Atlas shrugs, Atlas starves. The End. The most fatal flaw in Ayn Rand's book.

[yellowcanine]

23. "Josef Stalin was the elected leader of the Soviet Union,..." Not really.

Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922. At the time this position was mainly administrative and disciplinary with the role of maintaining party membership. It wasn't until after Lenin's death in 1924 that Stalin became the Soviet leader by eliminating or neutralizing opposition within the party. There was nothing "elected" about it. Democratic Centralism was a methodology originally crafted by Lenin to enforce party decisions - "freedom of discussion, unity of action." Yes Stalin used it to help consolidate his power but it is a perversion of what most people would consider "elected" to say that Stalin was the elected leader of the Soviet Union.

It is quite a mistake to fix all of the blame for the bad reputation of Stalin on Trotsky. Lenin himself was very critical of Stalin and suggested that the party find a way to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary.

Reasonable people can disagree about how much Stalin's industrialization and agricultural policies contributed to the famines of the 1930's but it is quite clear from history that neither collectivized agriculture nor centralized industrial planning worked very well for the Soviet Union.

As for defeating Hitler, many would say that it was in spite of Stalin rather than a result of his leadership. He purged the Red Army of its leadership in 1937-1938 which likely weakened the Soviet military greatly just prior to WWII. His pact with Hitler in 1939 gave Hitler breathing room to attack the West and gain combat experience which the German army used to great effect in attacking the Soviet Union in 1941. It also lulled the Soviets into a false complacency which may have contributed to their horrendous losses early on in Operation Barbarossa. The defeat of Hitler on the Eastern Front probably had more to do with Hitler's miscalculations, geography, and the character of the people of the Soviet Union and their access to natural resources, as well as material support from the Western Allies, than Stalin's leadership.