In this broadcast Dr Matthew Johnson attempts to summarize a huge amount of information concerning early Soviet economic policy and ideology.
The argument can be summarized this way:
1. Trotsky had far more power and influence than Lenin.
2. Marxism was almost totally irrelevant to the Red forces during and after the Civil War.
3. Labor organization was destroyed by the Red forces. The “Worker’s State” was far harsher on their labor force than the industrialists in the West.
4. The West created the USSR brick by brick.
5. Few knew what “Bolshevism” was in the West. Russian history was almost entirely unknown until the 1950s. Therefore, rumor and self-interest decided what was real and what was not.
6. The West permitted Trotsky to destroy the agricultural base of the economy, since they were receiving regular food aid.
7. Trotsky defined “worker” as a leftist (mostly Jewish) revolutionary. Therefore, he can say that Jacob Schiff was a “worker” but the counterrevolutionary peasant in eastern Ukraine was a “capitalist.”
8. The “proletariat” were a rootless tribe of wanderers without property or social standing. It was a metaphor for the Jew in his mind
9. Socialist self-organization from the peasantry or workers was harshly crushed by the Red forces and all forms of labor organizing were destroyed. This is a curious policy for the “Worker’s State”
Nothing makes sense about the early USSR. The rhetoric and the resulting policy had nothing in common. It was a lie based on a foundation of dissimulation itself built on a base of corruption.