history

Stalin’s contributions to the world is not just defeating the Nazis, ok?

Stalin was an economic and financial genius, whose groundbreaking Five-Year Plans pulled the USSR from the NEP rut and propelled it into a highly industrialized society capable of rivaling the more advanced capitalist West. It is debatable whether the USSR would have been capable of defeating Nazi Germany’s invasion if it had continued to stick with the NEP model, but it is undeniable that Soviet industrialization took off exponentially from 1929 onwards, marking the beginning of the first Five-Year Plan.

The Five-Year Plans were subsequently adopted by China and a variant of it by the DPRK. Heck, even South Korea, a right-wing dictatorship, emulated the Soviet Five-Year Plan to pull itself ahead of the DPRK - before implementing the Five-Year Plans in the 1960s, South Korea’s GDP per capita struggled to exceed even one third of the DPRK’s (even after all that bombing during the Korean War). Copying Stalin’s Five-Year Plan enabled South Korea to rapidly industrialize and transform itself into an economic powerhouse rivaling Japan’s economic miracle (I am simplifying here as I am omitting the role of chaebol (a form of nepotistic capitalism) and the state-run banking sector, but the Five-Year Plan was a key breakthrough for the South Korean economy in the 1970s)

Next, let’s talk about sociology. Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question (1912-13) is hailed as one of the most important Marxist work on resolving the contradictions of the national question. Employing dialectical and historical materialism, Stalin boiled down the complex problems and formulated the theoretical foundations on the national question. The following sentence would turn out to be one of the most important contributions from Stalin to the field of Marxist sociology:

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.

Importantly, the principles derived by Stalin in Marxism and the National Question would form the basis of China’s classification of its 56 ethnic groups (“nationalities”) in the 1950s, which is still in use to this day. The key breakthrough here is that the principles can be applied across varying developmental stages of capital formation, as these characteristics had already formed their latent potential in the pre-capitalist stage, and are realized and took their prominent forms throughout the different stages of capitalist development - this attracted the attention and became the guiding principles of the CPC’s pioneering work on formulating their own national/ethnic classification.

Lenin loved it so much that he proudly proclaimed the work as the “Bolshevism’s theoretical and programmatic declaration on the national question”. Even Trotsky - Stalin’s arch-nemesis - conceded that this was one of the most important works Stalin has ever produced, even throwing the jabs “hmm.. how come Stalin never wrote anything of this quality before and after that, was it really written by Stalin?” lol. Historians agree that while Lenin had contributed some ideas to the work, there is no reason to doubt that the work was essentially Stalin’s.