Question by myugenjin: Whats the difference between Stalin & Lenin?
Seems like everybody and they momma loves them some Lenin but Stalin he’s kinda iffy. Is this a Lincoln compared to George Bush kinda thing?
i.e. say Lenin unified a Soviet nation while Stalin got caught up in a costly war & thats why he’s disliked????
Answers and Views:
Answer by Sam D
Lenin helped lead the Russian Revolution after the czars were ousted. Stalin you might say, was his successor. Near the end, Lenin hated Stalin- and for good reason. Lenin used Communism for good, while Stalin only abused it and turned it into a brute-force method for trying to get the nation back up to par with the West.
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Asad Zaman says
When the state becomes no more than a device for preserving the state, then it matters little what its origins were. It is, in any case, totalitarian, and therefore reactionary. It is a mistake to think that Stalinism is a betrayal of Leninism. Neither Lenin, if he had lived, nor Trotsky, if he had remained in power, would have acted any differently from Stalin. All of their writings, all of their actions, and all of their speeches between 1917 and 1924, reflect the practice and the theory of a thoroughly Stalin-style dictatorship. They began in January 1918 by dissolving, with the help of the army, the Constituent Assembly set up by elections – elections in which the Bolsheviks had received only one quarter of the votes. From that moment, as Rosa Luxemburg has pointed out so well in The Russian Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky began from the principle that they knew the minds of the people better than did the people themselves. As Lenin remarked at the Tenth Party Congress, held in March 1921, the Party “alone is capable of grouping, educating, and organizing the avant-garde of the proletariat and of all the working classes – that avant-garde being the only force able to offer opposition to the inevitable oscillations of the petit-bourgeoisie.” And Trotsky, on the same occasion, added that “the Party is compelled to maintain the dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering, and even regardless of the transitory hesitations of the working class.
gee bee says
Lenin knew Stalin for what he was.
He did his best to try to stop Stalin but the man from Georgia was a wily fox as well as being a ruthless politician, not averse to eliminating his rivals.
Stalin caught on quickly. He got himself elected to all the key committees and gathered power to himself.
Then Lenin fell terminally ill. he became powerless to stop him and when Lenin died, Stalin stepped up and brought the committees together and laid the foundations for his becoming the only ruling Dictator. He was brutal and unstoppable.
Andrew A says
You should watch the TV movie Archangel. It's about Stalin and post Soviet Russia. You'll get an idea about Stalin. The numbers are mixed, but some show Stalin was responsible for up to 60 million deaths. That's more than Hitler.