gabor@qantel.UUCP (Gabor Fencsik@ex2642) (04/26/85)
Tony Wuersch (tonyw@ubvax), in an attempt to present a cost-benefit analysis of the Bolshevik Revolution, discusses Soviet performance in World War II as follows: > ... war cannot be won by endurance and patriotism alone. It needs > national industrial capacity. Proper credit has to be given to the > Communist party for the success of rapid industrialization. That success > made defense against the Nazis possible on a material basis. The pain > and sweat and indignities endured by Soviet citizens in industrialization > paid off in WWII. There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that I can only begin to scratch the surface. I won't even comment on 'pain and sweat and indignities', except to point out that we are talking about man-made famines and the mass extermination of millions. Here are a few relevant questions: 1) What 'rapid industrialization'? What is so spectacular about Soviet growth rates over the last 60 years? In many ways the USSR is more of an under- developed country today than it was in 1913, relative to the most advanced countries of the era. As to arms production, much of the deployed weaponry of the Red Army was destroyed or captured by the Germans in the first weeks of the invasion. (The USSR enjoyed 4:1 and 5:1 advantage in many types of aircraft, tanks and artillery on the eve of the German attack.) In any case, the Bolshevik methods of terror, refined and elaborated by Stalin, have probably done more to hinder than to aid industrial development by creating their unique combination of petrified rigidity and chaos throughout the economy. 2) It is questionable whether Hitler could have started WWII without the assurance of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That is what enabled him to conquer Norway, Denmark, Holland and France in a single sweep without having to worry about his Eastern flank. (Stalin sent congratulatory telegrams on each German victory.) 3) It is even more questionable whether Hitler could have come to power without the colossal strategic blunder of Stalin expressed in the infamous Comintern policy which regarded the Social Democrats as the main enemy and precluded the kind of coalition politics by the German Communists which could alone have blocked the rise of the Nazi party. One may argue against the relevance of 2) and 3) by claiming that they were peculiar blunders of Stalin, not necessary consequences of the Bolshevik revolution. I think Stalin was a necessary consequence of the revolution in that the one-party dictatorship could only be preserved by methods such as his. Another line of attack is to point to equally fatal Western mistakes contributing to the rise and intial victories of Hitler. I grant all such points sight unseen. I still feel that using the performance of the USSR in WWII to retroactively compensate for the colossal failure of Bolshevik rule is badly off the mark. Here is a final question to Tony: leaving aside wartime emergencies for the moment, do you really think that there is any social task (industrialization, literacy, public health, whatever) that a dictatorship can solve at a lower cost than a democracy could? ----- Gabor Fencsik {dual,nsc,hplabs,intelca,proper}!qantel!gabor
rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (04/29/85)
"If Stalin hadn't existed, we would have had to invent him." --- Soviet saying