Very nice to read such a great review!
I am not a communist, just like you, but I think that everything should be talked about honestly. This topic can be summarized as follows:
- the essence of communist ideology — in the desire for political, economic and cultural equality of all people, for universal enlightenment and the maximum disclosure of the creative potential of each person;
- the essence of the Nazi (fascist) ideology is the desire to divide society according to biological characteristics, providing completely different rights to different categories, to create a rigid hierarchy of subordination.
These statements are not a secret for anyone who is at least superficially familiar with the subject. But the colossal machine of bourgeois propaganda was able to make these two opposing ideologies mixed in the head of the average layman.
It is good that you very diligently strive to convey to the audience that the economic and political systems are not the same thing. In Marxist theory, this is called the “basis” and “superstructure”, respectively.
I agree that the absence of democracy in the USSR for the first period after the revolution was caused by the immaturity of society and the consequences of revolutionary cruelty. But I’ll add on my own that the game of “socialist democracy” could not last forever: smart people (and there were a lot of them in the USSR!) were sawing a contradiction between the officially proclaimed democratic ideology and real practice.
It is appropriate to say something in defense of Stalin. Since he is one of the most maligned historical figures, an unbiased person should be careful about the information that comes, for example, from the Nazis and their explicit or secret followers. Stalin was neither crazy nor selfish: in fact, he was wise and all his life he subordinated to the interests of the people. Therefore, he, of course, thought about the future of the country (and the world), and could not help but understand that power should be gradually transferred from the party elite to the people (especially since this corresponded to the ideology that he officially professed). He began to try to start doing this as soon as the minimum prerequisites arose for this. But he faced stiff resistance from the party elite. His first attempt to introduce alternative elections in 1937 provoked a company of mass repressions (I wrote a little more about this here: https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-reasons-for-Stalins-purges/answer/Valeriy-Beloyar), the second attempt after the war ended in his death. After Stalin, the dull and selfish party elite held on to power with their teeth and preferred to become bourgeois oligarchs than to share power with the people.
You also express concerns about turning democracy into fascism. In this regard, the question arises: is it possible to prevent such a threat by any measures at the level of the state or society as a whole?
