Vince Cable here following in the foolish footsteps of Lloyd George who maintained a knack for praising Stalin even whilst his own Foreign Affairs Adviser - a certain Gareth Jones, was uncovering evidence of Stalin's Genocide against the Ukrainian people https://twitter.com/vincecable/status/1253020673573871617

(1) More about Lenin: On January 15, 1918, he sent out a telegram to his associates calling for “Grain, Grain, Grain” to be forcibly requisitioned from Ukraine to feed Soviet Russia. By 1921 and after an independent Ukrainian state had been crushed by Soviet military might

(2) and partitioned between the USSR and Poland, this ambition to control Ukrainian Grain directly led to the 1st of the Soviet famines to hit Ukraine. Between 1921-3, some 1.5 - 2 million Ukrainians lost their lives to Lenin's whims. Some details here. http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1988/458814.shtml

(3) Yet anti-soviet discontent persisted, especially amongst Ukrainian peasants who had not given up upon the concepts of preserving their culture or independence. Lenin ultimately did recognise this but I wouldn't put too great an emphasis on "pragmatic" which Cable seems to do.

(4) The “New Economic Policy” (NEP) and concepts such as “Ukrainization” were based on attempts to consolidate Soviet rule by appeal to the peasants. What did that mean? Restrictions on economic activities were relaxed and relative autonomy was "allowed" - but only to a point.

(5) It's worth bearing in mind Lenin and Stalin's approach to dealing with Non-Russian nationalism. In November 1917 Lenin made Stalin the "Commissar of nationalities," in major part because of a work Stalin published in 1913 titled "Marxism and the National Question."

(6) Here Stalin dismissed the concept of his homeland of Georgia becoming independent as well as the other non-Russian peoples who inhabit the Caucasus region. "The national question in the Caucasus" he wrote "can be solved only by drawing the belated nations and nationalities

(7) into the common stream of a higher culture." In this vain he offered only "regional" (read not full!) autonomy, for in his words "such crystallized units as Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine [sic], the Caucasus, etc."

(8) His ideological solution ("To unite locally the workers of all nationalities of Russia into single, integral collective bodies, to unite these collective bodies into a single party – such is the task") clearly left open that Stalin (like Lenin)

(9) saw no ideological contradiction between a Russian domination of such a "single party" and of its "higher culture". Despite the claims of "internationalism", in reality ethnicity always mattered in the USSR. From the very beginning the USSR was in essence a "Russian state"

(10) Dr Roman Serbyn recently made a good point to me which I am going to share here for discussion. One of the few ways in which Lenin & differed was not in Russian dominance but in their tactics for promoting the much fantasised world "socialist" revolution

(11) I've mentioned before, the 1920 Battle of Warsaw in which the Red Army was decisively defeated and which put an end to Lenin's hopes of global conquest, After this conflict Lenin adopted a position titled “Socialism In One Country".

(12) In ideological terms, this meant creating a base within the USSR on which to lead the so-called "world revolution" and ultimately to "export it" at some future time. The crux between Lenin and Stalin is that Stalin went further in attempting to develop this "base" by

(13) turning it a unitary and ethnically homogenised totalitarian state. In essence, what Serbyn argued and I think It's an interesting argument for discussion, the Russian dominance factor fused more and more with the notion of the "base" for leading the "world revolution."

(14) I would definitely like to hear any arguments about that point, but we have to continue the story, because by 1928 the NEP was overturned by Stalin.

Officially the justification for doing so was that the NEP policies were widening a gap between the USSR and the West

(15) and in this we find one of Stalin’s more well known remarks that “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.”

(16) In practice, the reverse of the NEP and subsequent policies such as “Ukrainization” brought the USSR and by extension the Ukrainian SSR closer to Stalin’s own grip. Because The NEP had allowed a modicum of agricultural private enterprise, hunger during the mid-1920s

(17) didn’t become so much of an issue as being forced to conform to state whims. But Stalin’s policy reversal changed that. Lenin’s policy of forced requisitions that helped lead to the 21-23 famine returned, and this time, they were also deeply entwined with the destruction

(18) of Ukrainian academics, writers, artists etc - those that could be associated with being a part of a Ukrainian cultural elite as well as its rural peasantry for its close attachment to national sentiment. The targeting of nationalism is an important story of the #Holodomor

(19) But why mention all of this in response to Cable's remarks? Because Lenin's so-called "pragmatism" can only be compared to Stalin's but that certainly doesn't somehow negate the evilness of the model of totalitarianism and violence that in many key ways, Stalin followed.

(20) "The first dictator of the Soviet Union and his future successor had no major theoretical or political differences in the area of Communist doctrine, least of all on the wholesale and ruthless use of terror. [...] From the mid-1920s when he asserted his dominant position,

(21) Stalin justified every zigzag in policy, every twist of the screws, every dose of terror, by tracing it to some statement or other than Lenin had made [...]

(22) far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed. Stalin was Lenin's logical heir." - Robert Gellately - "Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe."

And with Gellately, I'll end this thread here as it is already rather long