Memes

good friends with Lenin as Trotsky was

Tell me you've never read Lenin without telling me

Trotsky arrived, and this scoundrel at once ganged up with the Right wing [...]

What a swine this Trotsky is: Left phrases, and a bloc with the Right.

This is an instance of high-flown phraseology with which Trotsky always justifies opportunism... The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue.

Trotsky has never yet held a firm opinion on any important question of Marxism. He always contrives to worm his way into the cracks of any given difference of opinion, and desert one side for the other.

Trotsky behaves like a despicable careerist and factionalist of the Ryazanov-and-co type. Either equality on the editorial board, subordination to the central committee and no one’s transfer to Paris except Trotsky’s (the scoundrel, he wants to ‘fix up’ the whole rascally crew of ‘Pravda’ at our expense!) – or a break with this swindler and an exposure of him in the CO. He pays lip-service to the Party and behaves worse than any other of the factionalists.

This is just a random sample, if you want more I can go on, for as long as you like.

The USSR was never imperialist, that's really a poor analysis based on the economy of the USSR. It didn't run an extractionary economy based on export of capital, nor was it under the control of financial capital.

Secondly, Stalin was better friends with Lenin than Trotsky. This isn't historical revisionism, Trotsky retained his Menshevik roots throughout his life in his style of theory and practice, while Stalin was a Bolshevik from the beginning and worked with Lenin directly for a longer time. The idea that Lenin disliked Stalin mostly comes from a letter demanding Stalin's resignation over the treatment of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, for which Stalin tried to resign but was rejected.

Third, the USSR wasn't a monarchy. Even if Lenin personally liked Trotksy more, Stalin was voted in. Are you suggesting that the Soviet Union should have been a monarchy? Moreover, Trotsky's plan of assaulting the peasantry and hoping Europe would have a revolution and save the USSR from the backlash would have been suicide. Trotsky's Permanent Revolution depended on the peasantry being incapable of long-term alliance, but we know from history that that was obviously false and socialism was solidifed in the USSR.

Stalin was no saint, not everything he did was good, but at the same time not everything he did was bad, either. The CPC maintains that he was "70% good, 30% bad," upholding him as legitimate but recognizing missteps. Most communist orgs hold a similar line. Overall, he was comparatively much better than contemporaries like Churchill, despite being remembered as far worse by liberal historians.