MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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I had never heard this, do you have a place I can read more?
Stalin hated communism too, though, he is a world champion at executing communists. He probably executed more communists than anyone else in history (including German communists who fled from Hitler, and also helped Hitler find and execute German communists in Germany before the war even started for some reason). He basically just wanted to be in charge, as far as I can tell, he didn't really like the whole "workers control the means of production" thing and while I don't know much about his early thoughts on it I don't see a whole lot of economic justice in anything he did while he was in power. I'm not an expert but I feel like he and Hitler would have gotten along fine from his side.
Stalin (and the Bolsheviks in general) were collectivists. They thought the ideal/only implementation of communism to be for the state to nationalize everything and manage national wealth rationally through collective labor of proletariat, which is pretty much what he did. Now this always was and will always be a ruse for obvious reasons, but it seems like Stalin, just like other Bolsheviks from before 1918, believed in that ruse. That's what we see in the Five-Year Plans and de-kulakization, for example. Their line of thinking seems to have been "the proletariat are represented by the party of the proletariat + we are the party of the proletariat = when we control the means of production, the workers control the means of production". It's fucking stupid, but these are MLs and proto-MLs we're talking about; of course their mental gymnastics are fucking stupid.
I also want to note and stress that this was in no way unique to Stalin. The Left Opposition (Trotsky and crew) were pushing for the exact same thing before Stalin allied with right-leaning Politburo members to oust them, and what Stalin did bears strong resemblance to what Lenin was up to during his time in power (see: War Communism). TL;DR: They're all true believers, and they're all pigs. Fuck MLs.
L'worker, et moi.
Just like how China is still a shining Marxist government, which is why the whole world uses them for a bunch of its production, even though the workers owning their own means of production means they get to keep a greater share of the profits and so it's more expensive... than... yeah, something like that.
Wow, how did I not think of that? That's literally it.
Not really. It's just the logical conclusion of Stalin not being an idiot, and Nazi's being vehemently anti-bolshevik, and Stalin knew that.
Stalin himself was nicknamed "the grey blur" because he was so difficult to fathom, but he wasn't dumb. A child could see the Nazis would break the pact, but he simply figured Hitler was as smart as him and wouldn't do it yet. He had Germany by the balls, sitting on a massive pile of raw resources they needed desperately, only a complete idiot would turn on that...
And of course, Russia wasn't exactly in amazing military shape in the early 40s, but since Stalin assumed Hitler would play it smart, he'd have time to prepare better. And since Russia had vastly more industrial potential than tiny Germany that was at war with the largest naval and colonial empire in the world, they were absolutely going take that time.
Now, would Stalin strike first in 1942, 1943 or even 1948? Who knows. Stalin didn't even order breakfast in advance, let alone write down plans like that. But he knew the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact was a stopgap measure at best.
IDK, I get what you're saying, but I feel like if this was as compelling and obvious as you're saying some historians would also say it.
I just got disillusioned about Lindybeige not knowing what he's talking about, so maybe I'm extra skeptical.
Quite a few works on the Soviet response to operation Barbarossa will mention it.
Stumbling Colossus (David Glantz) is a decent book that's very readable, and it at the very least mentions this.
There's also What Stalin Knew: the Enigma of Barbarossa, (David Murphy), which looks at the intelligence supplied to Stalin. It paints a picture that Stalin thought he was being lied to by people who wanted to attack Germany before they were ready, so he ignored all signs of the incoming attack.
I don't really know any book that goes in depth on Stalin's far future plans that would never come to pass, but it's mentioned a fair bit.