier life. But despite his armies doing much of the work of defeating Nazi Germany, his paranoia did not stop. Soviet POW's were sent to the gulags, even as Western ones were celebrated as heroes. And he ensured that Communist lackeys would rule most eastern Europe, though Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia decided that he did not want to be one of Stalin's lackeys.

On the cultural front, Stalin organized a "cult of personality", which included some absolutely absurd adulation:
While adopting a pose of "aw, shucks, they just love me."

And in science, a plant breeder and quack geneticist Trofim Lysenko gained favor with him; Lysenko claimed to be able to alter the heredity of crop plants to make them perform much better, without any need of the painstaking crossbreeding practiced by mainstream biologists, those Mendelist Weismannist Morganist idealist grovelers before Western capitalism who believed in things that don't exist -- genes. That he had no idea of how to do statistics or construct a controlled experiment did not bother him at all; he claimed that he did not need all that hocus-pocus.

But Stalin supported him and declared Lysenkoism the official doctrine, with mainstream biologists "recanting" their "errors". Scientists in other fields, however, were more successful at beating back Lysenko imitators, like those who claimed that quantum mechanics is un-dialectical-materialistic.

In the early 1950's, Stalin started getting sick, but he apparently did not become any less paranoid; he suspected that "killers in white coats" were out to get him.

But he died in 1953 before he could pull off any more big purges. And his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced him for doing a lot of damage to the Party and the nation.

seebs

Yes, but if the enemies you are reacting to are not the ones which really exist, the existance of those real enemies doesn't change the fact that the ones reacted to are figments of the imagination.

Anyway, if Stalin had millions of enemies, they were well-earned.

Totalitarianist

No, he went there because that was the best possible education for him, and it was the decision of his father. He was kicked out -- with the highest grades -- because of his Marxist beliefs.

Lenin criticised all potential leaders. Let us see what Lenin himself has to say of this:

" I am not sure whether [Comrade Stalin] will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, has diplayed excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work."

Note that the first person Lenin mentioned is Stalin.

"I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make the greater part of the danger of a split'.

"These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders [Trotsky and Stalin] of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split. . . ."

However, in "Letters to the Congress" by Lenin, which I am was quoting above, one historian says:

"This text is remarkably incomprehensible, clearly dictated by a sick and diminished man. How could 50 to 100 workers added to the Central Committee "raise its prestige"? Or reduce the danger of split? Saying nothing about Stalin's and Trotsky's political concepts and visions of the Party, Lenin claimed that the personal relationships between these two leaders threatened unity."

Another historian (Grey) says:

"Stalin emerged in the best light. He had done nothing to besmirch his party record."

If you think that Lenin preferred Stalin, Lenin said that Trotsky was seriously defective as in, for example (according to Lenin himself), his opposition to the Central Committee in the affair of the 'militarization of the unions'; he approached problems needlessly bureaucratically; his opinion of himself was highly exaggerated; and his non-Bolshevism was "not accidental".

With regard to Bukharin, Lenin noted that his ideas were not very Marxist but were on the contrary non-dialectic and scholastic.

Lenin noted, with regard to Kamenev and Zinoviev, that, during the October insurrection, their treason was intentional.

This leaves us with Stalin: apparently the least flawed, according to Lenin.

One historian, Ludo Martens, said: "Lenin dictated his notes in order to avoid a split in the Party leadership. But the statements that he made about the five main leaders seem better suited to undermining their prestige and setting them against each other."

Lenin said that the only "defect" (to use his words) about Stalin is his "rudeness", and of it he said that it was "entirely supportable in relations among us Communists".

Let us see what Stalin himself has to say of this:

"It is said in that 'will' Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin's 'rudeness' it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin's place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. . . . At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post. . . .

"A year later I again put in a request to the plenum to release me, but I was obliged to remain at my post."

No, on the contrary it was highly likely.

He was the last man to sign the nonaggression pact. The Capitalist countries had signed it before him.

And no, not helping "himself" (we are talking about a man who died with ten roubles in his pocket): helping to build Communism.

He revived the Russian Orthodox Church, and this is well established, because large segments of the population were becoming unpatriotic. Patriotism boosted considerably after he revived the church; he wanted -- it was absolutely necessary -- his soldiers to be patriotic and therefore courageous.

Yes, this was quite necessary. Those "troops" were members of the secret service.

Enormous and necessary; for without whom victory would be inconceivable.

A very wise decision. I would have done the same thing.

[quote[On the cultural front, Stalin organized a "cult of personality", which included some absolutely absurd adulation:
While adopting a pose of "aw, shucks, they just love me."[/quote]

Actually, the so-called cult of personality, in fact, had begun initially before Stalin had known about it. Whatever may be the case, the resulting patriotism was truly enviable.

In fact, the remarkable, highly original, and yet ignored insights of Lysenko have turned out to be true in botany, soil science, and other fields.

About this the historian Panaggio says:

' The important suggestion here is that it is much more enlightening and productive to view the "Lysenko affair" as a clash of representatives of different paradigms of heredity, rather than to see it in conventional ways which flourish under the auspices of totalitarian paradigms of Stalinist society. Conventional views are shared as much by many European Marxists, such as the Khrushchevite Dominique LeCourt, as by outright enemies of Stalin, Lysenko, and the former Soviet Union. These views generally share the belief that the Lysenko controversy was a conflict between Lysenko, who upheld an "archaic Lamarckian" theory of evolution (which he did not), vs. the first geneticists, who were "modern Darwinian geneticists" (which they were not). The mainstream view incorrectly says that Lysenko attempted to make his paradigm of heredity - which he called "Michurinist" theory - fit into the grander Marxist paradigm of history and philosophical thought as a kind of "Stalinist science."

'Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (b. Oct. 27 [date uncertain], 1855) was a Russian horticulturalist whose hybrid plants brought him praise from the new Soviet government and invitations by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to visit the United States. Lysenko considered himself an heir of what he called the "Michurinist trend" in plant sciences. Whatever the value of Michurin�s actual achievements as a creator of new flower and fruit varieties (accomplishments belittled by Western writers like David Joravsky and others as much as former Soviet authorities lauded them), Michurin spoke to the world scientific community from a very marginal position. To the Western scientific world, his was a small, weak voice from somewhere in remote Western Asia. Then suddenly, with the rise of the Soviet Union, there was the voice of Lysenko - sharp, intense, powerful. This single difference between Lysenko and Michurin had an important consequence:

'In 1939, due to the rise of Lysenko�s prestige and influence in the Soviet Union�s learned academies, a group of important professors in genetics and biology from Leningrad University and Leningrad pedagogical institutes, who had been losing a number of open academic debates with Lysenko and his fellow scientists, petitioned Communist Party officials to intervene in their academic controversy with Lysenko. In an eight page letter submitted to Andrei Zhdanov, the head of Agitprop (the Administration of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), they claimed that Lysenko�s theories had no scientific merit and that he rose to prominence solely due to his "merits in the field of agriculture" (Krementsov, N., Stalinist Science, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997, p. 66). Note that Lysenko�s achievements in agriculture were recognized by his learned opponents as completely obvious, despite assertions by David Joravsky, Valery Soyfer, Zhores Medvedev, and many others that Lysenko�s agricultural work was a bust or - worse - a fraud. By petitioning Party officials to intervene, the Leningraders thought to "leapfrog" the long process of organizing an open academic debate in a scientific congress on genetics. As Krementsov put it, the geneticists "themselves recognized the power of the Party bureaucracy to adjudicate their arguments" (ibid. p. 68) with the Lysenkoists. During the next decades, Party bosses did indeed intervene, much to the chagrin and regret of these scientists, who then cried out that Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov and other mere Party functionaries - such as Mark Mitin and Marxist theoretician and jurist (and Lysenko�s personal friend) Isaac Prezent - were pretending to understand sophisticated cytological experiments and the chemical reactions of very large molecules. Western writers who have expressed disgust and outrage that such governmental interference with the course of science occurred in the Soviet Union are unaware, or ignore the fact, that the very Soviet scientists whom Joravsky mischaracterized as "repressed" requested an adjudication themselves! Neither Lysenko nor the Lysenkoists pleaded for such interference. It shall be seen in what follows that archival evidence, newly available to Western scholars since perestroika and glasnost�, shows that in many areas of life, the Moscow Party bureaucracy (contrary once again to the conventional view) was not in the habit of being a "thought police" - as one "Orwellian" form of the conventional totalitarian paradigms asserts - but was very responsive to petitions and complaints from all workers and professions in the Soviet Union - including the geneticists, who wanted the Politburo to be a "paradigm patrol" until they clearly saw that the Moscow Party bureaucracy and intellectuals did not completely share their new paradigm of heredity.

'The facts just adduced are in glaring contradiction with views generated by the totalitarian paradigm. The latter presents the Stalin era as one in which a monolithic, centralized scientific community run by Lysenko (with Stalin�s blessing), dictated to - and persecuted - geneticists and other scientists. According to Krementsov and others who have examined the new Soviet archival evidence, there is no factual support for this view. Instead, the evidence coheres into a picture of fierce competition between Lysenko vs. N. Vavilov, Zhebrak, and others (like the Leningraders mentioned above) for favors and funds dispensed by the Party apparatus. According to Krementsov, "the black-and-white picture... - the oppressive state versus the victimized scientific community," does not fit "the archival documents I was unearthing" (ibid., p. xi).'

So once again, you are wrong

Perhaps he did do damage to the Party (I think not), but did not damage to the Nation.

Demigawd

Sources, Totalitarianist, sources. Who is this historian? Where can I find this article/book/whatever so I can read it for myself? You are deliberately obfuscating your sources so that another person cannot follow your research.

Until you start providing proper scholarly citation, you are merely a street-corner agitator. Keep asserting you deal with only the facts all you please, but you have demonstrated absolutely no credibility whatsoever.

Totalitarianist

that is the only source for which I forgot to provide. I share the source tomorrow, for my mom says that she does not want me to use this computer for the rest of the day. and therefore I am leaving. Goodbye.