Panopticon posted:

stalinists often remind us khrushchev participated in the purges and had blood on his hands. but if stalin was such a wonderful humanitarian, why didn't he punish khrushchev for this anti-soviet crime?

pobody's nerfect

Panopticon posted:

it follows from the points i made prior to that. if stalin wasn't concerned with individual guilt or innocence, but with destroying the kulaks as a class, then you can't say that ezhov somehow betrayed stalin by destroying the kulaks as a class with no regard for guilt or innocence

hypothetically let's say stalin did want to destroy (or at least neutralise) the kulaks as a class. why would that be wrong?

Panopticon posted:

why do you believe stalin was concerned with guilt and innocence, and not the suppression of a class?

stalin's other state-capitalist errors include refusing to tell us, despite repeated good-faith questions, when he stopped beating his wife

What does this mean? It means that we have passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class. It means that we have carried out, and are continuing to carry out, one of the decisive turns in our whole policy.

To launch an offensive against the kulaks means that we must smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.

Today, we have an adequate material base for us to strike at the kulaks, to break their resistance, to eliminate them as a class, and to replace their output by the output of the collective farms and state farms.

That is why we have recently passed from the policy of restricting the exploiting tendencies of the kulaks to the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class.

Panopticon posted:

i believe getty's interpretation of events over yours. stalin wanted to centralise power under the 1936 constitution, and to get the regions to go along with it he temporarily devolved judicial authority to them to kill and imprison their enemies

What is Getty's evidence? I'd rather look at the sources that actually prove this.

Chapter 5 includes Ezhov's confession among a lot of other great material and I look forward to your lengthy, tear-soaked apology. 30 pages

Edited by swampman (April 27, 2016 13:45:02)

Panopticon posted:

and if you disagree that stalin treated the kulaks as a class to be destroyed, you disagree with stalin

you might have missed this but literally all of those quotes include the qualifier "as a class." i mean you even say it yourself!

when you read that a company has been liquidated, do you feel the need to run out and rescue its employees from being dissolved in acid? or are you able to make a distinction between what happens to a structure vs. its constituents?

if the latter, then why does that faculty abruptly vanish when the structure in question is an economic class?

Constantignoble posted:

i'm reading that getty article, and like two pages in he is already talking about what a bureaucratic clusterfuck the whole thing was (going so far as to call that sort of chaos basically paradigmatic of stalin's era) and even says "there is little reason to think that Stalin sought or expected the mess he created"

this thing is pretty long, though, so maybe you could save some time by pulling what you think are the most significant bits to support your point? i mean i assume you're familiar with the piece, since you linked it and all

he did not expect his tight control to be ignored by the people implementing his plan (local party and NKVD leaders on the troikas). he not not plan for 400,000 people to be executed. but he DID plan for 80,000 people to be executed on the basis of their class affiliation. he did not plan for the guilty and the innocent to be separated as chaff from wheat. when he devolved state power to local authorities (abandoning the precepts of legalism he had been cultivating since 1933) he allowed for the abuses to take place.

this is why swampman's interpretation is complete garbage. ezhov was part of the stalinist centre and was only used as a scapegoat by stalin when he wanted to regain control after the local leaders were placated. ezhov was sending out the exact same kind of admonitions furr says absolve stalin of culpability. for example pages 133-134

In February 1938, Ezhov sent a letter to the NKVD leadership in Ukraine "and elsewhere" congratulating his subordinates on good work in arresting spies and observing that things were going generally well, but noting some "mistakes and serious shortcomings" in local NKVD operations... etc

Panopticon posted:

In February 1938, Ezhov sent a letter to the NKVD leadership in Ukraine "and elsewhere" congratulating his subordinates on good work in arresting spies and observing that things were going generally well, but noting some "mistakes and serious shortcomings" in local NKVD operations... etc

this letter is discussed at length in the upcoming chapter

babyhueypnewton posted:

panopticon every single post you make is extremely dishonest. this entire debate started because swampman posed a detailed and reasonable critique of your position and you responded to one line of it. you then purposefully confused the Marxist concept of liquidating a class and executions and when called out for this you pretended that you had understood the difference the whole time and actually mean that it was Stalin who didn't. now you responded to constantignoble with the same claim that swampman originally criticized (which you ignored).

we are not opposed to debate, considering this thread is pretty quiet otherwise. but you are again being completely dishonest and acting incredulous to hide the inadequacy of your critical thinking ability. if I was still mod I would have banned you but since I'm not please treat people's arguments with respect and actually pretend like everything you write can easily be read again.

i only needed that line. the entire argument that ezhov fell from grace for killing innocents is absurd given that stalin's intent had nothing to do with guilt and innocence, but with destroying a class (we can agree now that this is possible without mass murder, but stalin planned for those mass murders)

babyhueypnewton posted:

Panopticon posted:
he not not plan for 400,000 people to be executed. but he DID plan for 80,000 people to be executed on the basis of their class affiliation.

This is a pretty clear, simple example of how ideology distorts perception. When the word limity was translated as "quota" these Politburo orders and other documents had a more damning flair to them. But now that the numbers are shown to be the opposite - strict maximums on the number of people to be tried - it's still (to you) evidence against the Communists. Now, my reading of the "limit" here is that Stalin saw a need for immediate action but had no desire for overreach. Note that Stalin does not even specify the actual limit but asks for the limits to be provided from each territory. Stalin was asking for an estimate of the number of kulaks who were involved in anti-Soviet crimes in each area, then demanding the local troika stick to those limits instead of zealously rooting out ever more criminals until innocents became swept up. Probably Stalin remembered events from world history like, the Inquisition or whatever, and wanted Soviet agents, acting at a distance in a time before cellphones, not to undermine the goal of executing the anti-Soviet kulaks.

You on the other hand seem to read the "quotas" as proof that Stalin wanted at X thousand murdered, and now you read the "limit" as proof that Stalin already had the first X thousand executions lined up.

please actually respond to this this time instead of ignoring it.

see, again he hems and haws about innocents and crimes when those things weren't relevant

Petrol posted:

Panopticon posted:
he did not expect his tight control to be ignored by the people implementing his plan (local party and NKVD leaders on the troikas). he not not plan for 400,000 people to be executed. but he DID plan for 80,000 people to be executed on the basis of their class affiliation. he did not plan for the guilty and the innocent to be separated as chaff from wheat. when he devolved state power to local authorities (abandoning the precepts of legalism he had been cultivating since 1933) he allowed for the abuses to take place.

You draw a long fucking bow, mate. Getty is helping you do it so let's examine the obvious flaw with his take on these events. He assumes there was no genuine counterrevolutionary activity taking place - that regional party leaders were basically just being paranoid about the threat of former kulaks and other reactionaries gaining power in the forthcoming open elections, and Stalin gave his blessing for those local leaders to exterminate potential enemies simply to ensure the elections went smoothly. That makes far less sense than the alternative scenario, in which a reactionary terror campaign was actually being waged by former kulaks, Whites, etc in the leadup to the elections, and that in spite of the risks and potential for abuse, an urgent mass repression was actually required.

An important point I want to drive home now is that in such a scenario - heck, even if that WAS a paranoid fantasy Stalin was credulous enough to believe - when he authorised the repression/execution of kulaks by local authorities, he was actually authorising the repression specifically of counterrevolutionary terrorists.

Now, you can make the argument that he must have anticipated local authorities would abuse this power, and I agree, but (a) it doesn't follow that he would or could have anticipated how far the troikas would go, because his superhero power was not clairvoyancy; (b) in the context of an urgent response to a serious counterrevolutionary threat, it's a reasonable and quite probably necessary risk to take.

okay, if your position is 400,000 dead are an acceptable price for liquidating the kulak class, then fine, but please stick with that position and don't pretend stalin meant something else.

Panopticon posted:

okay, if your position is 400,000 dead are an acceptable price for liquidating the kulak class, then fine, but please stick with that position and don't pretend stalin meant something else.

Has anyone ever noticed you can't spell panopticon without cop

Panopticon posted:

see, again he hems and haws about innocents and crimes when those things weren't relevant

this is in no way a response to what he said, particularly since it is you who is fixated on the concept of legality and rule of law.

xipe posted:

Panopticon posted:
he did not expect his tight control to be ignored by the people implementing his plan (local party and NKVD leaders on the troikas). he not not plan for 400,000 people to be executed. but he DID plan for 80,000 people to be executed on the basis of their class affiliation.


taking a quick look at a (bad, machine) translation of the actual order itself (one of the few sources getty cites that you can read, it seems)

it says there are estimates of 73,000 people engaged "most serious" activities such as

"much in the past repressed churchmen and sectarians who were active participants in the anti-Soviet armed actions."

"As well as footage of former active members of bandit revolts, white, punitive, immigrants, etc."

"In addition, in the countryside and the city is still a significant nest frames criminals - skotokonokradov, habitual thieves, robbers, and others serving sentences who escaped from prison and fleeing from repression"

it says these numbers are approximate but could be less.

for what to do with them:
"They are subject to immediate arrest and, in consideration of their cases on threes - execution."

the wiki article itself says (uncited):

"The implementation was swift. By August 15, 1937, 101,000 were arrested and 14,000 convicted."


i have just picked that out quickly (and am misinterpreting parts obv) but it is very clear that getty (and you) casually stating "73,000 to be shot" is a lie.
Which casts doubt on all his other statements based on things we cant read

no