CHUEV: Who was more severe, Lenin or Stalin?
MOLOTOV: Lenin, of course. He was severe. In some cases he was harsher than Stalin. Read his messages to Dzerzhinsky. He often resorted to extreme measures when necessary. He ordered the suppression of the Tambov uprising, that everything be burned to the ground. I was present at the discussion. He would not have tolerated any opposition, even had it appeared. I recall how he reproached Stalin for his softness and liberalism. “What kind of a dictatorship do we have? We have a milk-and-honey power, and not a dictatorship!”
CHUEV: Where is it written that he reproached Stalin?
MOLOTOV: It was in a small circle among us. Here is a telegram from Lenin to a provincial food commissar in his native Simbirsk in 1919: “The starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow are complaining about your inefficient management…. I demand from you maximum energy, a no-holds-barred attitude to the job, and thorough assistance to the starving workers. If you fail, I will be forced to arrest the entire staff of your institutions and to bring them to trial…. You must immediately load and send off two trains of 30 cars each. Send a telegram when this is complete. If it is confirmed that, by four clock, you did not send the grain and made the peasants wait until morning, you will be shot. Sovnarkom Chairman, Lenin.”
I remember another case. Lenin had received a letter from a poor peasant of Rostov province saying that things were bad with them, that no one paid any attention to them, the poor peasants, that there was no help for them and that, on the contrary, they were oppressed.
Lenin proposed the formation of a group of “Sverdlovers [adults from Sverdlov University]….” Lenin directed this group to go to the place in question and, if the report was confirmed, to shoot guilty parties right then and there and to rectify the situation.
What could be more concrete? Shoot on the spot and that’s that! Such things happened. It was outside the law, but we had to do it…. Lenin was a strong character. If necessary, he seized people by the scruff of their necks.
CHUEV: They say that Lenin had nothing to do with the execution of the tsar’s family in 1918, that it was a decision of the local authorities following Kolchak’s attack…. But some people say it was revenge for Lenin’s brother.
MOLOTOV: They make Lenin out to be a crank. They are small-fry philistines who think this.
Don’t be naive.
I think that, without Lenin, no one would have dared to make such a decision. Lenin was implacable when the Revolution, Soviet power, and communism were at stake. Indeed, had we implemented democratic solutions to all problems, this would surely have damaged the state and the party. Issues would have dragged on for too long and nothing good would have come of this sort of formal democracy. Lenin often resolved critical problems by himself, on his own authority.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 107-109
My god, I love Lenin far more now than I did a minute ago. Thank you comrade
“Lenin was not as bad as Stalin, who was very bad and deviated from Stalinism”
One time Lenin got up in Stalins face and screamed at him for being a filthy liberal
If it is confirmed that, by four clock, you did not send the grain and made the peasants wait until morning, you will be shot. [Lenin
to Stalin]Possibly the most based person to ever walk on earth
Not to Stalin
Here is a telegram from Lenin to a provincial food commissar in his native Simbirsk in 1919
Oops
Stalin was one of Lenin’s most trusted comrades, and was often Lenin’s first pick for dispatching to critical hotspots during the civil war. Even post-war, he remained a close confidant.
The log of Lenin’s activities during this time (May 25-Oct. 2, 1922) indicates Stalin to have been the most frequent visitor to Gorky, meeting with Lenin 12 times; according to Bukharin, Stalin was the only member of the Central Committee whom Lenin asked to see during the most serious stages of his illness. According to Maria Ulianova, these were very affectionate encounters: “Lenin met [Stalin] in a friendly manner, he joked, laughed, asked that I entertain him, offer him wine, and so on. During this and further visits, they also discussed Trotsky in my presence, and it was apparent that here Lenin sided with Stalin against Trotsky.” Lenin also frequently communicated with Stalin in writing. His archive contains many notes to Stalin requesting his advice on every conceivable issue, including questions of foreign policy. Worried lest Stalin overwork himself, he asked that the Politburo instruct him to take two days’ rest in the country every week. After learning from Lunacharsky that Stalin lived in shabby quarters, he saw to it that something better was found for him. There is no record of similar intimacy between Lenin and any other member of the Politburo. After obtaining Lenin’s consent and then settling matters among themselves, the triumvirate [Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev] would present to the Politburo and the Sovnarkom resolutions that these bodies approved as a matter of course. Trotsky either voted with the majority or abstained. By virtue of their collaboration in a Politburo that at the time had only seven members (in addition to them and the absent Lenin, Trotsky, Tomsky, and Bukharin), the troika could have its way on all issues and isolate Trotsky, who had not a single supporter in that body.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 464-466
Until the end of 1922, Stalin’s relations with Lenin were extremely close. From the end of May until the beginning of October in that year, Stalin visited Lenin at Gorky 12 times, more often than any other person. As Lenin’s sister Maria wrote to the Presidium of the Combined Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of July 1926: “Lenin valued Stalin very highly…. Lenin used to call him out and would give him the most intimate instructions, instructions of the sort one can only give to someone one particularly trusts, someone one knows as a sincere revolutionary, as a close comrade…. In fact, during the entire time of his illness, as long as he had the possibility of seeing his comrades, he most frequently invited Comrade Stalin, and during the most difficult moments of his illness Stalin was the only member of the Central Committee he invited.” This letter was written to bolster Stalin in the savage internecine struggle going on in the leadership, but it nevertheless reflects the reality.
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press, 1994, p. 268
The number of people Stalin and Lenin had shot who were up to their elbows in gore cannot be discounted.
And the propagandists who make a career of denying this crap are, as often as not, taking their own kind of statisfaction in the nightmare they’re denying exists.
Gotta hang all these fuckers high.
“Rights come with obligations” brother the whole point of rights is that you are always entitled to them no matter what!! You could be baby murderer 3000 and you’d STILL have your rights guaranteed because that’s the whole point of universal, inalienable human rights you dumdum
Their version of rights are privileges given to a select few that pass their virtue test and the all encompassing
Much like voting in the us is a “right” in practice it becomes a privilege.Rights are immutable. Privileges come with obligations. Privileges are freely given, once earned, and freely taken away by those in power.
Rights exist outside of the power struggle, what the libs consider rights they seem to have confused with privileges.
Also oppressed people by definition are denied their rights, so they wouldn’t even have the obligations.
I mean fuck that guy for sure. But do you really believe everyone is entitled to inalienable rights? Above is a long story (popular here, it seems) about Lenin acting on his own authority to have people shot for causing some dissatisfactions. What about nazis, or cops. I don’t give a fuck for their inalienable rights, do you?
Yes. It’s not all that hard to recognize the human rights of those people and to understand that sometimes they must be shot.
So… ‘aliable’ then? I don’t even disagree, I just don’t pretend to believe in it.
No, they still have human rights. Like, in a war you shoot soldiers who are trying to shoot you. If they surrender, you treat them as POWs, you don’t torture them or murder them. If a person is harming other people, you stop the harm but you don’t dehumanize them. It’s important to be consistent here.
It’s important to draw the distinction that those cops and Nazis you mentioned are in the conversation because of choices they make or beliefs they hold. Were they to stop making those choices, they would not be subject to violence. Even with the choices they make, were they to not harm others with their beliefs, I wouldn’t have a problem with them holding said beliefs. The obvious problem is fascism doesn’t build a cabin in the woods isolating themselves from everyone else.
The Dadaists were right: every word in our language has been militarized to the point of meaninglessness, and it’s past time to start over.
Stick the libs in Gaza and then see if they still repeat the same stuff about Israel, and this would have been true before October 7th and only triply more so now.
libs penning an op-ed from gaza: “No One Knew It Was This Bad”: How America Lost Its Innocence
They’re using the phrase in the same way that they say “no-one works on weekends”.
Even if we say rights come with obligations, when your rights are denied, how would the obligations still bind you?
“If you want the right to throw off your shackles and resist your oppressors, you must first fulfill your obligation to meekly accept your fate and never throw off your shackles and resist your oppressors!”
Removed by mod
Doesn’t that have a google-able answer? The same way that you can cite international law for what’s legal in illegally occupied land, I bet you can search for the obligations while you’re being illegally occupied. It sure isn’t “first do no harm.” Not like it matters to these ghouls.
To think I ever studied Walzer…
“What are the obligations of the oppressed” is just way too on the nose. It’s something we’d write as over-exaggerated parody.
