Russian communists: Stalin can fix the economy

Thu, 06/25/2009 - 2:32pm

Yesterday, the World Bank concluded that Russia will be one of the countries hardest-hit by the recession, including not returning to precrisis levels until 2012. But Russian communists believe that the cure lies in a blast from the past:

Russian communists have put up giant billboards of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in a southern city, promoting his tough methods as the best remedy for the world economic crisis.

Stalin killed millions of people during his 30 year rule until his death in 1953, but many in recession-hit Russia have grown nostalgic for his strong leadership, and he was voted the third most popular historical figure in a nationwide poll.

"Everybody knows that under Stalin our country achieved the highest rate of economic growth and development in other spheres, and the great victory (over Nazi Germany)," Sergei Rudakov, a senior Communist party official in the town of Voronezh, told Reuters by telephone.

Because what the world economy needs right now is a good ol' fashioned purge. 

Freedom Toast/Flickr

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Excellent start...

by tortmaster on Thu, 06/25/2009 - 4:35pm

at creating a new Stalin through the conditions they are creating in Georgia, especially taking into account the regime's recent comments that it intended to make "porridge" out of Georgia.

A highly amusing, yet

by krothrock on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 8:12am

A highly amusing, yet irrelevant, news story. In truth, that Russians celebrate the state over their civil rights is not news, and any activity by the Communists is a joke, not a headline.

The circumstances where

by RWB on Fri, 06/26/2009 - 9:32am

The circumstances where Stalinism can create economic growth are, I think, very specific. You have to have a country with a large population, and you have to have a bunch of resources that are locked away in extremely inhospitable terrain. Stalin, in effect, sent an army of slaves (mostly "kulaks") into the Arctic to mine for the metals and cut the timber that was needed for rapid industrialization. Under normal circumstances, free labor just would not have gone there. The death toll was appalling, but the industrial results were pretty impressive, and lots of surviving inmates ended up living in these terrible places and making them home--even after their sentences were complete.

Whenever I hear science fiction writers talking about colonizing Mars (for example), I always think--who outside of a few nuts and fanatics would choose to live there, a place a million times worse than Kolyma? I think the only way you "colonize" Mars is Stalin-style--randomly arrest a large portion of your population, dump them on the planet, and tell them that their survival depends on their productivity. (Unless things on Earth change drastically for the worse, I don't see this happening, fortunately.)

re: Russian communists: Stalin can fix the economy

by AlbertoT on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 3:49am

The blast from the past here talk about when Stalin introduced full central planning (although a variant of public planning had been the idea of the Left Opposition, which Stalin purged from the Party), re-nationalized the whole economy, and from the late 1920s onwards introduced a policy of rapid industrialization. Stalin's collectivization of agriculture has been his most notable, and most destructive departure from the NEP approach. It is often argued that industrialization could have been achieved without any collectivization and instead by taxing the peasants more, as similarly happened in Meiji Japan, Bismarck's Germany, and in post-World War II South Korea and Taiwan. Well. good luck to them. With this kind of recession, everyone will rely in there credit cards, short term loans or even unsecured loans.