- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
How much of this was Lenin as opposed to Stalin? Usually the defense I see is that Stalin did all the bad stuff but Lenin and Marx had great ideas.
Marx had great ideas, and died long before the Russian Revolution occurred.
Lenin was fond of contradicting himself in the pursuit of power for the Bolshevik Party. He couped a democratic socialist government and kickstarted a civil war, and then implemented a deeply repressive authoritarian state with precious little in the way of “workers’ rights” or “political freedoms”.
Stalin was a paranoid lunatic who made the political prisoner system into a resource for mass slave labor with high mortality rates. Not to mention worsening every issue under the sun during his regime - from the right to quit one’s job (very bourgeois, comrade, wanting to control your own labor!) to collectivization of farms to the bureaucratic mess that was Stalinist-era requisitions to public infrastructure. Oh, and he also performed multiple genocides and massacres, allied with the Nazis to invade Poland and the Baltic States, and supplied the Nazi regime with war materiel for the first two years of WW2.


