Rev [none/use name]

Just off the top of my head she could have called bullshit on his framing and segued into talking about socialism: what it is, what it’s goals are, how it is relevant to the vast majority of the American working class, what a socialist methodology in building a new world would imply, etc. But she’d have to have those hidden power levels to begin with, which she doesn’t. What you see is very often what you get with these things.

So if no one is preventing anyone from drawing caricatures why was showing a caricature in a class explicitly dealing with religious indoctrination punished? By death, no less.

Funny how the things you describe is how China decided to operate. Quite hilarious seeing Stalinists in other posts doing the mental contortions trying to reconcile their adherence to a strictly planned economy with their adulation for Dengist China. At least previous Stalinists were internally consistent and pivoted to Hoxhaism.

the nascent bourgeois

Hm… I wonder who came before Khrushev who let them become nascent. His name escapes me, maybe you can help?

those shot during the Moscow trials like Tukhachevsky who we know now were guilty beyond doubt

A later Soviet investigative commission found that almost none of those people were guilty and their “confessions” were extracted under torture. Funnily enough the Tribunal sentencing Tuchachevsky and Yakir (two of the most decorated and forward thinking red military leaders) was itself purged (save for 3 members, among them an absolute military retrograde Budyonniy). So who should we believe then if it’s seemingly traitors all the way down? Hell maybe Stalin was a traitor and secret Nazi collaborator himself, the NKVD just didn’t get to him in time? See the absurdity of this hyper-paranoid conspiratorial thinking. The only thing beyond doubt here is that Stalin wrecked the military, stripped the party of it’s most dedicated members (starting with cowardly killing Frunze via forced surgery) and fostered an atmosphere of constant suspicion and sycophancy towards careerist bureaucrats. Saying he had dreams of democratising Soviet society in the last year before his death just doesn’t cut it and is quite rich when he had presided over this same society for close to 30 years and somehow never bothered to do this before.