[ingliz]

Lenin had no intention of carrying out a bourgeois revolution and leaving it at that

Nor did Stalin!

The USSR still had the potential to evolve into socialism proper. Something that would have been impossible if Trotsky's utopian retreat into reformism had been accepted.

[daft punk]

Socialism has to be democratic. Stalin's Russia was a dictatorship. It was never socialist. To achieve socialism would have meant chucking out Stalin and his rotten regime of anti-communists. A priviliged elite who sabotaged every revolution in every country after 1927. It was never capitalist either. And it never achieved the tasks of a bourgeois revolution. They had the NEP to try to recover agriculture after the famine, and Stalin let that go on too long so then he had to radically collectivise to avoid the rising bourgeoisie getting any bigger and overthrowing him. It was only there for about 4 years.

[Vera Politica]

Socialism has to be democratic.

Why do you think this is true?

[Konradz]

No, there cannot be rich people in a socialist system. Socialism is inherently egalitarian, there cannot be "poor" and "rich" people, only people. Ideally at least. I'd say there could be economic inequalities as long as they were heavily limited by the state according to people's will.

[daft punk]

Why do you think this is true?

Engels said

"What will be the course of this revolution?

Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat."

Lenin:

"Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy; Soviet power is a million times more democratic than the most democratic bourgeois republic." Lenin, 1918, Bourgeois And Proletarian Democracy

It was always supposed to be democratic. Democracy got whittled away during the civil war. After that, Trotsky wanted more democracy but the revolution degenerated due to it's isolation in a backward country.

Socialism has to be democratic for several reasons

1. A planned economy requires mass participation in decision making, not a few bureaucrats locked away somewhere trying to decide everything.

2. Because people expect and demand democracy.

3. Because if it is not it will be a dictatorship and that is not socialism. It will not last.

[ingliz]

Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat

CHAPTER XI

THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM

ARTICLE 134. Members of all Soviets of Working People's Deputies--of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics, the Soviets of Working People's Deputies of the Territories and Regions, the Supreme Soviets of the Autonomous Republics, and Soviets of Working People's Deputies of Autonomous Regions, area, district, city and rural (station, village, hamlet, kishlak, aul) Soviets of Working People's Deputies--are chosen by the electors on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by secret ballot.

ARTICLE 135. Elections of deputies are universal: all citizens of the U.S.S.R. who have reached the age of eighteen, irrespective of race or nationality, religion, educational and residential qualifications, social origin, property status or past activities, have the right to vote in the election of deputies and to be elected, with the exception of insane persons and persons who have been convicted by a court of law and whose sentences include deprivation of electoral rights.

ARTICLE 136. Elections of deputies are equal: each citizen has one vote; all citizens participate in elections on an equal footing.

ARTICLE 137. Women have the right to elect and be elected on equal terms with men.

ARTICLE 138. Citizens serving in the Red Army have the right to elect and be elected on equal terms with all other citizens.

ARTICLE 139. Elections of deputies are direct: all Soviets of Working People's Deputies, from rural and city Soviets of Working People's Deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., inclusive, are elected by the citizens by direct vote.

ARTICLE 140. Voting at elections of deputies is secret.

ARTICLE 141. Candidates for election are nominated according to electoral areas. The right to nominate candidates is secured to public organizations and societies of the working people: Communist Party organizations, trade unions, cooperatives, youth organizations and cultural societies.

ARTICLE 142. It is the duty of every deputy to report to his electors on his work and on the work of the Soviet of Working People's Deputies, and he is liable to be recalled at any time in the manner established by law upon decision of a majority of the electors.

It was always supposed to be democratic.

Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

Trotsky wanted more democracy

They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers' democracy!... The Party is obliged to maintain its dictatorship . . . regardless of temporary vacillations even in the working class. . . The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy. . .

[daft punk]

Are you having a laugh? You post something from 1936, right when Stalin was killing all the opposition, talking about ballots!

Nobody could seriously consider the Stalinist USSR to be remotely democratic.

Engels mentions that industries will need elected people to run them, who then have authority. There is some truth to that, especially in the early stages. He never mentioned killing thousands of the best socialists. He talked about getting trains to run on time. Not political genocide.

Your last quote is from 1921 when the civil war had more or less finished, just. Kronstadt was going on, and the Workers opposition. Basically he wanted the unions incorporated into the state, so they could have a say in industrial administration. This was to build up industry because the country was so backward.

[ingliz]

Nobody could seriously consider the Stalinist USSR to be remotely democratic.

Why not? Delegates to the June 1936 Plenum of the Central Committee unanimously approved the draft Constitution despite initial opposition from entrenched interests.

Some say that this is dangerous, since elements hostile to Soviet power could sneak into the highest offices, some of the former White Guardists, kulaks, priests, and so on. But really, what is there to fear? 'If you're afraid of wolves, don't walk in the forest.' For one thing, not all former kulaks, White Guardists, and priests are hostile to Soviet power. For another, if the people here and there elected hostile forces, this will mean that our agitational work is poorly organized, and that we have fully deserved this disgrace.

The February–March 1937 Plenum gave the workers secret ballots, direct elections, single candidates in the place of lists, open debate of the candidates’s merits, and criticism from below.

"If we want to win the respect of our Soviet and Party workers to our laws, and the masses -- to the Soviet constitution, then we must guarantee the restructuring [perestroika] of Party work on the basis of an indubitable and full implementation of the bases of inner-party democracy, which is outlined in the bylaws of our Party."

And he enumerated the essential measures, already contained in the draft resolution to his report: the elimination of co-option; a ban on voting by slates; a guarantee "of the unlimited right for members of the Party to set aside the nominated candidates and of the unlimited right to criticise these candidates.

At the end of the discussion, when the subject was the search for a more dispassionate method of counting ballots, [Stalin] remarked that in the West, thanks to a multiparty system, this problem did not exist. Immediately thereafter he suddenly uttered a phrase that sounded very strange in a meeting of this kind: "We do not have different political parties. Fortunately or unfortunately, we have only one party." [Zhukov's emphasis] And then he proposed, but only as a temporary measure, to use for the purpose of dispassionate supervision of elections representatives of all existing societal organizations except for the Bolshevik Party. . . . The challenge to the Party autocracy had been issued.

The evidence suggests that Stalin intended the new electoral system to accomplish the following goals:

Make sure that only technically trained people led, in production and in Soviet society at large;

Stop the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party, and return Party members, especially leaders, to their primary function: giving political and moral leadership, by example and persuasion, to the rest of society;

Strengthen the Party's mass work;

Win the support of the country's citizens behind the government;

Create the basis for a classless, communist society.

He never mentioned killing thousands of the best socialists

Stalin aimed for a ruthless yet limited administrative attack* on those party officials opposed to democratic reform : Party opposition to direct democracy, democracy itself, and actual or imagined conspiracy scuppered that plan.

As Zhukov notes, the situation slowly, but decisively, got out of his control. (Stalin, "Vystuplenie"; Zhukov, Inoy Stalin Ch. 16, passim; 411).

People participated as perpetrators and victims, and sometimes both, through their membership in factories, unions, schools, military units, and other institutions... Within a year, democratic elections from union central to factory committees had routed the old leadership and stirred up a frenzy of denunciation and slander

The “democracy” allowed by the central party authorities was therefore not a “smoke screen”, not a collection of meaningless slogans designed to mask Stalin’s leadership’s true intentions; it was the very means by which the repression spread.

Thus, through little fault of his own, the attempt of Stalin and his group to reform the political system of the Soviet Union ended in total failure



* ... for all Party officials, including First Secretaries, Stalin stated that each of them should choose two cadre to take their places while they attended six-month political education courses that would soon be established. With replacement officials in their stead, Party secretaries [were to be] reassigned during this period, breaking the back of their "families" (officials subservient to them), a major cause of bureaucracy. (Zhukov, Inoy Stalin 362)

Basically he wanted the unions incorporated into the state, so they could have a say in industrial administration

Basically he wanted the "militarisation" of labour, so the unions could have no say in industrial administration.

The Soviet trade union dispute was the first attempt by the forces of bureaucracy to seize power in the Soviet Union. And the attempt was led by none other than Trotsky

"Cadres who Trotsky found disagreeable, and who Trotsky saw as standing in the way of his "militarisation" of labour policy, would be replaced by Trotsky’s own appointees". ( J.V. Stalin: Works 6)

Lenin was prompted to chide Trotsky for "…an out-and-out bureaucratic approach’" (V. I. Lenin: Collected Works. Vol. 32)

[daft punk]

Very clever, chuck in a bit of pretend democracy while you kill all the socialists who campaigned for more democracy. Nice.

In drawing close to an adequate understanding of the political meaning of the Great Purges, Khrushchev explained it by referring to Stalin’s break with the fundamentals of Marxist theory and Bolshevik political practice. He openly stated that the terror was unleashed by Stalin "in order to preclude the possibility of any people or groups appearing in the party who wanted to return the party to Lenin’s inner-party democracy, and to redirect the nation toward a democratic social structure.... Stalin said that the people are manure, an amorphous mass which will follow a strong leader. And so he demonstrated such strength, destroying everything which might contribute to a true understanding of events or to sound reasoning which would have contradicted his point of view. Herein lies the tragedy of the USSR." [9] Here, for the first time, Khrushchev called the Great Terror a tragedy not for Stalin, but for the nation and its people.

http://www.wsws.org/exhibits/1937/intro.htm

[ingliz]

Khrushchev explained it

He would, wouldn't he.

This is the same "Nikita Khrushchev, who had in 1937 called for power to execute 20,000 unnamed people when Party head in Moscow, was transferred to the Ukraine from where, within a month, he asked for authority to repress 30,000 people". (Zhukov, Tayny 64)

The same Nikita Khrushchev who said;

Of course all of us here have listened to you, spoken with you. But who will decide? In our country the people must decide. And the people -- who is that? That is the Party. And who is the Party? That is us. We are the Party. That means that we will decide. I will decide. Understand?

"The Party, as an organisation of millions of communists, was at an end. The group of people at its summit became the Party." (Mukhin, Ubiystvo 494)

[daft punk]

"The fractional regime must be eliminated, and this must be done first of all by those who have created it; it must be replaced by a regime of comradely unity and inner-party democracy."

The Declaration of 46

Left Opposition.


killed by Stalin.

Nearly every party member who followed or supported in anyway the Left Opposition was executed during the Moscow Trials (1936-38)

http://www.marxists.org/glossary/orgs/l/e.htm

[ingliz]

killed by Stalin

"Genrikh IAgoda consists mainly of investigators' interrogations of Yagoda and a few of his associates, and Yagoda's confessions of involvement in the conspiracy to carry out a coup against the Soviet government; Trotsky's leadership of the conspiracy; and, in general, all that Yagoda confessed to in the 1938 Trial. There is no indication that these confessions were other than genuine." (Getty, "Excesses" 115, 135; Thurston, 70, 90, 101-2; Genrikh IAgoda)

"Nikolai Bukharin, who, in loquacious attempts to confess past misdeeds, distance himself from onetime associates, and assure everyone of his current loyalty, managed only to incriminate himself further". (Thurston, 40-42; Getty and Naumov agree, 563)

Bukharin had freely confessed that;

On the instructions of enemy of the people L. Trotsky, and of leading participants in the ‘bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ - Bukharin, Ryjkov and Yagoda - (...) with obviously treasonable purposes, entered into direct relations with representatives of foreign states hostile to the U.S.S.R. and negotiated with them regarding the forms of assistance to be given to the aggressors in event of their attack upon the Soviet Union.

At the very beginning of the trial, in answer to the question of Citizen the President, whether I pleaded guilty, I replied by a confession. In answer to the question of Citizen the President whether I confirmed the testimony I had given, I replied that I confirmed it fully and entirely. When, at the end of the preliminary investigation, I was summoned for interrogation to the State Prosecutor, who controlled the sum total of the materials of the investigation, he summarized them as follows (Vol. V, p. 114, December 1, 1937):

Question: Were you a member of the centre of the counter-revolutionary organization of the Rights?

I answered: Yes, I admit it.

Second question: Do you admit that the centre of the antiSoviet organization, of which you are a member, engaged in counter-revolutionary activities and set itself the aim of violently overthrowing the leadership of the Party and the government?

I answered: Yes, I admit it.

Third question: Do you admit that this centre engaged in terrorist activities, organized kulak uprisings and prepared for Whiteguard kulak uprisings against members of the Political Bureau, against the leadership of the Party and the Soviet power?

I answered: It is true.

Fourth question: Do you admit that you are guilty of treasonable activities; as expressed in preparations for a conspiracy aiming at a 'coup d'etat?

I answered: Yes, that Is also true.

In Court I admitted and still admit my guilt in respect to the crimes which I committed and of which I was accused by Citizen the State Prosecutor at the end of the Court investigation and on the basis of the materials of the investigation in the possession of the Procurator. I declared also in Court, and I stress and repeat it now, that I regard myself politically responsible for the sum total -of the crimes committed by the "bloc of Rights and Trotskyites." I have merited the most severe punishment, and I agree with Citizen the Procurator, who several times repeated that I stand on the threshold of my hour of death

What else could he do? Stalin was clearly not in charge. If Stalin had spared them, he too would have most likely been voted out, arrested as a counter-revolutionary and executed.

Very clever

Stalin needed democracy, real democracy, to win support for the Party: He needed the support of the Party, real support, to implement his democratic reforms.

The Party believed that "real democracy" when anti-Soviet conspirators were active, and the central leadership had no idea how deep these conspiracies extended, would destroy the Soviet State.

Getty summarises the hopeless contradiction in this way:

Stalin was not yet willing to retreat from contested elections, and on 2 July 1937 Pravda no doubt disappointed the regional secretaries by publishing the first installment of the new electoral rules, enacting and enforcing contested, universal, secret ballot elections. But Stalin offered a compromise. The very same day the electoral law was published, the Politburo approved the launching of a mass operation against precisely the elements the local leaders had complained about, and hours later Stalin sent his telegram to provincial party leaders ordering the kulak operation. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in return for forcing the local party leaders to conduct an election, Stalin chose to help them win it by giving them license to kill or deport hundreds or thousands of "dangerous elements." ("Excesses" 126)

Whatever the history of these purges, extra-judicial executions, and deportations, Stalin appears to have believed that they were creating preconditions for contested elections. Yet all of this activity really sabotaged any possibility for such elections.

[daft punk]

I just proved you wrong. You said Stalin killed the Left Opposition because they opposed democracy. I proved this to be untrue. The fact is that Stalin killed all the old Bolsheviks. He killed the because there was always the danger of the population insisting on real, democratic socialism, and the Trotskyists would obviously lead that.

And now for a serious paste..

The scale of the repression, the arbitrary selection of victims and how their punishments were carried out, are both nauseating and overwhelming. A first directive in 1937 proposed arresting more than a quarter of a million people: around 72,000 were to be convicted, with a plan "to shoot 10,000 people in the camps". One bureaucrat described how this was carried out: "In the course of one evening we would go through up to 500 cases, and we tried people at the rate of several per minute, sentencing some to be shot, and others to various prison terms… We weren’t able to even read the summons, let alone look at the material in the dossiers"! While the social bases of fascism and Stalinism were different – one resting ultimately on capitalism, the other on a planned economy – there was nevertheless a symmetry, as Trotsky commented, in their arbitrary, bloodthirsty methods. In fact, the murderers and torturers of the Nazi SS openly confessed that they learnt from the Russian ‘security’ apparatus, the NKVD.

The second ‘mass operation’ was taken against representatives of several nationalities, primarily those having their own territories under the Russian empire but which had become independent states after the October revolution – Poles, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians. The Stalinist reprisals were especially ferocious against communists from these states. They were arbitrarily condemned as agents of the governments of these countries. Most had been forced to seek exile in the Soviet Union because of the oppression ‘at home’. Leopold Trepper, the heroic leader of the Russian underground intelligence organisation under the Nazis, the Red Orchestra, and who broke from Stalinism and praised Trotskyism, estimated that 80% of the revolutionary emigrants in Russia were repressed in the purges.

Eight hundred Yugoslav communists were arrested. Repression was launched against the Communist Party of Poland, which had committed the unpardonable sin of supporting the Left Opposition in 1923-24. The 70-year old Adolf Warski, a founder of the Polish social-democratic and communist parties, was shot. The same fate was meted out to the leaders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), who sought refuge in Russia from the horrors of Nazism only to meet the horrors inflicted by the NKVD. In January 1989, at the ninth congress of the Sozialistiche Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the governing party of the former German Democratic Republic, it was reported that at least 242 prominent members of the KPD had perished in the Soviet Union. By the beginning of 1937, the majority of Austrian Schutzbundists had already been arrested. They were members of the socialist military organisation which, after the defeat of the anti-fascist uprising of 1934, emigrated to Russia and were received as heroes. Rogovin comments: "Altogether, more communists from Eastern European countries were killed in the Soviet Union than died at home in their own countries during Hitler’s occupation".

Rogovin deals in some detail with the third open trial (March 1938). The 21 defendants were former top leaders of the USSR, including Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, and former Trotskyists. Stalin’s signature was on the death sentences carried out. His malevolent personality was expressed in the case of Avel Yenukidze, a long-time collaborator of Stalin in the persecution of others, including the Left Opposition. He fell to the executioner’s axe because of a disagreement with Stalin over the fate of Lenin’s former close collaborators, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. He confided: "My entire crime consisted of this: when he told me [at the end of 1934 – VR], that he wanted to stage a trial and then shoot Kamenev and Zinoviev, I tried to talk him out of it. ‘Soso’ [Stalin’s nickname], I told him, ‘there is no argument, they have done you a lot of harm but they have long since paid enough for it: you have expelled them from the party, you hold them in prison, their children have nothing to eat… They are Old Bolsheviks, just like you and me’… He looked at me as if I’d murdered his father and said: ‘Remember, Avel, he who is not with me is against me’."

Yenukidze, as Trotsky remarked, was a bureaucrat, but he could not go all the way in wiping out all those connected to the Russian revolution. Stalin had other intentions. The purge trials were a one-sided civil war, the aim of which was to secure the bureaucratic counter-revolution personified by Stalin and his circle against the last remnants of the Bolshevik party and the connection that they had with the Russian revolution. Many of those tried and shot had long since capitulated to Stalin. Rogovin’s description of the pitiful grovelling of such formerly giant figures as Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and even of the closest collaborator of Trotsky, Christian Rakovsky, shows the physical and moral degradation to which they had been reduced. Bukharin, appealing for his life, declared: "In recent years I… have learned to value you in an intelligent way and to love you". To no avail; he was shot, as was Rakovsky.

Trotsky accused
WHY DID STALIN need to annihilate those who had capitulated in this fashion? The bureaucratic apparatus resting on a planned economy was a regime of crisis by its very nature. The inevitable discontent of the masses at the constant zigzags of Stalinist policy provoked questioning and a challenge to this apparatus. In the period of the forced collectivisations – late 1920s and early 1930s – Stalin could invoke as a scapegoat the threat of the nascent capitalists in the form of the kulaks (rich peasants) to explain the Soviet Union’s difficulties, which were, in reality, the product of bureaucratic misrule. But after their annihilation, which cost the equivalent of a war – there were more victims than in the civil war of 1920-21 – there was no obvious figure or trend that could be demonised. Trotsky, and his son Leon Sedov, were therefore selected by Stalin as the main accused.

Stalin feared the influence of Trotsky and the International Left Opposition more than anyone else. Despite the paucity of his resources, Trotsky’s brilliant descriptions of the waste and corruption of the bungling bureaucratic misrule struck home. Even sections of the bureaucracy were affected by his diagnosis and the call for a political revolution to overthrow Stalinism.

http://www.socialismtoday.org/134/rogovin.html

sorry its a bit long but its an important subject

oh, yeah, people confess to all sorts of garbage when tortured.

[ingliz]

You said Stalin killed the Left Opposition because they opposed democracy.

No, I have never said that. He killed Trotskyites because they were wreckers who conspired to overthrow the Soviet State.

What I said was;

Stalin aimed for a ruthless yet limited (administrative) attack* on those party officials opposed to democratic reform...

[...]

* ... for all Party officials, including First Secretaries, Stalin stated that each of them should choose two cadre to take their places while they attended six-month political education courses that would soon be established. With replacement officials in their stead, Party secretaries [were to be] reassigned during this period, breaking the back of their "families" (officials subservient to them), a major cause of bureaucracy. (Zhukov, Inoy Stalin 362)

Stalin aimed for a ruthless yet limited (administrative) attack on...

Stalin did not set out to kill. Strictly, it would be better to say he did not set out to kill so many. He intended to kill, or imprison, the incorrigible.

In his final speech on March 5, the concluding day of the Plenum, Stalin minimised the need to hunt enemies, even Trotskyists, many of whom, he said, had turned towards the Party.

those party officials opposed to democratic reform

After the Plenum the First Secretaries staged a virtual rebellion. First Stalin, and then the Politburo, sent out messages re-emphasising the need to conduct secret Party elections, opposition to co-optation rather than election, and the need for inner Party democracy generally. The First Secretaries were doing things in the old way, regardless of the resolutions of the Plenum.

local party leaders did everything they could within the limits of party discipline (and sometimes outside it) to stall or change the elections.

[daft punk]

It's all Stalinist lies and conspiracy theory nonsense. You have been brainwashed. The only counter-revolutionaries in the CP were the Stalinists, who went on to sabotage every revolution around the world. See my Castro thread for example.

see this for a quick rundown of how Stalin tried to stop keep Eastern Europe capitalist.
http://www.marxists.org/subject/stalini ... /ch2-1.htm

Trotsky led the Red Army. But suddenly after Lenin died, he became a traitor. Yeah right.

Stalin accused him of being an agent of fascism. Yet Trotsky wrote a dozen papers agains fascism, warning of its dangers, and explaining how to fight it. The Stalinists did the opposite, spilt the workers, even formed a temporary alliance with the Nazis at one point, allowing the fascists into power. The blame lies with Stalin. Trotsky warned, years in advance, unless the workers united to stop the fascists, the fascists would take power using violence, decimate the workers, start a war on Europe, and exterminate the Jews.

Nice one, Stalin.

[ingliz]

an agent of fascism

Trotsky, a conversation with Piatakov, Oslo, December 1935:

This means it will be necessary to retreat. This must be firmly understood. Retreat to capitalism. How far and to what degree, it is difficult to say now — this can be made concrete only after we come into power.

Trotsky, Letter to Radek, December, 1935:

It would be absurd to think that we can come to power without securing the favorable attitude of the most important capitalist governments, particularly of the most aggressive ones, such as the present governments of Germany and Japan. It is absolutely necessary to have contacts and an understanding with these governments right now

Sokolnikov, Moscow, November 30, 1936:

This program provided for the renunciation of the policy of industrialisation and collectivisation and, as a result of this renunciation, the revival in the rural districts, on the basis of small farming, of capitalism, which, combined with the capitalist elements in industry, would develop into capitalist restoration in the U.S.S.R.

[Sceptic]

The socialist ideology and the idea of democracy are the most intertwined of political themes, in my opinion, since socialism is about empowering the proletariat over the disposal of the means of production (the national dividend) and being directly involved in workplace management. Marx was heavily influenced by earlier utopian socialism, such as Robert Owen and the English co-operative movement but aimed towards a more realistic means to an end (scientific socialism).

Unfortunately, excessive violent intervention in the market is subsequently necessary to democratise industry and reorganise the economy in a Marxian manner and tyranny of the majority is, in my opinion, only marginally preferable over autocratic tyranny.

I would argue that socialism must indeed be entirely democratic but complete democracy is neither necessary nor a desirable goal; an individualist and stable constitution is required, operating well within the frame work of the liberal capitalist economic order. Democracy is necessary for accountability of the state bureacrats but should not extend beyond its function.

[daft punk]

Trotsky, a conversation with Piatakov, Oslo, December 1935:

"Quote:
This means it will be necessary to retreat. This must be firmly understood. Retreat to capitalism. How far and to what degree, it is difficult to say now — this can be made concrete only after we come into power."

wikipedia

He (Pyatakov) was expelled from the party for belonging to the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite" bloc, but was reinstated in 1928 after he renounced Trotskyism, and became Deputy head of Heavy Industries.
In 1936 he was again accused of anti-party and anti-Soviet activity, and expelled from the party. At his trial, he was accused of conspiring with Trotsky in connection with the case of the so-called Parallel anti-Soviet Party Centre, to overthrow the Soviet Government. He was accused of entering into a conspiracy with the Nazis with the intent of seizing power in the Soviet Union, promising to reward the Germans with large tracts of Soviet territory. The prosecution presented evidence that he had secretly met with Trotsky in Norway for these purposes. However, it later emerged that the Oslo airdrome reported that no foreign planes had arrived at the time of Pyatakov's supposed visit to Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Oslo. The Hotel Bristol itself had been closed down years before the alleged meeting.
On January 30, 1937, he was sentenced to death and executed.

Trotsky, Letter to Radek, December, 1935:

"Quote:
It would be absurd to think that we can come to power without securing the favorable attitude of the most important capitalist governments, particularly of the most aggressive ones, such as the present governments of Germany and Japan. It is absolutely necessary to have contacts and an understanding with these governments right now"

Ok so Radek was a Trotskyist up to 1927 when he capitulated to Stalin. He was later jailed and many people make false confessions in those sort of circumstances. Who knows what was going on in his head? He was later assassinated in a gulag by the secret police, and was exonerated in 1988.

exactly the same thing happened to Sokolnikov.

Leon Trotsky, Hitler's Austria Coup (12th March, 1938).

"There is a tragic symbolism in the fact that the Moscow trial is ending under the fanfare announcing the entry of Hitler into Austria. The coincidence is not accidental. Berlin is of course perfectly informed about the demoralization which the Kremlin clique in its struggle for self-preservation carried into army and the population of the country. Stalin did not move a finger last year when Japan seized two Russian islands on the Amur river: he was then busy executing the best Red generals. With all the more assurance during the new trial could Hitler send his troops into Austria.

No matter what one's attitude toward the defendants at the Moscow trials, no matter how one judges their conduct in the clutches of the G.P.U., All of them - Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Piatakov, Radek, Rykov, Bukharin, and many others. - have by the whole course of their lives proved their disinterested devotion to the Russian people and their struggle for liberation."
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSpurge.htm

Democracy is necessary for accountability of the state bureacrats but should not extend beyond its function.

Sceptic, democracy in socialism is about getting efficient decision making by having it the lowest possible level when it comes to day to day stuff. Obviously you need the high level strategy as well. In Russia the problem was slow decision making because every decision went through committees of self interested, out of touch, bureaucrats.

[ingliz]

Another view of Stalin
by Ludo Martens

Pyatakov in Berlin

During the January 1937 Trial, Pyatakov, the old Trotskyist, was convicted as the most highly placed person responsible of industrial sabotage. In fact, Littlepage* actually had the opportunity to see Pyatakov implicated in clandestine activity. Here is what he wrote:

`In the spring of 1931 ..., Serebrovsky ... told me a large purchasing commission was headed for Berlin, under the direction of Yuri Piatakoff, who ... was then the Vice-Commissar of Heavy Industry ....

`I ... arrived in Berlin at about the same time as the commission ....

`Among other things, the commission had put out bids for several dozen mine-hoists, ranging from one hundred to one thousand horse-power. Ordinarily these hoists consist of drums, shafting, beams, gears, etc., placed on a foundation of I- or H-beams.

`The commission had asked for quotations on the basis of pfennigs per kilogramme. Several concerns put in bids, but there was a considerable difference --- about five or six pfennigs per kilogramme --- between most of the bids and those made by two concerns which bid lowest. The difference made me examine the specifications closely, and I discovered that the firms which had made the lowest bids had substituted cast-iron bases for the light steel required in the original specifications, so that if their bids had been accepted the Russians would have actually paid more, because the cast-iron base would be so much heavier than the lighter steel one, but on the basis of pfennigs per kilogramme they would appear to pay less.

`This seemed to be nothing other than a trick, and I was naturally pleased to make such a discovery. I reported my findings to the Russian members of the commission with considerable self-satisfaction. To my astonishment the Russians were not at all pleased. They even brought considerable pressure upon me to approve the deal, telling me I had misunderstood what was wanted ....

`I ... wasn't able to understand their attitude ....

`It might very well be graft, I thought.'

John D. Littlepage and Demaree Bess, In Search of Soviet Gold (London: George E. Harrap & Co., 1939)


During his trial, Pyatakov made the following declarations to the tribunal:

`In 1931 I was in Berlin of official business .... In the middle of the summer of 1931 Ivan Nikitich Smirnov told me in Berlin that the Trotskyite fight against the Soviet government and the Party leadership was being renewed with new vigour, that he --- Smirnov --- had had an interview in Berlin with Trotsky's son, Sedov, who on Trotsky's instruction gave him a new line ....

`Smirnov ... conveyed to me that Sedov wanted very much to see me ....

`I agreed to this meeting ....

`Sedov said ... that there was being formed, or already been formed ... a Trotskyite centre .... The possibility was being sounded of restoring the united organization with the Zinovievites.

`Sedov also said that he knew for a fact the Rights also, in the persons of Tomsky, Bukharin and Rykov, had not laid down their arms, that they had only quietened down temporarily, and that the necessary connections should be established with them too ....

`Sedov said that only one thing was required of me, namely that I should place as many orders as possible with two German firms, Borsig and Demag, and that he, Sedov, would arrange to receive the necessary sums from them, bearing in mind that I would not be particularly exacting as to prices. If this were deciphered it was clear that the additions to prices that would be made on the Soviet orders would pass wholly or in part into Trotsky's hands for his counter-revolutionary purposes.'

People's Commissariat of Justice of the U.S.S.R. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre (Moscow, 1937), pp. 21--27.


Littlepage made the following comment:

'This passage in Piatakoff's confession is a plausible explanation, in my opinion, of what was going on in Berlin in 1931, when my suspicions were roused because the Russians working with Piatakoff tried to induce me to approve the purchase of mine-hoists which were not only too expensive, but would have been useless in the mines for which they were intended. I had found it hard to believe that these men were ordinary grafters .... But they had been seasoned political conspirators before the Revolution, and had taken risks of the same degree for the sake of their so-called cause.'

Littlepage and Bess, op. cit. , p. 102.


* John D. Littlepage, American mining engineer, contracted to conduct an inspection of the Urals copper mines.

[daft punk]

I have no idea whether Trotsky tried to sneak a bit of cash off Stalin's regime. It's not really the point. But I find it unlikely he would want orders placed in Germany in 1931.

But we do know that the story about Pyatakov meeting Trotsky in Norway is not true.