caffeine-and-revolution:

spaffy-jimble: spaffy-jimble: Me when Stalin robs banks to fund the communist party, breaks out of tsar Nickie’s prisons four times, and then goes on to lead the first grand scale socialist society: Boys will be boys Just to clarify for the liberals; robbing banks, breaking out of prison, the communist party, and Stalin are all (overall, 70/30) good things. can you please show me some good stuff that stalin did? i don’t know much about actual communist history and all i’ve heard about the ussr is negative. albeit that’s coming from capitalists so it’s probably mostly fabricated but i’ve still not heard much good about the ussr.

“The Stalin Era,” by Anna Louise Strong is a good start. Chapters 1-4 deal with the building of the former Russian Empire from the semi-feudal backwater of Europe, to a bastion of new art and science, engineering marvels constructed by the people, for the people, to a society that took great leaps to ensure the collective well-being of the people. A lot of the stuff you hear is straight up fake, you can use primary source data from the Soviet archives (why would they lie to themselves, think about it) as well as eyewitnesses whose stories do not make it to Western audiences because their words do not get translated by capitalist journalism. You can find a pdf for free from prisoncensorship.info

The Soviet Union and the Soviet people were not perfect, therefore neither were their leaders. But they represented the most progressive force in terms of leading people from superstition to science, from darkness to electrical light, from tsarism to socialism. We look to Stalin for economics (the Soviet Union was the fastest growing economy in history, we should examine why), for organizing a party both covertly and openly, and for handling the complex diplomatic and political nature of the time period where the Soviet Union stood as the largest force against fascism. We do not look to Stalin for most parts of social policy, or police reform.