sans-culotte wrote:You have to be a racist to see racism there; just because Jugashvili was a highland lezginka-dancing donkey-fucker doesn't mean all Georgians are; for example, Budu Mdivani was very much a Georgian donkey-phobe and an actual Bolshevik, but was one of Jugashvili's first purge victims.
Mdivani was a nationalist deviationist, just like Soltangaliev and others who under the guise of opposing Stalin were in fact opposing the Communist Party. Lenin supported the struggle against Mdivani's faction, but he did express concern at the high-handed way in which Stalin, Dzerzhinsky and Ordzhonikidze were carrying out this struggle.
You have to be a racist to see racism there
You mean like how Trotsky ruminated on how Stalin had "Mongol blood" and was in his element when among knavish rouges which apparently made up most of the Georgian population?
There's no evidence at all for Jugashvili's anti-menshevik position, because there are literally no records of his position throughout those 20 years; perhaps a sign that they were intentionally destroyed.
This is an extraordinary claim considering the many newspaper articles Stalin wrote and agitation work he carried out while active in the Caucasus, most of these efforts explicitly against the Mensheviks. All one needs to do is check the first two volumes of Stalin's
Works to see this was the case, such as his article "Briefly About the Disagreements in the Party" from May 1905.
It is, however, known that he worked for the Mensheviks for a while from 1903, and among the few records from that time a note indicates that he viewed the Bolshevik-Menshevik struggle as a "storm in a glass" and was dismissive of it.
That's not difficult considering how dominant a force Menshevism was in Georgia at the time, and does not negate the two decades of work he did subsequent to 1903 in combating the Mensheviks. Many soon-to-be Bolsheviks failed to understand the significance of the split when it happened.
In 1917, he supported the provisional government, using the Menshevik justification of pacifying the bourgeoisie and seeing the provo gov't as the revolution's consolidator.
Supporting the Provisional Government was common among many members of the party at that moment, including Kamenev. If you're going to claim Stalin was a Menshevik because of a mistaken position he took and later admitted he took, does this mean that Molotov (who opposed the Provisional Government from its first days) was the greatest Bolshevik who ever lived?
All you're demonstrating is that Stalin was not a perfect human being who at all times adopted Lenin's policy the moment the latter wrote or spoke it, especially in conditions like 1903 when Stalin
couldn't have immediately known why the split had occurred. And in this you would find support in Soviet historiography after 1956, which ceased viewing him as a godlike figure.
During a German communist uprising in 1923, Jugashvili argued against giving aid using the old menshevik "unripe conditions" line.
Again this was not just "Stalin," and it seems to suggest that revolutions can be made to order.
I also notice you've failed to respond to the point that it was Trotsky who
actually and definitely sided with the Mensheviks for a short while on the question of
Iskra, and who spent the years before 1917 in active opposition to Lenin's line, and who as late as mid-1917 was saying that he could not be called a Bolshevik or forced to recognize Bolshevism.
All of his later politics, from supporting Chan Kai Shek
"Stalin" (the Soviet Union) "supported" Chiang Kai-shek against Japanese aggression, just as Soviet Russia under Lenin supported Mustapha Kemal against Anglo-Greek aggression. The Soviets had no illusions about either men. Both were opposed to communism.
the bloody mess in Spain
One would think from your post that the "bloody mess in Spain" had nothing to do with the bombing of Guernica, the white terror enacted by the supporters of Franco and other innumerable atrocities which were enacted upon the Spanish people. The fact that it was the Soviet Union which was the sole country to come to the assistance of Spain in any significant capacity, while it was the "great democracies" who tacitly accepted Franco, eludes you.
No wonder fascism won in Europe
A victory which can be credited to the anti-communism of the "great democracies" far more than to any sectarian blunders committed under Stalin.