I myself do not really view “What is to be Done?” as a great beginner work for Marxists, since it mentions a lot of obscure philosophers or groups that a modern audience (with their cursory knowledge of Russian history being from the lips of liberals, or worse, conservatives) would hardly know the context of, and I am reading a version that has notes on these people!
That is not to say that it is not an influential or essential work of Lenin (I think it might be up there with “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” and “The State and Revolution” in terms of either factor), but one has to be willing to trudge through Russian names that you will likely never hear again.
(TRIGGER WARNING: SA)
I know there’s an entire Spanish Armada of disinformation about the USSR - especially during the Stalin years - but I am instinctively skeptical of claims that Lavrentiy Beria wasn’t a sex pest.
For one thing, I believe all women.
For another it’s not exactly hard to imagine a man in a position of power abusing said power to take advantage of women - especially when that man is a cop and being the head of the NKVD does make you a cop no matter what way you try to look at it and all cops at the end of the day are bastards.
Of course I can still accept this possibility that it might not be true; I’m just very suspicious of the claim when covering up the sex crimes of powerful men is a recurring theme throughout history and despite the great progress the USSR made on the front of women’s liberation there was still a very visible patriarchal culture present right up until the end.
Again: I accept it could be bullshit. I just really doubt it.
I would say this part is what’s important to investigate rather than who was or wasn’t a “cop”, since LE for the proletariat isn’t the same inherently as LE for a parasitic class. And disproportionate sexual abuse of women is an observable side effect of patriarchy. If it was about him being a “cop”, I’d would expect more of an indiscriminate abuse, regardless of gender.
Incidentally, the “believe all women” thing is hard for me because even though I want to on principle, there are times when it’s like… if I did unthinkingly, I could be lead astray by atrocity propaganda. It’s an ugly issue, but I think the core of it comes back to: what women need more than being voluntarily believed, is collective political power. They need enforcement for protections and liberation. The magnanimous trust of some good faith observers will never come close to being enough. This is another area where I would characterize it as liberalism trying to replace literacy of political power with volunteering, like its solution for poverty being charity; this isn’t to say that believing women is a negative, just as voluntary charity among the people is not a negative, but also that neither is a systemic solution.
So I keep circling back to (I’ve rewritten parts of this reply several times now X_X), where was the USSR failing on addressing patriarchy and why. That’s probably way more important as information than whether one particular guy was a sex pest.
“Believe all women” doesn’t mean assume every woman making an accusation is telling the truth; it means taking seriously any claim of abuse committed against women by men, something our society regularly struggles with (see: Amber Heard).
Right, but what’s the followup that “take seriously” leads to, that’s the thing of it. If women had more political power, they could push back earlier and create consequences for abusers much more readily, which would remove some of the relevance of random people believing it or not.
If I’m Random Nobody hearing about such a claim in the public eye, I’d still say it’s better if I take it seriously than if I’m dismissive of it. But in that position, I’m also generally not equipped well to investigate it either and being in a “eh I don’t know” position doesn’t seem worth a whole lot. Those situations are often somebody making a claim long after the fact and it’s their word against the other person’s. I understand why it happens that way, don’t get me wrong; I’m aware a lot of times people who are abused don’t speak out because of things like fear of consequences, or not wanting to harm the person who harmed them, and so on. But nevertheless, the end result is that we run into these cases where you sort of have to either take someone you don’t know at their word or “not be dismissive but also not rush to believe it either” which is sort of a weird halfway point to be in and doesn’t seem to be meaningfully advancing the liberation of women.
Then there’s cases where I may know the person and believing them matters insofar as acknowledging what they’ve been through, but again, it may be long after it happened or they may not want me to do anything.
Basically what I’m trying to get at is, far more is needed to prevent further abuse and bring consequences, and relying on public opinion to believe a claim is a horrible situation to be in. The metoo movement, for example, got some consequences out of it, which is good, but also a fair amount of “well now what”. It’s frustrating.
I get what you’re saying - and I agree that more needs to be done - but more cannot be done until we start treating the issues seriously. That’s the point of “Believe All Women”: it is the beginning, not the end. Violence against women cannot end until it is taken seriously. Even women getting the political power to fight this issue ourselves requires being taken seriously first. There is no emancipation for women from patriarchy at all until the social attitudes - which go far beyond what individuals believe - that mock and patronize women are confronted.
You can apply a similar approach to the working class: if you view workers as stupid, helpless, lazy, or uncivilized (all of which are common classist stereotypes of working class people) then you’re not going to be meaningfully advancing workers’ rights or our emancipation from wage slavery.
Same thing with racism: you have to acknowledge other races as humans before you can end white supremacy.
Etc.
I think that his execution should be viewed as a part of the dismantling of the revolutionary vanguard by Kruschev.
Regardless of whether he was a sex pest, the entire movement of destalinization should be viewed as a shift towards liberalism.
As in, he was executed as part of a power grab. Not because of his alleged deviancy.
Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I completely agree. He wasn’t merked for being a sex pest; he was merked so Khrushchev could solidify power.
That only counts for capitalist countried though. The reason they are all bastards is because they protect capital. Chinese cops for example are comrades and the NKVD are too
Edit: I originally had a comment saying how the police in China were called something different in Chinese compared to the Chinese term for police in other countries, but I am not sure if that is true after trying to look into it.
Deepseek also told me that the terms are the same. At most, they say “x-country police” and “people’s police” according to deepseek
Sorry for the mistake
Nah, no worries 🤗
Yay hugs
(perhaps you could have put a trigger warning at the beginning)
In regards to your topic, I have heard something about that from a former conservative professor of mine, but it was in the same vein of propaganda that all the other anti-USSR lectures were in, so I did not really think much of it beyond it possibly being more propaganda (the person thought that Stalin was worse than Hitler when comparing the methods that they used to persecute people).
Do you have resources on the cultural sphere of Soviet society? It is not a part of my current knowledge, so resources on it would be nice.
Sorry, I didn’t think it was needed since I wasn’t going into explicit details.
That is a fair response. The issue with critics of the USSR is that while they mostly rely on atrocity fiction and Orwellian propaganda they often end up stumbling on genuine criticisms every now and then and making them part of their arguments. This ends up lending credence to their other, more sensationalist criticisms just by association which in turn makes their propaganda more effective (propaganda is most effective when the core claim isn’t necessarily a lie) and has the side effective of comrades dismissing genuine critique as propaganda by mistake, which can make us look bad if its a real critique.
As for resources I don’t really do a lot of research on Soviet society myself; mostly I just absorb the research of other comrades. Lady Izdihar and RevolutionaryTh0t have several videos going over women’s rights in the USSR (and really just Soviet society in general) if you’re interested. You can find them both on YouTube.
Ah you have a point with a small amount of truth mixing into the soup of atrocity fiction, and it honestly makes their propaganda stronger than it normally would be (because sometimes that truth is miscontextualized or exaggerated beyond absurdity, like the quote from Marx saying he is not a Marxist being used to make people believe he stopped being a Marxist when I do not think that was the original context of the quote).
I definitely know of those two, but I have not gotten around to watching them much (I probably should some day).