The thumbnail of the first video is just clickbait, with the conclusion at the end of the video being that Trotsky wasn’t right or completely vindicated about everything and that Trotsky and Stalin both used the history of the Soviet Union as a weapon for political and ideological orthodoxy.

Here’s the transcript of that conclusion

Now, am I trying to argue that Trotsky was right about everything after all and is completely politically vindicated? No, not at all. Rather, this is just an illustrative example of how in the 1920s, Soviet history itself was one of the key weapons wielded in the battle for political and ideological orthodoxy. As the ongoing historiography series will illustrate, Stalin cultivated a certain historical narrative that was favorable to himself and his goals. Well, Trotsky did the same. In the former’s case, a considerable industry emerged of party committees, government departments, press outlets, even entertainment. The school of falsification, if you will, which wrote and rewrote the history of the revolution. This school censored or suppressed certain pieces of evidence, canonizing one interpretation to the detriment of others, and in the process worked to cement Stalin’s position as the school’s leading professor.

I just finished the first video and, knowing nothing about any of this, I’d like to be pointed towards the direction of any refutation or criticism of the contents of the video.

I guess I don’t know the first thing about Trotsky.

Ahhhh

I figured as much, but that doesn’t mean absolutely everything this person says is bunk.

Re the 2nd video:

As the story goes, Stalin was Lenin’s right-hand-man and the person slated to succeed him upon his death. Or if not Stalin, sometimes emphasis is placed on Leon Trotsky as a possible alternative. However, in actuality there was a man more senior than both Stalin and Trotsky, a man who was Lenin’s original right-hand-man: Yakov Sverdlov. Up to his untimely death in 1919, Sverdlov held the reins of the Secretariat, placing him in a position to succeed Lenin if the opportunity arose. He was effectively Stalin before Stalin, serving as the blueprint for the latter’s rise to power.

really loving the word [extremely Al Pacino voice] “citatinos” and I implore you not to fix the typo

The CIA document, as the video points out, is weak if used alone. However, there does exist good evidence of the soviet system of democracy. Defense of Stalin against Red Scare mythology is complex, and ultimately Stalin was neither a saint nor a monster, but a socialist head of state under extremely turbulent conditions.

I myself have used the CIA report, not because it absolves Stalin of any excess (which is to fictionalize Stalin into a saintly figure), but because of the line describing his leadership style as more of a “captain of a team,” which is backed up by reporters like Anna Louise Strong’s first hand experience.

Finally, it’s important for any ML to recognize that no socialist project has been free of sin, no socialist leader without bloodless hands, including innocent blood. People often get caught up in historical debates more than they do material reality of today. We must know our history to know how best to learn from our mistakes, but too often Marxists debate which historical figure was morally superior, vs which was theoretically and practically correct.

Stalin was more correct than Trotsky regarding the issues they debated at the time, such as socialism in one country vs permanent revolution. Stalin had a better theoretical line regarding the peasantry, and ultimately did oversee the world’s first Marxist state and navigated tumultuous waters. Trotsky did more than a fair amount to undermine socialism, and Trotskyist organizations have been more of an enemy to socialism than an ally, with few exceptions. Trotksy was sometimes correct, though, such as analyzing fascism. Neither were perfect saints nor devils, even if Stalin was better than Trotsky.

All in all, what’s important is connecting theory with practice, learning as we go. If the strength of our ideology rests more on the morality of those that contributed to the creation and refinement of Marxism-Leninism than to the actual practical use of said ideology, then Marx would roll in his grave.

It was certainly foolish and irresponsible of us (I am also guilty of it), but the CIA conforming to the liberal view isn’t all that surprising when they are working with a hypothesis that they didn’t have all that much ability to falsify and didn’t have information from the Soviet archives about, for example, Stalin being repeatedly outvoted on basic issues.

As I recall, here’s another famous note “from the CIA” about Cuba, specifically how attempts to create broad opposition within Cuba to the communist regime have failed even in the extreme circumstances Cuba has faced for its whole existence, and the only remaining option (in so many words) is to use sanctions to just turn Cuba into a failed state. I now wonder what the provenance of that note is and if it reflects or conflicts with better sources . . .

Hopefully people watch the video and the claim does not continue to go unchallenged

I like what RedWizard had to say elsewhere in this thread.

One of the things that does make this item of agitprop so effective is that it takes a ‘trusted source’ in the minds of liberals and turns it on them. They have no real pre-programmed response to this kind of message. This, however, will begin to fail to be effective and rightfully paint those who parriot [sic] it as shallow agents peddeling [sic] in simple misinformation that they themselves cannot even identify. Sources like the ones presented in this video, which effectively state, “The CIA was stairing [sic] at a black box, unable to expose it’s inner workings, and deriving its function purly [sic] from its form,” could be more persuasive. It would need to be followed up, however, with more current Soviet archive research.

Seems like bad agitprop to me

This video isn’t saying that. The video is saying that this CIA document isn’t evidence that “there is no such thing as one person controlling a government unilaterally” and that it is even an authoritative opinion from the CIA as an organization. Presenting it as such is easily disproven, and there is far more documentation of a higher level of authority within the CIA at the time, exposing that the CIA did in fact believe Stalin was a dictator.

It doesn’t take a position on the nature of Stalin’s level of power relative to the collective management of the Soviet Union. It is only pointing out how weak this document is as evidence of the claim that “even the CIA didn’t believe Stalin was a dictator.” Then effectively calls on the viewer to act and discard this document as a vehicle for agitprop and find new material.

I don’t think you’ve watched the video

To me, it seems like it’s still a good piece of agitprop in the beginning, but as communism, anarchism, socialism become more popular and people become more generally knowledgeable about them, then the counter arguments will start to become more sophisticated (like the arguments about the communists stabbing the anarchists in the back during the Russian Revolution or Spanish Civil War). That’s when it doesn’t look great when you peddle this argument and you get countered without any more to say because you never had to say more than that lol.

Why isn’t it good propaganda? What criteria are you making to determine that? And why should we ignore the CIA, whether it’s internal analyses or external publications? It seems like your smuggling lots of idealistic principles into this.

Does the CIA think Maduro is a dictator?

Publicly? Or internally?

Same situation as Stalin. Public propaganda does not reflect the internal understanding of the organisation.

I guess we’ll have to wait until 2070 to know for sure

So, taken together, the source seems to believe there is a dictatorship in the Soviet Union, that Stalin was the captain, but that his absolute power or singularity is often exaggerated. As it so happens, this understanding is closer to the conclusion that many modern scholars have arrived at: that Stalin wasn’t a despot in the sense of having absolute, total power, but he was still dictatorial in the sense of having near-absolute power at the head of a small, unaccountable group of people. So our claim isn’t exactly earth-shattering.

But to get back to the point, even if this document was 100% factual, it doesn’t exactly say the Soviet government was non-dictatorial. It definitely doesn’t say it was democratic, had checks and balances, or anything like that. There’s no indication of Stalin being constrained by the people, for example. It’s at best only saying, in the opinion of the source at least, there was more of an oligarchic dictatorship rather than a one-man dictatorship.

I find it really weird that they have done such a good job thinking critically to disabuse us of the validity of this source but then do such a bad job interpreting its contents. “Wide powers” does not mean “near-absolute” power, even the President of the US has “wide powers” and he obviously is not a dictator (though we can make token remarks about how the current one is trying with the expansion of the police state, etc.) Then this is backpedaled to calling the SU a bureaucracy, which I actually agree with, but it doesn’t really reconcile these views, so it’s like a preemptive motte-and-bailey.

@ClathrateG@hexbear.net

Or what about this one from 1947, stating that “ever greater concentration of power in the hands of Stalin himself is taking place. During the war he was already, to all intents and purposes, a dictator with unlimited powers, but at that time this was considered as a temporary state of affairs. It has now been made permanent. The USSR has now entered upon a period of personal dictatorship.” This report, by the way, is also just far more detailed, with dozens of points explaining the argument.

But then we move beyond the realm of just information reports—meaning beyond just the raw intelligence—and look at the processed memorandums, briefs, and research reports prepared by the CIA from these inputs. For example, in a staff discussion just after Stalin’s death, everyone seems to agree that he was a personal dictator. They talk about if “the enormous power concentrated in Stalin personally could be transferred to a successor or successors.” One person “[REDACTED] began by stating flatly that any concept of solidarity or cooperative committee relations among the men in the top ruling group was utter nonsense,” said he “[REDACTED] believed that modern totalitarianism inevitably removedd into personal dictatorship. Stalin had become more and more like Hitler.”

Meanwhile, in another analysis, “Stalinism is defined as the theory and practice connected with Stalin’s personal dictatorship, one-man rule.” In the analysis of Khrushchev’s secret speech, we read: “The Soviet leadership has recently reaffirmed that the Soviet people are irrevocably subordinated to authoritarian one-party dictatorship, iron discipline, individual leadership—in spite of the now proven fact that the party could not protect the people, the Soviet state, or itself against a Stalin.”

And okay, one more: “Pure collectivity—the equal sharing of power and authority by a number of men—has never existed in the USSR. Stalin had succeeded in establishing an almost absolute dictatorship.” And on and on they go.

So in sum, our document is already in the least credible category of reports and is contradicted by other, more detailed reports of the same type. But on top of that, it’s contradicted in the more reliable categories repeatedly. Perhaps most revealing of all, none of these documents imply the CIA knew or acted as if Stalin wasn’t a dictator. I could highlight every last instance of them literally saying the words “dictator,” but what’s more important is how they report on him and Soviet politics in general with the assumption that the system works dictatorially. For example, there’s no talk of “elections are underway; we have to try to influence the results,” or “we’re not sure who the people will support,” or “Stalin be outvoted.” Here, they’re talking about how the supreme leader acts and what they expect he personally will do.

Now, in the end, any such document at best tells us what the CIA thought about the Soviet Union, not necessarily what it actually was. They may have their reasons, but they’re not infallible either. The CIA certainly had a lot of resources behind it and motivation to understand their enemy, but they were still an outside observer trying to peek across the Iron Curtain. To quote one analysis: “The CIA and Western intelligence in general faced an extremely difficult task in the early years of the Cold War, particularly in attempting to gain insights into the Soviet leadership, its deliberations, and what they intended to do. Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union was in several, if not most, respects a secret state.”

So the CIA shouldn’t be misconstrued as this authoritative, all-knowing source. It would be folly to take one comment in any such report as some smoking gun proving the fact, and that goes both for and against Stalin being a dictator. Such an assertion will be proven not by an off-hand CIA remark, but by examining the actual material reality on the ground and the much more revealing, reliable sources that the '50s CIA didn’t have access to—namely, the Soviet government’s own internal documents. So it’s no wonder historians spend more time in the Soviet archives than on cia.gov.

All this to say: please stop using this CIA report as some sort of proof that Stalin wasn’t a dictator. This is an unevaluated, anecdotal report from one unnamed source, not a statement of fact by the CIA. Even if that was legitimately what the 1950s CIA as a whole believed—which they didn’t—that wouldn’t sufficiently prove the claim anyway. This report is not the proof you think it is, and the fact that it’s been touted as conclusive for so long despite the obvious shortcomings would say more about current research standards than any of the actual realities of Stalin’s regime.

Found out about it from this comment