Was Joesph Stalin a Fascist? discussion and poll

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The Idea has being ventured that Joesph Stalin although a avowed communist and premier of the U.S.S.R. was secretly in his nasty little heart a fascist bully boy and ran the union on a model closer to fascism than socialism.

This of course depends on your definition of the word. By Umberto Eco's standards he certainly was. [[Eco 14 ways to see a blackshirt]] I am willing to accept alternate definitions of fascism if they are reasonable.
I we just do the first five because I am lazy . . . I mean busy.

I am in no way arguing that Marxism is fascist or that liberals are fascists because that would be stupid. Just Joe.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
here I would say that "marxism" was the tradition at the center of the cult.
the truth had already been spelled out by Marx we only have the power to interpret

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Joe rejected natural selection and the adaptive marxism of snowball I mean Trotskey.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
continual five year plans. internal displacements of populations constant social engineering.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
this one is just true on its face.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
was Joe racist? antisemitic sure. need more info.

One needs not be a fascist to be a horrible, horrible ruler.

Describing any regime but that of Mussolini with the word "fascist" is generally a misuse of the term.

On Stalin, you will notice that he was describing pejoratively everyone as "fascist", as early as the 1930s (probably before too, but I have no clear memory). The Moscow Trials against "trotsko-fascism" come to mind.

Also, you will need to define what you mean by "modernism". Because it does not mean "what is positive about present, Western society".

It wasn't a tradition so much as an authority. In no way does it approximate, even slightly, the national traditions exploited by both Mussolini and Hitler.

I think you're confusing "totalitarian" with "fascist". They are not synonyms, and Stalin wasn't a Fascist - but he was a totalitarian dictator, and so was Mussolini.

I do not care for these attempts to pervert language and change the meanings of words, and rewrite history, to suit political ends. Far too Orwellian for my taste.

Hilarious, Cuz it was Orwell that first made these sort of assertions.
in Homage to Catalonia and later in Animal Farm.

What exactly is my political end? To push uncle Joe into the right
or to call the left Fascist?

People are always seem to be so sure of things they have no possible ability to know.

Effectively he wasn't much different

I think Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal are called fascist by reputable scholars and by themselves at least initially identify as such. The Fascist model also informs Pinchet's Chile and Peron's Argentina. I am on sure footing using the word.

Joe's use of the word is telling but not proof that he did not adopt fascist techniques and tropes. It also is an example of scapegoating which is a known fascist thang. it is also an example of #4. Also no one is disputing that rhetorically he was a commie.

That was a quote from Eco ,you ... we will have to explore what he means by modernism.

No, he never called Stalin a fascist ... he noted the similarities between the totalitarian ideologies. There's a difference. Orwell didn't pervert the language and try to blur the lines between them at all ... he noted that they shared a number of unpleasant similarities, as totalitarians, but he never named them as the same thing.



There has been a big push among certain political elements (kicked off, no doubt, from a well-funded think tank) to muddy the waters about this historical period - to the end of making some elements of Nazi and fascist ideology more respectable, such as the hatred of the weak, the disabled, minorities, homosexuals, etc. There's an attempt to sweep all this under the rug and say fascism = communism and fascism = liberal and freedom = racial superiority, police state, corporatism, etc

That is because all of them embraced Mussolini's ideal of corporatism, which was the central tenet of fascist ideology. Pinochet is a classic example, for instance. Stalin certainly was not.

When the pigs eat with the farmers and you can't tell the difference.

as for the last part we all know who the real weak to strong-fascists are in contemporary culture.
They are right-wing postmodernists. the Fox news and right-wing radio folks.
Eco is a good man he is on our side. Read the whole article and you will see what I am talking about. Eco's definition fits them but it also fits uncle Joe.

diagram of my view.
Vladimir Lenin - Commie.
Alexei Rykov - social democrat
Joseph Stalin -crypto-fascist in commie clothing.
Georgy Malenkov - pretty much a open fascist liquidated the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and griped about "rootless cosmopolitans".
Nikita Khrushchev - Konstantin Chernenko Bureaucrat commies
Gorbachev is a Democrat.

Putin has a bit of the Fascist in him though.

Lenin was a Bolshevik, and most of what Stalin did was simply a continuation and expansion of policies set by Lenin (the Red Terror, for instance). There wasn't anything new about what Stalin was doing, really, though it was done with more intensity.

As far as Stalin being a fascist, it's a classic apples and oranges thing. Apples and oranges are both fruits, but an apple is not an orange. Likewise, Bolshevism and fascism were both totalitarian but fascism isn't communism or vice-versa. You're comparing apples and oranges here.

I think it is more telling to describe each of these regimes in their uniqueness than to give them a generic, pejorative word. Also, from what I understand, Franco was more a standard autocratic dictator than someone with any clear ideological view.


Modernism, normally, is the "ideology" (for lack of a better word) or movement of progress (the keyword), a linear view of time in which the present is better than the past, and the future holds all hope.

paragraph one.
This is the Stalin is just Lenin on steroids the evils of communism were already inherent theory?
if so paragraph 2 is unassailable. I argue that there was a shift between the two and that Stalin and Lenin are the dissimilar fruits.

Trotsky said that Stalin would be a fascist had it not been for the working class basis of the state. By the late 1930s, the Soviet Union had become a capitalist state. The Stalinist regime for was a fascist regime which rose from the capitalist counterrevolution. of course still wearing the trapping of communists.

I think this is the message of animal farm or at least my reading of it.
Orwell was far from an anticommunist he fought with the republicans in Spain.

Lets rise above the simple reading my argument is not totalitarians are all fascist I am saying Joe was.

You will have to explain what the shift was, and how that shift was towards fascism. But I doubt you will succeed.

I think there was a shift, because Lenin execised a collegial government of which he was only the most influent and charismatic member, whereas Stalin had full control of the bureaucracy and used it for his own ends. However, this has nothing to do with fascism.




It was capitalist? That must explain why the first thing Stalin did when his power base was stable was to end the NEP and do exactly what Trotsky argued for in the first place.

Paragraph one. Personal preference and a good one. I prefer to explore thing cross-culturally.

On modernism I am sure that that is very similar to the one Dr. Eco uses.
I think Stalin's rejection of natural selection falls in this category.

An other point of interest is was Stalin a Russian Imperialist or a revolutionary Internationalist?
Was the soviet bloc an extension of Russian power or a liberation of those countries?
I think one of his major bones of contention with Trotsky was the support of continuing revolution. Stalin destroyed the communes and compelled folks to become wage earning employees of a corporate state.

Giving general tags to different objects is a very good way to miss on their true nature.

Also, the word "fascism" itself is (or should be) heavily associated with Italy. It is part of the whole "heir to Rome" theme of Mussolini: the fasces were a piece of Roman imagery. (As such, it has been borrowed by other countries, including the US and France.)


I don't see how it fits. I don't know much about Stalin and natural selection, but I know how he wanted his scientist, and it certainly wasn't very open.

On the other hand, he only let old patriotic feelings ressurge when they were needed in the Great Patriotic War and he restarted the campaign against Christianity after a pause during the NEP, so if he was not open to modernism (which I don't know, or at least would need more time to think about), neither was he to traditionalism.


His diplomacy kept to the old tsarist lines: help/conquer the "Slav brothers" in the Balkans and Eastern Europe; expansion towards "warm seas". A quick look at a map of the Warsaw pact shows his success on the first issue. Also, he wanted to re-open the status of the Straits, he was quite interested in keeping his troops in Persia after the war, which matches the second one.

On the other hand, the area he controled was the same as the tsar, and so were the geo-political challenges. Once "Socialism in one country" became the policy, communist diplomacy could hardly be very different.

Atomisation is also a good way to miss things too I think it is a golden mean issue.

The modernist question becomes very strange when applied to a Hegelian system like Marxism. Obviously a Marxist believes in a future better than today. But when that future does not conform itself to historical materialism one could get antsy.

Stalin foreign policy as described by you could be called Nationalistic.

This "Socialism in one country" produces a linguistic joke
is "Socialism in one country" = National socialism? said and withdrawn