In the 1946 essay “Catastrophic Gradualism,” he said that one must admit, of the Stalinist nightmare in the USSR, “all the seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control.”
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It is certainly true that all of the "seeds of evil" were present from the start, but things would have been quite different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky taken power, as the paranoia and massive bureaucratized police state devoted to terror would have been missing. A comparison to Trotsky's and Stalin's behavior towards former Czarist officers during the Civil War is telling--Trotsky used them under his control whereas Stalin purged them. So the vast purges and stultification of any civil society probably would not have happened, but it still would have been a Dzerzhinsky-style police state. In particular, Stalin's proclamation in the 1934 Party Congress that the class struggle would intensify (12 years after the elimination of the bourgeois) and the slaughter of the "kulaks" would have been unlikely. And the USSR would almost have certainly cooperated with the West against Germany rather than ally itself with the Nazi regime.
Excellent piece! The question mark in my previous comment was a typo!
Excellent piece?
This comment is probably not true:
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In the 1946 essay “Catastrophic Gradualism,” he said that one must admit, of the Stalinist nightmare in the USSR, “all the seeds of evil were there from the start and that things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control.”
<
It is certainly true that all of the "seeds of evil" were present from the start, but things would have been quite different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky taken power, as the paranoia and massive bureaucratized police state devoted to terror would have been missing. A comparison to Trotsky's and Stalin's behavior towards former Czarist officers during the Civil War is telling--Trotsky used them under his control whereas Stalin purged them. So the vast purges and stultification of any civil society probably would not have happened, but it still would have been a Dzerzhinsky-style police state. In particular, Stalin's proclamation in the 1934 Party Congress that the class struggle would intensify (12 years after the elimination of the bourgeois) and the slaughter of the "kulaks" would have been unlikely. And the USSR would almost have certainly cooperated with the West against Germany rather than ally itself with the Nazi regime.