Loser Stalin

Among everything that the “father of nations” has done, it is difficult to find acts for which he can be given at least a C

Comrade Stalin was a complete failure. Or, more accurately, incompetent. A completely ineffective manager. It is curious that in the various intense debates about Stalinism this issue is hardly touched upon.

Democrats criticize Stalin for totalitarianism. Humanists are for cruelty. Socialists are for the perversion of Lenin’s ideas. At the same time, the Stalinists argue that only firm power, inflexibility and the creative development of Marxism could make our state great. In such a struggle of ideas, no one will convince anyone, since the disputants have different values. However, even if we take a great-power position, close to the majority of Stalinists, but at the same time adhere to the facts, abandoning manipulation in favor of the father of nations, it turns out that Joseph Vissarionovich led us to great power extremely ineptly. Rather, he destroyed the power than strengthened it.

Even the most stubborn Stalinist will probably not argue that before the revolution, Koba, together with all the Bolsheviks, did destructive work that destroyed the Russian state. But after the coup, he will say, Stalin worked in the interests of the state, strengthening defense capabilities, building a new economy, reviving religion and dealing with the enemies of the people.

Let's try to look at how he did it.

A consistent and unbiased analysis of the leader’s actions from 1918 to 1953 is shocking. Among everything he has done, it is difficult to find actions for which he can be given at least a C grade.

Error upon error. Failure after failure. Military defeats, squandering of people's resources and terrible naivety in resolving the most important political issues.

The first serious work entrusted by Lenin to Stalin was a business trip to Tsaritsyn in the summer of 1918, undertaken to normalize food supplies. He was to collect grain from the fertile south of Russia and send it to the starving areas controlled by the Bolsheviks. But Stalin, taking advantage of his status as a member of the government and a member of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), suddenly decided to take up military leadership. His idea was that old tsarist military specialists should not be brought into command. He removed military experts from the leadership of the troops and took it into his own hands.

Naturally, with such a command, the Reds began to suffer defeats. Tsaritsyn faced the threat of capture by enemy troops. And this is not surprising. Every job should be done by professionals, including military ones. The Russian army had a number of good generals and officers. If all of them had ended up among the whites, the Bolsheviks would have found it difficult to hold out. Fortunately for the Soviet Republic, Stalin's ideas did not prevail. Military experts were actively involved in the work, which made it possible to create a real army instead of scattered detachments of Red Guards and partisans.

Today, any sovereign leader recognizes that military affairs must be organized professionally. And most of the great powers will agree that professional experience was accumulated in the Russian army long before the advent of the Bolsheviks. But the great powers are trying to ignore how Stalin tried to destroy the army with his inept actions. Either due to ignorance of the facts, or because of their inherent double standards.

In the fall of 1918, Stalin was forced to leave Tsaritsyn. The leadership of the troops was entrusted to more trained people. Nevertheless, two years later, Joseph Vissarionovich again tried to appear as a military expert. When Lenin asked his opinion about the state of affairs in the Polish army and about the advisability of concluding peace with Warsaw, Stalin noted that the enemy’s troops were in complete disarray, that imperialism in general was very weak, and that it was necessary to behave firmly in the interests of the world revolution. He saw the future successes of the revolutionary movement so clearly that he proposed raising the question of organizing an uprising in Italy, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

Moscow really tried to be firm, and a little over a month after Stalin gave his “brilliant expert assessment,” our troops were completely defeated by the Poles. The so-called miracle on the Vistula happened.

It turned out that even a world revolution must be done wisely, realistically assess the degree of revolutionaryness of the proletariat and not rush into Europe ahead of time if the prerequisites for a social explosion are not yet ripe.

Fortunately for Stalin, the civil war soon ended and he could no longer demonstrate his strategic qualities. I had to deal with resolving national problems in the Caucasus. However, even in this area the “father of nations” failed to achieve success. He saw the problem of building a new Russian empire quite narrowly, which we will talk about in more detail in the next article.