The Soviet Union
Re: The Soviet Union
Inspirational women: Spanish-born Soviet spy Colonel Africa de las Heras
An outstanding comrade who devoted her life to defending the Soviet Union in its battle against imperialism and imperialist-backed fascism.
A 2019 postage stamp released in Russia in tribute to Colonel Africa, faithful servant of the revolution.
Ilona Yegiazarova
Wednesday 6 March 2024
The following article is reproduced from the Chekist Monitor, with thanks. The text has been shortened and a few explanatory facts have been added.
The text, published by the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda, is a chapter from a book on Soviet intelligence officers by journalist Ilona Yegiazarova. It describes the life and work of Africa de las Heras (1909-88), a Spanish-born Soviet intelligence officer active both during the World War 2 and the early cold war. In her later life, De las Heras was active in training new generations of Soviet illegal intelligence officers.
*****
The sultry girl
She was born in the city of Ceuta (Spanish Morocco) in 1909, where her father, an officer who was critical of the ruling regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera, worked in the military archive. And although Zoilo de las Heras Jimenez was the brother of the famous Spanish general Manuel de las Heras, working in Morocco was for him essentially an exile. (Remember the uncle who was the general; we will come back to him later in our story).
The father gave his daughter an unusual name – Africa – in gratitude to the African continent that had sheltered him and his family. After some time, they returned to Spain where Zoilo died suddenly in 1933. Africa and her older sister Virtudes found themselves on their own.
Our heroine got married early; she had barely turned 19 and her husband was an officer, of course. He was a supporter of Francisco Franco, but at that time Africa did not attach any significance to that. Then the couple had a child, and, with all the passion of her nature, she plunged into the joys of motherhood. But the baby died.
This was the traumatic turning point that changed her life. The unhappy woman looked for an outlet for her emotions; she did not know where to direct her unspent energy … Her husband seemed not to understand what was going on and they divorced. Then Africa turned to the parties of the left.
[Having trained as a dressmaker], in mid-1933, she worked in a textile factory in Madrid and joined the Communist party. Soon she took part in the preparations for the miners’ uprising in the province of Asturias. She carried out the most dangerous assignments: she distributed weapons and acted as a liaison between the various detachments of the rebels, all the while using the cover of being the famous general’s niece.
She ended up in jail a couple of times and then hid from the authorities for a whole year.
When the Spanish civil war broke out, ‘Afrikita’ enthusiastically joined the fight against the Franco regime. It was then that she was recruited by Soviet foreign intelligence in Madrid. On its behalf, she began taking dangerous trips to neighbouring countries. She took on the operational pseudonym ‘Patria’, which she used in her reports to the Centre for the rest of her life.
Leon Trotsky, Ramon Mercader and Nikolay Kuznetsov
Our heroine faithfully served in the Soviet foreign intelligence service for more than 45 years. It is breathtaking just to try to count the roles she played and the missions she was involved in. However, the truth and the legend are difficult to keep apart in this respect. Her full biography is still classified and there are gaps that many have filled with invented tales.
The most intriguing chapter in her life is perhaps her acquaintance with Leon Trotsky. It is said that she was assigned to him in the role of a translator and a secretary. It is also claimed that she was a friend of Ramon Mercader and helped him prepare the assassination of the ‘demon of the revolution’ on Stalin’s orders. [However, Trotsky was not killed until August 1940, quite some time after she left Mexico, so although she may have been spying on him and would probably have met Mercader, who was a part of Trotsky’s circle, it is unlikely she had anything to do with his death, which the Soviets have always denied having organised.]
She was urgently recalled to the USSR in 1939, when the Soviet intelligence chief in Madrid, Alexander Orlov, frightened by the purge in the intelligence service, defected to the west. The Centre feared that he would expose Africa and therefore it recalled her to Moscow. Here our heroine received Soviet citizenship and got a job in a textile factory. Many Spaniards arrived in the USSR at that time and no one even suspected who this dark, fragile beauty really was. And Orlov never exposed his former subordinate …
When the Great Patriotic War began, Africa made every effort to be sent to the front line. She enlisted in the special medical unit of the OMSBON (Independent Motorised Brigade for Special Operations) of the NKVD, and then attended the accelerated courses for radio operators. After graduating with honours, she was sent to the newly-formed reconnaissance and sabotage unit ‘Victors’ under the command of the future Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. In her memoirs, she wrote:
“Sometime later, I took the oath of a radio operator. I solemnly swore that I would never surrender to the enemy alive and would blow up with grenades the transmitter, the quartz mechanism, and the ciphers. I was handed two grenades, a pistol, a curved [Finnish] knife. From that moment on, I constantly carried all of that with me …”
From a partisan detachment, deep behind enemy lines, she fearlessly sent to Moscow secret information obtained by intelligence officer Nikolay Kuznetsov, who operated under cover as an officer of the German secret police Paul Siebert. In order to send his encrypted messages to the Centre, three radio operators, accompanied by guards, would go out of the camp into the forest. Two radio operators would broadcast disinformation, and only Africa – because she was the best – was chosen to transmit accurate information to Moscow. This was done to deceive the potential German interceptors. Nikolay Kuznetsov called her his favourite radio operator.
She steadfastly endured all the hardships of partisan life: “We received telegrams from about 30 partisan units. We handled encryption, transmission, reception, decryption … We had almost no time left for sleep.” The Russian winter caused physical suffering in this woman from the south: she felt cold all the time. Once Kuznetsov got three short fur coats for his radio operators and he also gave Africa a beautiful woollen shawl. For the rest of her life, she remembered him fondly …
For the successful performance of combat missions and active participation in the partisan movement during the war years, Africa was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the second degree and the Order of the Red Star, as well as the medals ‘For Courage’ and ‘Partisan of the Patriotic War’ of the first degree.
She got married on the orders of the Centre
In the first year after the war, Africa settled in Paris [as a dressmaker]. [There she married a Uruguayan and transferred to Uruguay with her husband, whom she divorced after she received her residency permit.] Her cover was that of the owner of a fashion studio and later of an antiquarian shop [in Montevideo].
And you know, she had some brilliant successes. Elegant, with a lot expertise in art, a painter herself, she easily made friends with high society ladies. Through them, she met their high-ranking husbands and obtained valuable information. She spent 22 years in Latin America [where she was known as Maria Luisa]. There was a lot of work to do. After eight years of solo work, in 1956, the Centre sent her a husband!
She obeyed without a protest and did not ask a single question. Her husband, station chief Giovanni Antonio Bertoni, was an Italian by birth and had worked for the USSR since 1936. He was Africa’s supervisor and friend. Was there any romantic love between them? When, after eight years of marriage, he died suddenly, she was crushed with grief.
Africa was also engaged in covert missions linked to the Cuban missile crisis and the struggle against the American atomic programme. Although she could have retired after the death of her husband, ‘Patria’ wanted to remain working. The country where she was based seemed to be on the verge of a military coup, and she remained there for another three years to collect and transmit important information.
Afterword
Africa returned to the USSR in the 1970s [with the rank of Colonel in the KGB, and was awarded the Order of Lenin]. She trained young intelligence officers and shared her experiences with them. She did not have any children of her own and her maternal care and tenderness found an outlet in her relations with her students.
Of course, she longed for her family members left behind in Spain, whom she had not seen since 1939. Once she heard on the radio how the Spanish Red Cross was looking for lost loved ones. The list of endless names included her sister Virtudes, who was looking for her. Her heart sank, but she could not reply because of her intelligence work.
That was the kind of life she led: she was completely devoted to the ideals of peace and security.
Africa de las Heras died at the age of 78, on an important day – 8 March 1988 [and is buried in the Khovanovskaya cemetery in Moscow]. On an international women’s holiday, on a date with three eights, which symbolise infinity.
https://thecommunists.org/2024/03/06/ne ... -ww2-ussr/
An outstanding comrade who devoted her life to defending the Soviet Union in its battle against imperialism and imperialist-backed fascism.
A 2019 postage stamp released in Russia in tribute to Colonel Africa, faithful servant of the revolution.
Ilona Yegiazarova
Wednesday 6 March 2024
The following article is reproduced from the Chekist Monitor, with thanks. The text has been shortened and a few explanatory facts have been added.
The text, published by the City of Moscow daily newspaper Moskovskaya Pravda, is a chapter from a book on Soviet intelligence officers by journalist Ilona Yegiazarova. It describes the life and work of Africa de las Heras (1909-88), a Spanish-born Soviet intelligence officer active both during the World War 2 and the early cold war. In her later life, De las Heras was active in training new generations of Soviet illegal intelligence officers.
*****
The sultry girl
She was born in the city of Ceuta (Spanish Morocco) in 1909, where her father, an officer who was critical of the ruling regime of Miguel Primo de Rivera, worked in the military archive. And although Zoilo de las Heras Jimenez was the brother of the famous Spanish general Manuel de las Heras, working in Morocco was for him essentially an exile. (Remember the uncle who was the general; we will come back to him later in our story).
The father gave his daughter an unusual name – Africa – in gratitude to the African continent that had sheltered him and his family. After some time, they returned to Spain where Zoilo died suddenly in 1933. Africa and her older sister Virtudes found themselves on their own.
Our heroine got married early; she had barely turned 19 and her husband was an officer, of course. He was a supporter of Francisco Franco, but at that time Africa did not attach any significance to that. Then the couple had a child, and, with all the passion of her nature, she plunged into the joys of motherhood. But the baby died.
This was the traumatic turning point that changed her life. The unhappy woman looked for an outlet for her emotions; she did not know where to direct her unspent energy … Her husband seemed not to understand what was going on and they divorced. Then Africa turned to the parties of the left.
[Having trained as a dressmaker], in mid-1933, she worked in a textile factory in Madrid and joined the Communist party. Soon she took part in the preparations for the miners’ uprising in the province of Asturias. She carried out the most dangerous assignments: she distributed weapons and acted as a liaison between the various detachments of the rebels, all the while using the cover of being the famous general’s niece.
She ended up in jail a couple of times and then hid from the authorities for a whole year.
When the Spanish civil war broke out, ‘Afrikita’ enthusiastically joined the fight against the Franco regime. It was then that she was recruited by Soviet foreign intelligence in Madrid. On its behalf, she began taking dangerous trips to neighbouring countries. She took on the operational pseudonym ‘Patria’, which she used in her reports to the Centre for the rest of her life.
Leon Trotsky, Ramon Mercader and Nikolay Kuznetsov
Our heroine faithfully served in the Soviet foreign intelligence service for more than 45 years. It is breathtaking just to try to count the roles she played and the missions she was involved in. However, the truth and the legend are difficult to keep apart in this respect. Her full biography is still classified and there are gaps that many have filled with invented tales.
The most intriguing chapter in her life is perhaps her acquaintance with Leon Trotsky. It is said that she was assigned to him in the role of a translator and a secretary. It is also claimed that she was a friend of Ramon Mercader and helped him prepare the assassination of the ‘demon of the revolution’ on Stalin’s orders. [However, Trotsky was not killed until August 1940, quite some time after she left Mexico, so although she may have been spying on him and would probably have met Mercader, who was a part of Trotsky’s circle, it is unlikely she had anything to do with his death, which the Soviets have always denied having organised.]
She was urgently recalled to the USSR in 1939, when the Soviet intelligence chief in Madrid, Alexander Orlov, frightened by the purge in the intelligence service, defected to the west. The Centre feared that he would expose Africa and therefore it recalled her to Moscow. Here our heroine received Soviet citizenship and got a job in a textile factory. Many Spaniards arrived in the USSR at that time and no one even suspected who this dark, fragile beauty really was. And Orlov never exposed his former subordinate …
When the Great Patriotic War began, Africa made every effort to be sent to the front line. She enlisted in the special medical unit of the OMSBON (Independent Motorised Brigade for Special Operations) of the NKVD, and then attended the accelerated courses for radio operators. After graduating with honours, she was sent to the newly-formed reconnaissance and sabotage unit ‘Victors’ under the command of the future Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. In her memoirs, she wrote:
“Sometime later, I took the oath of a radio operator. I solemnly swore that I would never surrender to the enemy alive and would blow up with grenades the transmitter, the quartz mechanism, and the ciphers. I was handed two grenades, a pistol, a curved [Finnish] knife. From that moment on, I constantly carried all of that with me …”
From a partisan detachment, deep behind enemy lines, she fearlessly sent to Moscow secret information obtained by intelligence officer Nikolay Kuznetsov, who operated under cover as an officer of the German secret police Paul Siebert. In order to send his encrypted messages to the Centre, three radio operators, accompanied by guards, would go out of the camp into the forest. Two radio operators would broadcast disinformation, and only Africa – because she was the best – was chosen to transmit accurate information to Moscow. This was done to deceive the potential German interceptors. Nikolay Kuznetsov called her his favourite radio operator.
She steadfastly endured all the hardships of partisan life: “We received telegrams from about 30 partisan units. We handled encryption, transmission, reception, decryption … We had almost no time left for sleep.” The Russian winter caused physical suffering in this woman from the south: she felt cold all the time. Once Kuznetsov got three short fur coats for his radio operators and he also gave Africa a beautiful woollen shawl. For the rest of her life, she remembered him fondly …
For the successful performance of combat missions and active participation in the partisan movement during the war years, Africa was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War of the second degree and the Order of the Red Star, as well as the medals ‘For Courage’ and ‘Partisan of the Patriotic War’ of the first degree.
She got married on the orders of the Centre
In the first year after the war, Africa settled in Paris [as a dressmaker]. [There she married a Uruguayan and transferred to Uruguay with her husband, whom she divorced after she received her residency permit.] Her cover was that of the owner of a fashion studio and later of an antiquarian shop [in Montevideo].
And you know, she had some brilliant successes. Elegant, with a lot expertise in art, a painter herself, she easily made friends with high society ladies. Through them, she met their high-ranking husbands and obtained valuable information. She spent 22 years in Latin America [where she was known as Maria Luisa]. There was a lot of work to do. After eight years of solo work, in 1956, the Centre sent her a husband!
She obeyed without a protest and did not ask a single question. Her husband, station chief Giovanni Antonio Bertoni, was an Italian by birth and had worked for the USSR since 1936. He was Africa’s supervisor and friend. Was there any romantic love between them? When, after eight years of marriage, he died suddenly, she was crushed with grief.
Africa was also engaged in covert missions linked to the Cuban missile crisis and the struggle against the American atomic programme. Although she could have retired after the death of her husband, ‘Patria’ wanted to remain working. The country where she was based seemed to be on the verge of a military coup, and she remained there for another three years to collect and transmit important information.
Afterword
Africa returned to the USSR in the 1970s [with the rank of Colonel in the KGB, and was awarded the Order of Lenin]. She trained young intelligence officers and shared her experiences with them. She did not have any children of her own and her maternal care and tenderness found an outlet in her relations with her students.
Of course, she longed for her family members left behind in Spain, whom she had not seen since 1939. Once she heard on the radio how the Spanish Red Cross was looking for lost loved ones. The list of endless names included her sister Virtudes, who was looking for her. Her heart sank, but she could not reply because of her intelligence work.
That was the kind of life she led: she was completely devoted to the ideals of peace and security.
Africa de las Heras died at the age of 78, on an important day – 8 March 1988 [and is buried in the Khovanovskaya cemetery in Moscow]. On an international women’s holiday, on a date with three eights, which symbolise infinity.
https://thecommunists.org/2024/03/06/ne ... -ww2-ussr/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
One hundred years of International Women’s Day
The women who showed the way forward – and the work we have still to do.
The daughter of working people and a young factory worker herself, the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel in space in 1963. From tractor drivers to doctors, scientists to engineers, the USSR pushed back the boundaries of what class society had deemed appropriate and possible for women to do.
Ella Rule
Tuesday 1 February 2011
The 8th of March 2011 will be a particularly important occasion for women and workers all over the world, since it marks 100 years since International Women’s Day was honoured for the first time.
As long ago as 1925, Josef Stalin explained the significance of the date for workers generally:
“Not a single great movement of the oppressed in the history of mankind has been able to do without the participation of working women.
“Working women, the most oppressed among the oppressed, never have or could stand aside from the broad path of the liberation movement. This movement of slaves has produced, as is known, hundreds and thousands of martyrs and heroines. Tens of thousands of working women were to be found in the ranks of fighters for the liberation of the serfs. It is not surprising that millions of working women have been drawn in beneath the banners of the revolutionary movement of the working class, the most powerful of all liberation movements of the oppressed masses.
“International Women’s Day is a token of invincibility and an augury of the great future which lies before the liberation movement of the working class.
“Working women – workers and peasants – are the greatest reserve of the working class. This reserve constitutes a good half of the population. The fate of the proletarian movement, the victory or defeat of the proletarian revolution, the victory or defeat of proletarian power depends on whether or not the reserve of women will be for or against the working class.
“That is why the first task of the proletariat and its advanced detachment, the communist party, is to engage in decisive struggle for the freeing of women workers and peasants from the influence of the bourgeoisie, for political education and the organisation of women workers and peasants beneath the banner of the proletariat.
“International Women’s Day is a means of winning the women’s labour reserves to the side of the proletariat. Working women are not only reserves, however. They can and must become – if the working class carries out a correct policy – a real army of the working class, operating against the bourgeoisie.
“The second and decisive task of the working class is to forge an army of worker and peasant women out of the women’s labour reserves to operate shoulder to shoulder with the great army of the proletariat.
“International Woman’s Day must become a means for turning worker and peasant women from a reserve of the working class into an active army in the liberation movement of the proletariat.” (1925 International Women’s Day address by JV Stalin)
Enormous advances have been made almost throughout the world since the first celebration of International Women’s Day was held on 19 March 1911 (it was only later that the date was changed to 8 March). [1] We have only to look at the demands of women at that time: a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland attended rallies on that date to campaign for a woman’s right to work in paid employment, to vote and to hold public office.
It was Clara Zetkin, a leading German socialist, who first tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day at the second International Conference of Working Women, which was held in Copenhagen in 1910. It was held in the aftermath of a successful end to a prominent and bitter struggle of some 70,000 US garment workers in New York.
The workforce in that strike had been predominantly (70 percent) female. Two thirds of the women workers were jewish, mostly of east European origin, and a third were of Italian origin. Many had had connections with the Bund, a jewish socialist organisation that had given them experience of conducting strikes in Germany.
Faced with general strike, the employers, with the backing of the forces of the state, resorted viciously to dismissals, mass arrests, manhandling, and convictions to terms in the workhouse. Led by the fiery and courageous Ukrainian Clara Lemlich, who set the example to other strikers by returning to the picket line after company goons had broken three of her ribs, the workers stood firm, and the employers, faced with the approach of the most profitable ‘season’ for the garment trade, finally backed down.
The gains that the women made were that the working week was limited to 52 hours (previously 65-75 hours depending on the time of year), workers were given four holidays with pay, employers were required to supply all tools necessary for the job (previously women having to supply their own needles, thread and sewing machines), and a grievance committee was established to deal with individual issues that came up.
However, the gains of this successful strike extended beyond the factory gates. Indeed, they extended beyond the borders of the USA. The victory energised and encouraged the working-class movement all over the world, particularly by highlighting the militant potential of women workers.
It helped many male workers to see that working women deserved equality and to overcome their prejudiced beliefs, engendered by the very fact of women’s subservience in class society, to the effect that women were inferior and that it was unnecessarily divisive for the working-class movement to embrace the demand for equal status for women. It demonstrated the fact that women could be as militant as men, and as useful in a fight as men, and that therefore there could be no justification in sidelining their demands.
As Stalin’s quotation above makes quite clear, the very success of a revolution depends on mobilising the forces of the entire proletariat, a task which would be impossible if the legitimate and pressing demands of fully half of the working-class masses were ignored.
It was in these circumstances that, in 1910, at a second international conference of working women held in Copenhagen and attended by over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties and working women’s clubs, Clara Zetkin, a prominent member of the communist German Social-Democratic party, proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to press for their demands. Her proposal was enthusiastically adopted by all those present.
The event was successful beyond anything the organisers had hoped for and set the scene for the celebrations of future years.
Russian women, who already had a long and honourable history of struggle against tsarist oppression and inhuman working conditions, eagerly took up the call to celebrate International Women’s Day, even though it was illegal under the conditions of tsarism to do so. They marked their first International Women’s Day on what was, for them, the last Sunday in February. However, this date was according to the outdated Julian calendar that was still in use in Russia. In countries that had converted to the Gregorian calendar, the date in question was 8 March.
The Russian women used the occasion to publish articles, making whatever use they could of legal outlets, including legal workers’ newspapers. A public meeting was called by women Bolsheviks at the Kalashaikovsky Exchange in Petrograd to discuss ‘The Woman Question’. Although the meeting was illegal, the venue was packed out and a lively discussion ensued until the meeting was raided by the police and many of the speakers were arrested.
The Bolsheviks continued to give great importance to promoting the demands of women and to supporting the celebrations of International Women’s Day each year. .
In 1914, under the editorship of comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife), the first issue of The Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa), a journal for working-class women, began to be published. Along with Iskra, The Woman Worker was printed abroad and smuggled into Russia for widespread distribution. At the same time, the Bolsheviks decided to create a special committee to organise meetings for International Women’s Day to be held in the factories and public places to discuss issues related to women’s oppression. At these meetings, representatives were elected, and the resulting proposals were discussed by the new committee they formed.
It cannot be over-emphasised how important this work turned out to be for the success of the socialist October Revolution. It is not for nothing that the tsarist secret policy reported to the ministry of the interior in January 1917 that: “Mothers of families, exhausted by endless standing in line at stores, distraught over their half-starving and sick children, are today perhaps closer to revolution than [the liberal opposition] and of course they are a great deal more dangerous because they are the combustible material for which only a single spark is needed to burst into flame.” (Quoted in William M Mandel, Soviet Women, 1975, p43)
Women’s Day 1917 in Russia
On International Women’s Day 1917, workers, including women workers in textile and metal-working industries, were on strike in St Petersburg. The most prominent issue behind the protests was opposition to Russia’s participation in the imperialist war. The war had made Russian women even more of a force to be reckoned with.
Natasha Samoilova (a founding editor of Pravda and an activist in the Baku oilfields of Azerbaijan) wrote that the war “had torn thousands of women away from housework and thrown them into the factories in place of their husbands to earn their daily bread. That war undoubtedly gave impetus to the political consciousness of women workers … and compelled them to take a more active part in the overall struggle of the working class for its liberation.” (Ibid, p47)
On 8 March (23 February on the Julian calendar), women in their thousands poured onto the streets to demand bread, peace, and the return of the men from the trenches. This was the spark that set off the February Revolution, the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of the provisional government to implement the democratic demands of the revolutionary masses. The government made the franchise universal, and recognised equal rights for women.
Subsequent to these momentous events, 8 March became the official date for International Women’s Day, when Bulgarian women attending the international women’s secretariat of the Communist International in 1921 proposed a motion that the event be uniformly celebrated around the world. The 8th of March was chosen to honour the role played by Russian women not only in their own revolution, but in the international struggle for women’s emancipation.
Today, International Women’s Day is still marked by a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
After the October Revolution
The grant by the provisional government of universal franchise and its declaration of women’s equal rights satisfied the bourgeois ladies, who joined their menfolk in continuing to support the imperialist war that was wreaking such appalling hardship on the mass of workers and peasants. The failure of the provisional government to extract Russia from the war sealed its fate and set the scene for the success of the October Revolution that followed.
However, the grant of these minimal formal rights, although astonishingly advanced at the time, certainly did not satisfy the Bolsheviks, who were committed to eliminating not just the formal aspects of women’s subservience to men, but also the whole gamut of conditions that gave rise to that subservience.
Although some bourgeois countries had before 1917 made a few concessions towards women’s formal equality (for instance, Finland had given the right to women to be elected to its parliament, its first three women MPs having attended the 1910 women’s conference in Copenhagen), no country could match the comprehensive abolition of all laws discriminating against women that was implemented by the Bolshevik government following the October Revolution.
The Bolsheviks introduced divorce and civil marriage laws that made marriage a voluntary alliance. They abolished all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. They gave women employment rights equal to those of men, equal pay for equal work (a concept not introduced in the UK until 1970, following the strike of the women machinists of Ford’s in Dagenham), and rights to paid leave during pregnancy and after the birth of children.
It was decades before any bourgeois country caught up, and, even then, the implementation of these laws in bourgeois countries could never match up to the thoroughness with which they were implemented in the USSR.
Ensuring women could take up their new rights in practice
The Bolsheviks were not satisfied with merely passing laws. They also undertook a vast array of measures to ensure that women could enjoy equality in practice. This meant not only ensuring that jobs were equally available to men and to women, but that women were able to catch up despite the fact that they were mostly much more uneducated than men.
The literacy campaign undertaken by the Bolsheviks, which was able to put an end to Russia’s prevalent illiteracy in just a few years, was a major factor enabling women to come into their own. On the one hand, they could read to find out about their new rights and to learn of the positive examples set by other women in various part of the country; on the other hand, the ability to read opened the door to more advanced education and to skilled and intellectual jobs.
The party also battled hard against prejudice and discrimination exercised by people who had never had the opportunity to experience for themselves the sight of women doing perfectly competently what had hitherto always been ‘men’s work’. With a view to sweeping away such prejudices as quickly as possible, a policy of positive discrimination in favour of women was adopted, which required women to be offered any job ahead of male candidates with equivalent qualifications.
In the countryside, the lot of the peasant woman changed drastically when, in the collective farms, she found that all workers were paid individually according to how much work they did. She ceased to be dependent on her husband’s income, which in the past had delivered into his hands the fruits of all her labour simply because the land that was worked was always in his name.
The fact that the burden of housework had traditionally always fallen on women, whether or not they worked outside the home, always diminished the contribution that women could make either to labour or to participation in political life. Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks led a major effort to provide as many social facilities as possible to lift that heavy burden from women’s shoulders.
Creches, kindergartens and nurseries were provided for the care of children (of excellent quality, and very affordably priced), public dining rooms were set up for workers and their families so that it was not necessary to cook every day. Men were also encouraged, with varying success, to take up some share of the remaining housework. After the second world war, families tended to ensure that housework was reduced to a minimum by confining themselves to only one child.
Women’s emancipation in practice
One way or another, the Soviet Union revolutionised women’s position. Women were introduced en masse into professions and trades that they had never been considered capable of undertaking. By the 1970s, three-quarters of Soviet doctors were women – and this at a time when in western imperialist countries most people’s stereotype of a doctor was uncompromisingly male. [2]
The introduction of women into every male preserve was not only carried out in the Soviet Union decades before capitalist countries followed suit, but was far more thorough than any capitalist country has ever done it. To this day, British and US professional women complain of a ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents most of them from reaching the highest echelons of their profession. Such a thing was unknown in Soviet Russia, where there were any number of women in top positions.
At the same time, the skill of jobs that had traditionally been regarded as ‘women’s work’ and had by association acquired the same low status as women themselves, became fully appreciated, and paid accordingly. As Mandel, writing in 1975, explained:
“Milkmaid in a collective … or state … farm, which involves feeding and care of the animals and their calves as well as milking, is a new job arising out of the real history of farming and of culture … in a real country. Champion milkmaids are awarded the country’s highest honour: the title of Hero of Socialist Labour. They are elected to Congress …
“In old Russia men worked with the draft animals as women did with the producing livestock. So today men are virtually all the operators of farm machinery, despite 40 years of real effort on the government’s part … to involve women in that work …
“But milkmaids usually earn more than tractor drivers. This is because animal care is harder work under Russia’s present conditions … Earnings have a lot to do with one’s prestige in interpersonal relations, as well as with one’s independence, of course.” (Ibid, p79)
By the time William Mandel was writing his book, women in the USSR were in a majority among employed graduates. It is therefore no accident that the first woman in space, as early as 1963, was a Russian, Valentina Tereshkova, daughter of peasants who had been the poorest of the poor until collectivisation.
At the time, it was unheard of in western countries for women even to be pilots of anything other than light planes, let alone test pilots. After Soviet women had blazed the trail, a woman in the USA was elevated to the position of second officer in a scheduled airline – but not until ten years after Tereshkova made her historic flight.
Another sphere that was largely closed to western women (although there were always exceptions to prove the rule) was navigation. Every kind of prejudice made it impossible for them to aspire to imitate the example of Captain Anna Schetinina, the master of a 20,000 ton freighter, or Captain Valentina Orlikova, who in 1956 was given command of a large refrigerated ocean fishing trawler with a crew of 90.
Since those days, the US navy (to take one example) has hastened to appoint a certain number of women to the highest positions. A high proportion of women admirals, however, are medical personnel rather than navigators or commanders of ships.
The first woman to be put in command of a US Navy cruiser, Captain Holly Graf, did not achieve that position until 2003. Last year, however, she was out on her ear, after displaying ‘inappropriate’ behaviour classically consistent with having been subjected to long-term low-grade bullying. When her ship shuddered as though it had run aground, her crew started clapping and cheering to show how happy they were that her career would undoubtedly end as a result.
Mandel’s book gave countless examples of Soviet women in positions of the highest responsibility – directors of scientific establishments, college principals, hydraulic project managers, hospital managers, top-flight medical consultants, etc, etc.
Maria Volodina was in charge eight hours a day of distributing electrical power throughout all the territory between Poland and Siberia, just at a time when in Colorado USA, a construction crew walked off the job when, for the first time in the history of the industry, a woman engineer entered a tunnel when work was in progress.
In the early 1970s, one-third of all judges in the USSR were women. In 1974, in Britain, Rose Heilbron became only the second female high-court judge. Even today in the UK, women are only about ten percent of judges appointed to the high court, and there have only been 20 in total. The situation is better in the USA, where women have today almost caught up with the Soviet women of the 1970s, since they represent about 25 percent of all judges.
Women’s work received the highest honours, including when they were working in areas that had previously been men’s exclusive preserve. Mandel noted that nominations for state prizes in the early 1970s included nominations for women working in the fields of earthquake geography, English literature, thermodynamics, automotive engineering, steel-mill engineering, and computer design and development.
Furthermore, in 1975, there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. They were greater in number than male engineers in the USA, and of course far outnumbered US women engineers, who at that time were only two percent of the total. In the USSR, they were 30 percent of the total number of engineers – but 38 percent of engineering students, laying the basis for becoming a higher percentage of the total employed once these students had graduated.
Meanwhile, if we zoom ahead to the UK in the early 21st century, we find that although in professions such as medicine and law women rapidly caught up with men after the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 (horizontally but not yet vertically – there are few women at the top), the same cannot be said of science and engineering, which still persist as virtual male preserves.
Professor Juliet Glover of Surrey university has researched the current situation and found that in engineering and science-related areas of employment “women’s representation remains persistently low”, while in ITEC (information technology, electronics and telecommunications) it was actually decreasing in 2002. Only about 20 percent of A-level science students were female, and only 35 percent of mathematics students.
In 1973, only three percent of Britain’s engineering undergraduates were female, and by 2000 this had only risen to 12 percent, while students of physics and computing did not increase the proportion of females from around 20 percent in all that quarter of a century.
Few though women engineering students were, and small though the number was entering scientific or engineering employment (teaching being the only area where a higher proportion of women graduates obtained employment as opposed to men, though even there women becoming science teachers were far fewer than men who did so), half of the women who did enter such employment dropped out within a few years, with many failing to return to work after the birth of their first child. As one goes higher up the promotional ladder, the percentage of women gets smaller and smaller, until at the summit it is all but imperceptible.
If Soviet women were well represented in the highest echelons of jobs requiring graduate qualifications, they also expanded their presence in manual jobs that had hitherto been overwhelmingly reserved for men.
“By 1959, one third of all crane, derrick and forklift operators were women. In their mothers’ generation, in 1926, only one such job in a hundred was held by a woman … In the earlier year, one streetcar driver in thirty was a woman, but by 1959 women were a majority of those at the control of these vehicles, trolley buses and subway trains.” (Ibid, p106)
In Britain, we would appear still to be closer to the 1926 Soviet woman than the 1959 one!
The historic end of women’s oppression
In his seminal work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels showed that the inferior status of women in all societies existing at the time he was writing was not due to women being in any way inferior to men, but to the fact that they had been stripped under class society of their independent economic role. Instead, they were confined in the home as a chattel of their husbands, with no role other than to perform household chores and bear children, and were totally financially dependent on their husbands for their every need.
Class society condemned women to inferiority by depriving them of education and of the opportunity to develop and put to work their underlying talents. From this, Engels drew the natural conclusion that once they were returned to social production and became economically independent of their husbands, the basis would be laid for their emancipation.
He and Marx had already noted how the status of working-class women had risen within the family as a result of their having been drawn back into social production by greedy capitalists keen to exploit their cheap labour – but also how their full emancipation was held back by the fact that by tradition they still had to bear a massive burden of domestic drudgery alongside their backbreaking jobs outside the home.
Because the Soviet Union was committed to securing the full emancipation of women, every effort was made to ensure the provision of facilities such as creches, kindergartens, public dining rooms, public laundry services, etc, as well as maternity benefits and flexible working hours, so that women could be genuinely free to participate in social production and in social life on an equal basis with men.
On this front, capitalist countries have always lagged way behind the Soviet Union and there is little chance of their catching up. To the extent that there are social facilities at all, they either tend to be terrible (eg, old people’s homes) or financially beyond reach of all but the best paid (nurseries, kindergartens, decent restaurants providing healthy food) – sometimes both. And as the present crisis bites deeper, it is clear that what facilities had previously been won for British workers are going to be cut to the bone in the coming years.
The only relief from backbreaking drudgery for women under capitalism is provided by technological developments that provide laboursaving household devices such as washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. And as more women have entered the workforce, particularly as it has become the norm for middle-class women to go out to work, more and more husbands have gradually been taking up a share of household chores.
Compared to the kind of social provision, especially for the care of children and the elderly, that was available in the USSR, however, gadget-wielding husbands and wives still have a heavy burden to bear and are often forced to leave children to the care of the television set far more than is recognised to be physically, intellectually and morally good for them.
The introduction of ‘market’ socialism, while it was still way ahead of the capitalist competition in the west in mobilising female labour, hampered progress in the USSR to full equality. When the aim of production ceased to be to satisfy to the maximum possible extent workers’ material, cultural and spiritual needs and became instead the generation of maximum profit, then providing workers with social facilities was bound to appear to be an overhead that was best avoided.
Social facilities began to wither away for much the same reason that they are barely provided in the first place in capitalist countries. As a result, the process of the emancipation of women in the USSR began to slow down significantly by the time they had on average attained an earning potential that was three-quarters that of men, which was already the case by the 1970s.
International Women’s Day 2011
As we celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day, it has to be admitted that the cause of women’s liberation has advanced a long way towards what was dreamed of in 1910 – and that it was the Soviet Union which led the way and which went furthest along that path.
By demonstrating that anything men could do women could do too, the Soviet Union established that there was not a single branch of social production that could not be open to women. Even capitalists in these circumstances were able, if painstakingly, to break with tradition and start employing women in all kinds of jobs in which they had never been seen before.
Women were originally paid only low wages because male wages were supposed to include the cost of maintaining a wife and family. This is because the value of male labour equals the cost of reproducing himself as a labourer from generation to generation, which at a time when women did not generally work outside the home, included maintenance of a wife. As a result of it becoming the norm for women to work outside the home, the wage a man would once have received alone has been split, and now pays for the labour of both the man and his wife (the latter at least part time), so that these days the capitalist is getting two workers for the price of one, and both men and women have to do household chores on top of their jobs.
In spite of all this, women in Britain are much freer. They have independent incomes that make it possible for them to leave a loveless marriage; they do not have to tolerate bullying and violence against either themselves or their children; they have access to education to a far greater extent; they are able to engage in work that is far more stimulating and satisfying than confinement to household drudgery.
They still have, however, a long way to go. Working-class women, in particular, desperately need access to social facilities to make their lives bearable and to enable them to give their children as good a start in life as they deserve, and so that society can benefit from people whose potential is fully developed in childhood.
As the crisis deepens, the situation of women is becoming worse and not better. The few areas in which women could find some support are being ruthlessly cut. While taxation rises, wages plunge in inverse proportion to rising unemployment. It is time to take up the cudgels again in the fashion of the New York garment workers, and more particularly in the fashion of the women of Russia’s revolutionary proletariat.
Experience shows that it is only under socialism that women’s needs can really be given priority, for it is only under socialism that the whole of production is geared to serving the needs of working people in general rather than the interests of profit, which always grudges every penny spent on wages and social facilities.
Women workers must stand shoulder to shoulder with the revolutionary proletariat as a whole to overthrow capitalism and establish and build socialism. And it stands to reason that the revolutionary proletariat must always put attending to the needs of the working-class women as one of their most urgent priorities, both in their demands on the capitalist class and in the measures that they implement as soon as they seize state power.
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NOTES
1. The date was chosen because on 19 March in the year of the 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognised for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promises he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.
2. At that time, most people in the UK presented with the following scenario simply could not work out the obvious explanation: A man and his son are travelling in a car and are involved in an accident in which the man is killed outright. The son is rushed to hospital and into the operating theatre where the surgeon on duty takes one look at him and exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s my son.”
https://thecommunists.org/2011/02/01/ne ... s-day-100/
The women who showed the way forward – and the work we have still to do.
The daughter of working people and a young factory worker herself, the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel in space in 1963. From tractor drivers to doctors, scientists to engineers, the USSR pushed back the boundaries of what class society had deemed appropriate and possible for women to do.
Ella Rule
Tuesday 1 February 2011
The 8th of March 2011 will be a particularly important occasion for women and workers all over the world, since it marks 100 years since International Women’s Day was honoured for the first time.
As long ago as 1925, Josef Stalin explained the significance of the date for workers generally:
“Not a single great movement of the oppressed in the history of mankind has been able to do without the participation of working women.
“Working women, the most oppressed among the oppressed, never have or could stand aside from the broad path of the liberation movement. This movement of slaves has produced, as is known, hundreds and thousands of martyrs and heroines. Tens of thousands of working women were to be found in the ranks of fighters for the liberation of the serfs. It is not surprising that millions of working women have been drawn in beneath the banners of the revolutionary movement of the working class, the most powerful of all liberation movements of the oppressed masses.
“International Women’s Day is a token of invincibility and an augury of the great future which lies before the liberation movement of the working class.
“Working women – workers and peasants – are the greatest reserve of the working class. This reserve constitutes a good half of the population. The fate of the proletarian movement, the victory or defeat of the proletarian revolution, the victory or defeat of proletarian power depends on whether or not the reserve of women will be for or against the working class.
“That is why the first task of the proletariat and its advanced detachment, the communist party, is to engage in decisive struggle for the freeing of women workers and peasants from the influence of the bourgeoisie, for political education and the organisation of women workers and peasants beneath the banner of the proletariat.
“International Women’s Day is a means of winning the women’s labour reserves to the side of the proletariat. Working women are not only reserves, however. They can and must become – if the working class carries out a correct policy – a real army of the working class, operating against the bourgeoisie.
“The second and decisive task of the working class is to forge an army of worker and peasant women out of the women’s labour reserves to operate shoulder to shoulder with the great army of the proletariat.
“International Woman’s Day must become a means for turning worker and peasant women from a reserve of the working class into an active army in the liberation movement of the proletariat.” (1925 International Women’s Day address by JV Stalin)
Enormous advances have been made almost throughout the world since the first celebration of International Women’s Day was held on 19 March 1911 (it was only later that the date was changed to 8 March). [1] We have only to look at the demands of women at that time: a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland attended rallies on that date to campaign for a woman’s right to work in paid employment, to vote and to hold public office.
It was Clara Zetkin, a leading German socialist, who first tabled the idea of an International Women’s Day at the second International Conference of Working Women, which was held in Copenhagen in 1910. It was held in the aftermath of a successful end to a prominent and bitter struggle of some 70,000 US garment workers in New York.
The workforce in that strike had been predominantly (70 percent) female. Two thirds of the women workers were jewish, mostly of east European origin, and a third were of Italian origin. Many had had connections with the Bund, a jewish socialist organisation that had given them experience of conducting strikes in Germany.
Faced with general strike, the employers, with the backing of the forces of the state, resorted viciously to dismissals, mass arrests, manhandling, and convictions to terms in the workhouse. Led by the fiery and courageous Ukrainian Clara Lemlich, who set the example to other strikers by returning to the picket line after company goons had broken three of her ribs, the workers stood firm, and the employers, faced with the approach of the most profitable ‘season’ for the garment trade, finally backed down.
The gains that the women made were that the working week was limited to 52 hours (previously 65-75 hours depending on the time of year), workers were given four holidays with pay, employers were required to supply all tools necessary for the job (previously women having to supply their own needles, thread and sewing machines), and a grievance committee was established to deal with individual issues that came up.
However, the gains of this successful strike extended beyond the factory gates. Indeed, they extended beyond the borders of the USA. The victory energised and encouraged the working-class movement all over the world, particularly by highlighting the militant potential of women workers.
It helped many male workers to see that working women deserved equality and to overcome their prejudiced beliefs, engendered by the very fact of women’s subservience in class society, to the effect that women were inferior and that it was unnecessarily divisive for the working-class movement to embrace the demand for equal status for women. It demonstrated the fact that women could be as militant as men, and as useful in a fight as men, and that therefore there could be no justification in sidelining their demands.
As Stalin’s quotation above makes quite clear, the very success of a revolution depends on mobilising the forces of the entire proletariat, a task which would be impossible if the legitimate and pressing demands of fully half of the working-class masses were ignored.
It was in these circumstances that, in 1910, at a second international conference of working women held in Copenhagen and attended by over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties and working women’s clubs, Clara Zetkin, a prominent member of the communist German Social-Democratic party, proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day – a Women’s Day – to press for their demands. Her proposal was enthusiastically adopted by all those present.
The event was successful beyond anything the organisers had hoped for and set the scene for the celebrations of future years.
Russian women, who already had a long and honourable history of struggle against tsarist oppression and inhuman working conditions, eagerly took up the call to celebrate International Women’s Day, even though it was illegal under the conditions of tsarism to do so. They marked their first International Women’s Day on what was, for them, the last Sunday in February. However, this date was according to the outdated Julian calendar that was still in use in Russia. In countries that had converted to the Gregorian calendar, the date in question was 8 March.
The Russian women used the occasion to publish articles, making whatever use they could of legal outlets, including legal workers’ newspapers. A public meeting was called by women Bolsheviks at the Kalashaikovsky Exchange in Petrograd to discuss ‘The Woman Question’. Although the meeting was illegal, the venue was packed out and a lively discussion ensued until the meeting was raided by the police and many of the speakers were arrested.
The Bolsheviks continued to give great importance to promoting the demands of women and to supporting the celebrations of International Women’s Day each year. .
In 1914, under the editorship of comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife), the first issue of The Woman Worker (Rabotnitsa), a journal for working-class women, began to be published. Along with Iskra, The Woman Worker was printed abroad and smuggled into Russia for widespread distribution. At the same time, the Bolsheviks decided to create a special committee to organise meetings for International Women’s Day to be held in the factories and public places to discuss issues related to women’s oppression. At these meetings, representatives were elected, and the resulting proposals were discussed by the new committee they formed.
It cannot be over-emphasised how important this work turned out to be for the success of the socialist October Revolution. It is not for nothing that the tsarist secret policy reported to the ministry of the interior in January 1917 that: “Mothers of families, exhausted by endless standing in line at stores, distraught over their half-starving and sick children, are today perhaps closer to revolution than [the liberal opposition] and of course they are a great deal more dangerous because they are the combustible material for which only a single spark is needed to burst into flame.” (Quoted in William M Mandel, Soviet Women, 1975, p43)
Women’s Day 1917 in Russia
On International Women’s Day 1917, workers, including women workers in textile and metal-working industries, were on strike in St Petersburg. The most prominent issue behind the protests was opposition to Russia’s participation in the imperialist war. The war had made Russian women even more of a force to be reckoned with.
Natasha Samoilova (a founding editor of Pravda and an activist in the Baku oilfields of Azerbaijan) wrote that the war “had torn thousands of women away from housework and thrown them into the factories in place of their husbands to earn their daily bread. That war undoubtedly gave impetus to the political consciousness of women workers … and compelled them to take a more active part in the overall struggle of the working class for its liberation.” (Ibid, p47)
On 8 March (23 February on the Julian calendar), women in their thousands poured onto the streets to demand bread, peace, and the return of the men from the trenches. This was the spark that set off the February Revolution, the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of the provisional government to implement the democratic demands of the revolutionary masses. The government made the franchise universal, and recognised equal rights for women.
Subsequent to these momentous events, 8 March became the official date for International Women’s Day, when Bulgarian women attending the international women’s secretariat of the Communist International in 1921 proposed a motion that the event be uniformly celebrated around the world. The 8th of March was chosen to honour the role played by Russian women not only in their own revolution, but in the international struggle for women’s emancipation.
Today, International Women’s Day is still marked by a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
After the October Revolution
The grant by the provisional government of universal franchise and its declaration of women’s equal rights satisfied the bourgeois ladies, who joined their menfolk in continuing to support the imperialist war that was wreaking such appalling hardship on the mass of workers and peasants. The failure of the provisional government to extract Russia from the war sealed its fate and set the scene for the success of the October Revolution that followed.
However, the grant of these minimal formal rights, although astonishingly advanced at the time, certainly did not satisfy the Bolsheviks, who were committed to eliminating not just the formal aspects of women’s subservience to men, but also the whole gamut of conditions that gave rise to that subservience.
Although some bourgeois countries had before 1917 made a few concessions towards women’s formal equality (for instance, Finland had given the right to women to be elected to its parliament, its first three women MPs having attended the 1910 women’s conference in Copenhagen), no country could match the comprehensive abolition of all laws discriminating against women that was implemented by the Bolshevik government following the October Revolution.
The Bolsheviks introduced divorce and civil marriage laws that made marriage a voluntary alliance. They abolished all distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. They gave women employment rights equal to those of men, equal pay for equal work (a concept not introduced in the UK until 1970, following the strike of the women machinists of Ford’s in Dagenham), and rights to paid leave during pregnancy and after the birth of children.
It was decades before any bourgeois country caught up, and, even then, the implementation of these laws in bourgeois countries could never match up to the thoroughness with which they were implemented in the USSR.
Ensuring women could take up their new rights in practice
The Bolsheviks were not satisfied with merely passing laws. They also undertook a vast array of measures to ensure that women could enjoy equality in practice. This meant not only ensuring that jobs were equally available to men and to women, but that women were able to catch up despite the fact that they were mostly much more uneducated than men.
The literacy campaign undertaken by the Bolsheviks, which was able to put an end to Russia’s prevalent illiteracy in just a few years, was a major factor enabling women to come into their own. On the one hand, they could read to find out about their new rights and to learn of the positive examples set by other women in various part of the country; on the other hand, the ability to read opened the door to more advanced education and to skilled and intellectual jobs.
The party also battled hard against prejudice and discrimination exercised by people who had never had the opportunity to experience for themselves the sight of women doing perfectly competently what had hitherto always been ‘men’s work’. With a view to sweeping away such prejudices as quickly as possible, a policy of positive discrimination in favour of women was adopted, which required women to be offered any job ahead of male candidates with equivalent qualifications.
In the countryside, the lot of the peasant woman changed drastically when, in the collective farms, she found that all workers were paid individually according to how much work they did. She ceased to be dependent on her husband’s income, which in the past had delivered into his hands the fruits of all her labour simply because the land that was worked was always in his name.
The fact that the burden of housework had traditionally always fallen on women, whether or not they worked outside the home, always diminished the contribution that women could make either to labour or to participation in political life. Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks led a major effort to provide as many social facilities as possible to lift that heavy burden from women’s shoulders.
Creches, kindergartens and nurseries were provided for the care of children (of excellent quality, and very affordably priced), public dining rooms were set up for workers and their families so that it was not necessary to cook every day. Men were also encouraged, with varying success, to take up some share of the remaining housework. After the second world war, families tended to ensure that housework was reduced to a minimum by confining themselves to only one child.
Women’s emancipation in practice
One way or another, the Soviet Union revolutionised women’s position. Women were introduced en masse into professions and trades that they had never been considered capable of undertaking. By the 1970s, three-quarters of Soviet doctors were women – and this at a time when in western imperialist countries most people’s stereotype of a doctor was uncompromisingly male. [2]
The introduction of women into every male preserve was not only carried out in the Soviet Union decades before capitalist countries followed suit, but was far more thorough than any capitalist country has ever done it. To this day, British and US professional women complain of a ‘glass ceiling’ that prevents most of them from reaching the highest echelons of their profession. Such a thing was unknown in Soviet Russia, where there were any number of women in top positions.
At the same time, the skill of jobs that had traditionally been regarded as ‘women’s work’ and had by association acquired the same low status as women themselves, became fully appreciated, and paid accordingly. As Mandel, writing in 1975, explained:
“Milkmaid in a collective … or state … farm, which involves feeding and care of the animals and their calves as well as milking, is a new job arising out of the real history of farming and of culture … in a real country. Champion milkmaids are awarded the country’s highest honour: the title of Hero of Socialist Labour. They are elected to Congress …
“In old Russia men worked with the draft animals as women did with the producing livestock. So today men are virtually all the operators of farm machinery, despite 40 years of real effort on the government’s part … to involve women in that work …
“But milkmaids usually earn more than tractor drivers. This is because animal care is harder work under Russia’s present conditions … Earnings have a lot to do with one’s prestige in interpersonal relations, as well as with one’s independence, of course.” (Ibid, p79)
By the time William Mandel was writing his book, women in the USSR were in a majority among employed graduates. It is therefore no accident that the first woman in space, as early as 1963, was a Russian, Valentina Tereshkova, daughter of peasants who had been the poorest of the poor until collectivisation.
At the time, it was unheard of in western countries for women even to be pilots of anything other than light planes, let alone test pilots. After Soviet women had blazed the trail, a woman in the USA was elevated to the position of second officer in a scheduled airline – but not until ten years after Tereshkova made her historic flight.
Another sphere that was largely closed to western women (although there were always exceptions to prove the rule) was navigation. Every kind of prejudice made it impossible for them to aspire to imitate the example of Captain Anna Schetinina, the master of a 20,000 ton freighter, or Captain Valentina Orlikova, who in 1956 was given command of a large refrigerated ocean fishing trawler with a crew of 90.
Since those days, the US navy (to take one example) has hastened to appoint a certain number of women to the highest positions. A high proportion of women admirals, however, are medical personnel rather than navigators or commanders of ships.
The first woman to be put in command of a US Navy cruiser, Captain Holly Graf, did not achieve that position until 2003. Last year, however, she was out on her ear, after displaying ‘inappropriate’ behaviour classically consistent with having been subjected to long-term low-grade bullying. When her ship shuddered as though it had run aground, her crew started clapping and cheering to show how happy they were that her career would undoubtedly end as a result.
Mandel’s book gave countless examples of Soviet women in positions of the highest responsibility – directors of scientific establishments, college principals, hydraulic project managers, hospital managers, top-flight medical consultants, etc, etc.
Maria Volodina was in charge eight hours a day of distributing electrical power throughout all the territory between Poland and Siberia, just at a time when in Colorado USA, a construction crew walked off the job when, for the first time in the history of the industry, a woman engineer entered a tunnel when work was in progress.
In the early 1970s, one-third of all judges in the USSR were women. In 1974, in Britain, Rose Heilbron became only the second female high-court judge. Even today in the UK, women are only about ten percent of judges appointed to the high court, and there have only been 20 in total. The situation is better in the USA, where women have today almost caught up with the Soviet women of the 1970s, since they represent about 25 percent of all judges.
Women’s work received the highest honours, including when they were working in areas that had previously been men’s exclusive preserve. Mandel noted that nominations for state prizes in the early 1970s included nominations for women working in the fields of earthquake geography, English literature, thermodynamics, automotive engineering, steel-mill engineering, and computer design and development.
Furthermore, in 1975, there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. They were greater in number than male engineers in the USA, and of course far outnumbered US women engineers, who at that time were only two percent of the total. In the USSR, they were 30 percent of the total number of engineers – but 38 percent of engineering students, laying the basis for becoming a higher percentage of the total employed once these students had graduated.
Meanwhile, if we zoom ahead to the UK in the early 21st century, we find that although in professions such as medicine and law women rapidly caught up with men after the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 (horizontally but not yet vertically – there are few women at the top), the same cannot be said of science and engineering, which still persist as virtual male preserves.
Professor Juliet Glover of Surrey university has researched the current situation and found that in engineering and science-related areas of employment “women’s representation remains persistently low”, while in ITEC (information technology, electronics and telecommunications) it was actually decreasing in 2002. Only about 20 percent of A-level science students were female, and only 35 percent of mathematics students.
In 1973, only three percent of Britain’s engineering undergraduates were female, and by 2000 this had only risen to 12 percent, while students of physics and computing did not increase the proportion of females from around 20 percent in all that quarter of a century.
Few though women engineering students were, and small though the number was entering scientific or engineering employment (teaching being the only area where a higher proportion of women graduates obtained employment as opposed to men, though even there women becoming science teachers were far fewer than men who did so), half of the women who did enter such employment dropped out within a few years, with many failing to return to work after the birth of their first child. As one goes higher up the promotional ladder, the percentage of women gets smaller and smaller, until at the summit it is all but imperceptible.
If Soviet women were well represented in the highest echelons of jobs requiring graduate qualifications, they also expanded their presence in manual jobs that had hitherto been overwhelmingly reserved for men.
“By 1959, one third of all crane, derrick and forklift operators were women. In their mothers’ generation, in 1926, only one such job in a hundred was held by a woman … In the earlier year, one streetcar driver in thirty was a woman, but by 1959 women were a majority of those at the control of these vehicles, trolley buses and subway trains.” (Ibid, p106)
In Britain, we would appear still to be closer to the 1926 Soviet woman than the 1959 one!
The historic end of women’s oppression
In his seminal work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels showed that the inferior status of women in all societies existing at the time he was writing was not due to women being in any way inferior to men, but to the fact that they had been stripped under class society of their independent economic role. Instead, they were confined in the home as a chattel of their husbands, with no role other than to perform household chores and bear children, and were totally financially dependent on their husbands for their every need.
Class society condemned women to inferiority by depriving them of education and of the opportunity to develop and put to work their underlying talents. From this, Engels drew the natural conclusion that once they were returned to social production and became economically independent of their husbands, the basis would be laid for their emancipation.
He and Marx had already noted how the status of working-class women had risen within the family as a result of their having been drawn back into social production by greedy capitalists keen to exploit their cheap labour – but also how their full emancipation was held back by the fact that by tradition they still had to bear a massive burden of domestic drudgery alongside their backbreaking jobs outside the home.
Because the Soviet Union was committed to securing the full emancipation of women, every effort was made to ensure the provision of facilities such as creches, kindergartens, public dining rooms, public laundry services, etc, as well as maternity benefits and flexible working hours, so that women could be genuinely free to participate in social production and in social life on an equal basis with men.
On this front, capitalist countries have always lagged way behind the Soviet Union and there is little chance of their catching up. To the extent that there are social facilities at all, they either tend to be terrible (eg, old people’s homes) or financially beyond reach of all but the best paid (nurseries, kindergartens, decent restaurants providing healthy food) – sometimes both. And as the present crisis bites deeper, it is clear that what facilities had previously been won for British workers are going to be cut to the bone in the coming years.
The only relief from backbreaking drudgery for women under capitalism is provided by technological developments that provide laboursaving household devices such as washing machines, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners. And as more women have entered the workforce, particularly as it has become the norm for middle-class women to go out to work, more and more husbands have gradually been taking up a share of household chores.
Compared to the kind of social provision, especially for the care of children and the elderly, that was available in the USSR, however, gadget-wielding husbands and wives still have a heavy burden to bear and are often forced to leave children to the care of the television set far more than is recognised to be physically, intellectually and morally good for them.
The introduction of ‘market’ socialism, while it was still way ahead of the capitalist competition in the west in mobilising female labour, hampered progress in the USSR to full equality. When the aim of production ceased to be to satisfy to the maximum possible extent workers’ material, cultural and spiritual needs and became instead the generation of maximum profit, then providing workers with social facilities was bound to appear to be an overhead that was best avoided.
Social facilities began to wither away for much the same reason that they are barely provided in the first place in capitalist countries. As a result, the process of the emancipation of women in the USSR began to slow down significantly by the time they had on average attained an earning potential that was three-quarters that of men, which was already the case by the 1970s.
International Women’s Day 2011
As we celebrate the centenary of International Women’s Day, it has to be admitted that the cause of women’s liberation has advanced a long way towards what was dreamed of in 1910 – and that it was the Soviet Union which led the way and which went furthest along that path.
By demonstrating that anything men could do women could do too, the Soviet Union established that there was not a single branch of social production that could not be open to women. Even capitalists in these circumstances were able, if painstakingly, to break with tradition and start employing women in all kinds of jobs in which they had never been seen before.
Women were originally paid only low wages because male wages were supposed to include the cost of maintaining a wife and family. This is because the value of male labour equals the cost of reproducing himself as a labourer from generation to generation, which at a time when women did not generally work outside the home, included maintenance of a wife. As a result of it becoming the norm for women to work outside the home, the wage a man would once have received alone has been split, and now pays for the labour of both the man and his wife (the latter at least part time), so that these days the capitalist is getting two workers for the price of one, and both men and women have to do household chores on top of their jobs.
In spite of all this, women in Britain are much freer. They have independent incomes that make it possible for them to leave a loveless marriage; they do not have to tolerate bullying and violence against either themselves or their children; they have access to education to a far greater extent; they are able to engage in work that is far more stimulating and satisfying than confinement to household drudgery.
They still have, however, a long way to go. Working-class women, in particular, desperately need access to social facilities to make their lives bearable and to enable them to give their children as good a start in life as they deserve, and so that society can benefit from people whose potential is fully developed in childhood.
As the crisis deepens, the situation of women is becoming worse and not better. The few areas in which women could find some support are being ruthlessly cut. While taxation rises, wages plunge in inverse proportion to rising unemployment. It is time to take up the cudgels again in the fashion of the New York garment workers, and more particularly in the fashion of the women of Russia’s revolutionary proletariat.
Experience shows that it is only under socialism that women’s needs can really be given priority, for it is only under socialism that the whole of production is geared to serving the needs of working people in general rather than the interests of profit, which always grudges every penny spent on wages and social facilities.
Women workers must stand shoulder to shoulder with the revolutionary proletariat as a whole to overthrow capitalism and establish and build socialism. And it stands to reason that the revolutionary proletariat must always put attending to the needs of the working-class women as one of their most urgent priorities, both in their demands on the capitalist class and in the measures that they implement as soon as they seize state power.
______________________________
NOTES
1. The date was chosen because on 19 March in the year of the 1848 revolution, the Prussian king recognised for the first time the strength of the armed people and gave way before the threat of a proletarian uprising. Among the many promises he made, which he later failed to keep, was the introduction of votes for women.
2. At that time, most people in the UK presented with the following scenario simply could not work out the obvious explanation: A man and his son are travelling in a car and are involved in an accident in which the man is killed outright. The son is rushed to hospital and into the operating theatre where the surgeon on duty takes one look at him and exclaims, “Oh my God, it’s my son.”
https://thecommunists.org/2011/02/01/ne ... s-day-100/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Stalin’s Gamble: Historian Michael Carley in Interview With Canadian Journalist Arnold August
APRIL 7, 2024
Professor Michael Jabara Carley in the MGIMO University in Moscow, Russia, in February 2015. Photo: Wikipedia.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—In the first episode of Interviews by Arnold August, posted on August’s YouTube channel, the Canadian journalist and author interviews Professor Michael Jabara Carley to dig into his prolific work as a historian and his work in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives to shed light on the decisions taken by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the preamble of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call the ]World War II.
Professor Michael Jabara Carley, born in 1945 in the United States, starts the interview by recounting his political and personal evolution as a young man born in the Bronx, New York. His family later moved to New Orleans, where he was exposed to the racism inherent in US society. He traces his evolution through his involvement in the civil rights movement, including the bus ride from Selma to Montgomery. “The blinds had to be drawn to avoid snipers,” he said.
Later, his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement led him, like many other US citizens, to emigrate to Canada.
He explains how he had to choose between activism and academic endeavors. He excelled at the latter. Professor Carley of the Department of History, Université de Montréal, is an expert on the history of Russian and Soviet foreign policy. He wrote six books (published and forthcoming)—four of them in Russia, and numerous translations. He is a prolific writer who is not afraid to take unpopular positions. The first of his trilogy is Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930-1936, published by the University of Toronto Press.
The trilogy is based on more than two decades of original research on the archives of the USSR, carried out by the historian. “In the interview, it is difficult to determine where Carley ends and the archives begin; the two seem to merge, such is his profound knowledge of the subject,” Arnold August remarked.
The core of the interview is based on the first volume of the series, which deals with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, one of the most controversial and disinformation-laden events in recent history.
Carley does not disappoint. In a lively and down-to-earth narrative, peppered with facts and analysis, he sets the record straight, by explaining the history of, on the one hand, the USSR’s intensive search for anti-Nazi allies in the 1930s and, on the other, the rejection of France, Great Britain, the US, Poland (a lost cause from the beginning), Romania, and even Italy as potential pillars against Nazi Germany.
Viewers are treated to some important yet virtually unknown facts about how the USSR attempted to form an alliance to contain the growing threat of Hitler and fascism. The “archive rat,” as Carley calls himself, narrates that the leaders of these countries (except Poland) who favored an anti-German Nazi alliance, such as US President Roosevelt, were in the minority among the elite, while the majority of the ruling circles in these countries were against the USSR, such as the powerful US State Department and its vast network in that country, for example.
Professor Carley shared this anecdote that illustrates both the tragic outcome of Stalin’s gamble (in retrospect) and how the failure of this gamble affected the USSR and its quest for peace.
During the interview, the modest, self-effacing professor, a rare phenomenon in North American academia, returns to his high school days, when his teacher, who had a profound influence on his life, told him: “Dare to think differently.” He jokes that his teacher forgot to add, “You’ll get in trouble.” Carley admits emotionally but with pride, “To get to where I am now, I have suffered many defeats in life. I have always dusted myself off and gotten back up again.”
https://orinocotribune.com/stalins-gamb ... ld-august/
APRIL 7, 2024
Professor Michael Jabara Carley in the MGIMO University in Moscow, Russia, in February 2015. Photo: Wikipedia.
Caracas (OrinocoTribune.com)—In the first episode of Interviews by Arnold August, posted on August’s YouTube channel, the Canadian journalist and author interviews Professor Michael Jabara Carley to dig into his prolific work as a historian and his work in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives to shed light on the decisions taken by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the preamble of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call the ]World War II.
Professor Michael Jabara Carley, born in 1945 in the United States, starts the interview by recounting his political and personal evolution as a young man born in the Bronx, New York. His family later moved to New Orleans, where he was exposed to the racism inherent in US society. He traces his evolution through his involvement in the civil rights movement, including the bus ride from Selma to Montgomery. “The blinds had to be drawn to avoid snipers,” he said.
Later, his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement led him, like many other US citizens, to emigrate to Canada.
He explains how he had to choose between activism and academic endeavors. He excelled at the latter. Professor Carley of the Department of History, Université de Montréal, is an expert on the history of Russian and Soviet foreign policy. He wrote six books (published and forthcoming)—four of them in Russia, and numerous translations. He is a prolific writer who is not afraid to take unpopular positions. The first of his trilogy is Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930-1936, published by the University of Toronto Press.
The trilogy is based on more than two decades of original research on the archives of the USSR, carried out by the historian. “In the interview, it is difficult to determine where Carley ends and the archives begin; the two seem to merge, such is his profound knowledge of the subject,” Arnold August remarked.
The core of the interview is based on the first volume of the series, which deals with the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, one of the most controversial and disinformation-laden events in recent history.
Carley does not disappoint. In a lively and down-to-earth narrative, peppered with facts and analysis, he sets the record straight, by explaining the history of, on the one hand, the USSR’s intensive search for anti-Nazi allies in the 1930s and, on the other, the rejection of France, Great Britain, the US, Poland (a lost cause from the beginning), Romania, and even Italy as potential pillars against Nazi Germany.
Viewers are treated to some important yet virtually unknown facts about how the USSR attempted to form an alliance to contain the growing threat of Hitler and fascism. The “archive rat,” as Carley calls himself, narrates that the leaders of these countries (except Poland) who favored an anti-German Nazi alliance, such as US President Roosevelt, were in the minority among the elite, while the majority of the ruling circles in these countries were against the USSR, such as the powerful US State Department and its vast network in that country, for example.
Professor Carley shared this anecdote that illustrates both the tragic outcome of Stalin’s gamble (in retrospect) and how the failure of this gamble affected the USSR and its quest for peace.
During the interview, the modest, self-effacing professor, a rare phenomenon in North American academia, returns to his high school days, when his teacher, who had a profound influence on his life, told him: “Dare to think differently.” He jokes that his teacher forgot to add, “You’ll get in trouble.” Carley admits emotionally but with pride, “To get to where I am now, I have suffered many defeats in life. I have always dusted myself off and gotten back up again.”
https://orinocotribune.com/stalins-gamb ... ld-august/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Fabrication of Katyn
April 11, 21:32
The FSB in the Smolensk region released an archive about the executions of Poles by the Nazis and the falsification of the Katyn case. Copies of unique historical documents were transferred to the OGKU "State Archive of Contemporary History of the Smolensk Region" as part of the project "Without a Statute of Limitations"
Start. Part 1.
This declassified archive includes working documents from 1944-1945 of the Smersh counterintelligence departments - certificates, interrogation reports, intelligence data, special messages to the Center.
The most interesting part of the declassified archive is the protocol of interrogations of Poles who served in the Wehrmacht in auxiliary and construction military units of Smolensk and the Smolensk region.
For example, a native of Poland, ethnic Pole Eduard Potkansky, who served at the Krasny Bor station in the Smolensk region, in a separate labor battalion, testified as follows during interrogations.
“In the summer of 1943, the Germans decided to show the participants of the working battalion the graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. According to the Germans, up to 12 thousand executed Polish officers lay in these graves, and up to 3 thousand more people are in another place, and these graves have not yet been opened “
What struck him,” Potkansky recalled, was that near the graves lay officer belongings, personal letters and documents of officers, as well as Polish cash. Moreover, what most struck those who examined these “material evidence” was that the cash was brand new, absolutely not from everyday circulation. And even more so - not after being in the ground for 4 years, since 1939, when, according to the Germans, the NKVD officers shot Polish officers.
Another prisoner of war, Roman Kowalski, who also inspected this mass grave in the Katyn forest, testified that
“from the majority of the corpses of those executed [it was] clear that these were very recent victims. In the published lists of executed Polish officers in Katyn, many of our working battalion found their own among the names of the dead acquaintances arrested even earlier by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps in Germany."
The administrator of Russian workers at the Focke-Wulf plant, a certain Smektal, testified that in April 1943 he was appointed as a delegate of the commission to investigate the massacre of Polish soldiers and officers in Katyn forest.
“One of the leaders of the Pozno SD (security service of the Reichsführer SS - TASS note), Sturmbannführer Gepner, had a conversation with the commission in which he warned that their trip to Katyn had propaganda purposes and that upon returning from there they should declare that they had personally seen 12 thousand corpses of Polish officers. <...> [After returning] the SD obliged the members of the commission to speak before meetings of Polish workers with propaganda reports about the trip to Katyn. The abstracts of the reports were previously edited by the SD"
Also, from Smektal's testimony:
"As a former judicial worker, I was it is clear from the behavior of these “witnesses” that they were specially prepared by the SD... The corpses shown to the commission did not look as if they had lain in the ground for several years... The clothes had not decayed, but on the corpse [of the Polish military leader,General of the Brigade Bronislav] Bogatyrevich, the lower part of his face with a mustache and goatee has been preserved"
(Other photos at link.)
https://t.me/otryadkovpaka/38120 - zinc
The truth is slowly but surely making its way.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9087574.html
Google Translator
April 11, 21:32
The FSB in the Smolensk region released an archive about the executions of Poles by the Nazis and the falsification of the Katyn case. Copies of unique historical documents were transferred to the OGKU "State Archive of Contemporary History of the Smolensk Region" as part of the project "Without a Statute of Limitations"
Start. Part 1.
This declassified archive includes working documents from 1944-1945 of the Smersh counterintelligence departments - certificates, interrogation reports, intelligence data, special messages to the Center.
The most interesting part of the declassified archive is the protocol of interrogations of Poles who served in the Wehrmacht in auxiliary and construction military units of Smolensk and the Smolensk region.
For example, a native of Poland, ethnic Pole Eduard Potkansky, who served at the Krasny Bor station in the Smolensk region, in a separate labor battalion, testified as follows during interrogations.
“In the summer of 1943, the Germans decided to show the participants of the working battalion the graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. According to the Germans, up to 12 thousand executed Polish officers lay in these graves, and up to 3 thousand more people are in another place, and these graves have not yet been opened “
What struck him,” Potkansky recalled, was that near the graves lay officer belongings, personal letters and documents of officers, as well as Polish cash. Moreover, what most struck those who examined these “material evidence” was that the cash was brand new, absolutely not from everyday circulation. And even more so - not after being in the ground for 4 years, since 1939, when, according to the Germans, the NKVD officers shot Polish officers.
Another prisoner of war, Roman Kowalski, who also inspected this mass grave in the Katyn forest, testified that
“from the majority of the corpses of those executed [it was] clear that these were very recent victims. In the published lists of executed Polish officers in Katyn, many of our working battalion found their own among the names of the dead acquaintances arrested even earlier by the Gestapo and sent to concentration camps in Germany."
The administrator of Russian workers at the Focke-Wulf plant, a certain Smektal, testified that in April 1943 he was appointed as a delegate of the commission to investigate the massacre of Polish soldiers and officers in Katyn forest.
“One of the leaders of the Pozno SD (security service of the Reichsführer SS - TASS note), Sturmbannführer Gepner, had a conversation with the commission in which he warned that their trip to Katyn had propaganda purposes and that upon returning from there they should declare that they had personally seen 12 thousand corpses of Polish officers. <...> [After returning] the SD obliged the members of the commission to speak before meetings of Polish workers with propaganda reports about the trip to Katyn. The abstracts of the reports were previously edited by the SD"
Also, from Smektal's testimony:
"As a former judicial worker, I was it is clear from the behavior of these “witnesses” that they were specially prepared by the SD... The corpses shown to the commission did not look as if they had lain in the ground for several years... The clothes had not decayed, but on the corpse [of the Polish military leader,General of the Brigade Bronislav] Bogatyrevich, the lower part of his face with a mustache and goatee has been preserved"
(Other photos at link.)
https://t.me/otryadkovpaka/38120 - zinc
The truth is slowly but surely making its way.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9087574.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Interrogation of Karl Radek
April 13, 14:59
Cool idea. Film videos with live actors using real interrogation protocols from 1937.
There is no need to invent anything of your own - a real archival interrogation document is taken and reproduced in a playful form.
In this case, it is proposed to look at one of the interrogations of Karl Radek.
Taking into account the fact that if the viewer is not too immersed in the materials of the cases of enemies of the people, you can take various controversial cases of that period and invite the viewer at the end, on the basis of the interrogation protocol read out, to take the side of the interrogator or investigator, which in the conditions of 1937 created conditions when, with one On the other hand, the enemy of the people could be trying to get out of a frying pan, trying to present himself as innocent, and the investigator could be a hidden enemy of the people who falsified criminal cases.
In general, I hope the authors will not abandon this fertile topic. Before the war, I liked to read on Istmat the declassified materials of interrogations of 1937-1938, as well as interrogations in the Kirov case. A very educational read.
PS. Radek himself was killed in prison in 1939 by another prisoner. After the Second World War, Lieutenant General of the NKVD Kubatkin, who was accused of organizing the murder of Radek, was arrested in the Leningrad case, accused of various abuses and shot in 1950. Kubatkin did not admit his guilt during the investigation.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9090755.html
Google Translator
April 13, 14:59
Cool idea. Film videos with live actors using real interrogation protocols from 1937.
There is no need to invent anything of your own - a real archival interrogation document is taken and reproduced in a playful form.
In this case, it is proposed to look at one of the interrogations of Karl Radek.
Taking into account the fact that if the viewer is not too immersed in the materials of the cases of enemies of the people, you can take various controversial cases of that period and invite the viewer at the end, on the basis of the interrogation protocol read out, to take the side of the interrogator or investigator, which in the conditions of 1937 created conditions when, with one On the other hand, the enemy of the people could be trying to get out of a frying pan, trying to present himself as innocent, and the investigator could be a hidden enemy of the people who falsified criminal cases.
In general, I hope the authors will not abandon this fertile topic. Before the war, I liked to read on Istmat the declassified materials of interrogations of 1937-1938, as well as interrogations in the Kirov case. A very educational read.
PS. Radek himself was killed in prison in 1939 by another prisoner. After the Second World War, Lieutenant General of the NKVD Kubatkin, who was accused of organizing the murder of Radek, was arrested in the Leningrad case, accused of various abuses and shot in 1950. Kubatkin did not admit his guilt during the investigation.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9090755.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
FROM THE CLASSICS: SOVIET CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DELEGATION OF THE CP CHINA IN MOSCOW, 1949
Posted by MLT Editors | Apr 15, 2024
From the Classics: Soviet Conversations with the Delegation of the CP China in Moscow, 1949
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interesting excerpt from the publication Revolutionary Democracy has a bearing on current debates about “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” We thank reader M.S. Andreou for calling our attention to the citation.
Soviet Conversations with the Delegation of the CP of China in Moscow, July 11, 1949
The Central Committee (CC) of the CPC (Communist Party of China) decided in July 1949 to submit to the decisions of the CPSU ( Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Stalin sharply remonstrated against this decision arguing that this was in principle impermissible between two ruling communist parties. The Russian editor of volume 18 of the works of Stalin in his annotation cites further the fraternal criticism by the Soviet leader of the notion propagated by the CPC and Mao himself from the 1930s onward of the notion of the ‘Sinification’ of Marxism in China. Vijay Singh, Revolutionary Democracy
“The Chinese delegation declares that the Communist Party of China will submit to the decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” To us, this seems odd. The party of one state submitting to a party from another state. It has never happened and is impermissible. It is true both the parties must be accountable before their respective peoples, must confer with each other on certain questions, help each other, and in difficulty unite both the parties. So today’s meeting of the Politbureau with your participation serves as one of the forms of association between our parties. And it must be so.
We are very grateful for such an honour, but some ideas are not acceptable and we want to point them out. It is like advice from a friend. It is so not only in words but in deed too. We may give you advice, but cannot give orders as we are insufficiently informed about the situation in China, cannot even compare ourselves with you in the knowledge of all the nuances of the situation, but above all we cannot give orders because the affairs of China must be fully resolved by you. We cannot resolve them for you.
You have to understand the importance of your position and that the mission that you have taken upon yourself has an historical significance unsurpassed before in history. And this is not meant to be just a compliment. This just goes to show how great is your responsibility and the historical significance of your mission.
Exchange of views between our two parties is essential, but our view should never be interpreted as an order. The communist parties of other countries may reject our suggestions. We too may not accept the suggestions of the communist parties of other countries.
Stalin’s Comments Noted Down by I.V. Kovalev
Rakhmanin O.B. Stalin and Mao // Dosier 2000. No. 3. C. 10
Note. Stalin expresses astonishment by the posture of complete submission of the Chinese communists to the Soviet decisions, but this posture is the effect of the directive from Mao Tse tung and is contained in the report dated 4 July 1949 that was handed over to the delegation of the CC CPSU by the CC CPC. ‘On the question of the relationship between the CPSU and the CPC’, it is stated in the document, comrade Mao Tse tung and the CPC are of the view:
The CPSU is the main headquarters of the international communist movement and the CPC a headquarter in just one direction. The interests of a part must be subservient to international interests, and therefore the CPC will unequivocally accept the decisions of the CPSU , even though the Comintern no longer exists and the CPC is not part of the Informbureau of the European Communist Parties. (Stalin, having read the report in this place writes: ‘No!’ Ed.) If on some questions there arise differences in the views between the CPC and the CPSU then the CPC having explained its view would submit to and decisively carry through the decisions of the CPSU . (Stalin: ‘No!’ Ed.) We think we should establish as close ties as possible between our two parties, mutually send appropriate political representatives in order to resolve the questions of concern to both our parties and to achieve better mutual understanding between our parties. (Stalin: ‘Yes’. Ed.)
We wish that the CC CPSU and comrade Stalin may give us without any reservations their directives and criticise the work and the policies of the CPC’ (Ledovsky, A.M. ‘USSR and Stalin in China’s Destiny’ pp. 102-103 (in Russian).
In the conversation, the meeting of the Politbureau of the CC CPSU is mentioned in which the delegation of the CC CPC headed by Liu Shao chi took part and presented the report on the military-political and economic situation in China.
From the beginning of 1947 to the end of 1949 Mao Tse tung’s visit to USSR was several times planned and then postponed. Regular communication was maintained for a prolonged period between him and Stalin which was carried through radio communication and was highly secret. Neither the Ministry of External Affairs nor the Soviet embassy in China knew about it. Stalin proved himself as an experienced conspirator and finally met Mao Tse tung not as a partisan and rebel leader but as the leader of the victorious Chinese revolution, the Chairman of the newly born People’s Republic of China. The conversations during the visit of Mao Tse tung to the USSR during 16 December and 17 February 1950 are contained in the book by Ledovsky mentioned above Fragments of the theoretical reasoning of Stalin in conversations with Mao Tse tung are also of interest as set forth (according to materials of V.M. Zhukhrai) in the book by V.V. Vakhani ‘The Personal Secret Service of J.V. Stalin’ (Moscow, 2004. pp. 414-416, in Russian):
‘You speak of Sinified socialism. There is nothing of the sort in nature. There is no Russian, English, French, German, Italian socialism, as much as there is no Chinese socialism. There is only one Marxist-Leninist socialism. It is another thing, that in the building of socialism it is necessary to take into consideration the specific features of a particular country. Socialism is a science, necessarily having, like all science, certain general laws, and one just needs to ignore them and the building of socialism is destined to failure.
What are these general laws of building of socialism?
1.Above all it is the dictatorship of the proletariat the workers’ and peasants’ state, a particular form of the union of these classes under the obligatory leadership of the most revolutionary class in history the class of workers. Only this class is capable of building socialism and suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and petty bourgeoisie.
2.Socialised property of the main instruments and means of production. Expropriation of all the large factories and their management by the state.
3.Nationalisation of all capitalist banks, the merging of all of them into a single state bank and strict regulation of its functioning by the state.
4.The scientific and planned conduct of the national economy from a single centre. Obligatory use of the following principle in the building of socialism: from each according to his capacity, to each according to his work, distribution of the material good depending upon the quality and quantity of the work of each person.
5.Obligatory domination of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
6.Creation of armed forces that would allow the defence of the accomplishments of the revolution and always remember that any revolution is worth anything only if it is capable of defending itself.
7.Ruthless armed suppression of counter revolutionaries and the foreign agents.
These, in short, are the main laws of socialism as a science, requiring that we relate to them as such. If you understand this everything with the building of socialism in China will be fine. If you won’t you will do great harm to the international communist movement. As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists. In the building of socialism in China I strongly recommend you to fully utilise Lenin’s splendid work ‘The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power’. This would assure success.
533.Stalin, Sochinenia, Tom 18, Informatsionno-izdatelskii tsentr ‘Soyuz’, Tver, 2006, pp. 531- 533.
Translated from the Russian by Tahir Asghar
https://mltoday.com/from-the-classics-s ... scow-1949/
Posted by MLT Editors | Apr 15, 2024
From the Classics: Soviet Conversations with the Delegation of the CP China in Moscow, 1949
EDITOR’S NOTE: This interesting excerpt from the publication Revolutionary Democracy has a bearing on current debates about “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” We thank reader M.S. Andreou for calling our attention to the citation.
Soviet Conversations with the Delegation of the CP of China in Moscow, July 11, 1949
The Central Committee (CC) of the CPC (Communist Party of China) decided in July 1949 to submit to the decisions of the CPSU ( Communist Party of the Soviet Union). Stalin sharply remonstrated against this decision arguing that this was in principle impermissible between two ruling communist parties. The Russian editor of volume 18 of the works of Stalin in his annotation cites further the fraternal criticism by the Soviet leader of the notion propagated by the CPC and Mao himself from the 1930s onward of the notion of the ‘Sinification’ of Marxism in China. Vijay Singh, Revolutionary Democracy
“The Chinese delegation declares that the Communist Party of China will submit to the decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” To us, this seems odd. The party of one state submitting to a party from another state. It has never happened and is impermissible. It is true both the parties must be accountable before their respective peoples, must confer with each other on certain questions, help each other, and in difficulty unite both the parties. So today’s meeting of the Politbureau with your participation serves as one of the forms of association between our parties. And it must be so.
We are very grateful for such an honour, but some ideas are not acceptable and we want to point them out. It is like advice from a friend. It is so not only in words but in deed too. We may give you advice, but cannot give orders as we are insufficiently informed about the situation in China, cannot even compare ourselves with you in the knowledge of all the nuances of the situation, but above all we cannot give orders because the affairs of China must be fully resolved by you. We cannot resolve them for you.
You have to understand the importance of your position and that the mission that you have taken upon yourself has an historical significance unsurpassed before in history. And this is not meant to be just a compliment. This just goes to show how great is your responsibility and the historical significance of your mission.
Exchange of views between our two parties is essential, but our view should never be interpreted as an order. The communist parties of other countries may reject our suggestions. We too may not accept the suggestions of the communist parties of other countries.
Stalin’s Comments Noted Down by I.V. Kovalev
Rakhmanin O.B. Stalin and Mao // Dosier 2000. No. 3. C. 10
Note. Stalin expresses astonishment by the posture of complete submission of the Chinese communists to the Soviet decisions, but this posture is the effect of the directive from Mao Tse tung and is contained in the report dated 4 July 1949 that was handed over to the delegation of the CC CPSU by the CC CPC. ‘On the question of the relationship between the CPSU and the CPC’, it is stated in the document, comrade Mao Tse tung and the CPC are of the view:
The CPSU is the main headquarters of the international communist movement and the CPC a headquarter in just one direction. The interests of a part must be subservient to international interests, and therefore the CPC will unequivocally accept the decisions of the CPSU , even though the Comintern no longer exists and the CPC is not part of the Informbureau of the European Communist Parties. (Stalin, having read the report in this place writes: ‘No!’ Ed.) If on some questions there arise differences in the views between the CPC and the CPSU then the CPC having explained its view would submit to and decisively carry through the decisions of the CPSU . (Stalin: ‘No!’ Ed.) We think we should establish as close ties as possible between our two parties, mutually send appropriate political representatives in order to resolve the questions of concern to both our parties and to achieve better mutual understanding between our parties. (Stalin: ‘Yes’. Ed.)
We wish that the CC CPSU and comrade Stalin may give us without any reservations their directives and criticise the work and the policies of the CPC’ (Ledovsky, A.M. ‘USSR and Stalin in China’s Destiny’ pp. 102-103 (in Russian).
In the conversation, the meeting of the Politbureau of the CC CPSU is mentioned in which the delegation of the CC CPC headed by Liu Shao chi took part and presented the report on the military-political and economic situation in China.
From the beginning of 1947 to the end of 1949 Mao Tse tung’s visit to USSR was several times planned and then postponed. Regular communication was maintained for a prolonged period between him and Stalin which was carried through radio communication and was highly secret. Neither the Ministry of External Affairs nor the Soviet embassy in China knew about it. Stalin proved himself as an experienced conspirator and finally met Mao Tse tung not as a partisan and rebel leader but as the leader of the victorious Chinese revolution, the Chairman of the newly born People’s Republic of China. The conversations during the visit of Mao Tse tung to the USSR during 16 December and 17 February 1950 are contained in the book by Ledovsky mentioned above Fragments of the theoretical reasoning of Stalin in conversations with Mao Tse tung are also of interest as set forth (according to materials of V.M. Zhukhrai) in the book by V.V. Vakhani ‘The Personal Secret Service of J.V. Stalin’ (Moscow, 2004. pp. 414-416, in Russian):
‘You speak of Sinified socialism. There is nothing of the sort in nature. There is no Russian, English, French, German, Italian socialism, as much as there is no Chinese socialism. There is only one Marxist-Leninist socialism. It is another thing, that in the building of socialism it is necessary to take into consideration the specific features of a particular country. Socialism is a science, necessarily having, like all science, certain general laws, and one just needs to ignore them and the building of socialism is destined to failure.
What are these general laws of building of socialism?
1.Above all it is the dictatorship of the proletariat the workers’ and peasants’ state, a particular form of the union of these classes under the obligatory leadership of the most revolutionary class in history the class of workers. Only this class is capable of building socialism and suppressing the resistance of the exploiters and petty bourgeoisie.
2.Socialised property of the main instruments and means of production. Expropriation of all the large factories and their management by the state.
3.Nationalisation of all capitalist banks, the merging of all of them into a single state bank and strict regulation of its functioning by the state.
4.The scientific and planned conduct of the national economy from a single centre. Obligatory use of the following principle in the building of socialism: from each according to his capacity, to each according to his work, distribution of the material good depending upon the quality and quantity of the work of each person.
5.Obligatory domination of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
6.Creation of armed forces that would allow the defence of the accomplishments of the revolution and always remember that any revolution is worth anything only if it is capable of defending itself.
7.Ruthless armed suppression of counter revolutionaries and the foreign agents.
These, in short, are the main laws of socialism as a science, requiring that we relate to them as such. If you understand this everything with the building of socialism in China will be fine. If you won’t you will do great harm to the international communist movement. As far as I know in the CPC there is a thin layer of the proletariat and the nationalist sentiments are very strong and if you will not conduct genuinely Marxist-Leninist class policies and not conduct struggle against bourgeois nationalism, the nationalists will strangle you. Then not only will socialist construction be terminated, China may become a dangerous toy in the hands of American imperialists. In the building of socialism in China I strongly recommend you to fully utilise Lenin’s splendid work ‘The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power’. This would assure success.
533.Stalin, Sochinenia, Tom 18, Informatsionno-izdatelskii tsentr ‘Soyuz’, Tver, 2006, pp. 531- 533.
Translated from the Russian by Tahir Asghar
https://mltoday.com/from-the-classics-s ... scow-1949/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
The FSB declassified the archive about the thwarted Bandera rebellion in the Red Army
April 18, 12:15
The FSB declassified the archive about the thwarted Bandera rebellion in the Red Army
The Soviet military counterintelligence "Smersh" in the summer of 1944 foiled an armed rebellion that was being prepared by Ukrainian nationalists who had specifically infiltrated the Red Army, follows from a declassified archival document of the Russian FSB, published by the intelligence service on the eve of the 81st anniversary of the creation of "Smersh".
In the spring of 1944, Soviet troops liberated right-bank Ukraine from the Nazi occupiers and reached the state border of the USSR. In the liberated territories, the mobilization of the local population of military age and the formation of reserve regiments and divisions of the Red Army began. Smersh employees carefully checked the replenishment. As it turned out, among those called up for military service were a large number of members of such nationalist formations as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, both banned in Russia).
The deputy head of the Main Directorate of Counterintelligence "Smersh" of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR Nikolai Selivanovsky on August 29, 1944 sent to the State Defense Committee addressed to its chairman Joseph Stalin, as well as Vyacheslav Molotov, a memorandum "on the results of the work of counterintelligence agencies of military districts in clearing hostile, nationalistic and another criminal element of the reserve rifle divisions, staffed by those mobilized from the western regions of Ukraine." As noted in the document, in total, from April 1 to August 25, 1944, the “Smershevites” arrested more than 6.6 thousand people, of which more than 4.2 thousand were OUN and UPA members*.
""The investigation into the cases of arrested Ukrainian nationalists has established that a significant part of them, living during the German occupation in the western regions of Ukraine and being members of the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists"*, brutally dealt with Soviet activists and prisoners of war, carrying out attacks on Soviet partisan detachments, and conducted enemy propaganda among the population directed against the Soviet Union,” Selivanovsky reported.
He reported that during the mobilization of residents of Western Ukraine into the Red Army, the leaders of the OUN* and UPA* instructed their subordinates to go to military service and “to create nationalist groups in military units to carry out subversive work.”
According to Selivanovsky, following these instructions, Ukrainian nationalists, being in the reserve units of the Red Army, began their subversive work. It consisted of anti-Soviet agitation in the ranks of conscripted Ukrainians under the slogan of the struggle for an “independent Ukraine”; the creation of rebel groups, the “decay of military discipline” and the organization of desertion of Red Army soldiers with weapons into UPA gangs*; as well as committing terrorist attacks against Red Army officers.
Selivanovsky gave the most typical examples of this subversive work, stopped by the Smershevites: “In July of this year, the Smersh department of the Kyiv Military District arrested a rebel group of 41 OUN members - servicemen of the 148th reserve rifle regiment of the 20th reserve rifle division, including its organizers E.A. Kucher, N.M. Zarusinsky and M.I. Shevchuk.”
The investigation established that this group of Ukrainian nationalists was preparing an armed uprising in the regiment, hoping to win over its entire personnel, which was staffed by those mobilized from Western Ukraine. According to the investigation, the attackers “intended to seize weapons and ammunition stored in nearby military warehouses, destroy the regiment’s officers, and then join forces with the UPA* gangs hiding in the forests of Western Ukraine.”
It was also established that the OUN members, mobilized in the west of Ukraine, were already preparing for an armed uprising on their way to reserve units, already having connections with the OUN* leadership, which had settled underground.
As historians of the special services note, in the Soviet Union, during the war, a clearly working system was built to counter the mechanism of reconnaissance and sabotage, honed by the Nazis for many years in different countries. According to experts, the main achievement of Smersh is that not a single Red Army operation was disrupted due to the actions of enemy intelligence services. Not a single strategic plan of the Soviet command became known to the enemy. In addition, there was not a single anti-Soviet protest either in the ranks of the Red Army or in its rear, which was so hoped for in Germany.
The work of Smersh was strictly defined by a legal framework; there was prosecutorial supervision over the activities of military counterintelligence agents.
Contrary to the “fakes” that Smersh performed punitive functions, and its employees allegedly only sat behind the backs of the Red Army soldiers, military counterintelligence officers, in addition to performing their direct duties, also participated in battles and at critical moments even took command of companies and battalions that lost commanders, led Soviet units out of encirclement, and created special-purpose partisan detachments. Counterintelligence officers fought alongside Red Army soldiers; in addition, they went on the attack with them and died. The percentage of losses among Smersh employees was no less than in the army.
Nikolai Selivanovsky (1901-1997) was one of the largest military counterintelligence officers. In July 1942, Selivanovsky, who then headed the Special Department of the Stalingrad Front, at his own peril and risk, sent a telegram to Stalin in Moscow about flaws in the leadership of the front, which threatened the loss of Stalingrad and a catastrophic development of events for the Red Army. Stalin took into account Selivanovsky’s opinion and took the necessary measures. According to historians, that courageous act of Selivanovsky, in fact, helped to save the country in many ways. In 1946-1947, Selivanovsky headed the entire Soviet military counterintelligence.
https://ria.ru/20240418/smersh-1940686659.html - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9100758.html
Google Translator
April 18, 12:15
The FSB declassified the archive about the thwarted Bandera rebellion in the Red Army
The Soviet military counterintelligence "Smersh" in the summer of 1944 foiled an armed rebellion that was being prepared by Ukrainian nationalists who had specifically infiltrated the Red Army, follows from a declassified archival document of the Russian FSB, published by the intelligence service on the eve of the 81st anniversary of the creation of "Smersh".
In the spring of 1944, Soviet troops liberated right-bank Ukraine from the Nazi occupiers and reached the state border of the USSR. In the liberated territories, the mobilization of the local population of military age and the formation of reserve regiments and divisions of the Red Army began. Smersh employees carefully checked the replenishment. As it turned out, among those called up for military service were a large number of members of such nationalist formations as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, both banned in Russia).
The deputy head of the Main Directorate of Counterintelligence "Smersh" of the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR Nikolai Selivanovsky on August 29, 1944 sent to the State Defense Committee addressed to its chairman Joseph Stalin, as well as Vyacheslav Molotov, a memorandum "on the results of the work of counterintelligence agencies of military districts in clearing hostile, nationalistic and another criminal element of the reserve rifle divisions, staffed by those mobilized from the western regions of Ukraine." As noted in the document, in total, from April 1 to August 25, 1944, the “Smershevites” arrested more than 6.6 thousand people, of which more than 4.2 thousand were OUN and UPA members*.
""The investigation into the cases of arrested Ukrainian nationalists has established that a significant part of them, living during the German occupation in the western regions of Ukraine and being members of the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists"*, brutally dealt with Soviet activists and prisoners of war, carrying out attacks on Soviet partisan detachments, and conducted enemy propaganda among the population directed against the Soviet Union,” Selivanovsky reported.
He reported that during the mobilization of residents of Western Ukraine into the Red Army, the leaders of the OUN* and UPA* instructed their subordinates to go to military service and “to create nationalist groups in military units to carry out subversive work.”
According to Selivanovsky, following these instructions, Ukrainian nationalists, being in the reserve units of the Red Army, began their subversive work. It consisted of anti-Soviet agitation in the ranks of conscripted Ukrainians under the slogan of the struggle for an “independent Ukraine”; the creation of rebel groups, the “decay of military discipline” and the organization of desertion of Red Army soldiers with weapons into UPA gangs*; as well as committing terrorist attacks against Red Army officers.
Selivanovsky gave the most typical examples of this subversive work, stopped by the Smershevites: “In July of this year, the Smersh department of the Kyiv Military District arrested a rebel group of 41 OUN members - servicemen of the 148th reserve rifle regiment of the 20th reserve rifle division, including its organizers E.A. Kucher, N.M. Zarusinsky and M.I. Shevchuk.”
The investigation established that this group of Ukrainian nationalists was preparing an armed uprising in the regiment, hoping to win over its entire personnel, which was staffed by those mobilized from Western Ukraine. According to the investigation, the attackers “intended to seize weapons and ammunition stored in nearby military warehouses, destroy the regiment’s officers, and then join forces with the UPA* gangs hiding in the forests of Western Ukraine.”
It was also established that the OUN members, mobilized in the west of Ukraine, were already preparing for an armed uprising on their way to reserve units, already having connections with the OUN* leadership, which had settled underground.
As historians of the special services note, in the Soviet Union, during the war, a clearly working system was built to counter the mechanism of reconnaissance and sabotage, honed by the Nazis for many years in different countries. According to experts, the main achievement of Smersh is that not a single Red Army operation was disrupted due to the actions of enemy intelligence services. Not a single strategic plan of the Soviet command became known to the enemy. In addition, there was not a single anti-Soviet protest either in the ranks of the Red Army or in its rear, which was so hoped for in Germany.
The work of Smersh was strictly defined by a legal framework; there was prosecutorial supervision over the activities of military counterintelligence agents.
Contrary to the “fakes” that Smersh performed punitive functions, and its employees allegedly only sat behind the backs of the Red Army soldiers, military counterintelligence officers, in addition to performing their direct duties, also participated in battles and at critical moments even took command of companies and battalions that lost commanders, led Soviet units out of encirclement, and created special-purpose partisan detachments. Counterintelligence officers fought alongside Red Army soldiers; in addition, they went on the attack with them and died. The percentage of losses among Smersh employees was no less than in the army.
Nikolai Selivanovsky (1901-1997) was one of the largest military counterintelligence officers. In July 1942, Selivanovsky, who then headed the Special Department of the Stalingrad Front, at his own peril and risk, sent a telegram to Stalin in Moscow about flaws in the leadership of the front, which threatened the loss of Stalingrad and a catastrophic development of events for the Red Army. Stalin took into account Selivanovsky’s opinion and took the necessary measures. According to historians, that courageous act of Selivanovsky, in fact, helped to save the country in many ways. In 1946-1947, Selivanovsky headed the entire Soviet military counterintelligence.
https://ria.ru/20240418/smersh-1940686659.html - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9100758.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Lenin's birthday
colonelcassad
April 22, 13:01
Lenin's birthday
Today is the birthday of the greatest revolutionary in human history. He did not run around with a gun and did not go to demonstrations under police batons, he was busy with something more complex - he created an idea and an organization, without which any idea is fiction.
Lenin does not need to be quoted, idolized or cursed, it is important to read him.
Today's mass pseudo-information and pseudo-education, in which any knowledge is always partial, eclectic and therefore completely useless, the criminal system that rules the world is preserved and reproduced. We have been weaned off our own intellectual and spiritual quest. Even basic cause-and-effect relationships in everyday life are more difficult to establish than to reach the yawning heights of technological barbarism, which creates new, increasingly perverted forms of slavery.
Without understanding Lenin, it is impossible to understand not only our history, but also the logic of any events of the last century, in which both seeds and bombs are under the soil of the present.
Lenin's living thought is inaccessible to fools and cynics, who always have at hand all the convenient answers to all the inconvenient questions. To tear the whole thought of a genius into hundreds of formulas and quotes in order to juggle it out of place in one’s own interests is not to understand his thoughts.
No other historical character has had as much dirt poured on him as Lenin; no other name has had as many fakes, gossips, labels and false myths created around him. It seems that as all this time passes, he becomes more and more dangerous and inconvenient.
We don't have to think or see history the same way. But the very ability to think and be interested in history is our main difference from the rest of the living world.
Apparently, in the spiral of development of society and the universe there are certain laws of constant replacement of the old with the new, and in this sense it is very naive to talk about the immortality of some of our temporary truths. Probably, one can and should argue with Lenin’s ideas. But so that it does not look as stupid and funny as it does today, you should grow up to this - intellectually and spiritually. And this is hard work, for which few of Lenin’s current critics are ready.
(c) Oleg Yasinsky
https://t.me/olegyasynsky - zinc
Happy birthday, Ilyich.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9108917.html
Google Translator
colonelcassad
April 22, 13:01
Lenin's birthday
Today is the birthday of the greatest revolutionary in human history. He did not run around with a gun and did not go to demonstrations under police batons, he was busy with something more complex - he created an idea and an organization, without which any idea is fiction.
Lenin does not need to be quoted, idolized or cursed, it is important to read him.
Today's mass pseudo-information and pseudo-education, in which any knowledge is always partial, eclectic and therefore completely useless, the criminal system that rules the world is preserved and reproduced. We have been weaned off our own intellectual and spiritual quest. Even basic cause-and-effect relationships in everyday life are more difficult to establish than to reach the yawning heights of technological barbarism, which creates new, increasingly perverted forms of slavery.
Without understanding Lenin, it is impossible to understand not only our history, but also the logic of any events of the last century, in which both seeds and bombs are under the soil of the present.
Lenin's living thought is inaccessible to fools and cynics, who always have at hand all the convenient answers to all the inconvenient questions. To tear the whole thought of a genius into hundreds of formulas and quotes in order to juggle it out of place in one’s own interests is not to understand his thoughts.
No other historical character has had as much dirt poured on him as Lenin; no other name has had as many fakes, gossips, labels and false myths created around him. It seems that as all this time passes, he becomes more and more dangerous and inconvenient.
We don't have to think or see history the same way. But the very ability to think and be interested in history is our main difference from the rest of the living world.
Apparently, in the spiral of development of society and the universe there are certain laws of constant replacement of the old with the new, and in this sense it is very naive to talk about the immortality of some of our temporary truths. Probably, one can and should argue with Lenin’s ideas. But so that it does not look as stupid and funny as it does today, you should grow up to this - intellectually and spiritually. And this is hard work, for which few of Lenin’s current critics are ready.
(c) Oleg Yasinsky
https://t.me/olegyasynsky - zinc
Happy birthday, Ilyich.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9108917.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Reckoning With the Soviet Role in the Creation of Israel
By Max Parry - April 23, 2024 1
[Source: jpost.com]
Since October 7th, global attention has largely shifted away from Ukraine toward the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
At the same time, the world has seen unprecedented mass protests in support of the Palestinians and calls for a cease-fire by the international community. Historically, some of the most prominent participants in the Palestinian cause have been Marxist organizations and recent demonstrations were no exception. However, a long-ignored and regrettable chapter in the history of socialism itself can be found in the very formation of Israel, which desperately needs to be addressed.
Whenever there is a flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the circumstances that led to the former’s 75-year occupation are inevitably revisited. Alas, it would be a disservice for this colossal misstep to remain neglected, especially since it is often used to discredit the legacy of the Soviet Union, which admittedly both voted for the 1947 UN partition of Palestine and was the first state to officially recognize the Zionist entity three days after it declared independence the following year. So how could the USSR at one moment have supported Israel, and why? While it may be far from the minds of those protesting genocide and seem like a rarefied question, it is a topic that is more relevant now than ever before.
Lamentably, there is simply no getting around the historical fact that the Soviets played a key role in the establishment of Israel. Given the previous ardent opposition to Zionism by the Bolsheviks including Stalin himself, as well as Moscow’s reorientation toward the Arab League after its establishment in 1948, it is a brief episode that has long puzzled historians of every stripe.
Yet the purpose of this reexamination is not to absolve the USSR for its tragic miscalculation but to place it in context — specifically that of the national question — an area where questionable political decisions made by Moscow decades ago still have consequences today in conflicts from the Caucasus to Ukraine. Hopefully, by interrogating this period, the quality of discourse on nationhood will improve, particularly in a way that does not lend itself to an anti-communist left whose political success is built upon lies about the Soviet Union.
[Source: blackwells.co.uk]
In theory, Marxism was antithetical to Zionism. In one of his earliest works, On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx argued for equal rights for German Jews and against the notion that the nature of their religion prevented integration or emancipation. (Despite his own Jewish lineage, this did not deter absurd accusations of anti-Semitism because of certain passages in the pamphlet.) However, there were some early socialist thinkers, such as Moses Hess, who opposed assimilation in favor of Jewish self-determination through the formation of a collectivist ethno-state in Palestine. While relatively obscure in his day, Hess’s fusion of socialist and Jewish nationalist ideas would become the syncretic precursor to the Labor Zionist tendency. From the beginning, there were politically confused attempts to wed Zionism with socialism.
Meanwhile, the founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, claimed that his awakening was inspired by the notorious “Dreyfus Affair,” in which an officer of Jewish descent in the French military, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly court-martialed for treason in 1894, resulting in a nationwide scandal and political crisis. Even though riots by the French public led to an eventual exoneration, Herzl was unmoved by such a notable historical moment of comradeship between workers and a minority religious group. Instead, he saw it as proof that there could never be mutual tolerance between Jews and gentiles. For the Zionist leader, a rise in bigotry across Europe was the perfect occasion to promote the idea that the Jewish people could only be free from persecution under a self-governed state with the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896.
Moses Hess [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Theodor Herzl [Source: thefamouspeople.com]
Captain Alfred Dreyfus [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
There was just one problem: The vast majority of Jews at the time were not committed to establishing an autonomous homeland of their own, much less in a place where they had little connection, as they represented less than 5% of the population in Palestine during the Late Ottoman period. In fact, the Zionists were mostly perceived as reactionaries seeking to prevent the diaspora from assimilating in Europe and around the world. Even when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, its reception was initially lukewarm and many prominent Jews publicly voiced their opposition to the statement, including British Cabinet Minister Edwin Montagu who described it as “a rallying ground for anti-semites in every country in the world” and a “mischievous political creed.” After all, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour himself was a noted racist who, during his previous tenure as Prime Minister, presided over the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act restricting Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe which had increased following a wave of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement.
Arthur Balfour [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Edwin Montagu [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
In the Russian Empire, Jews had faced continuous scapegoating and violence since the assassination of Alexander II. While the reaction of proto-Zionists such as the physician Leon Pinsker was to advocate ethnic separatism, many Jews alternatively began to play a key role in a growing socialist movement which championed their rights. Despite facing heavy discrimination, European Jews largely rejected ethno-nationalism and desired equality within their countries of residence, knowing full well the only way to achieve true liberation was through revolutionary change. The majority also understood Judaism to be a religion and not a nationality. At that time, Zionism was recognized as a racist tool of British imperialism designed to gain a foothold in the Middle East in competition with France and Russia which had their own respective Maronite and Orthodox subjects. Or as Sir Ronald Storrs, the Military Governor of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, would put it, “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
Christian Zionism had existed centuries before the Jewish nationalist movement and lobbied for their return to the Levant as a necessary pre-condition for the Second Coming. Academics trace the mythology to the Protestant Reformation with its revival of interest in the Old Testament and a biblical return of Jews to Zion. This ideology ultimately gained traction within the English political elite in the mid-19th century — most notably Lord Palmerston and his stepson-in-law Lord Shaftesbury — who promoted the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine decades prior to the World Zionist Organization. Even half a century earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had issued an imperial decree proclaiming Jews to be the “rightful heirs of Palestine” during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria. While the Revolution of 1789 brought about the first laws of Jewish freedom in Europe, the Corsican general exploited their status as a persecuted minority in order to advance French colonization of the Middle East, as the British would after World War I. As a matter of fact, Theodor Herzl would end up citing Napoleon as the first Zionist in an 1899 letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II. From the beginning, the origins of Zionism were non-Jewish.
Sir Ronald Storrs [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Napoleon Bonaparte—the First Zionist. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
For that reason, Zionism had to deceptively be made to appear one and the same with Judaism itself. Thus, a mythical narrative was concocted that the land of what would become Israel was the divine birthright of all Jews since they had been driven out of Jerusalem by the Romans in the destruction of the Second Temple. Unfortunately, there was scant evidence of any ancestral linkage of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine which undermined the entire basis of Israel as an ancient homeland to repatriate. In fact, recent genetic studies indicate that Ashkenazim today are not the descendants of the lost Hebrew tribes of circa 70 A.D. but rather traceable to European origin.
Then there is the more controversial theory popularized by Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe and Shlomo Sand in The Invention of the Jewish People that Ashkenazi ancestry originates in the Khazar Empire, a Turkic kingdom which converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. After its defeat by Kievan Rus, what remained of Khazaria would be wiped out in Mongol invasions by the Golden Horde, which would explain how much of the diaspora later fell under the rule of the Russian Empire. Regardless, it is quite clear that modern Jewry has little to do with the children of Israel in the Book of Exodus.
[Source: ebay.com]
Source: wordery.com]
Even though his stated preference was the Holy Land, Theodor Herzl himself was actually an admitted atheist and did not personally care where the future Jewish state would be located. Neither apparently did the British — whose Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had first proposed the “Uganda Scheme” which set aside a portion of British East Africa as a potential colony — so long as it fit His Majesty’s geo-strategic interests. Perhaps this is what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé meant when he observed, “most Zionists don’t believe in God, but they do believe he promised them Palestine.”
Herzl’s initial plans had been for settlement in Argentina per Leon Pinsker’s suggestion in Auto-Emancipation, but both Patagonia and the East Africa protectorate proved to be unpopular because of their lack of historic significance to Jews. For religious Zionists, only a restoration of the Land of Israel would suffice. After failing to convince the Sultan Abdul Hamid to sell Ottoman Palestine in a 1901 visit to Constantinople, Herzl appealed to England whose need for a beachhead in the Middle East aligned with the Zionist goal of capturing Jerusalem. The Viennese political activist realized that, if a Jewish state were to ever come into existence, it would require the auspices of an imperial power.
At the same time, the Jewish nationalists were willing to collaborate with anyone in their platform, no matter how unsavory. While Herzl supposedly claimed the motivation for the Zionist movement was to provide sanctuary from pogroms in Eastern Europe, it did not stop him from traveling to Russia in 1903 to meet with Tsarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, whom many held chiefly responsible for the Kishinev massacre that same year.
Photo taken after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and massacre. [Source: timesofisrael.com]
In St. Petersburg, Herzl pleaded for Nicholas II to grant an exodus of Jews from Imperial Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. In exchange for Russian pressure on the Turks to allow Zionist colonization, Herzl offered to help crack down on Jewish involvement in socialist activity — or, as he wrote in his diaries, “take the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.” From the beginning, the Zionists were willing to partner with the very worst Judeophobes in their settler colonialist project. Inextricably, Zionism was also inherently anti-communist, as author Lenni Brenner explained in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:
“The essentials of Zionist doctrine on anti-Semitism were laid down well before the Holocaust: anti-Semitism was inevitable and could not be fought; the solution was the emigration of unwanted Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making. The inability of the Zionist movement to take Palestine militarily compelled it to look for imperial patronage, which it expected to be motivated by anti-Semitism to some degree. Zionists additionally saw revolutionary Marxism as an assimilationist enemy which persuaded them to ally against it with their fellow separatists of the anti-Semitic right-wing nationalist movements in Eastern Europe.”
Leading up to his death in 1904, Herzl tried to persuade everyone—from the German Kaiser to Pope Pius X—that a Jewish state in the Promised Land would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia” and “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” In his diplomatic liaisons, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish nationalist placated various world leaders with promises in order to obtain their approval. To the Emperors of Germany and Russia, Herzl sold the idea as a win-win situation. On the one hand, it would enable both monarchs to solve their own respective Jewish questions by encouraging immigration to Palestine as well as dilute the revolutionary socialist groups in which Jews played a pivotal role. Although Herzl would die unexpectedly without having yet acquired enough political clout to see his vision through, he nonetheless laid the foundation for Israel to eventually be created.
By the time the infamous letter sent by Lord Balfour to Baron Rothschild was published in 1917, the First World War had reached a stalemate and an Allied defeat of the Ottoman Empire was uncertain. This did not stop the British government under Lloyd George, himself an evangelical Zionist, from making pledges of a Jewish national home in Palestine, even though it was still under Turkish rule. To make matters more complicated, a confidential war-time treaty had been signed among the United Kingdom, Tsarist Russia and France to carve up the Middle East in the event of an Allied victory.
It turned out this secretive accord completely contradicted formal negotiations between the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca which simultaneously vowed to reward an Arab Revolt against the Turks with an Arabian state. This double-dealing by the Triple Entente was only revealed after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty when the Bolsheviks uncovered the documents and published the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in Pravda.
The Russian Revolution further reinforced the peculiar alliance between anti-Semites and Zionists who were united in their joint animosity toward communism and belief that Jews were aliens in Europe. Among those in the British establishment who held such views was none other than Winston Churchill who, while serving as Secretary of State for War and Air, authored an article entitled “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People.”
In his 1920 editorial for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill made the case that, not only was Zionism to be an outpost for British imperialism, but a way of counteracting the Soviets due to the exaggerated preponderance of Jews among the Bolsheviks. While not quite as warped as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Churchill’s racist outlook was not far off from the infamous Okhrana forgery. In distinguishing between “national Jews” in “bankers and industrialists” from the “schemes of the international Jews,” Churchill propagated the paradoxical right-wing trope of Jewry symbolizing both world communism and Wall Street banking with Zionism as a solution.
Winston Churchill [Source: jpost.com]
In The Iron Wall, Lenni Brenner writes:
“The Bolshevik Revolution, which occurred within days of the [Balfour] Declaration, was seen by most of the ruling class as a Jewish plot. Although in Britain itself official anti-Semitism never passed beyond immigration restrictions and social discrimination, the British government had no qualms in financing and arming the White Guard pogrom hordes in Russia, thus bearing fundamental responsibility for their slaughter of at least 30,000 Jews. Zionism was seen as another tool against Bolshevism.”
But first, Britain would have to overcome the obstacle of persuading Jews to support its project, as Zionism was still viewed as a twisted ideology by the majority of the diaspora. Lenni Brenner continues in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:
“Most of the Jews in Eastern Europe did not see the Bolsheviks as the ogres that Churchill and [Chaim] Weizmann believed them to be. Under Lenin the Bolsheviks not only gave the Jews complete equality, but they even set up schools and, ultimately, courts in Yiddish; however, they were absolutely opposed to Zionism and all ideological nationalism. The Bolsheviks taught that the revolution required the unity of the workers of all nations against the capitalists. The nationalists separated ‘their’ workers from their class fellows. Bolshevism specifically opposed Zionism as pro-British and as fundamentally anti-Arab. The local Zionist leadership was therefore forced to turn to the nationalists as possible allies. In the Ukraine that meant Symon Petliura’s Rada (Council), which, like the Zionists, recruited on strictly ethnic lines: no Russians, no Poles and no Jews.”
Indeed, the relationship between Tel Aviv and Kyiv today starts to make a lot more sense after one learns of the secret 1921 agreement between far-right Zionist activist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose forces carried out anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War alongside the Tsarist White Movement. When Petliura was expelled to Galicia by the Soviets, Jabotinsky offered to provide him with a personal Zionist military protection unit and a police force to help his army with a planned invasion of Ukraine, ostensibly to halt further pogroms. In exchange, Jabotinsky publicly denied that Petliura was culpable for previous killings. (The pact would be aborted and Petliura was later assassinated in France by a Russian-Jewish left-wing poet whose family had been murdered by pogromists.)
Ze’ev Jabotinsky [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Symon Petliura [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Shockingly, the Zionists’ willingness to collude with enemies of the Jewish people later included even the Nazis themselves. In fact, it could be argued that the Zionists privately welcomed Hitler’s rise to power because it lent credence to their separatist beliefs. When a ban of German products in the United States and UK was organized in response to the Nazi Party’s persecution of Jews in 1933, the Zionists convinced many Jewish businesses in America and across the pond to oppose the anti-Nazi boycott.
Meanwhile in the Third Reich itself, the Zionist Federation of Germany offered to cooperate with the Nazi government in the event they supported the development of a Jewish state abroad to their economic benefit. In an outright betrayal of their own people, the German Zionists negotiated with the Hitlerites for the transfer of tens of thousands of Jews to Mandatory Palestine in return for opposition to the boycott campaign in what became known as the Haavara Agreement. Lenni Brenner continues:
“The truth is sadder than cowardice. The plain fact is that Germany’s Zionists did not see themselves as surrendering but, rather, as would-be partners in a most statesmanlike pact. They were wholly deluded. No Jews triumphed over other Jews in Nazi Germany. No modus vivendi was ever even remotely possible between Hitler and the Jews. Once Hitler had triumphed inside Germany, the position of the Jews was hopeless; all that was left for them was to go into exile and continue the fight from there. Many did, but the Zionists continued to dream of winning the patronage of Adolf Hitler for themselves. They did not fight Hitler before he came to power, when there was still a chance to beat him, not out of any degree of cowardice, but out of their deepest conviction, which they had inherited from Herzl, that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Given their failure to resist during Weimar, and given their race theories, it was inevitable that they would end up as the ideological jackals of Nazism.”
Even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” the secret pact went uninterrupted. As reactionaries, the Zionists were too eager to find common ground with the German fascists in their shared racism and hostility to the left. So much so, they never saw the Final Solution coming and only then was the unholy alliance finally ended in 1941. Still, this has not prevented Israeli politicians today from downplaying Nazi war crimes such as the claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who put the Germans up to the task all along. According to Bibi, Hitler only wanted to “expel” and “not exterminate” the Jews, an admission that the Zionists regarded ethnic cleansing by the Nazis as helpful to the development of Israel.
Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
It is true that the British-appointed Mufti met with the Führer in 1941, even though he was not the inspiration for Germany’s genocidal plans. Except an overlooked but perhaps more significant takeaway from al-Husseini’s flirtation with the Axis powers is that the strategic alliance and his avowed anti-communism may have tainted Arab-Soviet relations.
Prior to World War II, it was the British Mandate for Palestine which had increased Jewish immigration into the region throughout the inter-war period. When the Arabs revolted in the late 1930s, the British temporarily suspended the influx of Jewish settlers, incurring the wrath of Zionist terrorist organizations like the Irgun and the Stern Gang whose insurgency launched attacks against British soldiers, assassinated the Minister-Resident for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo, and bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Suddenly, the Zionist leadership in Palestine turned to Moscow for a helping hand in a war of independence against their former imperial patrons.
Officially, the Soviets had denounced Zionism up to that moment as a form of bourgeois nationalism which stratified Jews on class lines. In the introduction to Marxism and the National Question, Stalin condemned Zionism as a form of “crude chauvinism” and “a reactionary nationalist trend of the Jewish bourgeoisie, which had followers among the intellectuals and the more backward sections of the Jewish workers. The Zionists endeavored to isolate the Jewish working-class masses from the general struggle of the proletariat.” Earlier, Lenin had even ridiculed the Jewish Labor Bund, who were far from Zionists, when they advocated an autonomous socialist organization for Jewish workers. Moscow was also well aware that one of the primary goals of the Zionist movement was to relocate Jews to Palestine from nations where they had been dispersed, especially the USSR.
Jewish Bund logo. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
The turning point came with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Understandably, the existential threat of German aggression which ultimately cost the lives of 27 million of its citizens shifted the Soviet priority toward rallying international support for the war effort. Rightly or wrongly, Moscow chose to defer its long-established opposition to Zionism as thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime came pouring into the USSR. In the same way that the Russian Orthodox Church was enrolled during wartime to mobilize Soviet patriotism which saw religious life for Christians undergo a renaissance and churches reopen, Jewish religious activities commenced and synagogues were built. By relaxing previous constraints on religious liberties, the Soviets may have been trying to placate their new Allies in the United States and Britain.
At some point, pragmatism began to overshadow ideological concerns and cynical geopolitics clouded the judgment of the Politburo. Without modifying its formal position denouncing Zionism or official stated preference for a democratic bi-national state shared between Jews and Arabs, Soviet foreign policy reluctantly became pro-Zionist in the aftermath of World War II.
The Kremlin had initially rebuffed David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency in Palestine during war-time in consideration of their alliance with Britain, but things changed as soon as postbellum relations soured. Once the full extent of Nazi atrocities committed against Jews was revealed, Moscow wrongly assumed that, after having saved their ethnicity from extermination while Western countries enabled the rise of fascism, a Jewish state would be one that was pro-Soviet. Needless to say, this was quickly shown to be a false prediction but it was too late. In the eleventh hour, the USSR voted in favor of the UN proposal to divide Palestine. The Zionists had taken full advantage of the post-war circumstances with the collective responsibility felt [/img] the treatment of Jews while the Soviets regrettably fell for the deception of Zionism as interchangeable with Judaism.
It is difficult to say precisely what led to such an unforgivable mistake on the part of the Comintern but many forget that the Zionists also successfully portrayed themselves as socialists in this period. By the 1930s, Ben-Gurion and the secular Labor Zionist faction had surpassed the Political Zionist wing led by Chaim Weizmann, both internationally and within the Yishuv.
Given its reactionary record, this was perceived as an encouraging change. Unlike their counterparts, Labor Zionists espoused that a Jewish state could only be formed through its proletariat making aliyah to the Holy Land and developing a new society centered around collective farming (kibbutzim). On this basis, a limited number of Soviet Jews were permitted to emigrate in the naive hope that a Jewish proto-state would become socialist and expedite the decline of British imperialism in the region.
Of course, the irreconcilable ethnocratic contradictions of kibbutzism soon eclipsed any utopian ideals of communal living it purported to uphold through its brutal exclusion of indigenous Arabs. It is worth noting, however, that the Soviets were far from the only socialists misguided by the Labor Zionists, which included the Communist Party USA and even Albert Einstein among supporters.
[Source: goyimtv.com]
Due to its severe climate and the inability of territorialism to compete with Zionism, Birobidzhan never attracted enough Jews to contend with Israel, though at its peak its minority population was estimated to be around 30,000. While mainstream accounts directly attribute the failure of the JAR to Stalin and the purges of the 1930s which weakened Birobidzhan’s leadership, other historians such as Grover Furr have placed blame for the excesses of the NKVD on Nikolai Yezhov. (Although the district still exists in the present-day Russian Federation, just 1% of the remaining population is Jewish.) In the end, the unrealized dream of Birobidzhan meant that no progressive alternative to Zionism stood in its way. Not coincidentally, a socialistic façade was initially given to Israel in order to entice Jewish immigration into the newly formed ethnocracy, a left-wing pretense that was just as quickly abandoned.
It is hard not to wonder if the Soviets could have prevented the creation of Israel given the USSR’s emergence as one of the two Cold War superpowers. On the one hand, the question of Palestine was not a domestic Soviet matter where the Kremlin was the sole contributing factor but rather one of several states involved when the British Mandate was handed over to the United Nations and Resolution 181 was adopted. Then again, without the crucial shipment of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia, it is likely that the Haganah would not have prevailed.
For any Marxist-Leninist, it is sickening to know those weapons were used to massacre Arabs in the Nakba, not to mention forcibly expel more than 700,000 Palestinians. What is certain is that realpolitik and Moscow’s overemphasis on ensuring a withdrawal of the British corrupted its decision-making and it is forever a stain on Soviet history. In hindsight, the Kremlin was slow to recognize that Washington had become its larger foe and Israel’s closest ally.
Scene from the Palestinian Nakba. [Source: palestinechronicle.com]
The synthetic left never misses the chance to cite the short-lived Soviet-Zionist cooperation as evidence of a revolutionary betrayal by leadership after Lenin’s death. While even the most hard-line defenders of the USSR would concede the disastrous move as deserving of the utmost criticism, only opportunists would weaponize the Palestinian tragedy to try to diminish the achievements of the world’s first socialist state.
For an intellectually impoverished Western left, it is much easier to blame it all on Uncle Joe. Failing to recognize the complex historical conditions which led to such an unfortunate turn of events is anti-Marxist. That the Soviets so quickly reversed course suggests there was internal division over the issue which refutes the presumption that policymaking came simply by dictatorial rule. The inability to grasp complicated historical factors has resulted in a similar misunderstanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by the mainstream left which can never be allowed to have the final say on matters of Soviet history.
As Friedrich Engels wrote on the Irish question:
“The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best — paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie."
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... of-israel/
By Max Parry - April 23, 2024 1
[Source: jpost.com]
Since October 7th, global attention has largely shifted away from Ukraine toward the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.
At the same time, the world has seen unprecedented mass protests in support of the Palestinians and calls for a cease-fire by the international community. Historically, some of the most prominent participants in the Palestinian cause have been Marxist organizations and recent demonstrations were no exception. However, a long-ignored and regrettable chapter in the history of socialism itself can be found in the very formation of Israel, which desperately needs to be addressed.
Whenever there is a flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the circumstances that led to the former’s 75-year occupation are inevitably revisited. Alas, it would be a disservice for this colossal misstep to remain neglected, especially since it is often used to discredit the legacy of the Soviet Union, which admittedly both voted for the 1947 UN partition of Palestine and was the first state to officially recognize the Zionist entity three days after it declared independence the following year. So how could the USSR at one moment have supported Israel, and why? While it may be far from the minds of those protesting genocide and seem like a rarefied question, it is a topic that is more relevant now than ever before.
Lamentably, there is simply no getting around the historical fact that the Soviets played a key role in the establishment of Israel. Given the previous ardent opposition to Zionism by the Bolsheviks including Stalin himself, as well as Moscow’s reorientation toward the Arab League after its establishment in 1948, it is a brief episode that has long puzzled historians of every stripe.
Yet the purpose of this reexamination is not to absolve the USSR for its tragic miscalculation but to place it in context — specifically that of the national question — an area where questionable political decisions made by Moscow decades ago still have consequences today in conflicts from the Caucasus to Ukraine. Hopefully, by interrogating this period, the quality of discourse on nationhood will improve, particularly in a way that does not lend itself to an anti-communist left whose political success is built upon lies about the Soviet Union.
[Source: blackwells.co.uk]
In theory, Marxism was antithetical to Zionism. In one of his earliest works, On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx argued for equal rights for German Jews and against the notion that the nature of their religion prevented integration or emancipation. (Despite his own Jewish lineage, this did not deter absurd accusations of anti-Semitism because of certain passages in the pamphlet.) However, there were some early socialist thinkers, such as Moses Hess, who opposed assimilation in favor of Jewish self-determination through the formation of a collectivist ethno-state in Palestine. While relatively obscure in his day, Hess’s fusion of socialist and Jewish nationalist ideas would become the syncretic precursor to the Labor Zionist tendency. From the beginning, there were politically confused attempts to wed Zionism with socialism.
Meanwhile, the founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, claimed that his awakening was inspired by the notorious “Dreyfus Affair,” in which an officer of Jewish descent in the French military, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly court-martialed for treason in 1894, resulting in a nationwide scandal and political crisis. Even though riots by the French public led to an eventual exoneration, Herzl was unmoved by such a notable historical moment of comradeship between workers and a minority religious group. Instead, he saw it as proof that there could never be mutual tolerance between Jews and gentiles. For the Zionist leader, a rise in bigotry across Europe was the perfect occasion to promote the idea that the Jewish people could only be free from persecution under a self-governed state with the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896.
Moses Hess [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Theodor Herzl [Source: thefamouspeople.com]
Captain Alfred Dreyfus [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
There was just one problem: The vast majority of Jews at the time were not committed to establishing an autonomous homeland of their own, much less in a place where they had little connection, as they represented less than 5% of the population in Palestine during the Late Ottoman period. In fact, the Zionists were mostly perceived as reactionaries seeking to prevent the diaspora from assimilating in Europe and around the world. Even when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, its reception was initially lukewarm and many prominent Jews publicly voiced their opposition to the statement, including British Cabinet Minister Edwin Montagu who described it as “a rallying ground for anti-semites in every country in the world” and a “mischievous political creed.” After all, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour himself was a noted racist who, during his previous tenure as Prime Minister, presided over the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act restricting Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe which had increased following a wave of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement.
Arthur Balfour [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Edwin Montagu [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
In the Russian Empire, Jews had faced continuous scapegoating and violence since the assassination of Alexander II. While the reaction of proto-Zionists such as the physician Leon Pinsker was to advocate ethnic separatism, many Jews alternatively began to play a key role in a growing socialist movement which championed their rights. Despite facing heavy discrimination, European Jews largely rejected ethno-nationalism and desired equality within their countries of residence, knowing full well the only way to achieve true liberation was through revolutionary change. The majority also understood Judaism to be a religion and not a nationality. At that time, Zionism was recognized as a racist tool of British imperialism designed to gain a foothold in the Middle East in competition with France and Russia which had their own respective Maronite and Orthodox subjects. Or as Sir Ronald Storrs, the Military Governor of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, would put it, “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
Christian Zionism had existed centuries before the Jewish nationalist movement and lobbied for their return to the Levant as a necessary pre-condition for the Second Coming. Academics trace the mythology to the Protestant Reformation with its revival of interest in the Old Testament and a biblical return of Jews to Zion. This ideology ultimately gained traction within the English political elite in the mid-19th century — most notably Lord Palmerston and his stepson-in-law Lord Shaftesbury — who promoted the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine decades prior to the World Zionist Organization. Even half a century earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had issued an imperial decree proclaiming Jews to be the “rightful heirs of Palestine” during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria. While the Revolution of 1789 brought about the first laws of Jewish freedom in Europe, the Corsican general exploited their status as a persecuted minority in order to advance French colonization of the Middle East, as the British would after World War I. As a matter of fact, Theodor Herzl would end up citing Napoleon as the first Zionist in an 1899 letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II. From the beginning, the origins of Zionism were non-Jewish.
Sir Ronald Storrs [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Napoleon Bonaparte—the First Zionist. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
For that reason, Zionism had to deceptively be made to appear one and the same with Judaism itself. Thus, a mythical narrative was concocted that the land of what would become Israel was the divine birthright of all Jews since they had been driven out of Jerusalem by the Romans in the destruction of the Second Temple. Unfortunately, there was scant evidence of any ancestral linkage of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine which undermined the entire basis of Israel as an ancient homeland to repatriate. In fact, recent genetic studies indicate that Ashkenazim today are not the descendants of the lost Hebrew tribes of circa 70 A.D. but rather traceable to European origin.
Then there is the more controversial theory popularized by Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe and Shlomo Sand in The Invention of the Jewish People that Ashkenazi ancestry originates in the Khazar Empire, a Turkic kingdom which converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. After its defeat by Kievan Rus, what remained of Khazaria would be wiped out in Mongol invasions by the Golden Horde, which would explain how much of the diaspora later fell under the rule of the Russian Empire. Regardless, it is quite clear that modern Jewry has little to do with the children of Israel in the Book of Exodus.
[Source: ebay.com]
Source: wordery.com]
Even though his stated preference was the Holy Land, Theodor Herzl himself was actually an admitted atheist and did not personally care where the future Jewish state would be located. Neither apparently did the British — whose Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had first proposed the “Uganda Scheme” which set aside a portion of British East Africa as a potential colony — so long as it fit His Majesty’s geo-strategic interests. Perhaps this is what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé meant when he observed, “most Zionists don’t believe in God, but they do believe he promised them Palestine.”
Herzl’s initial plans had been for settlement in Argentina per Leon Pinsker’s suggestion in Auto-Emancipation, but both Patagonia and the East Africa protectorate proved to be unpopular because of their lack of historic significance to Jews. For religious Zionists, only a restoration of the Land of Israel would suffice. After failing to convince the Sultan Abdul Hamid to sell Ottoman Palestine in a 1901 visit to Constantinople, Herzl appealed to England whose need for a beachhead in the Middle East aligned with the Zionist goal of capturing Jerusalem. The Viennese political activist realized that, if a Jewish state were to ever come into existence, it would require the auspices of an imperial power.
At the same time, the Jewish nationalists were willing to collaborate with anyone in their platform, no matter how unsavory. While Herzl supposedly claimed the motivation for the Zionist movement was to provide sanctuary from pogroms in Eastern Europe, it did not stop him from traveling to Russia in 1903 to meet with Tsarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, whom many held chiefly responsible for the Kishinev massacre that same year.
Photo taken after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and massacre. [Source: timesofisrael.com]
In St. Petersburg, Herzl pleaded for Nicholas II to grant an exodus of Jews from Imperial Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. In exchange for Russian pressure on the Turks to allow Zionist colonization, Herzl offered to help crack down on Jewish involvement in socialist activity — or, as he wrote in his diaries, “take the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.” From the beginning, the Zionists were willing to partner with the very worst Judeophobes in their settler colonialist project. Inextricably, Zionism was also inherently anti-communist, as author Lenni Brenner explained in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:
“The essentials of Zionist doctrine on anti-Semitism were laid down well before the Holocaust: anti-Semitism was inevitable and could not be fought; the solution was the emigration of unwanted Jews to a Jewish state-in-the-making. The inability of the Zionist movement to take Palestine militarily compelled it to look for imperial patronage, which it expected to be motivated by anti-Semitism to some degree. Zionists additionally saw revolutionary Marxism as an assimilationist enemy which persuaded them to ally against it with their fellow separatists of the anti-Semitic right-wing nationalist movements in Eastern Europe.”
Leading up to his death in 1904, Herzl tried to persuade everyone—from the German Kaiser to Pope Pius X—that a Jewish state in the Promised Land would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia” and “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” In his diplomatic liaisons, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish nationalist placated various world leaders with promises in order to obtain their approval. To the Emperors of Germany and Russia, Herzl sold the idea as a win-win situation. On the one hand, it would enable both monarchs to solve their own respective Jewish questions by encouraging immigration to Palestine as well as dilute the revolutionary socialist groups in which Jews played a pivotal role. Although Herzl would die unexpectedly without having yet acquired enough political clout to see his vision through, he nonetheless laid the foundation for Israel to eventually be created.
By the time the infamous letter sent by Lord Balfour to Baron Rothschild was published in 1917, the First World War had reached a stalemate and an Allied defeat of the Ottoman Empire was uncertain. This did not stop the British government under Lloyd George, himself an evangelical Zionist, from making pledges of a Jewish national home in Palestine, even though it was still under Turkish rule. To make matters more complicated, a confidential war-time treaty had been signed among the United Kingdom, Tsarist Russia and France to carve up the Middle East in the event of an Allied victory.
It turned out this secretive accord completely contradicted formal negotiations between the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca which simultaneously vowed to reward an Arab Revolt against the Turks with an Arabian state. This double-dealing by the Triple Entente was only revealed after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty when the Bolsheviks uncovered the documents and published the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in Pravda.
The Russian Revolution further reinforced the peculiar alliance between anti-Semites and Zionists who were united in their joint animosity toward communism and belief that Jews were aliens in Europe. Among those in the British establishment who held such views was none other than Winston Churchill who, while serving as Secretary of State for War and Air, authored an article entitled “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People.”
In his 1920 editorial for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill made the case that, not only was Zionism to be an outpost for British imperialism, but a way of counteracting the Soviets due to the exaggerated preponderance of Jews among the Bolsheviks. While not quite as warped as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Churchill’s racist outlook was not far off from the infamous Okhrana forgery. In distinguishing between “national Jews” in “bankers and industrialists” from the “schemes of the international Jews,” Churchill propagated the paradoxical right-wing trope of Jewry symbolizing both world communism and Wall Street banking with Zionism as a solution.
Winston Churchill [Source: jpost.com]
In The Iron Wall, Lenni Brenner writes:
“The Bolshevik Revolution, which occurred within days of the [Balfour] Declaration, was seen by most of the ruling class as a Jewish plot. Although in Britain itself official anti-Semitism never passed beyond immigration restrictions and social discrimination, the British government had no qualms in financing and arming the White Guard pogrom hordes in Russia, thus bearing fundamental responsibility for their slaughter of at least 30,000 Jews. Zionism was seen as another tool against Bolshevism.”
But first, Britain would have to overcome the obstacle of persuading Jews to support its project, as Zionism was still viewed as a twisted ideology by the majority of the diaspora. Lenni Brenner continues in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:
“Most of the Jews in Eastern Europe did not see the Bolsheviks as the ogres that Churchill and [Chaim] Weizmann believed them to be. Under Lenin the Bolsheviks not only gave the Jews complete equality, but they even set up schools and, ultimately, courts in Yiddish; however, they were absolutely opposed to Zionism and all ideological nationalism. The Bolsheviks taught that the revolution required the unity of the workers of all nations against the capitalists. The nationalists separated ‘their’ workers from their class fellows. Bolshevism specifically opposed Zionism as pro-British and as fundamentally anti-Arab. The local Zionist leadership was therefore forced to turn to the nationalists as possible allies. In the Ukraine that meant Symon Petliura’s Rada (Council), which, like the Zionists, recruited on strictly ethnic lines: no Russians, no Poles and no Jews.”
Indeed, the relationship between Tel Aviv and Kyiv today starts to make a lot more sense after one learns of the secret 1921 agreement between far-right Zionist activist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose forces carried out anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War alongside the Tsarist White Movement. When Petliura was expelled to Galicia by the Soviets, Jabotinsky offered to provide him with a personal Zionist military protection unit and a police force to help his army with a planned invasion of Ukraine, ostensibly to halt further pogroms. In exchange, Jabotinsky publicly denied that Petliura was culpable for previous killings. (The pact would be aborted and Petliura was later assassinated in France by a Russian-Jewish left-wing poet whose family had been murdered by pogromists.)
Ze’ev Jabotinsky [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Symon Petliura [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
Shockingly, the Zionists’ willingness to collude with enemies of the Jewish people later included even the Nazis themselves. In fact, it could be argued that the Zionists privately welcomed Hitler’s rise to power because it lent credence to their separatist beliefs. When a ban of German products in the United States and UK was organized in response to the Nazi Party’s persecution of Jews in 1933, the Zionists convinced many Jewish businesses in America and across the pond to oppose the anti-Nazi boycott.
Meanwhile in the Third Reich itself, the Zionist Federation of Germany offered to cooperate with the Nazi government in the event they supported the development of a Jewish state abroad to their economic benefit. In an outright betrayal of their own people, the German Zionists negotiated with the Hitlerites for the transfer of tens of thousands of Jews to Mandatory Palestine in return for opposition to the boycott campaign in what became known as the Haavara Agreement. Lenni Brenner continues:
“The truth is sadder than cowardice. The plain fact is that Germany’s Zionists did not see themselves as surrendering but, rather, as would-be partners in a most statesmanlike pact. They were wholly deluded. No Jews triumphed over other Jews in Nazi Germany. No modus vivendi was ever even remotely possible between Hitler and the Jews. Once Hitler had triumphed inside Germany, the position of the Jews was hopeless; all that was left for them was to go into exile and continue the fight from there. Many did, but the Zionists continued to dream of winning the patronage of Adolf Hitler for themselves. They did not fight Hitler before he came to power, when there was still a chance to beat him, not out of any degree of cowardice, but out of their deepest conviction, which they had inherited from Herzl, that anti-Semitism could not be fought. Given their failure to resist during Weimar, and given their race theories, it was inevitable that they would end up as the ideological jackals of Nazism.”
Even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” the secret pact went uninterrupted. As reactionaries, the Zionists were too eager to find common ground with the German fascists in their shared racism and hostility to the left. So much so, they never saw the Final Solution coming and only then was the unholy alliance finally ended in 1941. Still, this has not prevented Israeli politicians today from downplaying Nazi war crimes such as the claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who put the Germans up to the task all along. According to Bibi, Hitler only wanted to “expel” and “not exterminate” the Jews, an admission that the Zionists regarded ethnic cleansing by the Nazis as helpful to the development of Israel.
Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
It is true that the British-appointed Mufti met with the Führer in 1941, even though he was not the inspiration for Germany’s genocidal plans. Except an overlooked but perhaps more significant takeaway from al-Husseini’s flirtation with the Axis powers is that the strategic alliance and his avowed anti-communism may have tainted Arab-Soviet relations.
Prior to World War II, it was the British Mandate for Palestine which had increased Jewish immigration into the region throughout the inter-war period. When the Arabs revolted in the late 1930s, the British temporarily suspended the influx of Jewish settlers, incurring the wrath of Zionist terrorist organizations like the Irgun and the Stern Gang whose insurgency launched attacks against British soldiers, assassinated the Minister-Resident for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo, and bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Suddenly, the Zionist leadership in Palestine turned to Moscow for a helping hand in a war of independence against their former imperial patrons.
Officially, the Soviets had denounced Zionism up to that moment as a form of bourgeois nationalism which stratified Jews on class lines. In the introduction to Marxism and the National Question, Stalin condemned Zionism as a form of “crude chauvinism” and “a reactionary nationalist trend of the Jewish bourgeoisie, which had followers among the intellectuals and the more backward sections of the Jewish workers. The Zionists endeavored to isolate the Jewish working-class masses from the general struggle of the proletariat.” Earlier, Lenin had even ridiculed the Jewish Labor Bund, who were far from Zionists, when they advocated an autonomous socialist organization for Jewish workers. Moscow was also well aware that one of the primary goals of the Zionist movement was to relocate Jews to Palestine from nations where they had been dispersed, especially the USSR.
Jewish Bund logo. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]
The turning point came with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Understandably, the existential threat of German aggression which ultimately cost the lives of 27 million of its citizens shifted the Soviet priority toward rallying international support for the war effort. Rightly or wrongly, Moscow chose to defer its long-established opposition to Zionism as thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime came pouring into the USSR. In the same way that the Russian Orthodox Church was enrolled during wartime to mobilize Soviet patriotism which saw religious life for Christians undergo a renaissance and churches reopen, Jewish religious activities commenced and synagogues were built. By relaxing previous constraints on religious liberties, the Soviets may have been trying to placate their new Allies in the United States and Britain.
At some point, pragmatism began to overshadow ideological concerns and cynical geopolitics clouded the judgment of the Politburo. Without modifying its formal position denouncing Zionism or official stated preference for a democratic bi-national state shared between Jews and Arabs, Soviet foreign policy reluctantly became pro-Zionist in the aftermath of World War II.
The Kremlin had initially rebuffed David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency in Palestine during war-time in consideration of their alliance with Britain, but things changed as soon as postbellum relations soured. Once the full extent of Nazi atrocities committed against Jews was revealed, Moscow wrongly assumed that, after having saved their ethnicity from extermination while Western countries enabled the rise of fascism, a Jewish state would be one that was pro-Soviet. Needless to say, this was quickly shown to be a false prediction but it was too late. In the eleventh hour, the USSR voted in favor of the UN proposal to divide Palestine. The Zionists had taken full advantage of the post-war circumstances with the collective responsibility felt [/img] the treatment of Jews while the Soviets regrettably fell for the deception of Zionism as interchangeable with Judaism.
It is difficult to say precisely what led to such an unforgivable mistake on the part of the Comintern but many forget that the Zionists also successfully portrayed themselves as socialists in this period. By the 1930s, Ben-Gurion and the secular Labor Zionist faction had surpassed the Political Zionist wing led by Chaim Weizmann, both internationally and within the Yishuv.
Given its reactionary record, this was perceived as an encouraging change. Unlike their counterparts, Labor Zionists espoused that a Jewish state could only be formed through its proletariat making aliyah to the Holy Land and developing a new society centered around collective farming (kibbutzim). On this basis, a limited number of Soviet Jews were permitted to emigrate in the naive hope that a Jewish proto-state would become socialist and expedite the decline of British imperialism in the region.
Of course, the irreconcilable ethnocratic contradictions of kibbutzism soon eclipsed any utopian ideals of communal living it purported to uphold through its brutal exclusion of indigenous Arabs. It is worth noting, however, that the Soviets were far from the only socialists misguided by the Labor Zionists, which included the Communist Party USA and even Albert Einstein among supporters.
[Source: goyimtv.com]
Due to its severe climate and the inability of territorialism to compete with Zionism, Birobidzhan never attracted enough Jews to contend with Israel, though at its peak its minority population was estimated to be around 30,000. While mainstream accounts directly attribute the failure of the JAR to Stalin and the purges of the 1930s which weakened Birobidzhan’s leadership, other historians such as Grover Furr have placed blame for the excesses of the NKVD on Nikolai Yezhov. (Although the district still exists in the present-day Russian Federation, just 1% of the remaining population is Jewish.) In the end, the unrealized dream of Birobidzhan meant that no progressive alternative to Zionism stood in its way. Not coincidentally, a socialistic façade was initially given to Israel in order to entice Jewish immigration into the newly formed ethnocracy, a left-wing pretense that was just as quickly abandoned.
It is hard not to wonder if the Soviets could have prevented the creation of Israel given the USSR’s emergence as one of the two Cold War superpowers. On the one hand, the question of Palestine was not a domestic Soviet matter where the Kremlin was the sole contributing factor but rather one of several states involved when the British Mandate was handed over to the United Nations and Resolution 181 was adopted. Then again, without the crucial shipment of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia, it is likely that the Haganah would not have prevailed.
For any Marxist-Leninist, it is sickening to know those weapons were used to massacre Arabs in the Nakba, not to mention forcibly expel more than 700,000 Palestinians. What is certain is that realpolitik and Moscow’s overemphasis on ensuring a withdrawal of the British corrupted its decision-making and it is forever a stain on Soviet history. In hindsight, the Kremlin was slow to recognize that Washington had become its larger foe and Israel’s closest ally.
Scene from the Palestinian Nakba. [Source: palestinechronicle.com]
The synthetic left never misses the chance to cite the short-lived Soviet-Zionist cooperation as evidence of a revolutionary betrayal by leadership after Lenin’s death. While even the most hard-line defenders of the USSR would concede the disastrous move as deserving of the utmost criticism, only opportunists would weaponize the Palestinian tragedy to try to diminish the achievements of the world’s first socialist state.
For an intellectually impoverished Western left, it is much easier to blame it all on Uncle Joe. Failing to recognize the complex historical conditions which led to such an unfortunate turn of events is anti-Marxist. That the Soviets so quickly reversed course suggests there was internal division over the issue which refutes the presumption that policymaking came simply by dictatorial rule. The inability to grasp complicated historical factors has resulted in a similar misunderstanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by the mainstream left which can never be allowed to have the final say on matters of Soviet history.
As Friedrich Engels wrote on the Irish question:
“The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the best — paid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie."
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/0 ... of-israel/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: The Soviet Union
Katyn case. Shot at Russia
April 29, 21:07
The Zvezda TV channel raises the issue of falsification of the Katyn case. The truth makes its way.
Katyn case. Shot at Russia
How a provocation developed in the Abwehr and implemented by Joseph Goebbels became a catalyst for the destruction of the USSR
The bomb planted by Goebbels
The Russian FSB published archival documents confirming that the mass execution of Polish officers in the Smolensk region was organized by the Hitlerite Gestapo, and not at all by the Stalinist NKVD, as was claimed in the years "perestroika". Among the declassified materials are certificates from military counterintelligence SMERSH, interrogation reports of Poles who served with the Germans, and testimony from former SS man Arnaud Duret, who participated in the burial of executed Poles.
According to the latter, in September 1941 he was sent to a penal company to dig graves for mass burials in the Katyn Forest. SS units brought the bodies of the dead there and threw them into a ditch 15-20 meters deep. He estimates that they buried up to 20 thousand bodies there. Later, in 1943, when Arno came on vacation, he saw in the newspapers a photograph of a ditch, under which it was written that the Russians had done it.
“I told my mother that it was not the Russians who did it, but the Germans, but my mother didn’t believe me,” Duret recalled. According to him, he did not tell anyone else about this because he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Another prisoner of war, Eduard Potkansky, admitted during interrogation that the Germans shot many Polish officers in the Katyn Forest for the purpose of provocation against the Soviet regime. In June 1943, the Nazis showed their work battalion the graves, next to which lay personal belongings, money and documents of the killed. However, they were in a form “in which they could not have been preserved in the ground since 1939,” when NKVD officers allegedly carried out executions.
The FSB removed the secrecy label from these and other archival materials on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Katyn, which is celebrated in Poland annually on April 13, although the mass execution of captured Poles, as established by Nikolai Burdenko’s commission, occurred in the fall of 1941. However, for some reason Warsaw chose the same day as the memorial date when, in 1943, Berlin announced the “brutal crime of the Bolsheviks,” who allegedly shot 20 thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. A few days after the newspapers of the anti-Hitler coalition published the stunning news, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “The Katyn affair is becoming a colossal political bomb, which under certain conditions will cause more than one blast wave.”
The words of the main propagandist of Nazi Germany turned out to be prophetic. Half a century after the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned the Nazis for the execution of the Poles, a “blast wave” again covered Europe. And the head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, blamed Stalin and the NKVD for the crime. During Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow on April 13, 1990, he gave him copies of the “execution lists” with the names of Polish officers allegedly executed in the Katyn Forest. Although in fact these were stage lists of captured Poles sent to NKVD camps.
On the same day, the TASS agency, “expressing deep regret,” admitted Soviet responsibility for Katyn, thereby overthrowing the verdict of the International Military Tribunal. Based on this fact, the Prosecutor General's Office will initiate a criminal case, which will then be closed after the death of the perpetrators. However, Warsaw, at the instigation of Gorbachev, already believed that the execution of the Poles was the work of Stalin’s NKVD. This is where the collapse of the Warsaw Bloc countries, and then the entire socialist system, will begin.
President Boris Yeltsin will go even further - he will hand over to the Polish side not copies, but genuine lists of “package No. 1” as evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn massacre. The head of state will decide to take this step, despite the fact that the Constitutional Court, obedient to him, was never able to establish the authenticity of archival materials. But Yeltsin didn’t care much about this - he needed a tool with which to discredit the CPSU. The “Katyn Affair” was perfectly suited for this purpose.
An aerial view of the exhumation site with rows of bodies of Polish officers lying on the ground near the mass graves (filmed by Nazi cameramen).
It was these supposedly authentic documents that were presented in 2009 to the European Court of Human Rights as the main evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn case. Relatives of the 12 executed Polish officers were counting on huge financial compensation. Poland was also going to file a claim for $100 billion. But the incredible happened: on June 18, 2012, the Strasbourg court decided that our country was not responsible for the execution of Poles in Katyn, and the “documents” presented as evidence of guilt were fake. True, by that time Russia had already rushed to apologize for what it had not done.
So, what is the essence of the “Katyn Affair”? When and by whom was it fabricated? And most importantly - for what?
Evidence that cannot be destroyed
As you know, in 1939, after the Wehrmacht attacked Poland and the flight of its government to Romania, the USSR sent troops to take protection of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. At the same time, more than 150 thousand Polish soldiers, without offering resistance, surrendered. Of these, 42 thousand returned to the territory occupied by the Germans, and another 42 thousand were liberated in the territory occupied by the Red Army (Red Army). The rest were interned in three camps west of Smolensk. With the beginning of the war, the NKVD tried to organize the evacuation of captured Poles, but only 3 thousand were taken out; the rest expressed a desire to stay in the camps, waiting for the Germans and hoping that they would return them home.
However, in order to secure the rear in the occupied territory, SS units executed all the Poles in the fall of 1941. Most of them were killed in the Goat Mountains, which would later be called Katyn. The execution was carried out without disguise as the “NKVD handwriting”, using German-made pistols. If the Germans had known that they would later need to shift the blame onto the Soviet security officers, they would probably have shot them with Russian revolvers and Mosin three-line guns. But no one set such a task.
In the spring of 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad, Western states began to realize that the days of the Third Reich were numbered, and began to prepare for the opening of a second front in Europe. The Nazis urgently needed to split the ranks of the anti-Hitler coalition, and then they remembered the mass grave near Smolensk.
This is how the Abwehr came up with a plan for the Katyn provocation, in which not only the “dead”, but also the “living” Poles were supposed to participate. That is, those who had already been shot, and those to whom these remains needed to be demonstrated. The Polish government in exile, warmed by the British in London, was supposed to stir up an international scandal.
Dr. Gerhard Bucht, professor of forensic medicine and criminology at the University of Breslau, studies the bodies of the deceased.
In order to give a larger scale to the “crime of the Bolsheviks,” in Berlin they decided to increase the number of victims in the place where representatives of the Polish Red Cross were supposed to arrive. The Germans opened the graves in the Goat Mountains and brought remains there from other burial sites, carefully checking the bodies and confiscating documents with dates after April-May 1940. For greater persuasiveness, papers with the “needed” dates were placed on the corpses, but here the Gestapo made a mistake, since many of the owners of the documents later turned out to be alive: Remigiusz Bezhanek, Franciszek Biernacki and others.
However, the Nazis did not have time to check all the remains - a commission of the Polish Red Cross had already arrived, and the bodies “unprepared” for inspection were transferred to a separate ditch, to which experts were not allowed. However, there was no need to guard him - the International Commission already worked under German control and did not even keep its own list of identified bodies.
But even such an obedient commission could not ignore the shell casings with German markings discovered in the graves. To explain this, the Nazis said that the NKVD shot Poles with German pistols using cartridges supplied to the USSR back in the 1920s. The question arises: why would security officers use ammunition with a long-expired shelf life, which usually does not exceed five years? After all, the cartridges would inevitably misfire. In addition, the Nazis never provided documents confirming the supply of 7.65 mm Walter pistols to Russia.
By the way, half a century later, during our own excavations in 1994-1995. In Kozye Gory, Polish experts discovered 79 steel cartridges with the date “41” stamped on them, which could not possibly have been used in April 1940.
As for other evidence, it later disappeared. From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, after the exhumation of the remains of 4,243 Polish officers, the names of 2,730 of them were established. The Germans transferred the documents and objects found on the corpses to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow, from where they were taken to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were soon burned during the bombing. It is no longer possible to establish who these documents belonged to. The ends are hidden.
Execution with German handwriting
Moscow resolutely rejected Berlin's accusations, and as soon as the Red Army liberated the Smolensk region, a commission of forensic experts headed by Nikolai Burdenko was sent to Katyn. After exhuming the remains, she carefully examined everything that could be collected from the site of the mass execution. Then, in the clothes of some of the bodies, receipts and receipts were found dating from June - August 1941, which did not fit into Goebbels’ scheme. Based on the data received, the commission was able to expose the Abwehr’s provocation and came to the conclusion that the mass execution in the Katyn Forest was carried out by the Nazis after the occupation of the Smolensk region.
A still from the Soviet documentary “On the Question of Katyn” - the skulls of executed Polish prisoners of war, 1943.
It is noteworthy that local residents, whose testimony was cited by the Germans to accuse the Soviet regime, recanted their testimony when they were questioned by the Burdenko commission. Some of the international experts whom the Germans brought to the burial site also renounced their testimony. In particular, pathologist Marko Markov did not sign the German protocol, because he believed that the remains presented for inspection had lain in the ground not for three years, but clearly less. By the way, Markov left detailed memories of this terrible story, in which he expressed doubt about the German version of events.
It should be emphasized that the materials of the Burdenko commission were presented to the international tribunal in Nuremberg, which held the Hitler regime responsible for this atrocity. However, very few years will pass, former allies will become irreconcilable enemies, and the Cold War period will begin. Western countries will shake off the archival dust from the Katyn Affair, and the Nazi version will once again become the main ideological tool of anti-Soviet propaganda. The task of Russia's enemies was to destroy the Soviet Union, but first they needed to discredit the CPSU. And Goebbels’ plan turned out to be very useful.
Archival fakes?
The propaganda campaign in favor of the version of the USSR's guilt in the Katyn Affair, which unfolded in the early 1990s, was based on archival materials that were later found to be fake. The most important document allegedly confirming the fact of the execution of captured Poles by NKVD officers is considered to be a “note” from the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Alexander Shelepin dated March 3, 1959, addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Khrushchev. It reported that 21,857 officers, gendarmes “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland" were shot based on the decision of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940. However, it is worth noting that in 1940 the party had a different name - the VKP(b). It is strange that until now none of the historians have paid attention to this error, which sticks out like an awl from a bag.
Note by Alexander Shelepin. Manuscript. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.138.
Note by Alexander Shelepin. Manuscript. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.139.
How did this archival document come about? It is assumed that having headed the KGB, Shelepin received access to the records of captured Poles and came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to “destroy documents on all persons executed in 1940 as part of the said operation.” Perhaps it was from here that the notorious “execution lists” of Polish officers in Katyn arose, which in 1990 were slipped to Mikhail Gorbachev as a “gesture of goodwill” towards Poland. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria would write:
“During Jaruzelski’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev gave him only copies of the lists of prisoners of war and internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in the Soviet archives, which included the names of Polish citizens who were in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky NKVD camps in 1939 - 1940 . None of these documents speak of the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.”
The execution of Poles was discussed in another document from “package No. 1” - a 4-page letter from Beria dated March 5, 1940, addressed to Stalin, where the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR proposed that the cases of Polish citizens held in NKVD camps be “considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution."
A page from a letter from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR dated March 5, 1940, where L. Beria proposes to “consider in a special order” the cases of captured Poles. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.130-133.
According to the famous historian Yuri Zhukov, when he turned to the archives of the President of the Russian Federation for this document in the early 1990s, he was provided with a photocopy of Beria’s note on one page. The resolution in the upper left corner, as the historian explained, was covered during copying.
“I believe she rejected the People’s Commissar’s proposal to be shot,” Zhukov told the author. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have hidden her.” They needed to blame everyone and everything for our past. Therefore, all my attempts to obtain the original document were rejected - a state secret.”
The first page of the “letter” from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria dated March 5, 1940. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.130-133.
Today, a color scan of this note, known as “Beria’s letter No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940,” is circulating on the Internet, with all 4 pages of it printed on typewriters with different fonts. Historians note that this is the first sign of forgery when they try to add or change any phrases in the text.
On the title page there are sweeping signatures of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, who supported Beria’s proposal to shoot captured Poles. Moreover, they were all made with the left hand and a pencil of the same color. This is the same resolution of the members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which was supposed to be proof of the guilt of the Stalinist regime in the Katyn tragedy. It was this “letter”, along with other archival materials from “package No. 1”, that Boris Yeltsin presented to the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, where the “CPSU case” initiated by him was considered, but for some reason the accommodating Constitutional Court refused to recognize them as authentic documents.
“Yakovlev Group”
In 2010, State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin and research experts Sergei Strygin and Vladislav Shved became aware of how the falsification of the aforementioned “Beria’s letter” was being prepared, which proposed shooting more than 25 thousand Polish prisoners of war. Ilyukhin, at a plenary session of parliament, released information that in the early 1990s, a group of specialists in forging archival documents was allegedly organized, headed by Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee.
The commission of academician Nikolai Burdenko works on the exhumation of graves in Katyn, December 1943.
“In 1943, Goebbels, trying to destroy the anti-Hitler coalition and quarrel between the USSR and the USA, spread a lie that Stalin and Beria ordered the execution of 10 thousand Polish officers,” said Ilyukhin. . - This lie was supported by the Polish government in exile, which was most motivated by a sense of anger at the Soviet Union for the defeat of the Polish army in Western Belarus and Ukraine and the annexation of these territories to the USSR. The well-known Alexander Yakovlev actually advocated for such a compromise of the USSR that the whole world would turn away from our country. After this, the greatest fraud and falsification of archival documents of the CPSU Central Committee took place.”
The “Yakovlev Group” worked in the structure of the security service of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, located in the village of Nagornoye, Moscow Region, until 1996, and then was relocated to another locality - Zarechye. From there, according to Ilyukhin, hundreds, if not thousands of false documents were thrown into the archives, and the same number were falsified by introducing distorted information into them and forging signatures.
One of the members of this group gave Ilyukhin samples of forms, seals, stamps and postmarks of counterfeiters, which the deputy demonstrated by making a video message, but the official media ignored him. Viktor Ilyukhin initiated a parliamentary review of archival documents, but his death from a heart attack prevented him from completing the work begun, as always happens in such cases.
It is noteworthy that in 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia confirmed that the NKVD troika imposed death sentences on 14,542 Polish prisoners of war, but the death of only 1,803 people was reliably established. And where, in this case, did the rest go?
Copies of the materials of the criminal case about the execution of Polish citizens in Katyn, transferred by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to the Polish side in 2004.
Researchers admit that after the publication of new archival data in the early 1990s, complete clarity on the “Katyn case” did not emerge. Moreover, digital copies of documents from “package No. 1,” which, by order of the president, were previously posted on the website of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, have now become inaccessible. Is this due to the fact that their authenticity raises questions among lawyers?
The forgery of documents has been recognized by the courts.
The results of studies of signs of forgery of the “Katyn” documents from “package No. 1” have been published in many publications and are well known. To date, their falsity has been determined by decisions of at least three Russian courts. In addition to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which received documents as evidence of the alleged guilt of the CPSU (b) - CPSU in the execution of captured Poles, they were also considered by the Basmanny and Tverskoy district courts of Moscow on October 13, 2009 and September 21, 2010. And everyone, having verified the falsification of archival materials, refused to recognize as true the information that Stalin and members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks had decided on capital punishment for the Poles.
I would like to hope that the time will come when the impartial court of history will give an objective assessment not only of all the facts of this tragedy, but also of those individuals who tried to speculate on it, fabricating fakes to discredit the Soviet Union. Involuntarily, I recall the sincere confession of the main ideologist of the CPSU A. Yakovlev: “We had to partially lie, be hypocritical, dissemble - there was no other way. We had to break the totalitarian communist party."
But they broke something completely different. As the former Soviet dissident and philosopher Alexander Zinoviev put it, “they aimed for communism, but ended up in Russia.”
(c) Evgeniy Kirichenko
https://zvezdaweekly.ru/news/20244161212-RWke8.html - zinc
And to the heap. Today, former Prosecutor General of Russia Skuratov spoke on the topic of Katyn.
Former Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Skuratov doubts the objectivity of the investigation in Russia of the “Katyn case,” which led to the admission of guilt by the NKVD in the execution of Polish officers and soldiers in 1940.
“There was probably some kind of political decision. After all, we were still full of desire to please the West, and a lot of different kinds of concessions on our part were thrown into this firebox, so to speak,”
PS. My position on this matter has not changed since the 2000s - the Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9125433.html
Google Translator
April 29, 21:07
The Zvezda TV channel raises the issue of falsification of the Katyn case. The truth makes its way.
Katyn case. Shot at Russia
How a provocation developed in the Abwehr and implemented by Joseph Goebbels became a catalyst for the destruction of the USSR
The bomb planted by Goebbels
The Russian FSB published archival documents confirming that the mass execution of Polish officers in the Smolensk region was organized by the Hitlerite Gestapo, and not at all by the Stalinist NKVD, as was claimed in the years "perestroika". Among the declassified materials are certificates from military counterintelligence SMERSH, interrogation reports of Poles who served with the Germans, and testimony from former SS man Arnaud Duret, who participated in the burial of executed Poles.
According to the latter, in September 1941 he was sent to a penal company to dig graves for mass burials in the Katyn Forest. SS units brought the bodies of the dead there and threw them into a ditch 15-20 meters deep. He estimates that they buried up to 20 thousand bodies there. Later, in 1943, when Arno came on vacation, he saw in the newspapers a photograph of a ditch, under which it was written that the Russians had done it.
“I told my mother that it was not the Russians who did it, but the Germans, but my mother didn’t believe me,” Duret recalled. According to him, he did not tell anyone else about this because he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Another prisoner of war, Eduard Potkansky, admitted during interrogation that the Germans shot many Polish officers in the Katyn Forest for the purpose of provocation against the Soviet regime. In June 1943, the Nazis showed their work battalion the graves, next to which lay personal belongings, money and documents of the killed. However, they were in a form “in which they could not have been preserved in the ground since 1939,” when NKVD officers allegedly carried out executions.
The FSB removed the secrecy label from these and other archival materials on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Katyn, which is celebrated in Poland annually on April 13, although the mass execution of captured Poles, as established by Nikolai Burdenko’s commission, occurred in the fall of 1941. However, for some reason Warsaw chose the same day as the memorial date when, in 1943, Berlin announced the “brutal crime of the Bolsheviks,” who allegedly shot 20 thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. A few days after the newspapers of the anti-Hitler coalition published the stunning news, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “The Katyn affair is becoming a colossal political bomb, which under certain conditions will cause more than one blast wave.”
The words of the main propagandist of Nazi Germany turned out to be prophetic. Half a century after the Nuremberg Tribunal, which condemned the Nazis for the execution of the Poles, a “blast wave” again covered Europe. And the head of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, blamed Stalin and the NKVD for the crime. During Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow on April 13, 1990, he gave him copies of the “execution lists” with the names of Polish officers allegedly executed in the Katyn Forest. Although in fact these were stage lists of captured Poles sent to NKVD camps.
On the same day, the TASS agency, “expressing deep regret,” admitted Soviet responsibility for Katyn, thereby overthrowing the verdict of the International Military Tribunal. Based on this fact, the Prosecutor General's Office will initiate a criminal case, which will then be closed after the death of the perpetrators. However, Warsaw, at the instigation of Gorbachev, already believed that the execution of the Poles was the work of Stalin’s NKVD. This is where the collapse of the Warsaw Bloc countries, and then the entire socialist system, will begin.
President Boris Yeltsin will go even further - he will hand over to the Polish side not copies, but genuine lists of “package No. 1” as evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn massacre. The head of state will decide to take this step, despite the fact that the Constitutional Court, obedient to him, was never able to establish the authenticity of archival materials. But Yeltsin didn’t care much about this - he needed a tool with which to discredit the CPSU. The “Katyn Affair” was perfectly suited for this purpose.
An aerial view of the exhumation site with rows of bodies of Polish officers lying on the ground near the mass graves (filmed by Nazi cameramen).
It was these supposedly authentic documents that were presented in 2009 to the European Court of Human Rights as the main evidence of Russia’s guilt in the Katyn case. Relatives of the 12 executed Polish officers were counting on huge financial compensation. Poland was also going to file a claim for $100 billion. But the incredible happened: on June 18, 2012, the Strasbourg court decided that our country was not responsible for the execution of Poles in Katyn, and the “documents” presented as evidence of guilt were fake. True, by that time Russia had already rushed to apologize for what it had not done.
So, what is the essence of the “Katyn Affair”? When and by whom was it fabricated? And most importantly - for what?
Evidence that cannot be destroyed
As you know, in 1939, after the Wehrmacht attacked Poland and the flight of its government to Romania, the USSR sent troops to take protection of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. At the same time, more than 150 thousand Polish soldiers, without offering resistance, surrendered. Of these, 42 thousand returned to the territory occupied by the Germans, and another 42 thousand were liberated in the territory occupied by the Red Army (Red Army). The rest were interned in three camps west of Smolensk. With the beginning of the war, the NKVD tried to organize the evacuation of captured Poles, but only 3 thousand were taken out; the rest expressed a desire to stay in the camps, waiting for the Germans and hoping that they would return them home.
However, in order to secure the rear in the occupied territory, SS units executed all the Poles in the fall of 1941. Most of them were killed in the Goat Mountains, which would later be called Katyn. The execution was carried out without disguise as the “NKVD handwriting”, using German-made pistols. If the Germans had known that they would later need to shift the blame onto the Soviet security officers, they would probably have shot them with Russian revolvers and Mosin three-line guns. But no one set such a task.
In the spring of 1943, after the Battle of Stalingrad, Western states began to realize that the days of the Third Reich were numbered, and began to prepare for the opening of a second front in Europe. The Nazis urgently needed to split the ranks of the anti-Hitler coalition, and then they remembered the mass grave near Smolensk.
This is how the Abwehr came up with a plan for the Katyn provocation, in which not only the “dead”, but also the “living” Poles were supposed to participate. That is, those who had already been shot, and those to whom these remains needed to be demonstrated. The Polish government in exile, warmed by the British in London, was supposed to stir up an international scandal.
Dr. Gerhard Bucht, professor of forensic medicine and criminology at the University of Breslau, studies the bodies of the deceased.
In order to give a larger scale to the “crime of the Bolsheviks,” in Berlin they decided to increase the number of victims in the place where representatives of the Polish Red Cross were supposed to arrive. The Germans opened the graves in the Goat Mountains and brought remains there from other burial sites, carefully checking the bodies and confiscating documents with dates after April-May 1940. For greater persuasiveness, papers with the “needed” dates were placed on the corpses, but here the Gestapo made a mistake, since many of the owners of the documents later turned out to be alive: Remigiusz Bezhanek, Franciszek Biernacki and others.
However, the Nazis did not have time to check all the remains - a commission of the Polish Red Cross had already arrived, and the bodies “unprepared” for inspection were transferred to a separate ditch, to which experts were not allowed. However, there was no need to guard him - the International Commission already worked under German control and did not even keep its own list of identified bodies.
But even such an obedient commission could not ignore the shell casings with German markings discovered in the graves. To explain this, the Nazis said that the NKVD shot Poles with German pistols using cartridges supplied to the USSR back in the 1920s. The question arises: why would security officers use ammunition with a long-expired shelf life, which usually does not exceed five years? After all, the cartridges would inevitably misfire. In addition, the Nazis never provided documents confirming the supply of 7.65 mm Walter pistols to Russia.
By the way, half a century later, during our own excavations in 1994-1995. In Kozye Gory, Polish experts discovered 79 steel cartridges with the date “41” stamped on them, which could not possibly have been used in April 1940.
As for other evidence, it later disappeared. From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, after the exhumation of the remains of 4,243 Polish officers, the names of 2,730 of them were established. The Germans transferred the documents and objects found on the corpses to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow, from where they were taken to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were soon burned during the bombing. It is no longer possible to establish who these documents belonged to. The ends are hidden.
Execution with German handwriting
Moscow resolutely rejected Berlin's accusations, and as soon as the Red Army liberated the Smolensk region, a commission of forensic experts headed by Nikolai Burdenko was sent to Katyn. After exhuming the remains, she carefully examined everything that could be collected from the site of the mass execution. Then, in the clothes of some of the bodies, receipts and receipts were found dating from June - August 1941, which did not fit into Goebbels’ scheme. Based on the data received, the commission was able to expose the Abwehr’s provocation and came to the conclusion that the mass execution in the Katyn Forest was carried out by the Nazis after the occupation of the Smolensk region.
A still from the Soviet documentary “On the Question of Katyn” - the skulls of executed Polish prisoners of war, 1943.
It is noteworthy that local residents, whose testimony was cited by the Germans to accuse the Soviet regime, recanted their testimony when they were questioned by the Burdenko commission. Some of the international experts whom the Germans brought to the burial site also renounced their testimony. In particular, pathologist Marko Markov did not sign the German protocol, because he believed that the remains presented for inspection had lain in the ground not for three years, but clearly less. By the way, Markov left detailed memories of this terrible story, in which he expressed doubt about the German version of events.
It should be emphasized that the materials of the Burdenko commission were presented to the international tribunal in Nuremberg, which held the Hitler regime responsible for this atrocity. However, very few years will pass, former allies will become irreconcilable enemies, and the Cold War period will begin. Western countries will shake off the archival dust from the Katyn Affair, and the Nazi version will once again become the main ideological tool of anti-Soviet propaganda. The task of Russia's enemies was to destroy the Soviet Union, but first they needed to discredit the CPSU. And Goebbels’ plan turned out to be very useful.
Archival fakes?
The propaganda campaign in favor of the version of the USSR's guilt in the Katyn Affair, which unfolded in the early 1990s, was based on archival materials that were later found to be fake. The most important document allegedly confirming the fact of the execution of captured Poles by NKVD officers is considered to be a “note” from the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Alexander Shelepin dated March 3, 1959, addressed to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Khrushchev. It reported that 21,857 officers, gendarmes “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland" were shot based on the decision of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940. However, it is worth noting that in 1940 the party had a different name - the VKP(b). It is strange that until now none of the historians have paid attention to this error, which sticks out like an awl from a bag.
Note by Alexander Shelepin. Manuscript. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.138.
Note by Alexander Shelepin. Manuscript. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.139.
How did this archival document come about? It is assumed that having headed the KGB, Shelepin received access to the records of captured Poles and came to the conclusion that it would be advisable to “destroy documents on all persons executed in 1940 as part of the said operation.” Perhaps it was from here that the notorious “execution lists” of Polish officers in Katyn arose, which in 1990 were slipped to Mikhail Gorbachev as a “gesture of goodwill” towards Poland. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria would write:
“During Jaruzelski’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev gave him only copies of the lists of prisoners of war and internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in the Soviet archives, which included the names of Polish citizens who were in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky NKVD camps in 1939 - 1940 . None of these documents speak of the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.”
The execution of Poles was discussed in another document from “package No. 1” - a 4-page letter from Beria dated March 5, 1940, addressed to Stalin, where the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR proposed that the cases of Polish citizens held in NKVD camps be “considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution."
A page from a letter from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR dated March 5, 1940, where L. Beria proposes to “consider in a special order” the cases of captured Poles. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.130-133.
According to the famous historian Yuri Zhukov, when he turned to the archives of the President of the Russian Federation for this document in the early 1990s, he was provided with a photocopy of Beria’s note on one page. The resolution in the upper left corner, as the historian explained, was covered during copying.
“I believe she rejected the People’s Commissar’s proposal to be shot,” Zhukov told the author. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have hidden her.” They needed to blame everyone and everything for our past. Therefore, all my attempts to obtain the original document were rejected - a state secret.”
The first page of the “letter” from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria dated March 5, 1940. RGASPI. F.17. Op.166. D.621. L.130-133.
Today, a color scan of this note, known as “Beria’s letter No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940,” is circulating on the Internet, with all 4 pages of it printed on typewriters with different fonts. Historians note that this is the first sign of forgery when they try to add or change any phrases in the text.
On the title page there are sweeping signatures of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, who supported Beria’s proposal to shoot captured Poles. Moreover, they were all made with the left hand and a pencil of the same color. This is the same resolution of the members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which was supposed to be proof of the guilt of the Stalinist regime in the Katyn tragedy. It was this “letter”, along with other archival materials from “package No. 1”, that Boris Yeltsin presented to the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, where the “CPSU case” initiated by him was considered, but for some reason the accommodating Constitutional Court refused to recognize them as authentic documents.
“Yakovlev Group”
In 2010, State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin and research experts Sergei Strygin and Vladislav Shved became aware of how the falsification of the aforementioned “Beria’s letter” was being prepared, which proposed shooting more than 25 thousand Polish prisoners of war. Ilyukhin, at a plenary session of parliament, released information that in the early 1990s, a group of specialists in forging archival documents was allegedly organized, headed by Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee.
The commission of academician Nikolai Burdenko works on the exhumation of graves in Katyn, December 1943.
“In 1943, Goebbels, trying to destroy the anti-Hitler coalition and quarrel between the USSR and the USA, spread a lie that Stalin and Beria ordered the execution of 10 thousand Polish officers,” said Ilyukhin. . - This lie was supported by the Polish government in exile, which was most motivated by a sense of anger at the Soviet Union for the defeat of the Polish army in Western Belarus and Ukraine and the annexation of these territories to the USSR. The well-known Alexander Yakovlev actually advocated for such a compromise of the USSR that the whole world would turn away from our country. After this, the greatest fraud and falsification of archival documents of the CPSU Central Committee took place.”
The “Yakovlev Group” worked in the structure of the security service of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, located in the village of Nagornoye, Moscow Region, until 1996, and then was relocated to another locality - Zarechye. From there, according to Ilyukhin, hundreds, if not thousands of false documents were thrown into the archives, and the same number were falsified by introducing distorted information into them and forging signatures.
One of the members of this group gave Ilyukhin samples of forms, seals, stamps and postmarks of counterfeiters, which the deputy demonstrated by making a video message, but the official media ignored him. Viktor Ilyukhin initiated a parliamentary review of archival documents, but his death from a heart attack prevented him from completing the work begun, as always happens in such cases.
It is noteworthy that in 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of Russia confirmed that the NKVD troika imposed death sentences on 14,542 Polish prisoners of war, but the death of only 1,803 people was reliably established. And where, in this case, did the rest go?
Copies of the materials of the criminal case about the execution of Polish citizens in Katyn, transferred by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to the Polish side in 2004.
Researchers admit that after the publication of new archival data in the early 1990s, complete clarity on the “Katyn case” did not emerge. Moreover, digital copies of documents from “package No. 1,” which, by order of the president, were previously posted on the website of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, have now become inaccessible. Is this due to the fact that their authenticity raises questions among lawyers?
The forgery of documents has been recognized by the courts.
The results of studies of signs of forgery of the “Katyn” documents from “package No. 1” have been published in many publications and are well known. To date, their falsity has been determined by decisions of at least three Russian courts. In addition to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, which received documents as evidence of the alleged guilt of the CPSU (b) - CPSU in the execution of captured Poles, they were also considered by the Basmanny and Tverskoy district courts of Moscow on October 13, 2009 and September 21, 2010. And everyone, having verified the falsification of archival materials, refused to recognize as true the information that Stalin and members of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks had decided on capital punishment for the Poles.
I would like to hope that the time will come when the impartial court of history will give an objective assessment not only of all the facts of this tragedy, but also of those individuals who tried to speculate on it, fabricating fakes to discredit the Soviet Union. Involuntarily, I recall the sincere confession of the main ideologist of the CPSU A. Yakovlev: “We had to partially lie, be hypocritical, dissemble - there was no other way. We had to break the totalitarian communist party."
But they broke something completely different. As the former Soviet dissident and philosopher Alexander Zinoviev put it, “they aimed for communism, but ended up in Russia.”
(c) Evgeniy Kirichenko
https://zvezdaweekly.ru/news/20244161212-RWke8.html - zinc
And to the heap. Today, former Prosecutor General of Russia Skuratov spoke on the topic of Katyn.
Former Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Skuratov doubts the objectivity of the investigation in Russia of the “Katyn case,” which led to the admission of guilt by the NKVD in the execution of Polish officers and soldiers in 1940.
“There was probably some kind of political decision. After all, we were still full of desire to please the West, and a lot of different kinds of concessions on our part were thrown into this firebox, so to speak,”
PS. My position on this matter has not changed since the 2000s - the Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9125433.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."