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Differences and Similarities between CommunistIdeology and Communism on the Ground.
Ryan WulpiY340Professor TooleFebruary 11, 2005
 
One major difference between communist ideology and communism on theground is that the state never withers away, as it says that the state should eventually do
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It starts as a transitional period, a period that is necessary to ensure that all policies areimplemented in favor of the revolution.
 
However, to employ this ideology on a people,centralization becomes the key, the centralization of power and property, all to the state.The state in turn controls everything - economic, social, and political. This remains a backbone of communism, consolidation of power to one person, where every decisioncomes from the top. After a certain amount of time, when the state can run itself, theconstraints are let go, thereby creating a utopian society. The problem in Eastern andCentral Europe is that this “withering” away never comes to pass. The brutality andoppression in these countries after WWII and the implementation of communism washorrific. What kind of utopian society can come from this kind of tyranny? The peopleat the beginning were probably grateful. Grateful to be liberated from fascism, grateful to be out from under the boot of Hitler, but little did they know that they soon would befaced with the incredible tyranny of Joseph Stalin. The people slowly figured out thatthey were not much better under communism as they were under fascism. As Milosz putsit, “he finds he acquires new habits quickly. Once, had he stumbled upon a corpse on thestreet, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk andcomment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in thegutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions. The man who fired the gun musthave had his reasons; he might well have been executing an Underground sentence(Milosz p. 27).” He goes on to talk about how the man from the East starts to lose allrecollection of what it was like before the “Party” rule, where dealing with someone who2
 
displeases the administration becomes as easy as snatching a man off the street andsending him off to a labor camp (Milosz p. 32). From the late 1940’s until the early1990’s, people lived with these appalling conditions, although some leaders throughoutthis era did relax some of the restrictions of communism so long as the Soviet Union didnot disapprove.The Soviet Union created a modern day empire within Eastern and CentralEurope. The rest of the world even had a name for this region – the Soviet bloc. As Istated earlier, the people of this region were happy that communism liberated them fromfascism, but apart from Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union installed puppets to rule thesenewly communist states, veterans of the ‘party’ so to speak. This stemmed as much fromsecurity concerns as it did from the need to spread communism further West, “to accountfor the methods that Stalin and his heirs selected to operationalize Soviet hegemony over the area requires the introduction of ideological, systemic, contingent, and evenidiosyncratic explanatory variables, in addition to postulating “objective” securityconcerns (Rothschild and Wingfield p. 75).” The logic from this remains quite obvious,Stalin could not afford to lose this area to Germany or any other potential enemy andsimply denying this area to them would not be sufficient, as he viewed the area too weak to resist any future pressure from such an inimical power (Rothschild and Wingfield p.77)” What does all of this mean? That Stalin had to, for the survival of the Sovietcommunist system, make sure that all the “satellite” states would be subordinate to theSoviet Union. He postulated that “the institutional form of these structuraltransformations would be people’s democracy, a social form transitional between bourgeois democracy (the West) and mature Socialism (the Soviet Union); (Rothschild3
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