Messages

[Stalin Launches a Purge of the Communist Party]

 May I add my comment?

Communism, in order to work, beleives that all problems are external to man. If we could alleviate, therefore, poverty and lack, and give people opportunity, then we could create a Utopia. However, Communism has never worked because  mankind IS self-centered, greedy, and lazy. Therefore, the basic premise is faulty.

Even after the masses gain control, and therefore power; then the power corrupts them. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Read history from the beginning, it has always been so.

 So when peasants are no longer peasants, but become the rulers, they fall into the same behaviour that their own rulers had over them before. And the cycle perpetuates.


And I would also like to ad a bit about Stalin: While I don't beleive you can prove Stalin killed Lenin,  I have a bit of information about Josef that might enlighten a few people.

Excerpt from "What Everyone Should Know About the 20th Century, page 129-131

Stalin Launches a Purge of the Communist Party

The event: When the 17th Communist Party Congress in 1934 showed support for Sergei Kirov, a moderate and potential rival of its chairman Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader not only engineered Kirov's assasniation in December 1934, but used the murder as a pretext for arresting most of the parties; high-ranking officials as counterrevolutionary conspirators, launching the first of a series of sweeping and deadly purges of the Soviet Government that would last until 1938 and destroy even the hope of a challenge to Stalin's already all-but-absolute control of Russia.


Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovitch Djugashvili on December 21, 1879, in Gori, a rural town in the tsarist state of Georgia. His brutal father, an impoverished and alcaholic shoemaker, was killed in a brawl when Josef was eleven, whereupon the boy's indulgent mother groomed him for the Orthodox preisthood. By the time he entered the Tiflis Theological Seminary at age fourteen the youth's rebelliousness had earned him the nickname "Koba", after a legendary Georgian bandit and rebel. Koba became involved in radical and anti-tsarist political activity in 1898, and a year later left the seminary to become a full-time revolutionary. Soon he was touring the Caucasus, stirring up laborers and organizing strikes on behalf of the Social Democrats.

In 1903 the party split into two groups, V.I. Lenin's radical Bolshevik faction and the more moderate Mensheviks. Stalin fell in with the radicals and grew close to Lenin. For the next decade, from 1903 until he was exiled to Siberia in 1913, Stalin worked to expad the Bolshevik's power, organizing cell after cell across the nation, and financing ?the parties' work through a series of daring robberies. Repeatedly arrested, ?he always managed to escape, which has led to some speculation ta he was in the pay of tsarist secret police. ?Regardless of such rumours, Lenin in 1912 elevated Stalin to the bolshevik Central Commitee, the parties' inner circle. Reticent, even inarticulate, ?Stalin nevertheless became the first editor of Pravda ("Truth"), the Bolshevik's official newspaper., and adopted the name of Stalin, meaning "Man of Steel".

? In 1913, the wily Stalin was at last exiled to Siberia, returning to Russia only after the overthrow of Nicholas II in March 1917. When the first Bolshevik attempt to seize power in the summer of 1917 failed, resulting in the arrest of Leon Trotsky and the self-imposed exile of Lenin, Stalin worked to re-organize the party and played a central role in the October Revolution.

Stalin served in a succession of commisar posts in the Bolshevik government while working quietly to consolidate greater power. ?By 1922, he was named General Secretary of the party's Central Commitee, a position from which he could control most of the party. By the time Lenin fell victim to the stroke that would kill him, he had grown disenchanted with Stalin and had taken steps to to prevet him from assuming a leadership role after his death. But when Lenin died in 1924, despite a letter to the party he left warning against Stalin, the latter promoted himself as te Communist leader's handpicked successor and rutlessly exploited his position as general secretary to eliminate all who opposed him.

?Once his position was secure, Stalin announced a retreat from Lenin's ideal of world communist revolution by advocating "Socialism in one country". He also imposed a economic program far more moderate than the one Lenin had envisioned. Opposed by party leftistsm Stalin eliminated much of the left. Having accompished this in about 1928, he instantly shifted ground ?and adopted radical leftist economic programs, including the forced collectivization of agriculture and a hyper-accelerated program of industrialization. With his original left-wing opponents neutralized, Stalin attacked the party's right wing. By 1930, opposition on the left and the right had been quashed. Stali had become the undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union.

In order to transform the Soviet Union rom an agricultural nation into a modern industrial power, Stalin expropriated the lands of the middle-class farmers, or kulaks, "deporting" or killing those who offered resistance. His regime decreed a series of five-year plans to enforce collectivization and industrialization, financing the plans by exportin grain and otherproduce despite a devastating famine that swept throuh the Soviet Union in 1932. Millions who resisted were executed, and millions more starved to death. A 1988 estimate put the deahs that directly resulted from the forced collectivization of 1928-1933 at 25 million.

? ?During the first five-year plan, opposition to Stalin mounted, and there was a short-lived peasant revolt, which the dictator easily crushed. More challenging was the 17th Party Congress and its mild suport for Sergei Kirov, a Moderate rival to Stalin. Wit Kirov's murder as an excuse for arresting most of the party's highest-ranking officials as counterevolutionary conspirators, beginning in 1936 Stalin conducted a series of public trials of party officials and senior military officers. As a result of the mssive purges, by 1939 , 98 of the 139 central commitee members had been executed, and 1,108 of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th congress had been arrested. Moreover Stalin's KGB (secret police) cheif Lavrenti Beria directed the arrest, execution, exile, and imprisonment of millions of ordinary Soviet citizens.


The deaths caused by forced collectivization- through eecution as well as starvation- would have been more than enough to make Josef Stalin the most prolific mass-murder in a century that offered tough competition for that dubious title.

And to these must be added the devastation of the purges, which went well beyond the hundreds of party officialsneutralized and the millions of citizens persecuted or executed. For, in eliminating so many of his senior military officers, Stalin badly crippled the Red Army, making Russia ripe for Hitler's invasion of 1941. The purges, coupled with the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, not only shocked the citizens of Western nations but also disillusioned many Communists and would-be communists worldwide, including a number in the United States. to them, as to the recently purged old party faithful, Stalin had betrayed the Revolution.

Please pardon my spelling mistakes.


Now that you know all this, you can decide for yourself whether Stalin killed Lenin or not. IMO, I certainly woudn't put it past him to do it with no hesitation.


As a closing comment, I hope, Juby, that you refrain from using absolutes such as "You obviously have NEVER read anything smart.", or "I have said NOTHING wrong.", as its inflammatory. In Volkov's defense, I think he was thinking about that guy who was exiled to Mexico, and then assasinated. Forgot his name though.

Sincerely,

Dur?