text: Thread for discussing the spanish civil war. I start the thread with a short paper on Soviet Union's involvement 1936-1939.
  What do people here make of Orwell's interpretation of the war? His theory goes that the MLs shot themselves and the war effort in the foot by siding with the liberals instead of committing to full social revolution like what POUM and CNT were doing. He thinks if all the communists overthrew the Republican liberals, that they could've inspired a rural insurgency behind Franco's lines and eventually won.
  It has quite some hot takes about it and my general understanding of the events is not deep enough to tell how valid they are.
  Does anyone have some good things to read about the NEP period and the collectivisation period and the transition between the two?
  a quite popular narrative among anti communists, the so called resistance narrative that presents the soviet collectivisation of agriculture as a mostly or completely unpopular policy on the part of the peasants. The resistance narrative draws on OGPU reports and peasant letters and (mis)takes the peasant protests during winter of 1929-30 and passive resistance in the collectives as proof of widespread resistance to collectivisation. I go through the nature of the sources this narrative uses, the scope and nature of the peasant protests, and annual grain produce in the collectives during 1930s to show it is false.
  He took them all off. I don't know why he quit. The official line was that he was fed up with Breadtube not doing Praxis in real life and they only care about aestethics.