Stalin gave up any such "idea[l]s" and fairly fast realised he can not change reality [all that quickly]. Instead, what he could do was to change the perception of reality. Hence, for instance, a 5-year "plan" which actually changed very little realiter, except the terminology. What we got was loads of nonsense about different stages of "achievement", i.e. "how far we have come" etc. All of us in the "East of European Eden" knew how that worked: every so often one needed to learn a few new phrases, according to what the Central Committee announced on the latest big bang gathering, if one "wanted to get on in life and/or politics"...
And Stalin was a master of "perception wars" and political strategy [regardless of the price to be paid, for whatever he wanted to "achieve" in the greater scheme of things, on a large scale], for sure. Heh, "Bolsheviks" [Majority], as opposed to Mensheviks [Minority], were actually a minority but they were "well placed". Moreover, he pronounced every politics to be nothing more than cadre-politics. You could only be "his" [wo]man - or else...
Some say he must be understood from the perspective of his church education and backwards Russian civilisational and cultural background, whereby he was trained to think in "authoritarian" thinking, both by the church and the state "tradition". Only because he was one with his surroundings, only because he both understood and felt it "correctly", was he able to establish himself and his personal "fiefdom". But let us not forget: Hitler had to kill considerably less people, in an allegedly very civilised Germany af the time, in order to gain the same kind of control/level of power...
There are those who would agree with a certain "glorious assessment" of him, that "he took feudal Russia into the World Power League in no time"... But the question of price and ultimately self-destructive nature of such "achievements" is always there for all to ponder and be haunted by it... Moreover, the Q of HIS power, rather than the success of Revolution is also there... I.e. the repressive state apparatus, for instance, was strengthened, as opposed to the proclaimed goals, with some crude but effective "artistry" on the dialectical trapeze... There were no attempts of any kind at imaginative, new societal or political experimentation, no ideas of self-management, for instance, NOTHING MEANINGFUL was undertaken to at least try to get away from totalitarian horrors!!!
For crying out loud, imagine a purge in which one either physically destroys or orders all who spoke languages [or had ties with "the West"] to join the "great migration of people towards building a Socialist Siberia"... For instance. How is that strengthening anything?!? Stalin's critics state that he won the war IN SPITE of his cruelty and incompetency, to the great detriment of all around him, the SSSR and the Socialist movement in general. Hell, even the members of his cabinet were shitting themselves because they knew they might not be coming back to the cabinet meetings tomorrow... The question of societal, cultural and civilisational grounds on which this was possible, of course, remains a very unpalatable one to chew over to this day...
Some Soviet sociologists have shown how "social peace" was not only enforced [although Stalin did do it for quite a while, as it is not cheap and efficient to put an armed soldier to every few workers, is it?] but also bought by certain level of egalitarianism, keeping those at the bottom of the pile quiet, thereby "preventing any ideas coming from the middle classes, which could have pushed the whole thing forward"...
Rhetoric was one thing [egalitarianism] but practice spoke for itself. For instance, when "egalitarian measures" in education were brought in you could quickly see which schools were "special" by the surnames of pupils in them... So, privileges were even more "tightened", rather than abolished!
Eventually it boiled down to two things:
1) there was nothing in the shops
2) the amount of fear that permeated every pore of society, pointing to the amount of force needed to back the regime up.
These obvious and ever growing discrepancies between the proclaimed goals and objectives couldn't be "glossed over" any longer. At the deepest end of it all, it seems to me, the very foundations of the system are at fault. Once a society is built on an inordinate amount of force, sheer violence and repression - there is no way out... We saw most of the really important things being turned into their opposite or at least dragged forcefully very, very far away from the alleged goals of emancipation of Mankind! There is no way in Hell anyone with conscience or even minimal intelligence can possibly justify or merely "understand as necessary" all that "dialectical trapeze artistry"...
FFS, it fell apart... And good riddance: it had nothing much in common with equa-liberty... Ideas of social justice, equal chances in life, real freedom to growth and learning, being free from oppression [of the state] and dumbing down while slaving endlessly... Oh, well...
However, this has to be said: its demise has no bearing whatsoever on the starting idea!!!
Us, who knew personally, on our very own skin, with our very lives, just how "innocent" of Marx [and the best traditions he grew up on, the traditions he inherited from the best of Humanity] were its main actors - we can not be fooled by these idiotic "accusations" and "direct connections" between "sur-real socialism" and original ideas it came from, which will not die and wither away for as long as Humans are Humans and exploitation and domination are weighing us down...
