On Thu, 22 Jan 1998, Andrew Wayne Austin wrote:
> The reality of atrocities in the former Soviet Union during some of the
> Stalinist era are bad enough without exaggerating those numbers. It is the
> *exaggeration* I attacked. The predicted response: "Apologist!" It is not
> true, of course. But it is functional, and its *function* is what is
> crucial to expose here. This tactic legitimates the liberal and corporate
> versions of totalitarianism, and diminishes the horror of authoritarian
> capitalism, while making communism nonviable.
>
> Those who inflated the numbers of killed--10 million, 30 million, 100
> million--were evidently (and ironically, in a way) counting on the Soviet
> Union never falling, and state records never coming out.
The archival evidence finally available to scholars shows that somewhere
between 1 and 1.5 million people were executed during the purges of the
Thirties; many of these folks were not "politicals" but were classified as
criminals, but they were victims of the crash industrialization just the
same. Millions more were drafted into labor camps, where they existed
in pretty horrible conditions. These are not personal anecdotes, these are
the best historical evidence we have today -- KGB archives, personal
accounts, a wide variety of sociological and statistical sources etc.
Yes, peasants were starving in India in the 1930s. And millions of
Ukrainian peasants starved to death during the same time-period,
thanks to the madness of Stalinist collectivization (I won't even begin to
mention the various sell-outs of the Greek revolutionaries, the Spanish
anarchists, etc. by the Stalin apparat). I just don't see the
point of selecting the bright points of Soviet society, labelling these
"socialism", and comparing these to the worst aspects of American, or
German, or Indonesian society: dialectics is about thinking critically
about ALL societies, and analyzing the tendencies of a very large,
complex and antagonistic world-system in an attempt to stop the incessant
and continuing slaughter of capitalist pre-history. Stalinism did not stop
the slaughter, but continued it with different means, which is no
socialism at all.
-- Dennis