“As I just passed through your hall, I observed a placard with the inscription: ‘The realm of the workers and peasants will never end!’ After I had read this remarkable placard, which did not, it is true, hang on the wall in the usual manner but stood in a corner, perhaps because it occurred to someone that the inscription had not been happily chosen and he therefore put it on the side – when I had read this remarkable placard, I was forced to think: So, there still prevail among us misunderstandings and false conceptions about those most elementary and most fundamental things! If the realm of the workers and peasants were really never to end, this would mean that there would never be socialism,
for socialism is the abolition of all classes; but so long as there are workers and peasants, then there are different classes, and complete socialism would be for that reason impossible. And when I reflected that, three and a half years after the October revolution, there can be among us such remarkable placards, even if pushed somewhat to the side, it occurred to me that it is possible for the greatest misunderstandings to prevail even about the most widely disseminated and widely used watchwords.” – Lenin, Speech at the All-Russian Conference of Transport Workers, Moscow, March 1921.
Now, I thought socialism was a mid-way point between capitalism and the classless society?
The fact of the matter is that communists in power have used these terms interchangeably over a very long period of time, and even used both terms to describe similar states of society.
Although I have met some people in Russia (usually very young, or uneducted, or both) who were under the impression that communism existed in the USSR.
Were just about done Zoid, head games wont' cut it...
You might also be interested to know what Marx said. He said: "Democracy is the road to socialism". And I agree that your country is on a faster track to socialism than you even realize.
That's only because he understood that open, free societies have little defense against propaganda. In Communist countries, one can just censor it.
The difference between Lenin and Stalin is huge. Lenin advocated the global revolution; Stalin set out to try to build communsim behind the Iron Curtain. Lenin was a very modest man who got embalmed and put in a mausoleum after his death and practicallly religiously worshipped, but few know that it was against his and his wife's wishes. Compare that to Stalin's personality cult.
We're done. I'm not lowering myself by debating you any further.
Here then is our modest revolutionary (who never did those terrible, awful things Stalin did) Vladimir Lenin, and his theory (and we know of course, that he did in fact carry his theories into practice) of governance in a Communist society:
“We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois - more blood, as much as possible.”
Excerpt from an interview with Felix Dzerzhinsky published in Novaia Zhizn on 14 July 1918.
“We stand for organized terror - this should be frankly admitted. Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution. Our aim is to fight against the enemies of the Soviet Government and of the new order of life. We judge quickly. In most cases only a day passes between the apprehension of the criminal and his sentence. When confronted with evidence criminals in almost every case confess; and what argument can have greater weight than a criminal's own confession.”
Excerpts from V.I. Lenin, “The Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” (1906)
Of course, the massive famine precipitated by Lenin and his government after he took power, the civil war waged by his government against the Russian peasantry, the severe decline in living standards, the depopulation of urban areas, and the Checka summarily executing such peasants (petty bourgeoisie) who dared defy the government's crackpot economic policies (forced collective agriculture) all of this...nawwww, doesn't sound like Stalin at all.
It doesn't matter who identifies themselves as what. You, for instance, think you are a follower of Christ, but I think you are delusional in this self-identification. Now stop ranting about totalitarianism and start using your brain. And tell me what you think about the United Order.