Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
May I help your imagination?
I often wonder what would have happened if various nations in the Eastern Bloc had been designated as buffer states, and allowed multi-party democracy, woth just pro-capitalist parties being suppressed. Including assassinating the occasional fascist that popped up in the big-tent movement. But “every possible party except mine is a pro-capitalist party” is not a useful or serious position.
I wonder what would have happened if RIAU and other groups holding territory against the Bolsheviks in the early USSR would have been truced with in order for them to dedicate their war efforts against the invading imperialist powers, and then granted special autonomous/devolution zones.
I wonder what would have happened if some of the demands of the striking sailors at Kronstadt, like plurality in the workers’ councils, were granted- whether having the experience of 5000 socialist soldiers instead of having their blood being shed would have influenced the Winter War or even the Eastern Front of WW2 as a whole.
I also wonder about the missed opportunities from the party officials and public figures killed in the Great Purge, but that extends far beyond anarchists. With the degree to which the USSR was fighting itself for its first 2 decades especially, it’s easy to wonder whether it could have avoided the political dilution and degeneration of the second half of the twentieth century.
All of those are interesting hypotheticals, and whether they would have brought more plurality within socialism than danger against the institutions and the socialist project, is up for anyone to guess.
What I can tell you is one thing: these hard decisions weren’t made by “power hungry individuals”, or by “authoritarianism”. They were the consequence of the historical and material realities of the time, and carried out by a party composed of people wanting the best for the future of socialism in the RSFSR/Soviet Union. The reality is that the early USSR survived insurmountable odds: decomposed economy after pulling out from WW1 (which happened after a war with Japan), Russian civil war, the massive problems within dekulakization and agricultural collectivisation, and the looming threat and eventually invasion of Nazi Germany that murdered more than 20 million people in the Soviet Union. The fact alone that it was capable of doing so, tells me enough about the necessity of the decisions taken.
That does not mean that everything is perfect. Of course the Great Purge went way beyond too far, of course socialists don’t ideally want to oppress working class revolutionaries like in the Kronstadt rebellion, but what should we attribute those to then? Mustache man bad? Lenin bad? Marxism-Leninism bad? Or to extremely difficult time periods which create extreme necessities?
Moreover: why, if all of this is supposedly embedded in the nature of the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism, such things stopped happening after the 1960s for the most part? There was no great purge, there was no rebellion like Kronstadt or Hungary with their subsequent repressions
I wouldn’t attribute the excessive internal violence to heads of state being in essence bad, I would attribute them to mistakes being made. Mistakes made under duress, sure, but still avoidable mistakes.
I’m not an expert on this but there are comparisons that can be made with figures like Julius Caesar and Napoleon, who were relatively favorable to the poor/proletarians, and used institutional power to seize control of the state to fend off reactionary forces. Lenin is less like these other two, but it is a tragic model that repeats in history.
Something else that plays into it is the proverbial person with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. When you’re a revolutionary force, any entity you have conflict with instinctively feels counter-revolutionary.
We accept that representational bodies should include all demographics, ideally proportionally, because we recognize that someone from one demographic cannot understand the full experience and implications of the others, and therefore cannot speak for the others. The mechanism here is that people with power are going to use it in ways that benefit themselves, consciously or subconsciously; there is also going to be inequities based on how close people are to power. There are no fully equitable and considerate leaders. And this problem happens even in anarchist groups. I’ve personally noticed and commented on how avowed anarchists can end up reflexively “leading” things in all but name. A critique of democracy that came out of Occupy was that it is impossible for even a general assembly to represent everyone equally.
The solution is to have a mechanism in place from the beginning for how to devolve and disperse both formal power and informal power, down to a level that is deemed as acceptable.
Anyone who converts to a certain identity is prone to being sectarian at first, as a way of confirming their identity. The more history I’ve studied and the more I’ve experienced, the more nuanced many of my positions have become.