Effect of free speech on the USSR?

Effect of free speech on the USSR?

  • Negative effect

    Votes: 7 46.7%
  • Positive effect

    Votes: 8 53.3%

  • Total voters
    15
Imagine if you will Stalin has an aneurysm in 1928 and while recovering undergoes a stark personality change.
"Socialism in One Open Country!" he decries and his associates obey.

So while collectivization and the 5 year plans still happen, it does so with the right of free speech & free press protected.

Could it have worked? and if so what sort of benefits/negatives could it have provided to the early USSR onward?
 
free speech did not exist properly in the mildest of authoritarian states, why would it be possible to exist in 1928 USSR one of the most totalitarian states in existence.

Even if Stalin does institute this without being removed and put in a sanitorium, it's probably likely that local party cadres would have still restricted free speech. When it's possible to imprison and and execute someone without trial it's very likely that officials would have harassed and punished all those who criticised them.

Mao tried something like this wiht the hundred flowers campaign and the party was instantly horrified with the level of criticism they received and had to crack down on this free speech with the arrest of several hundred thousand people.
 
No. The Bolsheviks were collectively sure they had the monopoly on the one true path to humanity's future, and that the necessary steps to take would not be immediately popular, not by solid majorities anyway. They believed their program was not only in the best interests of the working masses but was dictated by inexorable forces of history, that the only alternative to the Party staying in charge would be chaos followed by a reactionary regime that would leave the workers in misery. Therefore they could not allow unrestrained free speech lest some clique of the disgruntled masses and defecting Party members should take a popular but misguided stance and steal power from themselves. Only they could be trusted with the power. Stalin's repressions began as a matter of consensus in his own Party, dissidents from this stand having been purged long ago.

To go differently, either the Bolsheviks would have to have been forced into sharing power with another party or three that the Bolsheviks could not oust nor could any coalition of the others oust them. The Bolsheviks would then be forced to seek a different path to socialist worker control of a strong and expanding industrial state, or fall back on less ambitious goals, or admit defeat and fall back on critiquing the more popular factions. Or else the nature of the Party, and Lenin's character, would have to be quite different before the Revolution.
 
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