I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin’s part. Like bruh you’re gonna die soon anyway maybe don’t purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.
Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability’s sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history
After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.
The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.
Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.
“Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?”
wait when was this lol
Stalin near the end had gone through half-a-dozen strokes, and was taking medical advice from a veterinarian.
His suspicious nature went into full blown paranoia, and he pretty much lost it.
I agree, think stuff like the Leningrad Affair was incredibly stupid on Stalin’s part. Like bruh you’re gonna die soon anyway maybe don’t purge thousands of your most popular cadres? Those guys would have been useful a few decades down the road.
Party should have thanked Stalin for his service throughout the 30s and 40s and then forcibly retired him post war in favor of Malenkov. Instead they let his brain melt which gave the Khrushchevites an opportunity to trash his entire legacy for a little temporary popular support, all while compromising the greater ideological project.
Hindsight is 20/20 and all though, and sticking with Stalin till death for stability’s sake probably looked like the best option at the time after the most destructive war in human history
After Stalin abandoned Lenin’s internationalism and started promoting the socialism in one country model, it was mostly downhill. Even though Stalin executed most of the Nazbol leadership, he appropriated the same sort of Russian nationalism to drive support for the Winter War in Finland, which was an absolute disaster.
The USSR’s ideological project of international socialism ended with Lenin. Stalin went full hog nationalist and the USSR’s socialist project never really recovered after Stalin’s purges. Stalin eliminated 75% of the Comintern.
Nikolay Bukharin who advocated for gradual changes in agricultural policies like collectivization would have been a much better leader imho. A trained economist who worked out models on decentralizing a command economy, he was one of the last purged by Stalin in the Great Purge.
sources and when did this happen?
Read it in a book long ago.
Found an article with some of the keywords, but it is just the abstract. There are 10 sources for the paper though.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-1331.1999.tb00004.x
Omg literally me
based