Vladimir Lenin

How Would Socialism Be Percieved In The USA if Lenin hadn't died so young?


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Weren't Lenin's policies significantly more pragmatic than Stalin's? While you may still get the Gulags of OTL, you might not get the crippling famine in the Southern European regions.

You might want to read a hell of a lot more criticism of inner party life. Even Archipelago notes that Stalin tail-ended the party and the industrial proletariat. Stalin was nothing if not pragmatic—in fact, if there is any criticism of Stalin, he placed the immediate interests of the nomenklatura ahead of their absolute interests. Djilas is also a good read for just how pragmatic Stalin was.

yours,
Sam R.
 

Incognito

Banned
Lenin's New Economic Policy was planned to last virtually until the entire country was literate (or as close as). Stalin changed that and supported collectivisation in 1928 in order to essentially pay for his mass drive for industrialisation. The NEP was unpopular in some of the Bolshevik circles because it retained and evan expanded upon capitalist institutions in order to stabalise the Soviet economy and further the economic expansion. Stalin wanted such things to be under Party control not kulaks and capitalists and this struggle eventually lead to things such as the Holodomor as collectivised farms had their grain requisitioned. Fuck ups are going to happen still but it won't ever be on such a grand scale, I would have thought.
This makes me wonder... had the NEP continued would it result in Soviet Union's brand of communism resembling Chinese "socialist market economy"/"socialism with Chinese characteristics"? (It should be noted that I ask this as someone with no deep knowledge of the NEP or the Chinese economic reforms)
 
This makes me wonder... had the NEP continued would it result in Soviet Union's brand of communism resembling Chinese "socialist market economy"/"socialism with Chinese characteristics"? (It should be noted that I ask this as someone with no deep knowledge of the NEP or the Chinese economic reforms)

No. The Soviet rural working class and small peasantry were not subject to the same mass capitalist impulses as the urban centres. The countryside was willing to restrict output and avoid consumption of market goods in favour of consumption of personal production. This is the scissors crisis—urban goods cannot be efficiently exchanged for food products.

Given that the kulaks a) didn't exist in the manner advertised and b) didn't impose massifying capitalist relations of production in agriculture, the people with the power to displace millions of peasants and force them into the maw of industry in the NEP weren't going to.

So you get a large hungry urban working class who resents the peasantry for their petits-bourgeois privilege of choosing to restrict production in favour of in house personal consumption.

yours,
Sam R.
 
Socialism under Lenin would have been viewed as worse than neutral but better than the socialism of Stalin. I'm not going to vote because that option isn't presented. Lenin was brutal and a control freak but he wasn't paranoid like Stalin. He was an educated man who lived for many years in the West; an economic historian; and a journalist who spend years studying and commenting on the foibles of the Duma. He appears not to have been a victim of child abuse like Stalin was; if anything, his mother and his sisters spoiled him. Would he have killed a million or so out of fanaticism because he saw them as counterrevolutionaries? Yes. Would he have killed his own associates and purged his army out of a sense of paranoia and because it gave him a sadistic buzz? I doubt it. Would he have killed tens of millions simply because he had the power to do so and wanted to indirectly act out his grudges against his father? Again, I doubt it. And I don't think he would have handled the Ukrainian famine the way Stalin did. This doesn't mean the communist system would have lasted in Russia; it inevitably would have collapsed because it was based on false premises. It was something that could work, clumsily, for awhile, but inevitable people would have wanted something better.
 
Socialism under Lenin would have been viewed as worse than neutral but better than the socialism of Stalin. I'm not going to vote because that option isn't presented. Lenin was brutal and a control freak but he wasn't paranoid like Stalin. He was an educated man who lived for many years in the West; an economic historian; and a journalist who spend years studying and commenting on the foibles of the Duma. He appears not to have been a victim of child abuse like Stalin was; if anything, his mother and his sisters spoiled him. Would he have killed a million or so out of fanaticism because he saw them as counterrevolutionaries? Yes. Would he have killed his own associates and purged his army out of a sense of paranoia and because it gave him a sadistic buzz? I doubt it. Would he have killed tens of millions simply because he had the power to do so and wanted to indirectly act out his grudges against his father? Again, I doubt it. And I don't think he would have handled the Ukrainian famine the way Stalin did. This doesn't mean the communist system would have lasted in Russia; it inevitably would have collapsed because it was based on false premises. It was something that could work, clumsily, for awhile, but inevitable people would have wanted something better.

I agree with you on all points up until the inevitable collapse of Communism. The biggest culprit of the long-term failure of the Soviet Union would be the fallout of many of Stalin's own policies and the destruction caused by WWII. Lenin in charge for another decade or two unleashes a storm of butterflies that could change how WWII happens if it does at all which would remove one of the biggest economic barriers facing the USSR vs the United States.

The USSR certainly wouldn't be the land of milk and honey but I think if Lenin is in charge for another ten years at leastalong with the other Old Bolshevik leading lights (who were very intelligent, well-educated men especially compared to Stalin) the situation is going to turn out very differently. No Stalin means the political and academic culture of the Soviet Union could evolve in a direction where it is more capable of self-assessment, self-criticism, and course correction. The greatest damage Stalin ever did was his psychopathic demands for total obedience to his will regardless of the practical consequences; remove that kind of thinking and you'll avoid a lot of the problems that came as a result of his time in power. Keeping Lenin in long-term definitely means Stalin will NEVER have a chance to gain power; Lenin's final testament pretty clearly denounced Stalin and called for his removal from positions of power. When you compare the more academic Old Bolsheviks to Stalin's system it gives the USSR a much greater range of options to work with.
 
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