I dont know why you feel an absurd attachment to just a few of the 'top' bolsheviks. Trotsky for one was just a menshevik so no one should care. the buhkarin clique was NEP nonsense that would have gotten the soviet union killed if their plan had been implemented. The trotsky clique was indeed planning a coup and the evidence points to using outside help from the west and japan to do so in exchange for some territorial concessions. Trotsky also had connections to the military and associates that were planning an overthrow in conjunction with the buhkarin clique. Zinoviev was an opportunist who sided with the reactionaries in kronstadt and other reactionary groups just to gain power. People who give a shit about zinoviev in the year of our lord 2024 are just reactionaries or left coms who make their whole ideology worrying about and being irrelevant things. As well as nerds who goon about the 'lenin testament' which is an unverified and highly dubious source.

All of the bolshevik cliques were going to murder each other, no matter who won. This is the inevitable result of Lenin's revolutionary coalition falling apart after he died. The anti stalinists killed people like Kirov, an excellent organizer, just because he was stalin's friend. Stalin was too nice, and should have given similar punishments out, but alas actually followed democratic centralism and the laws of the soviet union. the leadership of the soviet union was never going to be just the same 40 dudes anyway, have you gentlemen ever seen a revolution?

[–] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 1 points 1 month ago

All of the bolshevik cliques were going to murder each other, no matter who won.

have you gentlemen ever seen a revolution?

Remind me to never join a party with you in it. Or, alternatively, to immediately take steps to ensure my own security if I do.

Idk, if I modeled myself after someone (or some clique) who turned all their friends into enemies, I'd be very wary of where my own path was pointing. I haven't spent years digging into the One Truth lying behind thousands of pages of minutiae, my understanding of how people work comes from direct experiences of them and applying a statistical perspective to it. I spent enough time familiarizing myself with prominent agents of the Russian Revolution to realize that barely any of their deaths were of natural causes, and an unusual number of them were in a spike 20 years after taking power.

I'm not "attached to the Bolsheviks" at all. I'm pointing out that the worst enemy of a Bolshevik was another Bolshevik. In no other socialist revolution do you see a party's leadership fragmenting and one fragment killing off all the others more than a decade after the political situation has stabilized. Even if you include the precursor of revolutionary France, the purges happened only early on and amidst wars.

This is the inevitable result of Lenin's revolutionary coalition falling apart after he died.

Would you want to model a party where without its Great Man, it instantly turned into an internal power struggle? Because that looks to me like at best a failure to democratize power, and at worst a replication of the dynamics of monarchy.