Stalin invited Trotsky to join the Central Committee. Trotsky refused and instead organised underground agitation against the soviets, encouraging sabotage and aligning with ultras.

This was not a "muh both sides". Stalin was no saint but Trotsky was in the wrong. He was an opportunist who wanted power.

He didn't want to share leadership with Stalin who was too "crude" and "peasant-like" and the wrong race. He couldn't stand the fact that a "mighty intellectual" like himself wasn't Lenin's successor.

He then fled abroad rather than face justice and did more harm to the socialist movement than any fascist or liberal has ever done. He fucking deserved worse than that ice-pick.

A split in the left is never frivolous and I'm tired of people thinking this.

https://www.iskrabooks.org/stalin-history-and-critique

[–] anarcho_blinkenist@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

All of the pretendedly-mourned-in-the-west "old bolsheviks" that were shot (which ignores all the ones that weren't and lived through the purges, and the ones who died of old age or illness or even anti-Bolshevik assassination a decade or two before the purges, and ignores that half those mfs who were shot that they talk about spent more of their revolutionary careers as mensheviks and SRs against the Bolsheviks than as actual Bolsheviks) Stalin protected a from expulsion constantly. It's actually frustrating in hindsight how many times he voted to keep (now-)obvious wreckers or incompetents in the party against others' judgement.

Including shielding them from Lenin lol. Lenin wanted Kamenev and Zinoviev expelled before the October revolution even, saying he didn't even consider them comrades anymore and would do everything in his strength to secure their expulsion because they betrayed him and the party and the revolution and the workers by leaking that the Bolsheviks were going to call for a general strike and armed insurrection, in order to complain about it in a BOURGEOIS NEWSPAPER after they lost the vote against insurrection in the committee vote proper. Stalin went to bat for them.

[–] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 2 months ago

dialectical materialism is when you take opposing views and run them through a blender

[–] Nakoichi@hexbear.net 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Nah the Sino Soviet split was where shit really went south.

[–] Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Replace Stalin and Trotsky with Mao and Khrushchev