Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q618/WhatWasStalinDoing

"What was Stalin going to do?"
1. Fight the other Communist party that also wanted to construct Bolshevism, because there were two of them
2. Protect the 14 nationalities of the Soviet Union from being scattered across the world as other countries attempt to take its land and drive its people out
3. Fight Hitler and help win World War II (he put that one off for a while)
4. Build railroads that are still standing today, in a country without highways
5. Collectivize peasants into corporations and end feudalism
6. Teach everyone science in a country where large fractions of people are uneducated (!!)
7. Prevent the economy from dissolving into a bunch of grifters (because they can't found businesses based on their own values)
8. Prevent Russia from going to war with Ukraine and killing its people (!) because Ukrainians and Russians would be part of one state
9. Study the actual way to get rid of capitalism, which was already understood to not be something that ends instantly and instead something that requires extensive knowledge of the fine structure of society
10. Try to prevent all of human existence from devolving into one big competition over people's attentions where all socializing is turned into buying things or doomscrolling, all of which is a consequence of capitalism, creative destruction, and new corporations constantly being created
11. Try to keep society from abolishing universal healthcare
12. Try to create a government that better serves its people than modern China (because China let capitalists into its central party and, of all the things the CPSU might do, he would not let it do that one particular thing)
6B. Try to prevent an outcome where everybody is so uneducated that nobody would be able to vote. Even though that does indeed challenge his power. It was an actual instance of an educational dictatorship. Sometimes he actually didn't understand the opposition between the central party's values and the central party's procedures

Only one of those things is bad, and it's the first one.
Nobody on this podcast would have been fit to govern the Soviet Union, because nobody here would have been able to perceive the possibility that when two Communist parties are fighting one of them could actually be correct and actually needs to win.