Asklemmy

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

Within a few weeks after the 13th Congress Pravda published Stalin’s report…. Stalin’s report also contained an attack on Zinoviev, though without naming him:

“It is often said that we have the dictatorship of the party. I recall that in one of our resolutions, even, it seems, a resolution of the 12th Congress, such an expression was allowed to pass, through an oversight of course. Apparently some comrades think that we have a dictatorship of the party and not of the working class. But that is nonsense, comrades.”

Of course Stalin knew perfectly well that Zinoviev in his political report to the 12th Congress had put forward the concept of the dictatorship of the party and had sought to substantiate it. It was not at all through an oversight that the phrase was included in the unanimously adopted resolution of the Congress.

Zinoviev and Kamenev, reacting quite sharply to Stalin’s thrust, insisted that a conference of the core leadership of the party be convened. The result was a gathering of 25 Central Committee members, including all members of the Politburo. Stalin’s arguments against the “dictatorship of the party” were rejected by a majority vote, and an article by Zinoviev reaffirming the concept was approved for publication in the Aug. 23, 1924 issue of Pravda as a statement by the editors. At this point Stalin demonstratively offered to resign, but the offer was refused.

-Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 144

This is from an explicitly anti-"Stalinism" book showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.

For the record, I do think that historical texts by "comrades," as you sneer, can be interesting and insightful, but I mostly concern myself with texts by liberals (or otherwise anti-communist ideologies) because I know those are the only ones that won't be rejected out of hand.

I'm referring to the book itself, you have a lot of confused ideas about the USSR itself. Blackshirts and Reds is another great "Myth Debunker."

I'll explain further, then: At first, the lower body elects the upper body. The upper body decides everything.

Wrong. The lower bodies also decide things among themselves particular to issues specific to them, and elect delegates for the larger area. Imagine a soviet of a single factory, then a soviet of a city composed of delegates from all of the factories, then a regional soviet, etc. Each rung governs their respective areas with matters exclusive to them. These were workers with instant recall elections if needed.

1. Why not just skip the waste of time of the lower body voting on stuff? I can't find any time something like jury nullification of a really awful presidium policy happened.

Because the lower bodies vote on matters pertaining to themselves that don't affect others.

2. Since whoever disagrees with the upper body gets expelled, the lower body will perpetually elect whomever the upper body wants. While this may have enabled a dictatorship of the proletariat for a while, this behavior blocked out a ton of new ideas and became problematic after Stalin's straight-up purging of opponents and entrenched an oppressive old guard, by whom Khrushchev got ousted trying to get rid of.

That's not really accurate. Diverse opinions were held and discussed, what was purged was liberalism and fascism, which were dangerous currents deliberately infiltrating the USSR, as well as wreckers like Trotsky who collaborated with fascists and liberals.

Secondly, Stalin fought against beaurocracy, it wasn't until WWII where the population was decimated and the USSR needed to be rebuilt that a beaurocratic class of "career politicians" began to take hold.

Again, I suggest reading more on the subject, you seem to be confused on the basic structure itself, causing other confusions to spring forth.