The Communists lost, the Nationalists won: Better fate for Russia and China?

What's your opinion on this issue?

  • Yes, the victory of White Russians and Kuomintang means a better fate for Russia and China

    Votes: 93 45.8%
  • White Russian victory, yes; but Kuomintang's victory, no

    Votes: 21 10.3%
  • Kuomintang's victory, yes; but White Russian victory, no

    Votes: 38 18.7%
  • No, the victory of both of them doesn't mean a better fate for either Russia or China

    Votes: 51 25.1%

  • Total voters
    203
If anything is inflated it is Stalinist production figures. They said whatever Stalin wanted them to say. Hell, during the entire Cold War the USSR's GDP figures were inflated as well as inflated figures gave the USSR bragging rights and allowed the Pentegon to get a larger budget.

That's what happens when you already believe a bad idea really, really strongly: it leads to blatant lies and fraud as surely as night leads into day. Stalinism made the Big Lie into an art form.
 
Stalin was competent at being a power politician. His fanatical Marxism and intense paranoia also sometimes led his policies in relatively productive directions.

And Snake, I know you don't admire the Soviets. Just their army circa 1943-45. This can easily get confused with admiration for the Soviets. Good night!
 
In the fact that his industrialization program produced one of the quickest rates of industrialization ever. The Soviet Union under him went from a industrially backwards pariah to a superpower that would soon launch people into space. If it wasn't for the fact that he was responsible for the death of millions, he would be remembered as a rather effective, if authoritarian ruler.

It did this, however, at an appalling price and where the USSR actually did have its most advanced areas, Stalin was directly responsible for reversing this progress (the Deep Operations concept). Soviet industry made gains in a process rife with blatant lies and filled with tremendous brutality, to a point where Stalin was in practice someone with the unrestrained cruelty of an Ivan the Terrible yoked to the cruelty and malignant embrace of a new system, damn the consequences, of a Peter the Great.

The most idiotic bit of criticisms of Stalin is how little of "his" system he invented, as opposed to perfected. Stalin in a real sense is the apogee of the system built by Rurikids, Romanovs, and Leninists. And he, like them, was a bloodthirsty and cruel monster ruling a system that favored monsters. The real defect in views of Stalin is trying to view his era in a vacuum removed from everything else, he was a symptom, not the disease.
 
Stalin was competent at being a power politician. His fanatical Marxism and intense paranoia also sometimes led his policies in relatively productive directions.

And Snake, I know you don't admire the Soviets. Just their army circa 1943-45. This can easily get confused with admiration for the Soviets. Good night!

Actually if my comments are read as they fully should be, what I say is that I admire the Red Army of 1943-5......that needed US trucks to do anything approaching what it did. In contrast to the wooden caricature of my argument I give the USA its full due in what was in practice a coalition war won by a coalition. How this gets translated into a view of Soviet-admiration I don't know. I suppose the concept of backhanded compliments is too obscure for most people.

*shrugs*

I admit unashamedly to admiring Russian civilization, but in this sense the Soviet era was just an exaggeration of all that was rotten with the system Filaret built.
 
The thing is that Snake's arguments in the end still aren't convincing me that the Tsars or White autocrats would just go and kill as many people as Stalin.
 
The thing is that Snake's arguments in the end still aren't convincing me that the Tsars or White autocrats would just go and kill as many people as Stalin.

I never said they would. I'm simply noting that it will be because they literally are incapable of doing it, not because they had any kind of squeamishness or scruples about it.
 

Stolengood

Banned
I have to ask... were the people in Europe and America, then, who believed in the power of Communism and socialism and the "revolutionary solution" just overly-optimistic, especially in hindsight from what we now know about the states that used those systems? :(
 
I have to ask... were the people in Europe and America, then, who believed in the power of Communism and socialism and the "revolutionary solution" just overly-optimistic, especially in hindsight from what we now know about the states that used those systems? :(

Not always. If there was one thing the Soviet Union was good at, it was taking a bunch of bullshit and turning it into brown gold and getting people to sincerely believe it. That's less optimism and more gullibility.
 
I never said they would. I'm simply noting that it will be because they literally are incapable of doing it, not because they had any kind of squeamishness or scruples about it.

If they're incompetent at cementing their rule through Stalinist means, they will have to use less efficient (and less absolutely brutal) methods which would lead to Russia falling majorly behind other powers (no Stalin-style industrialization), or they would be forced to undergo reforms similar to those done in Western/Japanese nations in order to keep pace. I think that under a more conservative system, there is more chance of the latter happening, since what Stalin achieved was, as you said, to become the ultimate Tsar and thus had no need for reforms, only purges, to keep his power in health.
 
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