Was Stalin a marxist?

So much that he persecuted genetic researchers because he thought genetics to be a "bourgeois science" that conflicted with Marxist environmentalism.

he was a stalinist desu

No he was a criminal.

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Indeed

>>280786
Pleonasm.

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>>280670
I'm currently reading about him. (pic related, available at least in french, italian and german) ("history and critic of a black legend")

It's a known fact that Lenin in his will said that Stalin was treacherous and a brute, looking for personal power.
But he should be credited for the brilliant victory of WW2. And as a Commissary for nationalities, not only did he defend minorities (Georgia...), he also should be credited for defending communism in one single country, opposing Marxist theory.

An interesting source is Trotsky, though both men hated each other.
The point of communism was equality and the end of slavery.
Losurdo credits Stalin with the decision to postpone equality, considering that speed-of-light industrialisation was more urgent than sharing what they didn't have (the Wehrmacht was astonished by the level of technology, the non-mapped railways, USSR developed really quickly, Germans thought winning over peasants would be easy, they found tanks and planes).

But a modern State needed an administration. Trotsky was quite aware of the threat in the birth of a new class of rich exploiters : the bureaucrats. That's why at the beginning, the point of the Communist Party was to control the administration.

But Stalin, in his thirst for power, merged the Communist Party and the bureaucracy, to create the uncontrolled Nomenklatura we know.

To take an example, Losurdo (who rather defends Stalin) considers the problem of wages and inequality. Trotsky worried about inequality, while Stalin was keen on rewarding all his allies with money, datchas etc. Trotsky reminds him that the point of Marxism was the end of money...

What's to keep in mind is that in USSR, everyone *had* to be a Marxist-Leninist. So Stalin had to find a text by Marx, "Critique du Programme de Gotha", where Marx says that in a 1st phase of communism, inequality would still be necessary.

>cont.

>>281164
cont.

Trotsky told him, "but inequalities in the streets of Moscow are glaring, and shocking".

On the other hand, I saw a french documentary about the russian book "[How] we made the Metro [of Moscow]" (Gorki et al.). You see that in practice, Stalin fought personnally for equal opportunity (w/e you call it), like hiring women, bums, drunks to build the metro... When an engineer was lazy, denouncing was encouraged, and he would be replaced by a better comrade, better-willed, despite the lesser experience.

My personal opinion is that someone who doesn't care about wage inequality is not really a Marxist. But fast undustrialisation led to USSR winning WW2, that's what history remembers. Stalinists credit him for being a realist.

>>280670

Why else would he force the collectivization if not because he blindly believed in Marx?

>>281190
Maybe because industralize a backwater rural shithole with a large landmass and sparse population wasn't easy?

>>280786
>>280822
Stalin was admired by Churchill.
At Stalin's death, all the WW2 leaders paid tribute to him.

lrn2history.

Then came the Khrushchev report, turning the Idol into a Monster, and what the Russians thought was a call for reform, was seen by the capitalists as a self-confession that communism actually = fascism.

>>281190
didn't happen.
As a son of peasants, Stalin was against collectivisation, his best Allies were the Kulaks. He allowed them to rent land from poor peasants and make them work for them (the Kulaks). Stalin constantly refered to Marx writings justifying to delay real communism.

bit OT, but Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948.

http://www.nobelprize.org/faq/questions_in_category.php?id=11

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>Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist) contingent at London May Day march in 2008, carrying a banner of Stalin.

>>281190
obviously it wasn't blindly if the focus of his collectivisation was the rural peasantry and not the urban workers

>Once Stalin entered revolutionary politics, he stopped writing poetry – it took too much time, he told a friend – but in 1907 he still used his prestige as Soselo to obtain information, he needed for a bank robbery, from an admirer. During the Great Purge, he edited a Russian translation of the Knight in the Panther's Skin (by a Georgian intellectual he released from prison for the purpose) and competently translated some of the couplets himself.[1]

>Stalin published all of his work anonymously and never publicly acknowledged it.

B-A-S-E-D => BASED

>>281164
>brilliant victory

>>281555
just summarizing Losurdo (op. cit.). First, an intelligence success. Nazis said they knew everything about France's military, ignored everything about Russia's.
Second, though not military trained (except obvious experience in guerilla), Stalin was a great strategist.
Like they did with France, Nazis wanted to bait the Red Army on the Polish Front, and then circle them. Stalin opposed his Generals, decided to counter Blitzkrieg tactics by baiting the Wehrmacht into longer warfare.