So, over the past year I have learnt so much about the amazing achievements these men (and the party they were the leaders of) did that I was never taught. I’ve ‘semi-intentionally’ deprogrammed myself of so much anti-communism bullshit while having to live with that most still in the West, based upon misinformation, view them as ‘evil, 100 quintillion deaths, dictator, psychopath where muh freedoms’.
The reason I am focusing on Stalin and Mao in particular in this post is, to be very open, due to a truth-seeking hyperfixation that I must satisfy so I can move on to the next topic of intense, dopamine chasing, obsession. Yeah I love being me. Anyway, propaganda, mythologising, exaggerating and misattributed blame brushed aside, what is left?
I am quite knowledgeable of, thanks to some high quality M-L documentaries, educational videos and podcast episodes, the more obvious wrongdoings such as the Great Leap Forward killing of pests worsening the famine, purges of comrades who were legitimately innocent, re-criminalising homosexuality, support of Khmer Rouge and ethnic deportations to name a few.
I wouldn’t mind hearing more obscure examples, or a deeper analysis of the mistakes and unjustifiable actions I am already aware of. And as much as a few good book recommendations probably would give me the answers I crave, I am lowkey illiterate with long-form reading thanks to my ADHD (still waiting on meds after being diagnosed 8 months ago).
In all honesty this is a difficult topic to get utility from. The biggest problem is the deeply-seeded Christian moralism that poisons western thought, messily conflating tacticality and morality on multiple levels. The second problem is how much of the hard data has been corrupted, obscured, crowded out, or destroyed.
(I’m speaking mostly of the USSR because that’s the one I’ve read a bunch of books on. I only have a passing knowledge of post-rev China).
And I super empathize with unmedicated ADHD. One thing that sort of helped me in this specific case was taking a non-linear study approach to the USSR (which actually is the only good way to study this specific topic, imo, since none of the sources are both trustworthy and comprehensive). Rather than choosing one book and reading it cover to cover, I bought/downloaded a few of them, then continued to get more as I followed citation trails back. This let me start to get a picture of the life cycle of historiography, the process by which truth is narrativized and manufactured.
Which brings me back to the aforementioned second problem (which I’m addressing first for some reason): how do we know things? Or skipping a few steps past sense-certainty, how do historians claim to know things? Well, they read firsthand and secondhand accounts, contemporaneous documents, and other historians, then assemble a skeleton of events of varying certainty, using their own heuristics and intuition to fill in the gaps to construct a cohesive narrative (this description is a massive oversimplification of course). Given the right inputs and academic rigor, that tends to produce something that’s probably a pretty decent approximation of reality.
The historian then might write a book about the object of study, where a thought like “according to person A, event x happened, and according to historian B, event z happened, and I’m filling in the gaps to say event y happened” might get polished down to “events xyz happened - person A and historian B”. This sort of lossy compression is necessary to some degree, otherwise you end up with unreadable, long-winded blathering like this comment. It’s not realistic to, like, color code every single sentence in a history book based on how provable or controversial it is, or hotlink each claim to all existing sources that both confirm and contradict it (as much as I wish those were somehow the standard).
A result of this is that the skeleton of cited data might be informative, but the narrative flesh around it tends to reproduce already-existing consensus, assumptions, and ideology. And in the case of Western Sovietology, the skeleton of citable data comes in large part from (1) Nazis, (2) Trotsky, (3), Khrushchev, or (4) nowhere, pulled out of someone’s ass. So Historian A might cite a nazi for x, Khrushchev for z, then fill in y based on what they, an anticommunist, think is reasonable. Then Historian B comes along and cites Historian A for x, Radio Free Asia for z, and fills in y. Then Historian C comes along, etc etc etc. Including Historian A coming back with another book and citing Historian J and Trotsky, etc etc etc. I frequently call western sovietology incestuous and that’s what I mean. The academia factory produces the illusion of consensus, but if you start following the genealogy of a claim back, you often find there is no reliable factual ancestor.
Why is this relevant to the question of the mistakes of the USSR? Because if you want to do a proper analysis, moral or tactical, the particulars start to matter. Think of any difficult decision you’ve had to make, with both pros and cons on either side, and imagine if you erased most or all of those pros and cons. What may have been a justifiable/strategic decision might seem like an immoral/stupid one without all the data. Even omitting or mis-weighting a single data point might tip the scales. So imagine someone trying to do so using a century of historiographic incest as their source (often a single book, or worse, a couple YouTube videos).
It’s not at all to say you shouldn’t study and learn from history, but in the case of revolutionaries at least, the framing question shouldn’t be an analysis of whether decisions were justified/correct, but taking stock of what problems were faced and how they might correlate to problems we face today. The historic answers to those problems are only tactically useful in a very general sense, because (1) the veil of history prevents us from knowing the circumstances that demanded them or the particulars of the solutions and (2) the cross-applicability of a solution to an entirely different set of circumstances is not a given.
Attempting to circle back to the first problem of Christian moralism: as Marxists most of us have figured out we can disregard the vilification of revolutionaries. It takes practice, though, not to accidentally fall back on old habits when diving into particulars. People are often caught at the roadblock of moral-if-tactical faux analysis, which accomplishes little for the reasons I tried to lay out previously, and is still just a moralist analysis dressed up in the language of a tactical analysis. Roughly paraphrasing Hobsbawm as one example. After the fall of the USSR: the “crimes of Stalin” might have been justified if they had resulted in global communism, but since that didn’t happen and the USSR eventually failed, they were all for nothing.
Another side of that coin is attempting to do apologetics for revolutionaries, which is just accepting the framing and framework of anticommunists to argue on their ground. Convincing liberals that Stalin was a good person and is currently in heaven with Jesus and Lenin is a black hole of effort, and misses the point of studying history. (Contradicting this claim, I suspect de-vilifying Stalin might be necessary for communist theory and organization to advance in the US. I haven’t figured out how to reconcile these thoughts yet). But 9 out of 10 times when agitating and educating, if the topic of the USSR comes up, it’s more effective to focus on the successes of the Soviet Union and its workers, de-emphasizing specific figureheads as necessary.
I don’t currently have access to my books, but off the top of my head a few that I remember referencing are Kotkin’s biographies of Stalin, Roberts’ Stalin’s Wars, Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism and On Stalin’s Team, and of course Losurdo’s Black Legend. As memories drain from my colander-brain I can’t remember all of them or which ones are better than others. None should be taken at face value, although Losurdo’s benefits from his being a philosopher and communist.
I think I remember 100 Days that Shook the World and Black Bolshevik being pretty good for options that aren’t academic history books. If I remember others I’ll add em
Good post and points.
Sounds very much like “the ends justify the means”, so yeah, I agree that kind of thinking is its own kind of dead-end.
I do think morality is kind of an unavoidable piece of the puzzle, so to speak, in actually existing communist practice. The primary problem with Christian morality thought seems to be that it has a tendency to break things down into simplistic binary states. Good and evil, right and wrong, justified and unjustified, pure and corrupted, saved and damned, etc.
Then the idea goes something like, each time you do an act that lands on one end of a given binary, you move closer to or further from saved or damned. So judging a person or entity becomes this exercise in tallying up the good and the bad, and deciding whether they are good or evil in the end. But also, in practice, actually tallying up is hard, so what more tends to happen is people look for deeds that can be categorized as unforgivably evil or fantastically good and decide that those outweigh everything else in the analysis.
The most obvious problem with this being that most actions a given person or entity can/will take do not, in fact, fit into simplistic binary states and few actions are so thoroughly fucked that no restorative justice is possible and even then, the reason why usually has more to do with the intractableness of embedded institutions of power than to do with any kind of inherent impossibility of addressing grievances. For example, organic revolutions in history (I say organic cause color revolutions are their own beast) don’t tend to happen simply because there’s a grievance, but more like because a society reaches a point where there are many ongoing grievances and other options for resolving them face consistent violent repression.
In other words, Christian morality thought often gets lost in the weeds of which category we should view someone/entity in: good or evil. If they fall under good, we can look up to them, model after, etc. If they fall under bad, everything they do is suspect and nothing they do is of value. This is a very limiting view of the world. For example, under this mode of thinking, the western/white empire cannot possibly have ever done anything of note beyond pure evil. This would be foolish to say though, as clearly there’s a lot it has done effectively, else the legacy of colonialism and then imperialism would not have lasted so long. But at the same time, acknowledging this does not reverse the binary and now mean the empire is good.
For someone stuck in Christian morality thought, we could maybe say “how can you defeat darkness if you don’t understand how it operates?” Or on the flip side, “how can you work in muddy water if you are paralyzed by the fear of becoming dirt because dirt gets on you?” (e.g. how can you fix a problem if you’re too afraid that trying to fix it will taint you with the elements of a broken world). At any rate, the idea is to feel that it’s okay to view actions beyond a binary (without going to a different extreme like “everything is morally relative” silliness). And importantly, doing this while respecting the foundation of a thing, where it matters. For example, if the CPC were to pile dirt on Mao, this would undermine the foundations of the CPC itself and its history. At the same time, if they were to say that Mao can never be criticized, they would, by extension, be implying that the CPC itself is beyond criticism.
Oh and I think proles of the round table did a few episodes on Stalin that might be informative. I don’t remember them and they still likely suffer from the citation problem, but they’re probably good
Also forgot to mention the Soviet Archives in my comment, but that’s where most good information is going to lead back to. But they didn’t become accessible to the West until the fall of the USSR (and I believe they were closed again iirc) and since they’re not in English and they contradict anticommunist claims their information has been slow to permeate into western academia. You can find a very small portion of them available online, but sometimes you’ll follow the citation trail back to a reference to an Archives document and you can’t really verify it because there’s no way to read it. But at least if it’s pointing to something in the Archives it’s slightly more trustworthy than something citing Conquest.
Thank you for writing all of that, it was very enlightening. And goddamit comrade, I am jealous of your intellect 😅.
I think most people (I know I desperately do) desire a clear objective truth to the past and present world yet pretty much everything, as far as I am aware, is muddied by subjective information. I’d love if I could have some magic fact dispenser teach me the truth about whatever I wanted.
I’m going to go learn some more about historiography as you weren’t the only commenter to bring that up.