Chapter 02 - Economic Growth & The Zigzags Of The Leadership

[kinetikos]

This is where he really embarrasses Stalin et al.

It's both humorous and tragic.

The "zigzags" Trotsky describes are those of the flip-flopping SOB (Stalin) as he cynically uses the Left Oppostition's rational, well thought out plan -- to manage the NEP correctly by empowering the masses, both in the city and the country -- by calling it "fantastic", a "a leap into the unknown"... and then after he had driven the Oppostion from power... the stupid SOB turns directly around and implements those very ideas, but, of course, in a TRULY thoughtless, headlong and chaotic way.

[kinetikos]

1926

“To accelerate industrialization," answered the representatives of the Opposition at the party conference of 1926, "in particular by way of increased taxation on the kulak, will produce a large mass of goods and lower market prices, and this will be to the advantage both of the worker and of the majority of the peasants... Face to the village does not mean turn your back to industry; it means industry to the village. For the ’face’ of the state, if it does not include industry, is of no use to the village."

November 1927: Kamenev and Zinoviev expelled from the Party; Trotsky expelled and sent to Central Asia.

1928

On the 15th of February, 1928, the population of the country learned with surprise from an editorial in Pravda that the villages looked not at all the way they had been portrayed up to that moment by the authorities, but on the contrary very much as the expelled Left Opposition had presented them. The press which only yesterday had been denying the existence of the kulaks, today, on a signal from above, discovered them not only in the villages, but in the party itself. It was revealed that the communist nuclei were frequently dominated by rich peasants possessing complicated machinery, employing hired labor, concealing from the government hundreds and thousands of poods of grain, and implacably denouncing the "Trotskyist” policy. The newspapers vied with each other in printing sensational exposures of how kulaks in the position of local were denying admission to the party to poor peasants and hired hands. All the old criteria were turned upside down; minuses and pluses changed places.

January 1929, Trotsky completely expelled from the USSR

1929

 In November 1929, Stalin, abandoning his own vacillations, announced the end of individual farming. The peasants, he said, are entering the collective farms "in whole villages, counties and even provinces.” Yakovlev, who two years before had insisted that the collectives would for many years remain only "islands in a sea of peasant holdings", now received an order as People’s Commissar of Agriculture to "liquidate the kulaks as a class"...
 

[kinetikos]

That "timeline" (fabricated agit-prop, more like it) is nothing but a cheap attempt to link unrelated events. Ludicrous!

Not to mention the term "liquidate" can be interpreted in many ways. Only a Trot would dare attach sinister implications to such.

[turnoviseous]

Originally posted by kinetikos
That "timeline" (fabricated agit-prop, more like it) is nothing but a cheap attempt to link unrelated events. Ludicrous!

Not to mention the term "liquidate" can be interpreted in many ways. Only a Trot would dare attach sinister implications to such.

Hmm? :confused:

[T.K.A.-Denmark]

I think it was a joke, well I hope it was.:)

[kinetikos]

Yeah... just bored and wondering if anyone is out there :D

'Spoze I could finish the book. Might be a better use of time.