Ep 378 - Revisiting the Stalin Eras Part 2: Context Not Caricature with Jeremy of Proles Pod
** Macro ‘n Chill is our weekly online gathering where we listen to the podcast episode and talk about it among friends. This Tuesday, Jeremy of Proles Pod will be with us to answer questions. May 5 at 8pm ET/5pm PT Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/gCOXxGttQryRnQNq-A3NbA
This is Part 2 of Steve’s interview with Jeremy, co-host of Proles Pod, talking about their exhaustive series on the Stalin Eras. It's a nuanced, de-stigmatized discussion about Joseph Stalin and the political reality of the Soviet Union. They begin by dismantling Western misconceptions of dictatorship to explain the actual Leninist methodology of democratic centralism, contrasting it with Western parliamentary systems.
Rather than asking whether Joseph Stalin was good or evil, the conversation reframes the question entirely. It situates the Soviet project within the pressures of counter-revolution, imperial encirclement, and internal struggle, while investigating how decisions were actually made inside a socialist state. Jeremy calls out indefensible behavior and debunks long-standing myths. The result is a dialectical examination of power, democracy, and historical development.
Proles Pod is an explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist podcast run by four ADHD-addled individuals. Although the foundation of Proles was built on the topic of history, more recently they have branched out into theory, politics, and culture. You can find them anywhere fine podcasts are distributed.
Join their Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/ProlesPod/posts
Check out a teaser for their series, The Stalin Eras: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DP81SiTjQry/
Transcript
All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese.
And yes, this is part two of my conversation with Jeremy, the co host of the Marxist Leninist podcast prolspad. We go into great depth in the beginning to discuss democratic centralism. It is not Joseph Stalin. It is democratic centralism.
It's a methodology, it's a style, it's understanding. What is the difference between quote, unquote, a dictatorship and understanding democratic centralism? Most people have no clue of that.
So we wanted to, as I said, as the closing from our last one, we didn't want to lionize, we didn't want to demonize. We just wanted to factualize and contextualize the content.
And I'm here to dig into some of the questions that have just driven me absolutely nuts with Joseph Stalin and Joseph Stalin, who?
My God, if you post anything about him, you got the Trotskyites coming at you, calling you a tanky and calling you horrible and saying you're a traitor to the mission. Because, after all, socialism was supposed to be around the world all at once.
And Joseph Stalin stripped Lenin of his beliefs and everything and took it to just one country and all the other tropisms. I'm not here to tell you that he was a great man or a bad man. I'm here to learn.
I reached out to somebody who spent hundreds of hours digging into original texts. He has a formal education in history, archeology and cultural anthropology.
in socialist organizing since: Jeremy from Proles Pod:Thank you. Let's circle back to Joseph Stalin. You may imagine in your head what you think Stalin was like and the things that Stalin did.
And certainly he did things that he shouldn't have done. He made mistakes that he shouldn't have made. But he was not alone. He was one man of several who also made mistakes.
One man of hundreds who made mistakes, one man of thousands who made mistakes. Like, it's not one guy who was doing all this, but it's important for the United States project.
It's necessary for its existence, for its continued existence as it is for you to think that he was a monster and that socialist countries don't work, that they are undemocratic, that they are authoritarian. And I would like to say that, firstly, it's not true.
We imagine in the west that getting to vote every four years or two years is the end of democracy, but it's not even a good example of democracy, especially when you factor in media pressure that decides for you what your opinions are going to be and then beams it into your head via an unending onslaught of nonsense. It's hegemonic and therefore difficult to see, but it's there.
And you may think you are immune to propaganda, and you may be better at most that at deflecting it, but you're not. Nobody is immune to propaganda.
Steve Grumbine:Because we've been talking about Gramsci a lot, and you hit that cultural hegemony, Right?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:This is, to me, the missing link with people's discourse in terms of understanding not only current events, but history. Obviously, historical and dialectical materialism comes with a lot of. Oh, they must be talking about Stalin. Right?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah, Stalin.
Steve Grumbine:But in reality, what we're talking about here is the oligarchy's use of institutions that they create in their own image.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Right.
Steve Grumbine:To create what amounts to be common sense for all of us. And they do have the power, unlike us, because, like you said, our reach might be a couple thousand. Theirs is millions.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Right.
Steve Grumbine:And every day they put out another message. And just to keep up, we put a podcast out weekly.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And we know we can't keep up with current events, so we don't do them that way. We do them Evergreen, because we want people to have the conception. We want people to have the.
Not tell them what to think, but teach them how to consider, to think through these things so that they're not just repeating State Department, CIA talking points.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Because we can't break from this if they're not thinking, there's just no way.
And anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I felt like the Gramsci element of cultural hegemony is something that I have found to be really super important to include in my conversation. So, anyway, go ahead, buddy. I'm sorry.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah, no, no worries. I want to express that, like, again, democracy does not mean getting to vote every few years.
If we look at, for instance,:And when I say millions, I mean millions of Soviet citizens sent in ideas for what they thought the Constitution should look like, and if you're like, well, right, but they didn't have any power as compared to Stalin. I'll give you a specific example of something that Stalin wanted that the people voted down.
In:The dictatorship of the proletariat was safe enough that we could now start allowing those people to vote. And it was the peasants and it was the working people of the Soviet Union who were like, are you fucking crazy?
These people were just oppressing us like a decade ago. They were ruining our lives. And now you want to give them the right to vote?
No, they vehemently disagreed with Stalin on the enfranchisement of additional classes of people in the Soviet Union. But again, when I say millions, I do mean like millions of people wrote in and were like, we think this would be a good idea.
gether into what would be the:Can you imagine if the United States asked us if the government was like, what do you guys think should happen in our country? And then the President was like, I think this should happen. And then the people were like, are you fucking crazy? No way. And then they shot that down.
Can you fathom that happening in the United States?
Steve Grumbine:Nope.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:There is a 0.000% chance of that ever taking place in here. And they call this a democracy and they call the Soviet Union a dictatorship.
In Cuba, in: on, There's a story from like:I can't remember the title, but basically the Commander in Chief of the Red Army. He had begun a campaign to improve the efficiency and quality of the Red army.
And he received 15,000 suggestions from like rank and file soldiers and sailors and NCOs and officers basically just suggesting what should be done to make things better within the Red Army.
Can you imagine being an airman or a soldier in the US army and being Like, I think this is what we should do to improve the efficiency and my quality of life. And then the, like, Joint Chiefs of Staff going, yeah, this is a great idea. Let's do this.
That is democracy, and we don't have that in the United States. There is like, again, this parliamentary capitalist democracy is not real democracy.
It is a shadow, a sham, like a weird, like, distorted reflection of what real democracy could look like.
And instead of having real democracy, we are told that real democracy is actually dictatorship and that the dictatorship of capital, which is what we live under, is democracy. And again, all of these things work together. The media wants you to believe these things. The US Government wants you to believe these things.
Big business owners want you to believe that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship and that the United States has freedom and that the checks and balances we have are not to destroy democracy but to defend it. And it is the opposite. All of that is fake.
Steve Grumbine:Absolutely. So let's zero in on our guy, Joseph Stalin.
We've been on here for over an hour and we're going to keep going because this is such an important subject. You started your mission with the Stalin eras.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And all the stuff we've talked about in the first hour is pointing towards democratic centralism, which is a core part of what Stalin led, what the government that he functioned within led.
And obviously you've got the Trotskyites who say Stalin went against everything that Lenin put forward and killed all the Bolsheviks and did this and did that, and gulags and this. I don't want to get trapped in the Trotsky stuff, but I do want to make sure that we do touch on it.
But I want to know about the man and I want to understand what he did in reality. Like, you all were so balanced. And yes, you didn't come out hating Stalin.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure.
Steve Grumbine:You are so balanced in your assessment. Let's talk about Stalin now.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure, yeah.
It is interesting to me that people will point at people like Kamenev and Zinoviev and Trotsky and they'll be like, those were the real inheritors of Lenin's legacy and Stalin was a right deviation who destroyed Lenin's legacy.
But if you look at the history of the RSFSR and the like brief moments of the Soviet Union before Lenin passed, this is not borne out based on that period of time, what those people were doing versus what Stalin was doing. So again, democratic centralism was a core tenet of Lenin's theoretical framework of how a revolution should be carried out.
And when I say revolution I don't just mean the violence that led to the establishment of the state. I mean the continued work that is required to build socialism. Democratic centralism was a core tenet of that.
Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev repeatedly violated the principles of democratic centralism. And they did it before the revolution and they did it during the revolution.
So Kamenev and Zidoviev in particular thought that Lenin's April theses went too far.
So the April theses basically were a call to action, to the Soviets, to say, look, the Provisional Government has done some, like, decent stuff, but they are not ready to take this revolution where it needs to go. They are not ready to build socialism. They are already making concessions to the capitalists. We need to keep going.
Kamenev and Sadoviev were like, stop. You're going to undermine the gains that we've made thus far, so you need to shut up.
And then when they found out that Lenin had planned to execute the October Revolution, they published in newspapers a criticism of the decision to do this. They were like, don't. Like, this is bad.
You're going to fuck things up and you're going to lose and it's going to put us in a worse position and the reaction is going to drive us underground and blah, blah, blah.
eir lives. Again. Zinoviev in:Anyway, somewhere in the 20s, Zenoviev began to argue that they should shift away from dictatorship of the proletariat and toward dictatorship of the party.
Meaning the party should be the ones who decide what is good for the country, because they are the most educated and they are the most, like, in line ideologically with socialism, with Lenin's teachings. You know, I think it's a very tempting argument to make. Stalin was like, no fucking way.
Stalin was like, you are out of your mind if you think we can lose the trust of the people and that's going to get us to where we need to go. We have to be in constant dialogue with the people in order to make sure that we understand their needs.
If we try to establish ourselves as the final word on policy, we are going to lose their trust and they are going to hate us for it. And that is not within the keepings of socialism. That is not within the keepings of democracy. That is dictatorship. Okay?
Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev attempted to create a parallel party structure with their own printing Presses their own meeting houses, their own central committee. And they created what was referred to as the new opposition. That is in direct violation of Lenin's policy of democratic centralism.
Okay, so all of this shit.
There was one of Trotsky's sort of right hand men argued that we should abandon Stalin's attempt to establish socialism in one country and we should tie the socialist development of world revolution to the socialist development of the rsfsr.
Steve Grumbine:Right?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:It was before the revolution happened. It was voted upon and it was knocked down. It was an unpopular opinion among the Soviets, among the people.
Then Trotsky comes back and is like, I know that this was voted down like several years ago, but we're actually arguing for it again and again with this like weird parallel party structure. He tried to assert the parallel party above the cpsu. This is a violation of democratic centralism.
And somehow in the minds of Trotskyists, I don't think there really are any Zenovievites anymore.
But like in the minds of people who believe that the old Bolsheviks had the correct line and that Stalin was the deviation, like somehow, even though in life they oppose Lenin at every turn, even though after his death they betrayed his theoretical frameworks, in spite of that somehow they really are the guys that Lenin wanted to lead the Soviet Union. And Stalin just outmaneuvered them and oppressed them. And again, I don't see any evidence for that whatsoever.
So I guess to address that, there's a lot of like discussion of Lenin's testament, which is like this document that he wrote where he, he criticized and praised the people that he thought might lead the Soviet Union after his death. There are a few different versions of it.
The one that Trotskyites use as like the best example for the fact that Lenin really wanted Trotsky to take over, not Stalin. Fake. Even Stephen Kotkin thinks it's fake.
Like there is no duplicate in the Soviet archives, which means, which makes it very suspect because they made duplicates of everything. Anything that Lenin wrote especially was duplicated and put in the archives.
It also is just very suspicious on the timing of when it was released anyway. But aside from that, I would like to raise the point, and I raised this in the actual episode itself on this period.
What Lenin thought should not have superseded what the people of the Soviet Union wanted. And firstly, Stalin had already been elected as chairman of the CPSU before Lenin died. In fact, he had been recommended for the position by Lenin.
And when Lenin died, Trotsky wanted to replace Lenin as dictator of the Soviet Union as this central figure who would rule over the Supreme Soviet, rule over the Central Committee and make these big picture decisions himself. And Stalin was like, no, we are not going to do that. In fact, we are going to abolish Lenin's position entirely.
There will never be another dictator of the Soviet Union. There will never be another unelected official who oversees the goings on that supersedes the Central Committee.
We will as a group decide how things proceed and that's what we're going to do. And again, Trotsky lost. Stalin was right. Like, I don't know, like how to express this to people. They were not on equal footing.
Trotsky was deeply unpopular by the mid-20s. He had a lot of adherence to, in terms of like people who were willing to conspire against the Soviet Union, within the Soviet Union.
But we're not talking about a majority, we're talking about a very small minority who just happened to be in high ranking positions. And he had a following from his army days. He was well respected for his, you know, command of the Red Army.
But by the time of:Again, I think Trotsky prefigures a lot of the way the Western left behaves, which is to say that they like to imagine themselves as the central figure of the revolution, even if that's not true. And they like to imagine themselves as like having the last word on what should and should not happen without talking about it with their comrades.
They just, I don't know, they imagine that if they speak the right words into the ether, that suddenly the population will arise and awake and be convinced of their rightness. And that's not how this works.
I mean even we as podcasters, our like circle of people who are deciding what does and doesn't get put on a podcast, very small. This is not the way that we're going to win the revolution. This is the way that we're to going, going to like propagandize to people.
We're going to get people to like see things that they might not have seen. But then it's up to them to go join a party, for them to go join a party that is dedicated to building socialism.
And that's where that's going to happen. It's not going to happen because we say the right words to you.
Steve Grumbine:You know, that is so hard to keep in mind because, you know, I'm one person. And before we did this interview. Unlike some, I have a cadre of people within my circle.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:That I asked specifically. Keep me honest, Vital. What should I do here? I want to make sure, knowing full well that I'm about to put my foot in a pile of doogie.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:That a lot of people will never even bother listening to. They will see the promo picture. They will read the title. They might read. Read the first paragraph of the show. Notes.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And they will say, ah, tanky.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Ah, you know, hey, Steve, read this book, the Homage to Catalonia. Read it, Steve. Where's your armed rebellion, Steve? We gotta vote blue. No matter, Steve. You're crazy. You're stupid. We just need a.
A Media Commons, Steve. Okay. How do we get a Media Commons, buddy? Yeah, okay. I'm not saying we wouldn't be great having a Media Commons, but.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes, but.
Steve Grumbine:Douchebag. Erroneous. Can you please tell me how you get there? Because I'm sitting here doing a podcast and I've got thousands, not millions of people.
And even the biggest ones out there are not reaching the numbers that would make the dent. Unless, as Gabriel Rockhill calls them, they're the acceptable left.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Right.
Steve Grumbine:And they are the ones that are given the error and the hand on the shoulder to say, they're okay, they're harmless, let them talk.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yep.
Steve Grumbine:Anyway, I just wanted to say that. Sorry.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:No, no, no, no. I mean, that's 100% it. The work that needs to be done cannot be done by individuals.
Even individuals who have like, you know, a small group that they talk to. Like, the path forward is going to be decided by millions, not by dozens. You know what I mean?
And it's even worse when you look at people who are like, individuals who have YouTube channels or podcasts.
One person who is deciding what they're going to say, what they're not going to say, what guests are going to have on, what their topics are going to be like. That's to me, even worse because there is no.
There are no checks on their own sort of like ego and their own particular concept of what should and should not happen, which they have only debated within their own head. And that again, is the problem of Trotsky, is that he did not wait to have his ideas checked. In reality. He was like, this is my great idea.
You guys don't like my idea? Well, fuck you. I'm going to start a separate party that undermines the existing party. They were given multiple chances.
Kamenev and Zinoviev were given multiple chances to, like, give up on this shit. To be like, we will let you stay in the party. In fact, they allowed Kamenev and Zinoviev to return to the Central Committee.
They were like, you can come back to the Central Committee as dissenting voices. You can continue to argue your point.
And if we fuck up as the Central Committee, if we do wrong and your ideas are proven to be the correct ones, great, we'll try that next. But you can't continue to try to destroy what we have built here because you don't like the path we're going through.
You cannot decide as an individual what the correct path is. That is something that has to be determined socially. That is democracy. That is a democratic will being decided.
And of course, yes, the Soviet Union was a single party state and they determined who could and could not vote based on how well read they were in socialism. But it was not nearly as restrictive as you might imagine.
We weren't talking about like a group of 12 people deciding the fate of hundreds of millions. We're talking about tens of millions deciding the fate of hundreds of millions. At the beginning, maybe 9 million people.
But by the time of the death of Stalin, tens of millions of people were in the party deciding what should and should not happen. And of course you have to restrict reactionaries from taking over your government. Are you crazy?
Democracy to me does not mean I want fascists to be able to be fascists. That's not democracy. They are explicitly anti democratic. I would never give them the power. Oligarchy is not democratic.
You think I want an oligarchic party to take over my country? No fucking way.
You have to put restrictions on these people or they will turn you and twist you back in the direction that you were when you were all miserable and suffering. Under capitalism you have to have checks and balances. Now do I think a single party state is the solution to that? No, it's a very bad solution.
But the Soviet Union was the first. They had nobody to look back on. They had nobody to go, okay, what works and what doesn't work?
They just had to like throw shit at the wall and see if it stuck. And if it stuck, great, and if it didn't, fuck, let's start over. But that's what they had to do because nobody else could show them the way.
They were blazing fucking trails. Now if you look at like China, for instance, they have a multi party state.
They have like, I think there's like 18 parties or something like that in the National People's Congress.
But their innovation to this, their way of keeping a fascist party from taking over is to limit the number of candidates who can sit in the National People's Congress to, to one third. You cannot have more than one third of the total amount in the National People's Congress.
Two thirds has to be reserved for the Communist Party and people may call that undemocratic. Again, I think that's a great innovation because it allows the voices of other parties to be heard.
Because they operate on democratic centralism in the National People's Congress. They have, like these smaller parties have the right to introduce bills that suggest the direction the country should go.
And then the entire Congress argues about it. And then once they decide on a shape for this bill that actually functions, it gets passed or it doesn't.
And this is why, like, the west will refer to the National People's Congress as a rubber stamp Congress, because something like 97% of all bills that are introduced get passed. But that's because they don't understand democratic centralism or they do and they are like intentionally misleading you.
What happens is, even if it's a small party that introduces it, there's a concept there. The concept might be good, but the execution might not be great.
And the entire group argues about it and fights about it and gets it into a shape of something that is reasonable to be adopted. And then of course, once it gets into that sort of shape that everybody or most everybody can agree on it, it gets passed. That's why it's 97%.
Most of the things that get introduced can be turned into a good idea, some can't. And that's why there's that whatever, 3 or 6% or something that gets thrown away. But that's democratic centralism. That's democracy. Yeah. I don't know.
Like, there are so many arguments for the negative sides of that situation.
It does lead to situations where somebody who might be in a weaker position politically will never get what they want because they do not have the social capital to introduce something that allows their particular niche desires to be met.
But it's better than what we have in the west, which is two different capitalist parties that both want roughly the same thing, just crushing us, squeezing us between these two stones, you know, over and over and over again. Yeah, I don't know.
Steve Grumbine:I know. I really agree with that.
And one of the things that I think is the hardest part about this is going back to the CIA and to the role of the state of the United States and their need to make socialism look absolutely ass tastic. Yeah, right. They need to make it look as horrible as possible. They need Maduro to look like he's a horrible dictator.
They need it to look like Chavez was not for the people. They needed to make it look like Thomas Sankara was some crazy lunatic in Africa. They need to make it look all these things.
But Stalin is a specifically, particularly horribly painted bad guy, Right?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Like, this is a guy who. Mean, we can look at most of the NGOs that the United States created after World War II directly to try to counter Uncle Joe.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure.
Steve Grumbine:And the entire anti communist, you know, anti totalitarian. Yeah. George Orwell.
And like, we talked about: Jeremy from Proles Pod:He presided over the Great Purge, as it's called. It is referred to as the Yezhov. China in the Soviet Union and in Russia, which saw the deaths of approximately 675,000 people.
And if you want me to pretend like that was a good thing, I won't. It was horrible, heinous. Like, there were so many mistakes made in the lead up to those events that I genuinely am unable to defend.
There's not really any excuse for them.
What I will say is that there were genuine acts of sabotage taking place in the Soviet Union in the mid to late 30s, and they were being carried out by Nazis who had snuck into the country through the Baltic States.
And it was carried out by Trotskyists who were attempting to use the destabilization of the Soviet Union by basically the lead up to World War II in order to attempt to have another revolution, a Trotskyite revolution that was happening.
And there were multiple conspiracies and plots against the Central Committee and against the Soviet Union by imperialist powers, you know, by Germany, by Britain, again, also by Trotskyists, also by Zenovievites. Like, there were plots against the Soviet Union.
But what happened in the lead up to what's referred to as the Yezhovchina is there were so many accusations of sabotage that were coming in that the court systems could no longer give trials to everyone.
And so the Central Committee decided to hand the trying of sabotage over to what they call troikas, which is just three judges, quite often, not professionals, quite often people who had no experience judging anything. And it became a sort of, I don't know if it was like, about showing off to be like, Yo, I found 5, 15, 20 saboteurs over here.
Let's accuse them of this crime. There were petty grievances that people would use to accuse their neighbors of sabotage.
There were bad actors who were basically trying to destroy the Soviet Union and ruin its credibility by sending people to trial. And the person who was overseeing this appears to have also been one of these bad actors, that he was compromised in some way. Yezhov was his name.
Obviously. Yezhov Chino is the name of the purge. Anyway, it spun out of control, like, consistently.
And it was not Stalin who was at the lead of this, at the reigns, who was deciding who lived and who died.
In fact, many, many, many people wrote to Stalin personally to the tune of thousands of individuals wrote to him personally, were like, please, my husband has been accused of this crime and he's not guilty. This is all like a sham trial.
And in many, many cases, Stalin intervened on behalf of the party who felt like this was again, like a sham trial to save their lives.
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Jeremy from Proles Pod:But can I say that, like, he had no control over the situation and couldn't have done better? No. Neither could anybody in the Central Committee.
There were plenty of opportunities for them to intervene and be like, my God, what's happening?
I don't know if they just were so overwhelmed with everything that was happening that they just assumed everything was fine, or if they didn't want to look at it because they were like, well, we need to get these saboteurs under control or the Nazis are going to roll over us.
I don't know what the thought process was, but regardless, again, 675,000 people is unbelievable in terms of the human cost and the sabotage that was done indirectly to the Soviet Union. People who were very clearly innocent died, and that's indefensible.
Steve Grumbine:Can I add something here real quick to this? Because this is. I want to be clear. We are being honest. I mean, he was no saint to guide your life by.
In fact, you could say that this was a absolutely disqualifying act in many ways.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Many people believe that. Right?
Like, many people see this and they're like, well, that just anything else that he might have done cannot be made up for or like, cannot make up for what happened during the Great Purge. Again, even if it wasn't him directly, he did have some Control at the time to stop it. And he didn't until it was too late.
And he did stop it because the overwhelming number of people who were like, hey, something is fucked up rolling into him made him go, okay, we have to remove the power of the troikas and we have to put it back in the hands of the courts. Even if it does overwhelm the courts, we can't be doing this anymore. And Yezhov was tried and executed for his crimes.
But could it have happened sooner? Yes.
Steve Grumbine:Let me jump in on one more element here, because this is the part that I'm trying to tie together for people. Okay.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure.
Steve Grumbine:When I look at the French Revolution.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:And we look at Robespierre.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Robespierre, you know, was originally one of the good guys. He was the incorruptible.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure.
Steve Grumbine:Everyone loved Maximilian Robespierre.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure.
Steve Grumbine:But Robespierre with the counter revolutionary for the monarchist, you know, rebellion, the counter revolution. Okay. Starts making people crazy. Like the idea of underground trying to off you, trying to destroy your gains.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:It starts out with legitimate concerns. Sure. And then it gets out of control. Yes.
You look down at Haiti, you got Toussaint l', Ouverture, who was basically the Barack Obama of revolutionaries, who is then dimed on by Jean Jacques Dessalines. And if you look, Jean Jacques Dessalines slaughtered all those people. Now, is he a hero or is he a villain?
I would say it depends on your perspective.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Right.
Steve Grumbine:But nonetheless, you're talking once again about counter revolutionary forces. Each of these revolutions, you must bake into account for the counter revolution.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:It's going to happen.
And you must understand that right now, as we speak, we're not in a revolution, but right now, the United States has funded and ensured not only the slaughter and destruction of Gaza at the behest of Israel, we can get into whose fault that is. But this whole Greater Israel thing, there's not a soul in this country that I know of anyway. You know, maybe there's Zionists that vote for this.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:But I guarantee the people that voted not only for Biden didn't say, yeah, we should kill all the people in Gaza.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Right.
Steve Grumbine:And I can pretty much guarantee you that much of the hype train around the Trump train was, hey, he's going to stop these wars. He's a businessman. He doesn't want war. Wars are bad for business. We're going to keep this going. And then Trump, what did he do?
He said, hold my beer, jolt. And Joe.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Because at the end of the day, the Permanent state. The MIC and all the rest of them were going to do what they were going to do.
And it's good for business because the arms dealers needed to sell their shit to Israel and whoever. Yeah, but that said, you look at Maduro Chavez, I mean, all of the unfinished Bolivarian Revolution, you, what did you have?
You had non stop counter revolutionary forces both inside and outside of the country.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:The imperialist forces pushing back and destroying. Look at what's happening in Cuba.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:I can't remember Cuba ever harming a soul. And yet somehow or another they're being blockaded.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:So I want folks to take the ship out of their ears, shove it in their mouth and listen and learn for real.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Understand the nature of revolution and counter revolution.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:Understand the nature of these things. Because in the end, we're sitting by idly saying, well, at least we didn't have a revolution.
Well, say that to all the people we've killed around the world to keep our prices cheap.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:And I should specify that, like, you know, when people ask, is Stalin a mass murderer? And I say, no, but the Great Purge, you know, people will argue that, well, he's responsible. Maybe.
I mean, maybe that is the reality that, like, through his inaction, he allowed that to happen and therefore he's responsible. But that is genuinely the worst thing that happened under the guidance of Joseph Stalin. People will point to the quote, unquote, hello to Moore.
No, like, there is no evidence whatsoever that Joseph Stalin or anybody else in the Soviet Union was planning to intentionally starve Ukrainians to punish them for not, I guess, wanting to be part of the Soviet Union. First of all, the famine was not isolated to Ukraine.
It was in western Russia and it was in Kazakhstan, two places which were fiercely loyal to the Soviet Union. Why were they starving those people? They were not.
s a study done in, I believe,:Once the grain was harvested, could they have distributed it more fairly? I don't know.
Again, we're talking about technology levels that did not allow instantaneous contact and context from the government center to the periphery, which is where Ukraine was. Ukraine is the Russian word for borderland. It is the western edge of what was the Russian empire.
There was no way for them to be able to communicate directly back and forth and to make decisions that were perfect in the way.
I mean, obviously we couldn't make perfect decisions now, but it would be even harder then than it would be now to be able to decide what to do with this grain. Because you had to feed people in the cities, but you were also starving peasants in the countryside to do that.
Should we have starved the people in the cities to keep the peasants fed? Could we have distributed it more equitably? Yes, obviously. But again, it would have been like, let's bring it over here.
Oh, shit, the people over here are starving. Let's bring it back there.
amine, which was in the early:And dozens of them starved to death because they believed so hard in the revolution, and they believed so hard in the project, and they believed that the peasants were more important than they were because the peasants would grow, you know, the next year's grain and the next year's grain. And if I, as a commissar, starve to death, I can be replaced.
ow, was this happening in the:But the people who were building this project truly believed in the project that they were working on.
And there is no chance in hell, especially at this time when there was a shortage of workers, that they would kill their own people to the tune of 1 million or 2 million or 5 million or 10 million or 50 million. Like, it's an insane proposition. And I must be clear that the numbers that we have of dead are fully made up.
f how many people died in the:But Robert Conquest is the one who came up with the million number. And all of the other numbers have just been inflated based on random testimony from individuals. It'd be like, oh, you had a grandma who died.
Everybody must have had a grandma who died. And if everybody who had a grandma who died, then that makes one quarter of the population over 70.
d be also Pointed out that in:I cannot imagine that would happen if also 40 million of your people had been starved to death intentionally by the Soviet Union. It's all these, like, weird little stories.
Most of the press regarding the quote, unquote, hello to more from the time came from William Randolph Hearst, who was a fascist who supported the Nazis, who was. He got Hearst newspapers to be the exclusive American representative of the Nazi party in the United States.
It was Joseph Goebbels who initially suggested the holodomor was an intentional starvation. And it was obvious then that his mouthpiece in the United States, Hearst magazines, would continue that lie, would continue that story.
The reporter that Hearst sent to the Soviet Union to observe the Holodomor, the famine in action, got there after the famine was largely over, and he landed in Moscow, and then he didn't go west to Ukraine, he went east. He took a train all the way to Vladivostok and then flew back to the United States from there and.
And then, quote, unquote, interviewed people who were aware of the famine on his way, even though he had never gone anywhere near where the famine was taking place. He was also a sex trafficker, which is like, It's a really weird. Yeah, like, these are the people that we're listening to.
And all of the secondary sources that we read can all be traced back to this one guy. There are no primary sources on the ground from the famine.
The next set of sources for the holodomor are family members of the Galician Waffen SS Division who were relocated to Canada after World War II. They were interviewed to find out if they could give any insight into the Holodomor.
Steve Grumbine:Nice.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Again, like, these are the sources for that.
And there are people who will argue, again, that because bad decisions were made regarding what happened to the grain after it was harvested, that really, yes, it is actually Stalin's responsibility, or it is the Central Committee's responsibility, or it is the Soviet government's responsibility for what happened. And I'm going to be real with you. I would say they would agree with you.
There were many times when we read primary sources from Stalin, from various commissars, from educators within the Soviet Union who were like, if something goes wrong, and we are the guiding party, and we are the guiding. Like, we are the ruling government.
If something happens, even if it was not intentional, it's our responsibility to deal with that, to address that, to correct it over and over and over. They would say that I Do not think again. That makes their project useless. I do not think that you can write it off.
They were trying this for the first time. They had nobody to look back on. And. And they are not the only ones to have done something like this.
It is a fairly well known fact that Winston Churchill starved Bengalis to death intentionally by taking grain out of India and sending it to Greece, where they did not need it.
It was like a move to try to buy the favor of the Greeks during a time when it was possible they might have, like, gone to socialism, but they didn't need the grain.
And literally, I think the total number is like a million and a half people in Bengal died of starvation as a result of Winston Churchill's decision to steal grain from India and send it to Greece. So I don't know what to say.
Like, Winston Churchill gets to be this great hero that they do, like, biopics about every few years to remind you what a great fucking leader he was during World War II. But Stalin, who was also a great leader during World War II, is a monster.
And if there's a biopic about him, it paints him in the worst possible light and makes him the villain of history.
Steve Grumbine:Wasn't Churchill absolutely a throat boy for Mussolini?
Jeremy from Proles Pod: ainst Hitler, Nazi Germany in:And he was like, but I can't do it unless a Western front is opened up. So, Churchill, will you open a Western front, please? And Churchill was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great idea.
Let's open a Western front. You open an Eastern front, we'll crush the Nazis in a pincer movement and end this war.
Then Churchill went back to England, and Stalin, like, wrote him letters and was like, hey, about what we discussed. When are you planning on opening the Western Front? And Churchill basically left him on red.
like, oh, wait, no, it wasn't:Sorry, my brain is fried. It's been too long since I read about all this. But, like, it would have preceded much of the misery that was caused by Nazi Germany.
It would have prevented, basically, the Holocaust had this happened the way that it was supposed to. And again, like, Churchill gets to be a hero and Stalin gets to be a Villain.
And one of the policies of the Soviet Union was to allow Jews to voluntarily basically leave the west, leave Ukraine, leave, Leave Western Russia and move to the east.
Because the Nazis were advancing and the Soviet Union wanted to protect them, to keep them from being slaughtered, which they were where they remained. And not just by the Nazis. The Ukrainian fascists also slaughtered Jews en masse.
pogroms after pogroms in the:Many, many nationalists in Ukraine today point to him as like a hero figure, especially in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But his party established what was known as the upa. They were all one party first. They were initially one group.
And the name of the party is escaping me.
Steve Grumbine:I don't know it.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah, the Trident symbol that everybody likes to flash around, that's their party symbol. Anyway, they were one party. The paramilitary organization and the party were one.
And they created the UPA as a separate, like entity, basically, so they could have plausible deniability, but that the UPA could go on doing pogroms, basically fighting against the Soviets and for the Nazis. And they will point out, oh, but the banderites fought against the Nazis.
Yes, at the very end, when they were already losing, when they were being pushed back by the Red army, that's when the banderites turned. Prior to that, they had allied with the Nazis. They fought on the side of the Nazis. I don't know, man.
Like, there's all of these factors to consider that people aren't even aware of as to why the Soviet Union behaved the way it did toward particular people or groups of people. And they pretend like it's just, there's a good and there's a bad, there's a virtuous and there's an evil, and it's nothing like that.
Everything is so complicated in terms of all of the factors that led to one event or another event. And again, you cannot point to one person as the reason for that happening.
There was no Joseph Stalin without the Central Committee, without Molotov and Voroshilov, without. Without Kirov. Like, you can't have him without all of these people who supported him.
And you can't have those people without the party that was underneath them. The Supreme Soviet and all of the other Soviets, they all supported this structure. And were bad decisions made? Of course. Were great decisions made?
than it is, especially in the:It is such a beautiful time for socialist development.
All of the things that happened, literacy rates going up, the preservation of indigenous cultures, the broad based education, the establishment of state orphanages that helped to take care of massive populations of peasants who had been orphaned during the Volga famine. It was, and it was also economic gains on a level that you could not even imagine.
tually no electric grid to by:They built industries and sub industries and co industries that did not exist before the Soviet Union was established, before the RSFSR was established. They did incredible things to improve the lives of workers.
Workers wages doubled and tripled and quadrupled over the course of just a couple of decades. Something that would be unimaginable in this country. But this was the sort of project that they were dedicated to.
And this is the sort of thing you can accomplish when you do not have a parasitic capitalist class leeching off of the working people, the people who are doing the shit, the people who are actually making things happen.
If you don't have some parasite sitting on top of you taking millions and billions of dollars away and spending it selfishly on themselves and instead spending it on newspapers and on TV stations and social media platforms and AI shit. If you don't have any of that, it's incredible what you can accomplish. And they did all this when they were under constant threat of invasion.
The United States and Britain and France during what was called the Russian Civil War, which was nothing like a civil war. It was not a civil war. It was an attempt by the Western powers to reassert the monarchy. But it was an imperialist invasion first and foremost.
Volga famine, in spite of the:And they could only do that because of democratic centralism. And they can only do that because they didn't allow capitalists to undermine them and destroy the project that they had built.
Steve Grumbine:That's beautifully said. And let me just recap very, very briefly for everyone. What we didn't say was Joseph Stalin is a God amongst men.
What we did not say was Joseph Stalin was Without flaws or even guilty of deaths that were inexcusable.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:What we didn't also say was that, oh, well, you know, a little capitalism is. Okay. We didn't say any of those things. We didn't say any. Okay.
What we said here, what we talked about, what this thing brought about was an understanding of democratic centralism. We talked about the history of the Soviet Union during this period of time and the things that were going on during it.
And what we also did was talked about the man, Joseph Stalin, both the man that made mistakes and the man who did great things.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And it's important to note that if we try and go forward, Joseph Stalin doesn't matter. All we can do is learn from his mistakes.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Correct.
Steve Grumbine:Or worse, we can learn from the things that he did that were just straight up wrong, evil, whatever you want to say, we can learn from them. We do not have to duplicate them. And unfortunately, back to that. What is the tiresome left?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:The tiresome left.
Steve Grumbine:I would consider this a broader group, and that is Shitlibs and others that fit this category. Okay.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:They would sit there and try and lecture you. Well, you know, we can't have hierarchy. We can't have this, we can't have that. And all this stuff.
Show me anywhere where anything ever got done, where there weren't systems, where there weren't in some way shape or form a pecking order in terms of decision making and ultimately someone finally making a decision.
I assure you, if you sit in a room full of 20 people and there isn't a way of breaking a tie or there isn't a way of coming to an agreement, at the end of the day, you're going to be sitting there twiddling your thumbs for years.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yes.
Steve Grumbine:And I want to be crystal clear that we are up against a climate crisis right now that is being funneled and fueled by war in Gaza, war in Iran, war in the Strait of Hormuz, and all the other things we're watching the United States, the land of freedom, the home of the brave and all the other. With apple pie and pork pie hats and red, white and blue and fresh cut grass for baseball season.
Whatever other things you want to go out there and say. I'm here to tell you that we can learn from things if you just take the Stalin out of your mouth.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And start thinking about systems and processes and what the hell is it that we want?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah. Like, I guess my final word on this, really, my sort of.
The thing that I want people to take away is that regardless of whether you think Marxism Leninism is great. Regardless of whether you love the Soviet Union or you hate it, Regardless of whether you think Stalin was a good dude or a monster.
You need to evaluate the reality of what he did and the reality of the Soviet Union and the reality of Marxism Leninism and not the caricature that you have been fed your entire life about those three things.
You need to engage with facts and not weird religious crusades against these objects or ideas, and then you can come to a rational and reasonable response to it, even if you disagree with it.
Steve Grumbine:Beautifully said, Jeremy. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been too long. I wanted to have you guys on a long time ago. Yeah, I'm glad we were able to do this.
Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.
Jeremy from Proles Pod: st was initially conceived in: ant, and then we came back in:We do have a Patreon, patreon.com/prospod, where we have a bunch of extra content related to the episode. So if you listen to the Stalin eras and you're like, damn, I want to hear more from the host.
Because we had people like Brett from Rev Luft Radio and Jen from how the Red was Won and some other folks who basically are from other places and they sort of get to talk about their feelings on what we covered during those particular episodes. Those are all on the Patreon.
Steve Grumbine: ed with a name that came from:We are fellow travelers, man. And we're desperately in need of the dude that puts his hand on our shoulder and gets us access to the church. Hey, he's okay with us.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:Because we just do not hold truck in the socialist left.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And we're trying desperately to become a member of it. But we're also a member of an MMT community that explains the way currency works.
We feel that even if you can't positively say we're going to have a green new deal, what you can do is understand the real way it's used against us as a tool. Because if you don't understand the system you're fighting against. You can't unmake the system. Correct.
And for me, part of what we're trying to do is teach people about the way actual currency operates. We're not hyperbolic. We really do try to take a deep dive into these things.
And Jeremy, I really, truly would appreciate any kind of, hey, these guys are okay. You should go on their show because we are just lacking entree. It was great to have Gabriel Rockhill. We had Vijay Prashad. We also had Ali Cadre.
Come on. We've had Jason Hickel, who's a little bit more of the demoso side of things, the eco socialist.
But we are really doing our dead level best to try and find that sweet spot. And we really do need friends and help to pull that off because this shift is very risky.
You realize we have people that have been listening to us forever. What?
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah, yeah.
That happened to Brett, actually, because he was kind of in the process of sort of determining his particular, like what he felt like was the ideology or the political direction he wanted to take.
And revolutionary left radio for years was centered primarily around sort of anarchist and libertarian socialist ideals, and that's who most of the guests were and so on and so forth.
to talk about Stalin back in:But it also brought a whole bunch of people on board who otherwise would not have listened to his stuff based on sort of previously what the content was like. So, yeah, certainly I'll talk to some people who I think would be great guests on this show.
Steve Grumbine:That would be fantastic.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:But yeah, no, it's interesting how that.
Steve Grumbine:Goes, you know, within the MMT space. You know, we've always been a bit of a renegade, but we still hold to mmt. We still teach it every chance we get.
Yeah, we're just not allowing a false fake world to exist where we pretend like we can vote this stuff away. Correct.
And again, I just got attacked by somebody who I had to block because they just went out there with this full cup mindedness that it's nihilism. I swear, it's not nihilism. There's nothing about it that's nihilistic. In fact, it's hope.
It's hope that brings us to doing this, that it's not nihilism.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:And on that note, I think that people hear me say we will not see revolution in our lifetime and think I'm a nihilist for that reason.
But we need to get through our thick skulls that, like, there have to be a huge number of changes, a huge number of advancements in class consciousness, there need to be advancements in the networks, that we need to be able to support one another outside of the capitalist state and outside of capitalism altogether before we can even conceive of, let's say, feeding an army. Like these things need to happen first. And we are nowhere near that.
And so what we need to be doing right now is to help our children and our grandchildren to get to that point. What can we do now that will allow our children or our grandchildren to achieve the things that we want? That's not nihilism. That's optimism to me.
And again, one of my favorite quotes, which we can't really.
There's no really clear idea of who said it initially, but it was first printed on a Sunday school pamphlet for what was called the Praying Church, which was an explicitly anti Nazi German Protestant church. And on the COVID of this pamphlet, it said, even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
And that is, I think, the mindset that we desperately need to have.
As socialists as people who want a better future, even though we may never see it, we need to have our strength poured into making it happen for somebody in the future.
Steve Grumbine:Amen. Got nothing to add to that. That's beautiful. I really appreciate your time. Jeremy. Yeah, we're going to be over two hours.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Sure, it's running long, but.
Steve Grumbine:No, but it's not long. I think we left meat on the bone still. I think we could have spoken for seven more hours and still not be done.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Oh, yeah.
Steve Grumbine:So I think for the purposes and the ability for us to get information out there, I think we did a hell of a good job. I really appreciate how well you did with this. I loved it. And what I do want to say is thank you, Prospod.
Thank you for all the guests that have come through the door. Every Tuesday night. We have something called Macro and Chill. We do a webinar where we break these conversations down into 15 minute segments.
We have 30, 40, 50 people, sometimes on a good night, show up, we talk, we discuss. And it is really nice to have an intimate setting where people can ask the questions.
We don't publish it, we don't print it, we don't reproduce it because we want people to feel like they can ask questions.
Jeremy from Proles Pod:Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:And I'm going to go ahead and take us out here, folks. My name's Steve Grumban. I am the host of Macro and Cheese and the founder of the nonprofit Real Progressives. We are a 501C3, not for profit.
And that means your donations. Guess what? They're tax deductible.
And if you think the big guys are donating money to us, trust me, the subject matter we put on probably isn't attracting the wealthy to donate. So if you're considering something to support, we would like very much that you consider donating to us.
Also, because we're a nonprofit, most of the work we do is volunteer driven. If you'd consider becoming a donor, we have a Patreon. Patreon forward slash Real Progressives. We also are on Substack, please.
You can become a donor there and the conversations much better than on Twitter. We're also on Twitter, but you can also go to our website, realprogressives.org and become a monthly donor. There's a lot of ways you can donate.
Time is one of them. But money is definitely needed and we're very grateful for any amount.
And on behalf of the organization, myself, Steve Grumbine and my guest Jeremy from Pros Pod, please do check out their work. We are out of here.
End Credits: with the working class since:
