Stalin is trending

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 22, 2018 12:55 pm

J.V. Stalin- Lenin: The Genius of the Revolution
by worker
Sunday, January 21, 2018
J.V. Stalin- Lenin: The Genius of the Revolution
http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/01/j-v- ... ution.html

Joseph V. Stalin -
Speech Delivered at a Memorial Meeting of the Kremlin Military School.
January 28, 1924.

First Published on Pravda, No. 34,
February 12, 1924.
Source: Works, Vol. 6, January-November, 1924, pp. 54-66, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954.
Reproduced from Marxists Internet Archives.
Comrades,

I am told that you have arranged a Lenin memorial meeting here this evening and that I have been invited as one of the speakers. I do not think there is any need for me to deliver a set speech on Lenin’s activities. It would be better, I think, to confine myself to a few facts to bring out certain of Lenin’s characteristics as a man and a leader. There may, perhaps, be no inherent connection between these facts, but that is not of vital importance as far as gaining a general idea of Lenin is concerned. At any rate, I am unable on this occasion to do more than what I have just promised.

The Mountain Eagle

I first became acquainted with Lenin in 1903. True, it was not a personal acquaintance, but was by correspondence. But it made an indelible impression upon me, one which has never left me throughout all my work in the Party. I was in exile in Siberia at the time. My knowledge of Lenin’s revolutionary activities since the end of the nineties, and especially after 1901, after the appearance of Iskra, had convinced me that in Lenin we had a man of extraordinary calibre. At that time I did not regard him merely as a leader of the Party, but as its actual founder, for he alone understood the inner essence and urgent needs of our Party. When I compared him with the other leaders of our Party, it always seemed to me that he was head and shoulders above his colleagues—Plekhanov, Martov, Axelrod and the others; that, compared with them, Lenin was not just one of the leaders, but a leader of the highest rank, a mountain eagle, who knew no fear in the struggle, and who boldly led the Party forward along the unexplored paths of the Russian revolutionary movement.

This impression took such a deep hold of me that I felt impelled to write about it to a close friend of mine who was living as a political exile abroad, requesting him to give me his opinion. Some time later, when I was already in exile in Siberia—this was at the end of 1903—I received an enthusiastic reply from my friend and a simple, but profoundly expressive letter from Lenin, to whom, it turned out, my friend had shown my letter. Lenin’s note was comparatively short, but it contained a bold and fearless criticism of the practical work of our Party, and a remarkably clear and concise account of the entire plan of work of the Party in the immediate future.

Only Lenin could write of the most intricate things so simply and clearly, so concisely and boldly, that every sentence did not so much speak as ring out like a rifle shot. This simple and bold letter still further strengthened me in my opinion that Lenin was the mountain eagle of our Party. I cannot forgive myself for having, from the habit of an old underground worker, consigned this letter of Lenin’s, like many other letters, to the flames.

My acquaintance with Lenin dates from that time.

Modesty

I first met Lenin in December 1905 at the Bolshevik conference in Tammerfors (Finland). I was hoping to see the mountain eagle of our Party, the great man, great not only politically, but, if you will, physically, because in my imagination I had pictured Lenin as a giant, stately and imposing. What, then, was my disappointment to see a most ordinary-looking man, below average height, in no way, literally in no way, distinguishable from ordinary mortals. . . .

It is accepted as the usual thing for a “great man” to come late to meetings so that the assembly may await, his appearance with bated breath; and then, just before the “great man” enters, the warning whisper goes up: “Hush! . . . Silence! . . . he’s coming.” This ritual did not seem to me superfluous, because it creates an impression, inspires respect. What, then, was my disappointment to learn that Lenin had arrived at the conference before the delegates, had settled himself somewhere in a corner, and was unassumingly carrying on a conversation, a most ordinary conversation with the most ordinary delegates at the conference. I will not conceal from you that at that time this seemed to me to be something of a violation of certain essential rules.

Only later did I realise that this simplicity and modesty, this striving to remain unobserved, or, at least, not to make himself conspicuous and not to emphasise his high position, this feature was one of Lenin’s strongest points as the new leader of the new masses, of the simple and ordinary masses of the “rank and file” of humanity.


Force of Logic

The two speeches Lenin delivered at this conference were remarkable: one was on the current situation and the other on the agrarian question. Unfortunately, they have not been preserved. They were inspired, and they roused the whole conference to a pitch of stormy enthusiasm. The extraordinary power of conviction, the simplicity and clarity of argument, the brief and easily understood sentences, the absence of affectation, of dizzying gestures and theatrical phrases aiming at effect—all this made Lenin’s speeches a favourable contrast to the speeches of the usual “parliamentary” orators.

But what captivated me at the time was not this aspect of Lenin’s speeches. I was captivated by that irresistible force of logic in them which, although somewhat terse, gained a firm hold on his audience, gradually electrified it, and then, as one might say, completely overpowered it. I remember that many of the delegates said: “The logic of Lenin’s speeches is like a mighty tentacle which twines all round you and holds you as in a vice and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away: you must either surrender or resign yourself to utter defeat.”

I think that this characteristic of Lenin’s speeches was the strongest feature of his art as an orator.

No Whining

The second time I met Lenin was in 1906 at the Stockholm Congress of our Party. You know that the Bolsheviks were in the minority at this congress and suffered defeat. This was the first time I saw Lenin in the role of the vanquished. But he was not in the least like those leaders who whine and lose heart after a defeat. On the contrary, defeat transformed Lenin into a spring of compressed energy which inspired his supporters for new battles and for future victory. I said that Lenin was defeated. But what sort of defeat was it? You had only to look at his opponents, the victors at the Stockholm Congress—Plekhanov, Axelrod, Martov and the rest. They had little of the appearance of real victors, for Lenin’s merciless criticism of Menshevism had not left one whole bone in their body, so to speak. I remember that we, the Bolshevik delegates, huddled together in a group, gazing at Lenin and asking his advice. The speeches of some of the delegates betrayed a note of weariness and dejection. I recall that to these speeches Lenin bitingly replied through clenched teeth: “Don’t whine, comrades, we are bound to win, for we are right.” Hatred of the whining intellectual, faith in our own strength, confidence in victory—that is what Lenin impressed upon us. It was felt that the Bolsheviks’ defeat was temporary, that they were bound to win in the very near future.

“No whining over defeat”—this was the feature of Lenin’s activities that helped him to rally around himself an army faithful to the end and confident in its strength.

No Boasting

At the next congress, held in 1907 in London, the Bolsheviks proved victorious. This was the first time I saw Lenin in the role of victor. Victory turns the heads of some leaders and makes them haughty and boastful. They begin in most cases to be triumphant, to rest on their laurels. But Lenin did not in the least resemble such leaders. On the contrary, it was precisely after a victory that he became especially vigilant and cautious. I recall that Lenin insistently impressed on the delegates: “The first thing is not to become intoxicated by victory and not to boast; the second thing is to consolidate the victory; the third is to give the enemy the finishing stroke, for he has been beaten, but, by no means crushed.” He poured withering scorn on those delegates who frivolously asserted: “It is all over with the Mensheviks now.” He had no difficulty in showing that the Mensheviks still had roots in the working-class movement, that they had to be fought with skill, and that all overestimation of one’s own strength and, especially, all underestimation of the strength of the enemy had to be avoided.

“No boasting in victory”—this was the feature of Lenin’s character that helped him soberly to weigh the strength of the enemy and to insure the Party against possible surprises.

Fidelity to Principle

Party leaders cannot but prize the opinion of the majority of their party. A majority is a power with which a leader cannot but reckon. Lenin understood this no less than any other party leader. But Lenin never became a captive of the majority, especially when that majority had no basis of principle. There have been times in the history of our Party when the opinion of the majority or the momentary interests of the Party conflicted with the fundamental interests of the proletariat. On such occasions Lenin would never hesitate and resolutely took his stand in support of principle as against the majority of the Party. Moreover, he did not fear on such occasions literally to stand alone against all, considering—as he would often say—that “a policy based on principle is the only correct policy.”

Particularly characteristic in this respect are the two following facts.

First fact. It was in the period 1909-11, when the Party, smashed by the counter-revolution, was in process of complete disintegration. It was a period of disbelief in the Party, of wholesale desertion from the Party, not only by the intellectuals, but partly even by the workers; a period when the necessity for illegal organisation was being denied, a period of Liquidationism and collapse. Not only the Mensheviks, but even the Bolsheviks then consisted of a number of factions and trends, for the most part severed from the working-class movement. You know that it was just at that period that the idea arose of completely liquidating the illegal organisation and organising the workers into a legal, liberal Stolypin party. Lenin at that time was the only one not to succumb to the widespread epidemic and to hold high the banner of Party principle, assembling the scattered and shattered forces of the Party with astonishing patience and extraordinary persistence, combating each and every anti-Party trend within the working-class movement and defending the Party principle with unusual courage and unparalleled perseverance.

We know that in this fight for the Party principle, Lenin later proved the victor.

Second fact. It was in the period 1914-17, when the imperialist war was in full swing, and when all, or nearly all, the Social-Democratic and Socialist parties had succumbed to the general patriotic frenzy and had placed themselves at the service of the imperialism of their respective countries. It was a period when the Second International had hauled down its colours to capitalism, when even people like Plekhanov, Kautsky, Guesde and the rest were unable to withstand the tide of chauvinism. Lenin at that time was the only one, or almost the only one, to wage a determined struggle against social-chauvinism and social-pacifism, to denounce the treachery of the Guesdes and Kautskys, and to stigmatise the half-heartedness of the betwixt and between “revolutionaries.” Lenin knew that he was backed by only an insignificant minority, but to him this was not of decisive moment, for he knew that the only correct policy with a future before it was the policy of consistent internationalism, that a policy based on principle is the only correct policy.

We know that in this fight for a new International, too, Lenin proved the victor.

“A policy based on principle is the only correct policy”—this was the formula by means of which Lenin took new “impregnable” positions by assault and won over the best elements of the proletariat to revolutionary Marxism.

Faith in the Masses


Theoreticians and leaders of parties, men who are acquainted with the history of nations and who have studied the history of revolutions from beginning to end, are sometimes afflicted by a shameful disease. This disease is called fear of the masses, disbelief in the creative power of the masses. This sometimes gives rise in the leaders to a kind of aristocratic attitude towards the masses, who, although not versed in the history of revolutions, are destined to destroy the old order and build the new. This kind of aristocratic attitude is due to a fear that the elements may break loose, that the masses may “destroy too much”; it is due to a desire to play the part of a mentor who tries to teach the masses from books, but who is averse to learning from the masses.

Lenin was the very antithesis of such leaders. I do not know of any other revolutionary who had so profound a faith in the creative power of the proletariat and in the revolutionary efficacy of its class instinct as Lenin. I do not know of any other revolutionary who could scourge the smug critics of the “chaos of revolution” and the “riot of unauthorised actions of the masses” so ruthlessly as Lenin. I recall that when in the course of a conversation one comrade said that “the revolution should be followed by the normal order of things,” Lenin sarcastically remarked: “It is a pity that people who want to be revolutionaries forget that the most normal order of things in history is the revolutionary order of things.”

Hence, Lenin’s contempt for all who superciliously looked down on the masses and tried to teach them from books. And hence, Lenin’s constant precept: learn from the masses, try to comprehend their actions, carefully study the practical experience of the struggle of the masses.

Faith in the creative power of the masses—this was the feature of Lenin’s activities which enabled him to comprehend the spontaneous process and to direct its movement into the channel of the proletarian revolution.

The Genius of Revolution

Lenin was born for revolution. He was, in truth, the genius of revolutionary outbreaks and the greatest master of the art of revolutionary leadership. Never did he feel so free and happy as in a time of revolutionary upheavals. I do not mean by this that Lenin approved equally of all revolutionary upheavals, or that he was in favour of revolutionary outbreaks at all times and under all circumstances. Not at all. What I do mean is that never was the genius of Lenin’s insight displayed so fully and distinctly as in a time of revolutionary outbreaks. In times of revolution he literally blossomed forth, became a seer, divined the movement of classes and the probable zigzags of the revolution, seeing them as if they lay in the palm of his hand. It was with good reason that it used to be said in our Party circles: “Lenin swims in the tide of revolution like a fish in water.”

Hence the “amazing” clarity of Lenin’s tactical slogans and the “breath-taking” boldness of his revolutionary plans.

I recall two facts which are particularly characteristic of this feature of Lenin.

First fact. It was in the period just prior to the October Revolution, when millions of workers, peasants and soldiers, impelled by the crisis in the rear and at the front, were demanding peace and liberty; when the generals and the bourgeoisie were working for a military dictatorship for the sake of “war to a finish”; when the whole of so-called “public opinion” and all the so-called “Socialist parties” were hostile to the Bolsheviks and were branding them as “German spies”; when Kerensky was trying—already with some success—to drive the Bolshevik Party underground; and when the still powerful and disciplined armies of the Austro-German coalition confronted our weary, disintegrating armies, while the West-European “Socialists” lived in blissful alliance with their governments for the sake of “war to complete victory.”. . .

What did starting an uprising at such a moment mean? Starting an uprising in such a situation meant staking everything. But Lenin did not fear the risk, for he knew, he saw with his prophetic eye, that an uprising was inevitable, that it would win; that an uprising in Russia would pave the way for ending the imperialist war, that it would rouse the war-weary masses of the West, that it would transform the imperialist war into a civil war; that the uprising would usher in a Republic of Soviets, and that the Republic of Soviets would serve as a bulwark for the revolutionary movement throughout the world.

We know that Lenin’s revolutionary foresight was subsequently confirmed with unparalleled exactness.

Second fact. It was in the first days of the October Revolution, when the Council of People’s Commissars was trying to compel General Dukhonin, the mutinous Commander-in-Chief, to terminate hostilities and open negotiations for an armistice with the Germans. I recall that Lenin, Krylenko (the future Commander-in-Chief) and I went to General Staff Headquarters in Petrograd to negotiate with Dukhonin over the direct wire. It was a ghastly moment. Dukhonin and Field Headquarters categorically refused to obey the order of the Council of People’s Commissars. The army officers were completely under the sway of Field Headquarters.

As for the soldiers, no one could tell what this army of fourteen million would say, subordinated as it was to the so-called army organisations, which were hostile to the Soviet power. In Petrograd itself, as we know, a mutiny of the military cadets was brewing. Furthermore, Kerensky was marching on Petrograd. I recall that after a pause at the direct wire, Lenin’s face suddenly shone with an extraordinary light. Clearly he had arrived at a decision. “Let’s go to the wireless station,” he said, “it will stand us in good stead. We shall issue a special order dismissing General Dukhonin, appoint Comrade Krylenko Commander-in-Chief in his place and appeal to the soldiers over the heads of the officers, calling upon them to surround the generals, to cease hostilities, to establish contact with the Austro-German soldiers and take the cause of peace into their own hands.”

This was “a leap in the dark.” But Lenin did not shrink from this “leap”; on the contrary, he made it eagerly, for he knew that the army wanted peace and would win peace, sweeping every obstacle from its path; he knew that this method of establishing peace was bound to have its effect on the Austro-German soldiers and would give full rein to the yearning for peace on every front without exception.

We know that here, too, Lenin’s revolutionary foresight was subsequently confirmed with the utmost exactness.

The insight of genius, the ability rapidly to grasp and divine the inner meaning of impending events this was the quality of Lenin which enabled him to lay down the correct strategy and a clear line of conduct at turning points of the revolutionary movement.
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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:10 pm

The Death of Stalin: Vulgar anticommunism under the veil of “comedy”

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“The Death of Stalin” is the title of the anticommunist film which is going to be screened on cinemas. The two-minutes trailer of the movie is enough for someone to understand that it is another case of crude and vulgar anticommunism, of distortion and counterfeiting of History, as long as it shows Stalin as the “fear and terror of the nation” and other personalities of the time (e.g. Marshall Zhukov) as miserable caricatures.
But the text of the [film’s] synopsis by the distribution company ODEON which accompanies the movie and has been published in the media is also revealing. Promoting the film, the distribution company refers to it as “a comedy based on real events”: “On the night of March 2, 1953, a man is dying. A terrible stroke is wracking his entire body. He is drooling. He is pissing himself… The man is Joseph Stalin, dictator, tyrant, butcher as well a Secretary General of USSR. ‘The Death of Stalin’ is a satire about the days before the funerals of the Nation’s Father. Days that shine a sardonic light on all the madness, depravity and inhumanity of totalitarianism. Days that will see the men surrounding him fight to inherit his supreme power. And it’s all based on true events.”
“Dictator”, “tyrrant”, “inhumanity”, “totalitarianism”, “supreme power”… All the components of vulgar anticommunism, mixed in a blend and garnished with “satire” and “comedy”, so it can become more digestible and penetrating to the public.
Source: Rizospastis / Translation: In Defense of Communism.

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:56 pm

Domenico Losurdo’s book, Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, has been translated into English. An excerpt:


The Fall of the Romanov dynasty was preceded by a long series of attacks promoted by organizations which, despite heavy blows from repression, always managed to reconstitute themselves. In the opinion of Trotsky, a similar process was unfolding in the USSR in response to the ‘betrayal’ consummated by the bureaucracy. What threatens it aren’t individual acts of terrorism, but precursors of another great revolution:

All indications lead us to believe that events are headed toward a conflict between the popular forces, encouraged by cultural stimulation, and the bureaucratic oligarchy. This crisis doesn’t allow for a peaceful solution[...]; the country is clearly headed toward a revolution.

A decisive civil war appears on the horizon and, “in the atmosphere of civil war, the assassination of some oppressors is no longer a matter of individual terrorism”; in any case, “the Fourth International supports a struggle to the death against Stalinism”, destined to eliminate “a faction already condemned by history”.

As you can see, the attack against Kirov evokes the spectre of civil war among the forces that had toppled the old regime. In reality, this spectre follows the history of Soviet Russia like a shadow from the moment of its establishment. To sabotage the peace of Brest-Litovsk, interpreted by Bukharin as a capitalution to German imperialism and a betrayal of proletarian internationalism, he harbors for a moment the idea of a type of coup d’etat that would see removed from power, at least for some time, the man who was until that moment the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks (supra, pp. 54 and 55). If it was already out in the open while Lenin was still alive, despite his enormous prestige as a leader, the spectre of the division of the leading Bolshevik group and of civil war within that same revolutionary bloc took complete form in the following years. It’s what unequivocally appears in the important testimony from within the anti-Stalinist opposition and from the deserters of the communist movement, in whom the old faith had transformed into unrelenting hate. Let’s see how Boris Souvarine describes the situation created in the CPSU around ten years after the October Revolution:

The opposition considers forming its own organization as a clandestine party within the one party, with its miniature hierarchy, its Politburo, its central committee, its regional and local agents, its groups on the ground, its participation quotas, its memos, and its code for correspondence.

The expectations was of not only a political clash, but a military one as well. Immediately after the end of the second world war, the memoirs of Ruth Fischer are published in the United States, at the time a leading figure within the German communist movement and member of the presidium of the Comintern from 1922 to 1924. In this memoir she explains the way in which, in her time, she participated in the “resistance” organization in the USSR against the “totalitarian regime” that was installed in Moscow. This is in 1926. After having broken with Stalin the year before, Zinoviev and Kamenev drew close to Trotsky: they organize the “bloc” to win power. They then develop a clandestine network that reaches “as far as “Vladivostok” and the far East: messengers distribute exclusive party and state documents, transmit coded messages, personal armed guards provide security to secret meetings. “The leaders of the bloc made preparations for definitive steps”; based on the assumption that the clash with Stalin only could be resolved with “violence”, they met in a forest in the outskirts of Moscow with the aim of analyzing in depth “the military aspect of their program,” starting with the “role of those army units” willing to support the “coup d’etat.” Fischer continues:

It was a question that was mostly technical, which should be discussed among the two military leaders, Trotsky and Lasevi [vice-commissar for War, who died soon after, before the purges]. Since as vice-commissar of the red army he was still in a favorable legal position, Lasevi was tasked with planning the military action against Stalin.

The street demonstrations the following year, to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, should be read in that context: from Moscow and Leningrad they extended to “other industrial centers” so as to “force the hierarchy of the party to give in”.

In Europe during those years, it wasn’t a mystery to anyone the severity of the political battle that went on in Soviet Russia: “The history of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky is the history of the attempt by Trotsky to take power [...], it is the history of a failed coup d’etat”. The brilliant organizer of the Red Army, still enjoying “immense popularity”, certainly didn’t accept defeat: “His violent polemic and cynical and foolhardy pride made him a type of red Bonaparte backed by the army, the popular masses, and by the rebellious spirit of the young communists against the old Leninist guard and the high clergy of the party”. Yes, “the high tide of sedition advances upon the Kremlin”.
The author, Curzio Malaparte, who was in Moscow and had interviewed figures at the highest level, gives a reading of the tensions of 1927 which is confirmed by Ruth Fischer, that’s to say, by an authorized representative of the anti-Stalinist opposition:

On the eve of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the imprisonment of Trotsky would provoke an unpleasant reaction [...]. The occasion chosen by Trotsky to seize state-power couldn’t be better. Like the good tactician he is, he stayed in the shadows. To not appear as a tyrant, Stalin wouldn’t dare arrest him. When he would dare to, it would be too late, thought Trotsky. By the time the lights would go off on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin would no longer be in power.

As is already known, these plans fail and Trotsky, expelled from the party, sees himself obligated to transfer first to Alma Ata and later to Turkey. There “the Soviet consulate authorities” pay him $1,500 for ‘royalties’ as an author. Although it is a “ridiculous quantity”, as affirmed by a supporter, historian, and biographer of Trotsky, the gesture could be read as attempt to not sharpen the contradiction any further.

Conspiracy, infiltration of the state apparatus, and “aesopian language”

The exiled revolutionary didn’t renounce his plans. But how would he seek to carry them? Malaparte writes:

The acts of sabotage on the railways, power stations, telephone and telegraph lines increase every day. Everywhere Trotsky’s agents worm their way in. Screwing with the gears of the state’s technical organization, they provoke once in a while the partial paralyzation of sensitive agencies. They are the skirmishes that proceed the insurrection.

Is this a matter of mere illusions or the echo of regime’s propaganda? The book cited here, after being published, circulated widely in Europe and the thesis within it did not appear to raise ironic smiles or scandalized laughter. Just like with “terrorism”, so we must not lose sight of the particular history of Russia when it comes to “sabotage”. In 1908, both the petroleum executives and Stalin repeatedly condemned, with obviously different motives, the certain tendencies within the working class to achieve their demands by resorting to “economic terrorism”. Despite stressing that the ultimate cause of this phenomena was capitalist exploitation, the Bolshevik leader had welcomed “the latest resolution by the strikers from the Mirzoiev [factory], directed against the fires and ‘economic’ assassinations’”, and against “the old terroristic” and “anarchist tendencies”. By the start of the 1930s, had this tradition totally disappeared, or did it continue to manifest in new forms? In any case, we saw the white guards take advantage of it. What of the left opposition?
The “insurrectionary” plans that Malaparte mention reveal an important confirmation, at the least. The biographer of Trotsky describes here the attitude his hero continued to maintain while in exile: “The instructions are simple: the opposition must take on a solid military training, with seriousness and party consciousness and, once expelled from it, in the proletarian and soviet organizations in general, referring always to the International”. Here he turns against Soviet power the tradition of conspiracy which greatly contributed to its establishment. In What is to be Done? Lenin especially emphasizes that: We, the revolutionaries, “have to give maximum attention to propaganda and agitation among the soldiers and officers, and the creation of ‘military organizations’ belonging to our party”.
Taking note of that lesson, the opposition organizes a clandestine network that gives particular attention to the military apparatus. Its tormented process of formation made the task of infiltration easier. What happened at the time the Cheka was created, the first political police in Soviet Russia, is significant. On July 6th, 1918, an attack takes the life of the German ambassador: the perpetrator was Iakow G. Blumkin, a socialist revolutionary who sought to protest the Brest-Litovsk treaty and reopen the debate on it. When the chief of the Cheka, Félix E. Dherzhinsky, went to the German embassy in Moscow to offer the apologies of the Soviet government, he is informed the authors of the attack appeared with the credentials of the Cheka. To discover the truth, he proceeds to the headquarters of that institution where he is yet arrested by “Cheka dissidents”, themselves either members or close to the party of Revolutionary Socialists. Later freed by the Red Guard, Dzerjinski then purges the political police and has the execution of those responsible for the conspiracy and the mutiny. In conclusion, the first victims of the “purge” are members of the Cheka, although they formed part of the opposition.
The perpetrator of the attack managed to flee, but doesn’t yet exit the scene: “Trotsky publicly recognized, toward the end of 1929, having received Blumkin as a guest, while still an agent of the intelligence services of the Red Army.” Lev Sedov, son and colleague of Trotsky, sought to make it appear as something casual, however a document archived in Stanford “shows that the contact between Trotsky and Blumkin didn’t come about by coincidence, but from an organized connection within the USSR”; in this content “the secret agent evidently had an important role”. It would be this connection that would lead Stalin “to order the execution of Blumkin”.
As you can see, the opposition “agents infiltrated everything”. Even “in the GPU” a “small nucleus of Trotsky’s loyalists” remain hidden for a time. According to a contemporary American historian, it’s possible that Genrij G. Yagoda played a role as a double agent, the man led the first phase of the “Great Terror, before seeing himself eliminated. According to the accounts of militant anti-Stalinists it’s known that “some [opposition] documents were printed in the typography of the GPU”; looking closely, there’s “permanent tension in the [state] terrorist apparatus of Russia”.
The infiltration is made easier by the cautious opening of the regime. Upon calling for struggle against the “bureaucratic dictatorship”, Trotsky points out that “the new constitution offers at the same time a semilegal trench from which to fight it”. It is best fought with camouflage, disguising the intention of seeking to undermine and topple state power. On this point the leader of the opposition leaves no room for doubt: “the subversive work demands some conspirative precautions”; it’s necessary “to observe in the struggle [...] the rules of the conspiracy”. And yet more:
The life and death struggle can’t be conceived without the cunning of war, in other words: without lies and deceptions. Could the German workers possibly avoid deceiving Hitler’s police? Would Soviet Bolsheviks be unethical in deceiving the GPU?

Again the conspiratorial tradition of the Bolsheviks is turned against the regime that emerged from the revolution. In 1920 Lenin had called for the revolutionaries’ attention to “the obligation of combining illegal forms of struggle with legal forms, with the obligatory participation in the most reactionary parliament and a certain number of other institutions under reactionary laws”. And that’s not all: revolutionaries should know how to “face all sacrifices and -in case of necessity- resort as well to all tricks, illegal methods, and to silence and to hide the truth with the object of infiltrating the unions and remaining in them, and realizing there, at whatever cost, the work of a communist”. It’s exactly how the opposition conducts itself in relation to the political and social organizations of the hated “Thermidorian” regime.
The conspirators go by a precise rule of conduct:

Carry out self criticism, recognize your “errors” and that they are generally corrected. Those called “two faced men” by the stalinist press, or even the “left-right fraction”, from this moment on seek contacts which would allow the broadening of the resistance front to Stalin’s policies. Meet up with other groups on this path...

It’s understandable then the obsession over “duplicity”, the obsession for which Khrushchev condemned Stalin. Meanwhile, the abandonment of the NEP culminates in the rupture with Bukharin. Due to the position assumed by the latter it’s interesting to read the testimony of Humbert-Droz, leader of the Comintern who was expelled from the Swiss communist party in 1942 over his differences with Stalin. On a trip to the 1st Conferences of the Revolutionary Labor Unions of Latin America, in the spring of 1929 he meets with Bukharin and has a meeting with him, which he recalls with these words: “He got me up-to-date on the contacts his group made with the Zinoviev-Kamenev faction to coordinate the struggle against Stalin’s power”, that he anticipated the struggle including “individual terrorism”, whose central objective “was eliminating Stalin” and, to be clear, “eliminate him physically”. Three years later it is another representative of the “right”, Martemkan N. Riutin, who draws up and circulates a document that passes from hand to hand and which classifies Stalin as a “provocateur” who they must rid themselves of, resorting even to tyrannicide. When Bukharin reveals his plans, Humbert-Droz objects that “the introduction of individual terrorism in the political struggles born out of the Russian Revolution would run the risk of turning against those that used it”, but Bukharin isn’t persuaded. On the other hand, it would be difficult for the objection just seen to persuade a man who we now know -as he himself revealed confidentially in 1936- harbored a profound “hatred” in relation to Stalin, in fact, the “absolute” hatred that is reserved for a “demon”. While he expressed himself like this in private, Bukharin was incharge of Izvestia, the newspaper of the Soviet government. Are we dealing with an obvious incoherence? Not from the point of view of the Bolshevik leader, who continued to combine legal and illegal work, with the aim of toppling a regime that he considered detestable and who valued another lesson from Lenin. In reference to Tsarist Russia, we can read in What is to be Done? that:

In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forces its way into the censored literature and, though expounded in aesopian language, is understood by all the “interested”.

This is exactly how Bukharin uses the Soviet government’s newspaper. The condemnation of the “all-seeing total state”, founded on “blind discipline”, “jesuit obedience”, and on “the glorification of ‘leader’” pretends to alone make reference to Hitler’s Germany, but in fact points to the USSR as well. The “aesopian language” recommended by Lenin becomes immediately transparent when the denunciation refers to “cruel and uncultured provincialism”. It’s clearly the portrait of Stalin painted by the opposition. We saw Trotsky refer to him as a “small provincial man” (supra, pp. 20 and 39-40), and in discussions behind closed doors it is Bukharin himself that expresses his disdain for the leader that has succeeded Lenin, despite not knowing any foreign languages.
Continuing on the effectiveness displayed in Tsarist Russia by the revolutionary message expressed in “aesopian language”, What is to be Done? proceeds as follows:

Quite a considerable time elapsed (by our Russian standards) before the government realized what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. Meanwhile, Marxists books were published one after another, Marxist journals and newspapers were founded, nearly everyone became a Marxist, Marxists were flattered, Marxists were courted, and the book publishers rejoiced at the extraordinary, ready sale of Marxist Literature.


Bukharin and the opposition hoped that a similar phenomena would create a climate favorable to the overthrowal of Stalin. But Stalin also read What is to be Done? And knew well the rules of Bolshevik conspiracy. In conclusion, we witness a prolonged civil war. The clandestine network organizes itself, or seeks to reorganize itself despite successive rounds of repression that become increasingly unforgiving. According to the words of an active militant in the struggle against Stalin: “Despite being stomped on and annihilated, the opposition survived and grew; in the army, in the administration, in the party, in the cities, in the rural areas, every terrorist wave [from Stalin’s regime] brought forth a resistance movement”. The leading Bolshevik group now appears divided in a conflict that doesn’t exclude coups and that, at least in the expectations and hopes of Stalin’s enemies, from one moment to another could become open and generalized, involving the entire country. While the opposition turns to the lesson of Lenin and to the conspiratorial tradition of Bolshevism to weave their plans in the shadow, this double game provokes the indignation of Soviet power, which identifies in false friends the most dangerous and insidious enemy: the tragedy heads toward its conclusion.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by kidoftheblackhole » Sat Feb 17, 2018 8:29 pm

blindpig wrote:
Mon Jan 29, 2018 2:10 pm
The Death of Stalin: Vulgar anticommunism under the veil of “comedy”

Image

“The Death of Stalin” is the title of the anticommunist film which is going to be screened on cinemas. The two-minutes trailer of the movie is enough for someone to understand that it is another case of crude and vulgar anticommunism, of distortion and counterfeiting of History, as long as it shows Stalin as the “fear and terror of the nation” and other personalities of the time (e.g. Marshall Zhukov) as miserable caricatures.
But the text of the [film’s] synopsis by the distribution company ODEON which accompanies the movie and has been published in the media is also revealing. Promoting the film, the distribution company refers to it as “a comedy based on real events”: “On the night of March 2, 1953, a man is dying. A terrible stroke is wracking his entire body. He is drooling. He is pissing himself… The man is Joseph Stalin, dictator, tyrant, butcher as well a Secretary General of USSR. ‘The Death of Stalin’ is a satire about the days before the funerals of the Nation’s Father. Days that shine a sardonic light on all the madness, depravity and inhumanity of totalitarianism. Days that will see the men surrounding him fight to inherit his supreme power. And it’s all based on true events.”
“Dictator”, “tyrrant”, “inhumanity”, “totalitarianism”, “supreme power”… All the components of vulgar anticommunism, mixed in a blend and garnished with “satire” and “comedy”, so it can become more digestible and penetrating to the public.
Source: Rizospastis / Translation: In Defense of Communism.

Αναρτήθηκε από In Defense of Communism

http://www.idcommunism.com/2018/01/the- ... ulgar.html
I downloaded the comic book (graphic novel) this is supposedly based on. It is vulgar for the sake of vulgarity.

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blindpig
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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 19, 2018 2:08 pm

More from Lorsudo:

The Great Patriotic War and the Inventions of Khrushchev

Starting from Stalingrad and the defeat inflicted on the III Reich (the latter with a might that appeared unbeatable), Stalin acquired enormous prestige around the whole world. And, not by chance, does Khrushchev give particular attention to this matter. He describes in catastrophic terms the lack of military preparedness by the Soviet Union, whose army in some cases lacked the most basic armaments. Arguing against this is the overview that emerges from a study that appears to come from those connected to the Bundeswehr and makes ample use of their military archives. In it they speak of the “numerical superiority of the Red Army in armored cars, planes and artillery pieces”; further, “the industrial capacity of the Soviet Union had reached such dimensions that they could supply Soviet armed forces with an almost unimaginable amount of weaponry”. It rises at an ever increasing rate as Operation Barbarossa approaches. One stat is particularly eloquent: if in 1940 the Soviet Union produced 358 advanced armored cars, measurably superior to those available to other armed forces, in the first half of the following year 1,503 are produced. For their part, the documents from the Russian archives demonstrate that, for at least the two years immediately before the III Reich’s aggression, Stalin is literally obsessed over the problem of the “quantitative increase” and the “qualitative improvement of the entire military apparatus”. Some data speaks for itself: if in the first five year plan the defense budget reached 5.4% of total state spending, in 1941 the military budget increased to 43.4% of spending; “In September of 1939, by order of Stalin, the Politburo took the decision of constructing in the year of 1941 nine new factories for the production of planes”; at the moment of the Nazi invasion, “industry had produced 2,700 modern planes and 4,300 armored cars”. Judging by this data, we can say everything except that the USSR had arrived unprepared for the tragic confrontation.
On the other hand, already a decade ago an American historian offered a heavy blow to the myth of the despair and abandonment of responsibilities by the Soviet leader soon after the start of the Nazi invasion: “for however shocked he was, on the day of the attack Stalin had an eleven hour meeting with leaders of the party, government and military, and in the following day did the same.” But now we have at our disposition the registry of those that visited Stalin in the Kremlin, discovered at the beginning of 1990s: it appears to be that from the hours immediately following the military aggression, the Soviet leader is immersed in a series of incessant meetings and initiatives to organize the resistance. They are days and nights characterized as “strenuous... activity” but organized. In any case, “the entire episode [narrated by Khrushchev] is a complete invention”, this “story is false”. In reality, from the start of Operation Barbarossa, Stalin not only makes challenging decisions, giving the order for the relocation of residents and industrial installations from the frontline areas, but “he controls everything in a meticulous way, from the size and form of the beyonettes, to the authors and titles of the articles in Pravada”. There’s no sign of panic or histeria. Let’s read the entry from the diary and account of Dimitrov: “At seven in the morning they urgently called me to the Kremlin. Germany attacked the USSR. The war started [...], surprisingly calm, resolve and confidence in Stalin and all the others.” More impressive yet is the clarity of ideas. It’s not a matter of only carrying out “the general mobilization of our forces.” It’s necessary as well to define the political situation. Yes, “only communists can defeat the fascists”, putting an end to the apparently irresistible rise of the III Reich, but it’s necessary not to lose sight of the real nature of the conflict: “The [communist] parties develop locally a movement in defense of the USSR; not putting forward the question of the socialist revolution. The Soviet people fight a patriotic war against fascist Germany. The problem is the defeat of fascism, which enslaved a series of nations and tries to enslave other nations as well.”
The political strategy that had presided over the Great Patriotic War is well defined. Already some years earlier Stalin had stressed that the expansionism carried out by the III Reich “is in pursuit of the enslavement, and the submission of other nations”, these nations respond with just wars of resistance and national liberation. On the other hand, to those that academically counterpose patriotism and internationalism, the Communist International had responded once again before Hitler’s aggression, as is shown in the entry in Dimitrov’s diary from May 12th, 1941, that:

It is necessary to develop the idea that combines wise nationalism, correctly understood, with proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism should be based on the nationalism of individual countries [...], between that correctly understood nationalism and proletarian internationalism there can be no contradiction. The cosmopolitanism without nation, which denies national sentiment and the idea of the nation, doesn’t have anything in common with proletarian internationalism.

Far from being an improvised and desperate reaction to the situation created by the start of Operation Barbarossa, the strategy of the Great Patriotic War expresses a theoretical orientation of a general character maturing for some time: internationalism and the international cause of the emancipation of nations led directly to the wave of wars of national liberation, made necessary by the intention of Hitler to seize and radicalize the colonial tradition, subjecting and enslaving first the supposed inferior races of Eastern Europe. They are the themes returned to in the speeches and statements delivered by Stalin during the war: they constituted “important cornerstones in the clarification of Soviet military strategy and their political objectives, and played an important role at the hour of restrengthening popular morale”; and they took on international importance as well, as Goebbels observed to his annoyance, due to the radio speech of July 3rd, 1941 which “earned enormous admiration in England and the United States.”


A Series of Disinformation Campaigns and Operation Barbarossa

Even in the strict realm of military conduct, the Secret Report has lost all credibility. According to Khrushchev, paying no attention to the “warnings” coming from many directions regarding the imminent invasion, Stalin went irresponsibly toward disaster. What to say of this accusation? Even the information coming from a friendly country can be wrong. For example, on June 17th, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt warns Stalin of an imminent Japanese attack that doesn’t materialize. Especially in the lead-up to Hitler’s aggression, the USSR is forced to navigate around gigantic diversion and disinformation operations. The III Reich concentrates intensely in making believe that the gathering of troops in the East is aimed only at camouflaging the crossing of the English Channel, and this seemed very possible after the conquest of the island of Crete. “The entire state and military apparatus is mobilized”, Goebbels notes with satisfaction in his diary (31 of May, 1941), to stage the “first great wave of misdirection” of Operation Barbarossa”. Thus “14 divisions are transported to the West”; on top of this, all the troops stationed on the Western front are placed on the highest state of alert. Nearly two weeks later, the Berlin issue of Völkischer Beobachter publishes an article that indicates that the occupation of Crete is a model for coming settling of accounts with England; a few hours later the journal is censored with the aim of giving the impression that it had betrayed secret information of great importance. Three days later Goebbels writes in his diary: “The English radios announce that our maneuvers against Russia are only a bluff, that behind them we seek to hide our preparations for the invasion [of England].” To this disinformation campaign Germany added another: they spread rumors according to which the military maneuvers in the East were aimed at pressuring the USSR, eventually resorting to an ultimatum, so that if Stalin accepted to rewrite the clauses of the German-Soviet pact and agreed to export greater quantity of grain, petroleum, and coal, of which the III Reich lacked while involved in war whose conclusion couldn’t be predicted. They therefore wanted to give the impression that the crisis could be resolved with new negotiations and additional concessions on Moscow’s part. The British intelligence services arrived to that conclusion and military command, as late as May 22nd, warned the Minister of War: “Hitler still hasn’t decided to pursue his objections [in the direction of USSR] either by persuasion or by force of arms.” On June 14th Goebbels writes with satisfaction in his diary: “In general they believe still in the bluff or in the attempted blackmail.”
It’s necessary as well not to underestimate the disinformation campaign carried out on the other side and initiated two years earlier. In November of 1939, French press published an imaginary speech (supposedly delivered before the Politburo on August 19th of the same year) in which Stalin had exposed a plan to weaken Europe, encouraging within a fratricidal war in order to later Sovietize it. There’s no doubt, we’re dealing with a forgery that sought to exploit the pact of German-Soviet non-aggression and direct to the East the expansionist fury of the III Reich. According to a much circulated legend of history, on the eve of Hitler’s aggression, the government in London had sincerely and repeatedly warned Stalin, who, however, as expected of a dictator, had trusted solely in his counterpart in Berlin. In reality, at the same time Great Britain communicates to Moscow informations related to Operation Barbarossa, they spread rumors about an imminent USSR attack against Germany or territories occupied by it. It is evident and understandable the interest in making inevitable or in precipitating as quickly as possible the German-Soviet conflict.
Soon after the mysterious flight of Rudolf Hess to England happens, clearly encouraged by the hope of reconstructing the West’s unity in the struggle against Bolshevism, putting into motion the program described in Mein Kampf of alliance and solidarity of the Germanic nations in their civilizing mission. Soviet agents abroad inform the Kremlin that the number two of the Nazi regime took the initiative with the full agreement of the Fuhrer. On the other side, personalities of certain importance from the III Reich continued until the end maintaining the theory according to which Hess had acted on the encouragement of Hitler. Hitler, in any case, felt the need to send immediately to Rome the minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop for the purpose of removing from Mussolini any suspicion that Germany was planning a separate peace with Great Britain. Obviously, even stronger is the concern in Moscow caused by this suspected stagecraft, even more because the attitude of the British government helps feed it. It doesn’t exploit the “capture of the vice-Fuhrer” for the purposes of getting “the maximum propaganda value, something that both Hitler and Goebbels feared”; instead of this, the interrogation of Hess -as referred to Stalin by the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maiski- is entrusted to a supporter of the policy of appeasement. While they left the door open to a anglo-soviet rapprochement, the secret services of His Majesty concentrate on spreading rumors of a separate peace that is imminent between London and Berlin. All of this with the aim of adding pressure on the Soviet Union (that maybe had sought to prevent the feared alliance between Great Britain and the III Reach with a preventive attack by the Red army against the Wehrmacht) and thus strengthening the position of England.
The caution and distrust of the Kremlin is well understood: the imminent danger of a repeat of Munich on a larger scale and far more tragic. One can also raise the hypothesis that the campaign of disinformation promoted by the III Reich had played a role. Based, at least, on the transcript found in the archives of the Soviet communist party, even expecting the involvement soon by the USSR in the conflict, in the speech on May 5th, 1941, given to graduates of the military academy, Stalin stressed how historically Germany achieved victory when it was focused on only one front, while it suffered defeat when forced to fight at the same time in the East and the West. Yes, maybe Stalin had underestimated the possibility that Hitler was ready to attack the USSR. On the other hand, he knew very well that a premature total mobilization would have given the III Reich casus belli on a silver plate, as had happened at the start of the First World War. In any case, one point is clear: even acting with caution in a very complicated situation, the Soviet leader moved toward an “acceleration of the preparation for war.” In fact, “between May and June 800,000 reservists were called up, in mid-May 28 divisions are relocated to the western districts of the Soviet Union, while work on the border fortifications and the camouflaging of sensitive military objectives are accelerated. “On the night between the 21st and 22nd of June, that vast force is placed on alerted and called upon to prepare for a surprise attack by the Germans.”
To discredit Stalin, Khrushchev stresses the spectacular initial victories by the invading armies, but leaves out the predictions made at the time by the West. After the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and the entrance of the Wehrmacht into Prague, lord Halifax continued to reject the idea of a rapprochement between England and the USSR, resorting to the following argument: it didn’t make sense to ally with a country whose armed forces were insignificant.” On the eve of Operation Barbarossa or at the moment of its initiation, the British secret services had calculated that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated in 8-10 weeks”; on his part, the advisors of U.S. secretary of state (Henry L. Stimson) had predicted on June 23rd that it would all be over within 1-3 months. Moreover, the lightning breakthrough by the Wehrmacht -as observed in our days by an illustrious student of military history- is easily explained by geography:

The width of the front -1,800 miles- and the absence of natural obstacles offered the aggressors immense advantages for infiltration and maneuvers. Despite the colossal dimensions of the Red Army, the relation between its forces and the territory was so disfavorable that German mechanized units could easy find opportunities to indirectly maneuver into the rearguard of the adversary. Aside from this, the cities separated by great distances and to which converged roads and railways offered the aggressors the possibility of aiming for alternative objectives, leaving the enemy in the difficult situation of having to predict the real direction of the advance and having to facing dilemma after dilemma.

The Quick Unraveling of the Blitzkrieg

It’s important not to fall for appearances. Looking closely, the project of the III Reich of repeating in the East the triumph achieved by the Blitzkrieg in the West started to show problems already in the first weeks of the gigantic clash. The diaries of Joseph Goebbels are revealing about this. In the immediate lead-up to the assault he stresses the irresistibility of the imminent German attack, “without a doubt the most powerful the world has ever known”; no one could seriously oppose “the strongest army in all of history.” Therefore, “we are before a triumphal march without precedent[...]. I consider the military force of the Russians to be very weak, even weaker than the Fuhrer believes. If there were and if these is a sure thing, it is this.” In fact, the confidence of Hitler isn’t inferior, for some months earlier before a Bulgarian diplomat he referred to the Soviet Army as but a “joke.”
However, from the start the invaders found, despite everything, unpleasant surprises. “On June 25th, during the first aerial attack on Moscow, the anti-aircraft defenses proved to be so effective that the Luftwaffe is forced to limit itself to a reduced amount of nightraids.” It took only ten days of war for the certainties during its lead-up to be shaken. On July 2nd, Goebbels writes in his diary: “overall, the fighting is hard and stubborn. We can’t speak in any way of a walk in the park. The red regime mobilized the people.” The course of events preceded and the mood of the the Nazi leaders changed radically, as is always found in the Goebbels diary.

July 24th:
We can’t maintain any doubt about the fact that the Bolshevik regime, which has existed for nearly a quarter-century, left its mark on the peoples of the Soviet Union [...]. It would be, therefore, right to announce and with great clarity, before the German people, the difficulty of the struggle that rages in the East. It’s necessary to say to the nation that this operation is very difficult, but that we can surpass it and that we will surpass it.


August 1st:
In the headquarters of the Fuhrer [. . .]it’s also openly admitted that they were a little mistaken in the evaluation of the Soviet military force. The Bolsheviks reveal a greater resistance than we had suspected; especially the material resources available to them were greater than we thought.

August 19th:
Privately, the Fuhrer is very irritated with himself for having let himself be fooled to such an extent by the reports sent from the Soviet Union [from German agents] about the power of the Bolsheviks. The underestimation of the armored vehicles and planes of the enemy especially caused us many problems. He suffers a lot because of this. We’re dealing with a grave crisis [...]. Put in comparison, the campaigns carried out until now were like walks in the park [...]. Regarding the West, the Fuhrer has no reason to worry [...]. With rigor and with the objectivity we Germans always overestimated the enemy, except in this case with the Bolsheviks.

September 16th:
“We totally miscalculated the strength of the Bolsheviks.”

Scholars of military strategy stress the unforeseen difficulties with which the Soviet Union confronted a powerful war-machine, experienced and cloaked in the myth of invincibility. ”The battle of Smolensk in the second half of July 1941 is particularly significant for the success of the Eastern Front (until now it remains, in research, overshadowed by other events.” The observation is from an illustrious German historian who passes on these eloquent entries from a diary written by general Fedor von Bock from July 20th and 26th:

“The enemy seeks to recapture Smolensk at all costs and is always sending new forces. The theory expressed by some that the enemy acts without plans won’t find verification in the facts [...]. We’ve verified that the Russians have brought up across the front a new and compact deployment of forces. In many areas they seek to go on the offensive. It’s surprising for an adversary which suffered so many blows; they must possess an unbelievable amount of resources, in fact our troops still now lament the strong effect of the enemy artillery.”

Even more worried, or even decidedly pessimistic, is the admiral Wilhelm Canaris, leader of counter-espionage, who, speaking with general von Bock on July 17th, says: “I see it as very bleak.”
Not only does the Soviet army not breakdown in the first days or weeks of the assault but, to the contrary, it offers “tenacious resistance”, and is also well commanded, as revealed by, among other things, the “decision by Stalin at the time of halting the German advance at the point determined by him.” The results of this astute military command are revealed as well in the diplomatic sphere: it is precisely because it is “impressed by the fierce clash in the areas of Smolensk” that Japan, present there as an observer, decides to reject the request by the III Reich for it to join in the war against the Soviet Union. The analysis of the vehemently anti-communist German historian is fully confirmed by Russian scholars who distinguished themselves as champions in the struggle against “Stalinism” in the wake of the Khrushchev report: “The plans of the Blitzkrieg were already sunk in the middle of July.” With this context, it doesn’t appear formal the hommage which on August 14th, 1941 Churchill and F.D. Roosevelt offered to the “splendid defense” by the Soviet army. Also outside the diplomatic and governing circles, in Great Britain -we are informed by a diary entry from Beatriz Webb- common citizens, even of conservative alignment, show “lively interest for the surprising courage and initiative and for the magnificent equipment of the Russian armed forces, the only sovereign state able to oppose the almost mythical power of Hitler’s Germany.” In Germany itself, already three weeks after the start of operation Barbarossa, rumors start to circulate which put in deep doubt the triumphalist line from the regime. It’s what appears in the diary of an eminent German intellectual of Jewish origin: from what it appears, in the East “we suffer immense loses, we had underestimated the strength of resistance from the Russians”, which “was inexhaustible in men and military resources.”
For some time read as an example of political-military ignorance or even blind trust in the III Reich, the extremely cautious conduct by Stalin in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of hostilities now appear under new light: “The concentration of forces by the Wehrmacht along the entire front with the USSR, the violation of Soviet airspace, and another number of provocations had a single aim: attract the bulk of the Red Army as close as possible to the border. Hitler intended to win the war in a single, gigantic battle.” Even valiant generals were enticed by the trap, and expecting the onslaught of the enemy, insisted on a massive relocation of troops toward the border. “Stalin categorically rejected the request, insisting on the necessity of maintaining plenty of reserves at a considerable distance from the frontline.” Later, being conscious of the strategic plans of the designers of Operation Barbarossa, marshall Georgy K. Zhukov recognized the correctness of the line pursued by Stalin: “Hitler’s orders counted on a the relocation of the bulk of our troops toward the border, with the intention of surrounding them and destroying them.”
As a matter of fact, in the months following the invasion of the USSR, arguing with his generals, Hitler observed: “The problem of the Russian territory. The infinite width of the territory makes concentrating on decisive points necessary.” Later, in a conversation he clarified his thinking about the already initiated Operation Barbarossa: “In world history there had been until now only three battles of annihilation: Cannae, Sedan, and Tannenberg. We can be proud of the fact that two of them had been victoriously fought by German armies.” However, for Germany the third and greatest battle of annihilation and submission, which Hitler longed for, is increasingly complicated, and one week later he sees himself obligated to recognize that Operation Barbarossa had seriously underestimated the enemy. “The military preparation by the Russians must be considered incredible.” It’s apparent here the desire by the chess-player to justify the failure of his forecasts. However, the already cited English military scholar reaches the same conclusions: the reason for the French defeats lies “not in the quantity or quality of their resources, but in their military doctrine”; further, an excessively advanced deployment of the army had a disastrous effect, because it “gravely compromised their strategic flexibility; a similar error was made in Poland as well, driven by “national pride and overconfidence in the soldiers.” None of this happened in the Soviet Union.
More important than the individual battles is the entire outlook. “The Stalinist system was able to mobilize the immense majority of the popular and nearly all resources”; in particular, was “the extraordinary capacity of the Soviets”, in such a difficult situation as it occurred in the first months of the war, “evacuating and later reconverting to military production a considerable number of industries.” Yes, “created two days after the German invasion, the Evacuation Committee managed to move to the East 1,500 major industrial companies, after titanic operations of great logistic complexity.” Moreover, that process of relocation was already started in the weeks or months before Hitler’s aggression (infra, pp. 235-236), which is another confirmation of the fantastic character of the accusation delivered by Khrushchev.
There’s more. The Soviet leadership in some form understood the scenario of the war coming on the horizon as they were promoting the industrialization of the country. With a radical turn with respect to the previous situation, they identified a “Asian Russia as a key point”, at a distance from and sheltered from possible aggressors. Stalin had, in fact, insisted repeatedly and vigorously on this. On January 31st, 1931, he pushes forward the “creation of a new and well-equipped industrial base in the Ural mountains, Siberia and Kazakhstan.” A few years later, the report read on January 26th, 1934, at the 17th Congress of the CPSU had with satisfaction called attention to the powerful industrial development that has been achieved “in central Asia, Kazakhstan, in the Tatar, Buryat and Baskirian republics, in the Ural mountains, in Eastern and western Siberia, in the far-east, etc.” Trotsky didn’t miss the implications of all this when analyzing a few years later the dangers of war and the level of preparation in the Soviet Union, and highlighting the results achieved by the “planned economy” in the “military” sphere. He observes: “The industrialization of remote regions, especially Siberia, gives the steppes and forest regions new importance.” Only now does the great territorial expanse assumes its full value and made more difficult than ever the lightning war traditionally sought and prepared by the German high command.
It’s precisely in the sphere of the industrial apparatus built in expectation of the war where the III Reich is confronted with even more bitter surprises, as shown in the notes of Hitler:

November 29th, 1941:
“How is it possible that such a primitive people can reach such technical objectives in such a short time?”



August 26th, 1942:
“With respect to Russia, it is incontestable that Stalin raised the standard of living. The Russian people don’t go hungry [at the moment when Operation Barbarossa was launched]. In general, it’s necessary to recognize: they have built there factories of similar importance to Germann Goering Werke where two years ago existed nothing but unknown villages. We come across railway lines that aren’t on the maps.”

At this moment, it’s worth listening to three scholars, each very different (one Russian and the two others western). The first, who was director of the Soviet Institute of Military History and who participated in the militant anti-stalinism of the Gorbachev years, appears motivated by the intention of furthering and radicalizing the investigation of the Khrushchev report. However, from the results of the study he feels obligated to formulate a much more nuanced judgment: without being an expert and much less the genius portrayed by official propaganda, already in the years before the start of the war, Stalin gives particularly attention to issues of defense, defense industry, and the war economy as a whole. Yes, at the strictly military level, and only through effort and mistakes, including serious mistakes, and thanks to the hard practice of daily military life,” he “gradually learns the principles of strategy.” In other fields, his thinking proves to be “more developed than many Soviet military leaders.” Thanks as well to the long experience from managing political power, Stalin never loses sight of the central role of the war economy and he contributed to strengthening the USSR’s resistance with the relocation of war industry to the interior: “it’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of that enterprise.” Finally, the Soviet leader paid great attention to the moral-political dimension of the war. In that field, he “had totally unconventional ideas”, as shown by the “courageous military” decision “of celebrating the anniversary of the October Revolution on November 7th of 1941, in a besieged Moscow harassed by the Nazi enemy.” In conclusion, one can say that, with respect to career military officers and his inner circle, “Stalin demonstrated his universal mindset.” It is a mindset —we can add— that doesn’t neglect any of the smallest aspects of the life and morale of the soldiers: informed that they didn’t have cigarettes, and thanks as well to his ability to handle “an enormous workload”, “at a crucial moment in the battle of Stalingrad, he [Stalin] found time to call Akaki Mgeladze, party chief in Abkhazia, the principal region for the production of tobacco: “Our soldiers can no longer smoke! Without cigarettes, the front won’t hold!”
In their positive evaluation of Stalin as a military leader, two western authors go further. While Khrushchev stresses the overwhelming initial successes of the Wehrmacht, the first of the experts mentioned before references this same facts with very different language: it’s not shocking that the “greatest invasion in military history” had achieved initial successes; the response of the Red Army after the devastating blows of the German invasion in June of 1941 was “the greatest production of arms that the world had ever seen.” The second scholar, professor in an American military academy, starting from the understanding of the conflict in terms of long duration, attention to both the rear and the front, the economic and political dimension, as well as the military aspect of the war, speaks of Stalin as a “great strategist”, and as “the first authentic strategist of the 20th century.” Obviously we can debate and qualify these flattering judgments; it’s true however, at least in as it relates to the topic of war, that the evaluation made by Khrushchev loses all credibility.
Even more so because, at the moment of trial, the USSR proved itself quite prepared from another essential point of view. Let’s again give the word to Goebbels, who upon explaining the unforeseen difficulties of Operation barbarossa, points to another factor besides the military power of the enemy:

For our men of confidence and our spies it was almost impossible to penetrate the Soviet interior. We couldn’t get a precise overview. The Bolsheviks made a great effort in fooling us. Of the kinds of arms that they possessed, especially heavy weapons, we didn’t have a clue. Exactly contrary to that which was experienced in France, where we knew everything in practice and couldn’t in any way be surprised.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WS8 ... 3Amlk/edit


Very good. Use of Goebbels' diary is especially effective. I have real a collection of the pre-war entries which are also illuminating, apparently an honest monster, at least to his diary.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:52 pm

Lies concerning the History of the Soviet Union

Posted on January 14, 2017 by stalinsocietygb

Presentation by Ella Rule, based on information by Mario Sousa

In this world we live in, who can avoid hearing the terrible stories of suspected death and murders in the gulag labour camps of the Soviet Union? Who can avoid the stories of the millions who starved to death and the millions of oppositionists executed in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time? In the capitalist world these stories are repeated over and over again in books, newspapers, on the radio and television, and in films, and the mythical numbers of millions of victims of socialism have increased by leaps and bounds in the last 50 years.

But where in fact do these stories, and these figures, come from? Who is behind all this?

And another question: what truth is there in these stories? And what information is lying in the archives of the Soviet Union, formerly secret but opened up to historical research by Gorbachev in 1989? The authors of the myths always said that all their tales of millions having died in Stalin’s Soviet Union would be confirmed the day the archives were opened up. Is that what happened? Were they confirmed in fact?

The following article shows us where these stories of millions of deaths through hunger and in labour camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union originated and who is behind them.

The present author, after studying the reports of the research which has been done in the archives of the Soviet Union, is able to provide information in the form of concrete data about the real number of prisoners, the years they spent in prison and the real number of those who died and of those who were condemned to death in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The truth is quite different from the myth.

There is a direct historical link running from: Hitler to Hearst, to Conquest, to Solzhenitsyn. In 1933 political changes took place in Germany that were to leave their mark on world history for decades to come. On 30 January Hitler became prime minister and a new form of government, involving violence and disregard of the law, began to take shape. In order to consolidate their grip on power the Nazis called fresh elections for the 5th of March, using all propaganda means within their grasp to secure victory. A week before the elections, on 27 February, the Nazis set fire to parliament and accused the communists of being responsible. In the elections that followed, the Nazis secured 17.3 million votes and 288 deputies, about 48% of the electorate (in November they had secured 11.7 million votes and 196 deputies). Once the Communist Party was banned, the Nazis began to persecute the Social Democrats and the trade-union movement, and the first concentration camps began to fill up with all those left-wing men and women. In the meantime, Hitler’s power in parliament continued to grow, with the help of the right wing. On 24 March, Hitler caused a law to be passed by parliament which conferred on him absolute power to rule the country for 4 years without consulting parliament. From then on began the open persecution of the Jews, the first of whom began to enter the concentration camps where communists and left social-democrats were already being held. Hitler pressed ahead with his bid for absolute power, renouncing the 1918 international accords that had imposed restrictions on the arming and militarisation of Germany. Germany’s re-armament took place at great speed. This was the situation in the international political arena when the myths concerning those dying in the Soviet Union began to be put together.

The Ukraine as a German territory
At Hitler’s side in the German leadership was Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, the man in charge of inculcating the Nazi dream into the German people. This was a dream of a racially pure people living in a Greater Germany, a country with broad lebensraum, a wide space in which to live. One part of this lebensraum, an area to the east of Germany which was, indeed, far larger than Germany itself, had yet to be conquered and incorporated into the German nation. In 1925, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had already pointed to the Ukraine as an essential part of this German living space. The Ukraine and other regions of Eastern Europe needed to belong to the German nation so that they could be utilised in a `proper’ manner. According to Nazi propaganda, the Nazi sword would liberate this territory in order to make space for the German race. With German technology and German enterprise, the Ukraine would be transformed into an area producing cereals for Germany. But first the Germans had to liberate the Ukraine of its population of ‘inferior beings’ who, according to Nazi propaganda, would be put to work as a slave labour force in German homes, factories and fields – anywhere they were needed by the German economy.

The conquest of the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union would necessitate war against the Soviet Union, and this war had to be prepared well in advance. To this end the Nazi propaganda ministry, headed by Goebbels, began a campaign around a supposed genocide committed by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, a dreadful period of catastrophic famine it claimed was deliberately provoked by Stalin in order to force the peasantry to accept socialist policy. The purpose of the Nazi campaign was to prepare world public opinion for the `liberation’ of the Ukraine by German troops. Despite huge efforts and in spite of the fact that some of the German propaganda texts were published in the English press, the Nazi campaign around the supposed `genocide’ in the Ukraine was not very successful at the world level. It was clear that Hitler and Goebbels needed help in spreading their libellous rumours about the Soviet Union. That help they found in the USA.

William Hearst – Friend of Hitler
William Randolph Hearst is the name of a multi-millionaire who sought to help the Nazis in their psychological warfare against the Soviet Union. Hearst was a well-known US newspaper proprietor known as the `father’ of the so-called `yellow press’, i.e., the sensationalist press. William Hearst began his career as a newspaper editor in 1885 when his father, George Hearst, a millionaire mining industrialist, Senator and newspaper proprietor himself, put him in charge of the San Francisco Daily Examiner.

This was also the start of the Hearst newspaper empire, an empire which strongly influenced the lives and thinking of North Americans. After his father died, William Hearst sold all the mining industry shares he inherited and began to invest capital in the world of journalism. His first purchase was the New York Morning Journal, a traditional newspaper which Hearst completely transformed into a sensationalist rag. He bought his stories at any price, and when there were no atrocities or crimes to report, it behoved his journalists and photographers to ‘arrange’ matters. It is this which in fact characterises the ‘yellow press’: lies and ‘arranged’ atrocities served up as truth.

These lies of Hearst’s made him a millionaire and a very important personage in the newspaper world. In 1935 he was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at $200 million. After his purchase of the Morning Journal, Hearst went on to buy and establish daily and weekly newspapers throughout the US. In the 1940s, William Hearst owned 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news services, one business providing news items for films, the Cosmopolitan film company, and a lot of others. In 1948 he bought one of the US’s first TV stations, BWAL – TV in Baltimore. Hearst’s newspapers sold 13 million copies a day and had close to 40 million readers. Almost a third of the adult population of the US were reading Hearst newspapers every day. Furthermore, many millions of people throughout the world received information from the Hearst press via his news services, films and a series of newspapers that were translated and published in large quantities all over the world. The figures quoted above demonstrate how the Hearst empire was able to influence American politics, and indeed world politics, over very many years – on issues which included opposition to the US entering the Second World War on the side of the Soviet Union and support for the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

William Hearst’s outlook was ultra-conservative, nationalist and anti-communist. His politics were the politics of the extreme right. In 1934 he travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and friend. After this trip, Hearst’s newspapers became even more reactionary, always carrying articles against socialism, against the Soviet Union and especially against Stalin. Hearst also tried to use his newspapers for overt Nazi propaganda purposes, publishing a series of articles by Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. The protests of many readers, however, forced him to stop publishing such items and to withdraw them from circulation.

After his visit to Hitler, Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible Hearst’s sensationalist newspapers were filled with ‘revelations’ about the terrible happenings in the Soviet Union – murders, genocide, slavery, luxury for the rulers and starvation for the people, all these were the big news items almost every day. The material was provided to Hearst by the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s political police. On the front pages of the newspapers there often appeared caricatures and falsified pictures of the Soviet Union, with Stalin portrayed as a murderer holding a dagger in his hand. We should not forget that these articles were read each day by 40 million people in the US and millions of others worldwide!

The myth concerning the famine in the Ukraine
One of the first campaigns of the Hearst press against the Soviet Union revolved round the question of the millions alleged to have died as a result of the Ukraine famine. This campaign began on 18 February 1935 with a front-page headline in the Chicago American “6 million people die of hunger in the Soviet Union”. Using material supplied by Nazi Germany, William Hearst, the press baron and Nazi sympathiser, began to publish fabricated stories about a genocide which was supposed to have been deliberately perpetrated by the Bolsheviks and had caused several million to die of starvation in the Ukraine. The truth of the matter was altogether different. In fact what took place in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1930s was a major class struggle in which poor landless peasants had risen up against the rich landowners, the kulaks, and had begun a struggle for collectivisation, a struggle to form kolkhozes.

This great class struggle, involving directly or indirectly some 120 million peasants, certainly gave rise to instability in agricultural production and food shortages in some regions. Lack of food did weaken people, which in turn led to an increase in the number falling victim to epidemic diseases. These diseases were at that time regrettably common throughout the world. Between 1918 and 1920 an epidemic of Spanish flu caused the death of 20 million people in the US and Europe, but nobody accused the governments of these countries of killing their own citizens. The fact is that there was nothing these government could do in the face of epidemics of this kind. It was only with the development of penicillin during the second world war, that it became possible for such epidemics to be effectively contained. This did not become generally available until towards the end of the 1940s.

The Hearst press articles, asserting that millions were dying of famine in the Ukraine – a famine supposedly deliberately provoked by the communists, went into graphic and lurid detail. The Hearst press used every means possible to make their lies seem like the truth, and succeeded in causing public opinion in the capitalist countries to turn sharply against the Soviet Union. This was the origin of the first giant myth manufactured alleging millions were dying in the Soviet Union. In the wave of protests against the supposedly communist-provoked famine which the Western press unleashed, nobody was interested in listening to the Soviet Union’s denials and complete exposure of the Hearst press lies, a situation which prevailed from 1934 until 1987! For more than 50 years several generations of people the world over were brought up on a diet of these slanders to harbour a negative view of socialism in the Soviet Union.

The Hearst mass media empire in 1998
William Hearst died in 1951 at his house in Beverley Hills, California. Hearst left behind him a mass-media empire which to this day continues to spread his reactionary message throughout the world. The Hearst Corporation is one of the largest enterprises in the world, incorporating more than 100 companies and employing 15,000 people. The Hearst empire today comprises newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV, cable TV, news agencies and multimedia.

52 years before the truth emerges
The Nazi disinformation campaign about the Ukraine did not die with the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. The Nazi lies were taken over by the CIA and MI5, and were always guaranteed a prominent place in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The McCarthyite anti-communist witch hunts after the Second World War also thrived on the tales of the millions who died of starvation in the Ukraine. In 1953 a book on this subject was published in the US. This book holwas entitled Black Deeds of the Kremlin. Its publication was financed by Ukrainian refugees in the US, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War and to whom the American government gave political asylum, presenting them to the world as ‘democrats’.

When Reagan was elected to the US Presidency and began his 1980s anti-communist crusade, propaganda about the millions who died in the Ukraine was again revived. In 1984 a Harvard professor published a book called Human Life in Russia which repeated all the false information produced by the Hearst press in 1934. In 1984, then, we found Nazi lies and falsifications dating from the 1930s being revived, but this time under the ‘respectable’ cloak of an American university. But this was not the end of it. In 1986 yet another book appeared on the subject, entitled Harvest of Sorrow, written by a former member of the British secret service, Robert Conquest, now a professor at Stamford University in California. For his ‘work’ on the book, Conquest received $80,000 from the Ukraine National Organisation. This same organisation also paid for a film made in 1986 called Harvest of Despair, in which, inter alia, material from Conquest’s book was used. By this time the number of people it was being alleged in the US had lost their lives in the Ukraine through starvation had been upped to 15 million!

Nevertheless the millions said to have died of starvation in the Ukraine according to the Hearst press in America, parroted in books and films, was completely false information. The Canadian journalist, Douglas Tottle, meticulously exposed the falsifications in his book Fraud, famine and fascism – the Ukrainian genocide myth from Hitler to Harvard, published in Toronto in 1987. Among other things, Tottle proved that the photographic material used, horrifying photographs of starving children, had been taken from 1922 publications at a time when millions of people did die from hunger and war conditions because eight foreign armies had invaded the Soviet Union during the Civil War of 1918-1921. Douglas Tottle gives the facts surrounding the reporting of the famine of 1934 and exposes the assorted lies published in the Hearst press. One journalist who had over a long period of time sent reports and photographs from supposed famine areas was Thomas Walter, a man who never set foot in the Ukraine and even in Moscow had spent but a bare five days. This fact was revealed by the journalist Louis Fisher, Moscow Correspondent of The Nation, an American newspaper. Fisher also revealed that the journalist M Parrott, the real Hearst press correspondent in Moscow, had sent Hearst reports that were never published concerning the excellent harvest achieved by the Soviet Union in 1933 and on the Ukraine’s advancement. Tottle proves as well that the journalist who wrote the reports on the alleged Ukrainian famine, ‘Thomas Walker’, was really called Robert Green and was a convict who had escaped from a state prison in Colorado! This Walker, or Green, was arrested when he returned to the US and when he appeared in court, he admitted that he had never been to the Ukraine. All the lies concerning the millions of dead due to starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, in a famine supposedly engineered by Stalin only came to be unmasked in 1987! Hearst, the Nazi, the police agent Conquest and others had conned millions of people with their lies and fake reports. Even today the Nazi Hearst’s stories are still being repeated in newly-published books written by authors in the pay of right-wing interests.

The Hearst press, having a monopolist position in many States of the US, and having news agencies all over the world, was the great megaphone of the Gestapo. In a world dominated by monopoly capital, it was possible for the Hearst press to transform Gestapo lies into ‘truths’ emitted from dozens of newspapers, radio stations and, later on, TV channels, the world over. When the Gestapo disappeared, this dirty propaganda war against socialism in the Soviet Union carried on regardless, albeit with the CIA as its new patron. The anti-communist campaigns of the American press were not scaled down in the slightest. Business continued as usual, first at the bidding of the Gestapo and then at the bidding of the CIA.

Robert Conquest at the heart of the myths
This man, who is so widely quoted in the bourgeois press, this veritable oracle of the bourgeoisie, deserves some specific attention at this point. Robert Conquest is one of the two authors who has most written on the millions dying in the Soviet Union. He is in truth the creator of all the myths and lies concerning the Soviet Union that have been spread since the Second World War. Conquest is primarily known for his books The Great Terror (1969) and Harvest of Sorrow (1986). Conquest writes of millions dying of starvation in the Ukraine, in the gulag labour camps and during the Trials of 1936-38, using as his sources of information exiled Ukrainians living in the US and belonging to rightist parties, people who had collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of Conquest’s heroes were known to have been war criminals who led and participated in the genocide of the Ukraine’s Jewish population in 1942. One of these people was Mykola Lebed, convicted as a war criminal after the Second World War. Lebed had been security chief in Lvov during the Nazi occupation and presided over the terrible persecutions of the Jews which took place in 1942. In 1949 the CIA took Lebed off to the United States where he worked as a source of disinformation.

The style of Conquest’s books is one of violent and fanatical anti-communism. In his 1969 book, Conquest tells us that those who died of starvation in the Soviet Union between 1932-1933 amounted to between 5 million and 6 million people, half of them in the Ukraine. But in 1983, during Reagan’s anti-communist crusade, Conquest had extended the famine into 1937 and increased the number of victims to 14 million! Such assertions turned out to be well rewarded: in 1986 he was signed up by Reagan to write material for his presidential campaign aimed at preparing the American people for a Soviet invasion, The text in question was called `What to do when the Russians come – a survivalists’ handbook’! Strange words coming from a Professor of History!

The fact is that there is nothing strange in it at all, coming as it does from a man who has spent his entire life living off lies and fabrications about the Soviet Union and Stalin – first as a secret service agent and then as a writer and professor at Stamford University in California. Conquest’s past was exposed by the Guardian of 27 January 1978 in an article which identified him as a former agent in the disinformation department of the British Secret Service, i.e., the Information Research Department (IRD). The IRD was a section set up in 1947 (originally called the Communist Information Bureau) whose main task was to combat communist influence throughout the world by planting stories among politicians, journalists and others in a position to influence public opinion. The activities of the IRD were very wide-ranging, as much in Britain as abroad. When the IRD had to be formally disbanded in 1977, as a result of the exposure of its involvement with the far right, it was discovered that in Britain alone more than 100 of the best-known journalists had an IRD contact who regularly supplied them with material for articles. This was routine in several major British newspapers, such as the Financial Times, The Times, Economist, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Express, The Guardian and others. The facts exposed by the Guardian therefore give us an indication as to how the secret services were able to manipulate the news reaching the public at large.

Robert Conquest worked for the IRD from when it was set up until 1956. Conquest’s `work’ there was to contribute to the so-called `black history’ of the Soviet Union – fake stories put out as fact and distributed among journalists and others able to influence public opinion. After he had formally left the IRD, Conquest continued to write books suggested by the IRD, with secret service support. His book The Great Terror, a basic right-wing text on the subject of the power struggle that took place in the Soviet Union in 1937, was in fact a recompilation of text he had written when working for the secret services. The book was finished and published with the help of the IRD. A third of the publication run was bought by the Praeger press, normally associated with the publication of literature originating from CIA sources. Conquest’s book was intended for presentation to `useful fools’, such as university professors and people working in the press, radio and TV, to ensure that the lies of Conquest and the extreme right continued to be spread throughout large swathes of the population. Conquest to this day remains, for right-wing historians, one of the most important sources of material on the Soviet Union.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Another person who is always associated with books and articles on the supposed millions who lost their lives or liberty in the Soviet Union is the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn became famous throughout the capitalist world towards the end of 1960 with his book, The Gulag Archipelago. He himself had been sentenced in 1946 to 8 years in a labour camp for counter-revolutionary activity in the form of distribution of anti-Soviet propaganda. According to Solzhenitsyn, the fight against Nazi Germany in the Second World War could have been avoided if the Soviet government had reached a compromise with Hitler. Solzhenitsyn also accused the Soviet government and Stalin of being even worse than Hitler from the point of view, according to him, of the dreadful effects of the war on the people of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn did not hide his Nazi sympathies. He was condemned as a traitor.

Solzhenitsyn began in 1962 to publish books in the Soviet Union with the consent and help of Nikita Khrushchev. The first book he published was A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, concerning the life of a prisoner. Khrushchev used Solzhenitsyn’s texts to combat Stalin’s socialist heritage. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature with his book The Gulag Archipelago. His books then began to be published in large quantities in capitalist countries, their author having become one of the most valuable instruments of imperialism in combating the socialism of the Soviet Union. His texts on the labour camps were added to the propaganda on the millions who were supposed to have died in the Soviet Union and were presented by the capitalist mass media as though they were true. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn renounced his Soviet citizenship and emigrated to Switzerland and then the US. At that time he was considered by the capitalist press to be the greatest fighter for freedom and democracy. His Nazi sympathies were buried so as not to interfere with the propaganda war against socialism.

In the US, Solzhenitsyn was frequently invited to speak at important meetings. He was, for example, the main speaker at the AFL-CIO union congress in 1975, and on 15 July 1975 he was invited to give a lecture on the world situation to the US Senate! His lectures amount to violent and provocative agitation, arguing and propagandising for the most reactionary positions. Among other things he agitated for Vietnam to be attacked again after its victory over the US. And more: after 40 years of fascism in Portugal, when left-wing army officers took power in the people’s revolution of 1974, Solzhenitsyn began to propagandise in favour of US military intervention in Portugal which, according to him, would join the Warsaw Pact if the US did not intervene! In his lectures, Solzhenitsyn always bemoaned the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies.

But it is clear that the main thrust of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches was always the dirty war against socialism – from the alleged execution of several million people in the Soviet Union to the tens of thousands of Americans supposedly imprisoned and enslaved, according to Solzhenitsyn, in North Vietnam! This idea of Solzhenitsyn’s of Americans being used as slave labour in North Vietnam gave rise to the Rambo films on the Vietnam war. American journalists who dared write in favour of peace between the US and the Soviet Union were accused by Solzhenitsyn in his speeches of being potential traitors. Solzhenitsyn also propagandised in favour of increasing US military capacity against the Soviet Union, which he claimed was more powerful in `tanks and aeroplanes, by five to seven times, than the US’ as well as in atomic weapons which ‘in short’ he alleged were ‘two, three or even five times’ more powerful in the Soviet Union than those held by the US. Solzhenitsyn’s lectures on the Soviet Union represented the voice of the extreme right. But he himself went even further to the right in his public support of fascism.

Support for Franco’s fascism
After Franco died in 1975, the Spanish fascist regime began to lose control of the political situation and at the beginning of 1976, events in Spain captured world public opinion. There were strikes and demonstrations to demand democracy and freedom, and Franco’s heir, King Juan Carlos, was obliged very cautiously to introduce some liberalisation in order to calm down the social agitation.

At this most important moment in Spanish political history, Alexander Solzhenitsyn appeared in Madrid and gave an interview to the programme Directísimo one Saturday night, the 20th of March, at peak viewing time (see the Spanish newspapers, ABC and Ya of 21 March 1976). Solzhenitsyn, who had been provided with the questions in advance, used the occasion to make all kinds of reactionary statements. His intention was not to support the King’s so-called liberalisation measures. On the contrary, Solzhenitsyn warned against democratic reform. In his television interview he declared that 110 million Russians had died the victims of socialism, and he compared ‘the slavery to which Soviet people were subjected to the freedom enjoyed in Spain’. Solzhenitsyn also accused ‘progressive circles’ of ‘Utopians’ of considering Spain to be a dictatorship. By ‘progressive’, he meant anyone in the democratic opposition – were they liberals, social-democrats or communists. “Last autumn”, said Solzhenitsyn, “world public opinion was worried about the fate of Spanish terrorists [i.e., Spanish anti-fascists sentenced to death by the Franco regime]. All the time progressive public opinion demands democratic political reform while supporting acts of terrorism”. “Those who seek rapid democratic reform, do they realise what will happen tomorrow or the day after? In Spain there may be democracy tomorrow, but after tomorrow will it be able to avoid falling from democracy into totalitarianism?” To cautious inquiries by the journalists as to whether such statements could not be seen as support for regimes in countries where there was no liberty, Solzhenitsyn replied: “I only know one place where there is no liberty and that is Russia”. Solzhenitsyn’s statements on Spanish television were a direct support to Spanish fascism, an ideology he supports to this day.

This is one of the reasons why Solzhenitsyn began to disappear from public view in his 18 years of exile in the US, and one of the reasons he began to get less than total support from capitalist governments. For the capitalists it was a gift from Heaven to be able to use a man like Solzhenitsyn in their dirty war against socialism, but everything has its limits. In the new capitalist Russia, what determines the support of the west for political groups is purely and simply the ability of doing good business with high profits under the wing of such groups. Fascism as an alternative political regime for Russia is not considered to be good for business. For this reason Solzhenitsyn’s political plans for Russia are a dead letter as far as Western support is concerned. What Solzhenitsyn wants for Russia’s political future is a return to the authoritarian regime of the Tsars, hand-in-hand with the traditional Russian Orthodox Church! Even the most arrogant imperialists are not interested in supporting political stupidity of this magnitude. To find anyone who supports Solzhenitsyn in the West one has to search among the dumbheads of the extreme right.

Nazis, the police and the fascists
So these are the most worthy purveyors of the bourgeois myths concerning the millions who are supposed to have died and been imprisoned in the Soviet Union: the Nazi William Hearst, the secret agent Robert Conquest and the fascist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Conquest played the leading role, since it was his information that was used by the capitalist mass media the world over, and was even the basis for setting up whole schools in certain universities. Conquest’s work is without a doubt a first-class piece of police disinformation. In the 1970s, Conquest received a great deal of help from Solzhenitsyn and a series of secondary characters like Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev. In addition there appeared here and there all over the world a number of people who dedicated themselves to speculating about the number of dead and incarcerated and were always paid in gold by the bourgeois press. But the truth was finally exposed and revealed the true face of these falsifiers of history. Gorbachev’s orders to open the party’s secret archives to historical investigation had consequences nobody could have foreseen.

The archives demonstrate the propaganda lies
The speculation about the millions who died in the Soviet Union is part of the dirty propaganda war against the Soviet Union and for this very reason the denials and explanations given by the Society were never taken seriously and never found any space in the capitalist press. They were, on the contrary, ignored, while the `specialists’ bought by capital were given as much space as they wanted in order to spread their fictions. And what fictions they were! What the millions of dead and imprisoned claimed by Conquest and other `critics’ had in common was that they were the result of false statistical approximations and evaluation methods lacking any scientific basis.

Fraudulent methods give rise to millions of dead
Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and others used statistics published by the Soviet Union, for instance, national population censuses, to which they added a supposed population increase without taking account of the situation in the country. In this way they reached their conclusions as to how many people there ought to have been in the country at the end of given years. The people who were missing were claimed to have died or been incarcerated because of socialism. The method is simple but also completely fraudulent. This type of `revelation’ of such important political events would never have been accepted if the `revelation’ in question concerned the western world. In such a case it is certain that professors and historians would have protested against such fabrications. But since it was the Soviet Union that was the object of the fabrications, they were acceptable. One of the reasons is certainly that professors and historians place their professional advancement well ahead of their professional integrity.

In numbers, what were the final conclusions of the ‘critics’? According to Robert Conquest (in an estimate he made in 1961) 6 million people died of starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. This number Conquest increased to 14 million in 1986. As regards what he says about the gulag labour camps, there were detained there, according to Conquest, 5 million prisoners in 1937 before the purges of the party, the army and the state apparatus began. After the start of the purges then, according to Conquest, during 1937-38, there would have been an additional 7 million prisoners, making the total 12 million prisoners in the labour camps in 1939! And these 12 million of Conquest’s would only have been the political prisoners! In the labour camps there were also common criminals, who, according to Conquest, would have far outnumbered the political prisoners. This means, according to Conquest, that there would have been 25-30 million prisoners in the labour camps of the Soviet Union.

Again according to Conquest, a million political prisoners were executed between 1937 and 1939, and another 2 million died of hunger. The final tally resulting from the purges of 1937-39, then, according to Conquest, was 9 million, of whom 3 million would have died in prison. These figures were immediately subjected to ‘statistical adjustment’ by Conquest to enable him to reach the conclusion that the Bolsheviks had killed no fewer than 12 million political prisoners between 1930 and 1953. Adding these figures to the numbers said to have died in the famine of the 1930s, Conquest arrived at the conclusion that the Bolsheviks killed 26 million people. In one of his last statistical manipulations, Conquest claimed that in 1950 there had been 12 million political prisoners in the Soviet Union.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used more or less the same statistical methods as Conquest. But by using these pseudo-scientific methods on the basis of different premises, he arrived at even more extreme conclusions. Solzhenitsyn accepted Conquest’s estimate of 6 million deaths arising from the famine of 1932-33. Nevertheless, as far as the purges of 1936-39 were concerned, he believed that at least 1 million people died each year. Solzhenitsyn sums up by telling us that from the collectivisation of agriculture to the death of Stalin in 1953, the communists killed 66 million people in the Soviet Union. On top of that he holds the Soviet government responsible for the death of the 44 million Russians he claims were killed in the Second World War. Solzhenitsyn’s conclusion is that `110 million Russians fell, victims of socialism’. As far as prisoners were concerned, Solzhenitsyn tells us that the number of people in labour camps in 1953 was 25 million.

Gorbachev opens the archives
The collection of fantasy figures set out above, the product of extremely well paid fabrication, appeared in the bourgeois press in the 1960s, always presented as true facts ascertained through the application of scientific method.

Behind these fabrications lurked the western secret services, mainly the CIA and MI5. The impact of the mass media on public opinion is so great that the figures are even today believed to be true by large sections of the population of Western countries.

This shameful situation has worsened. In the Soviet Union itself, where Solzhenitsyn and other well-known ‘critics’ such as Andrei Sakharov and Roy Medvedev could find nobody to support their many fantasies, a significant change took place in 1990. In the new ‘free press’ opened up under Gorbachev, everything opposed to socialism was hailed as positive, with disastrous results. Unprecedented speculative inflation began to take place in the numbers of those who were alleged to have died or been imprisoned under socialism, now all mixed up into a single group of tens of millions of `victims’ of the communists.

The hysteria of Gorbachev’s new free press brought to the fore the lies of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn. At the same time Gorbachev opened up the archives of the Central Committee to historical research, a demand of the free press. The opening up of the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party is really the central issue in this tangled tale, this for two reasons: partly because in the archives can be found the facts that can shed light on the truth. But even more important is the fact that those speculating wildly on the number of people killed and imprisoned in the Soviet Union had all been claiming for years that the day the archives were opened up the figures they were citing would be confirmed. Every one of these speculators on the dead and incarcerated claimed that this would be the case: Conquest, Sakharov, Medvedev, and all the rest. But when the archives were opened up and research reports based on the actual documents began to be published a very strange thing happened. Suddenly both Gorbachev’s free press and the speculators on the dead and incarcerated completely lost interest in the archives.

The results of the research carried out on the archives of the Central Committee by Russian historians Zemskov, Dougin and Xlevnjuk, which began to appear in scientific journals as from 1990, went entirely unremarked. The reports containing the results of this historical research went completely against the inflationary current as regards the numbers who were being claimed by the ‘free press’ to have died or been incarcerated. Therefore their contents remained unpublicised. The reports were published in low-circulation scientific journals practically unknown to the public at large. Reports of the results of scientific research could hardly compete with the press hysteria, so the lies of Conquest and Solzhenitsyn continued to gain the support of many sectors of the former Soviet Union’s population. In the West also, the reports of the Russian researchers on the penal system under Stalin were totally ignored on the front pages of newspapers, and by TV news broadcasts. Why?

What the Russian research shows
The research on the Soviet penal system is set out in a report nearly 9,000 pages long. The authors of this report are many, but the best-known of them are the Russian historians V N Zemskov, A N Dougin and O V Xlevjnik. Their work began to be published in 1990 and by 1993 had nearly been finished and published almost in its entirety. The reports came to the knowledge of the West as a result of collaboration between researchers of different Western countries. The two works with which the present author is familiar are: the one which appeared in the French journal l’Histoire in September 1993, written by Nicholas Werth, the chief researcher of the French scientific research centre, CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), and the work published in the US journal American Historical Review by J Arch Getty, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, in collaboration with G T Rettersporn, a CRNS researcher, and the Russian researcher, V AN Zemskov, from the Institute of Russian History (part of the Russian Academy of Science). Today books have appeared on the matter written by the above-named researchers or by others from the same research team. Before going any further, I want to make clear, so that no confusion arises in the future, that none of the scientists involved in this research has a socialist world outlook. On the contrary their outlook is bourgeois and anti-socialist. Indeed many of them are quite reactionary. This is said so that the reader should not imagine that what is to be set out below is the product of some `communist conspiracy’. What has happened is that the above-named researchers have thoroughly exposed the lies of Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Medvedev and others, which they have done purely by reason of the fact that they place their professional integrity in first place and will not allow themselves to be bought for propaganda purposes.

The results of the Russian research answer a very large number of questions about the Soviet penal system. For us it is the Stalin era that is of greatest interest, and it is there we find cause for debate. We will pose a number of very specific questions and we will seek out our replies in the journals l’Histoire and the American Historical Review. This will be the best way of bringing into the debate some of the most important aspects of the Soviet penal system. The questions are the following:

[1] What did the Soviet penal system consist of?

[2] How many prisoners were there – both political and non-political?

[3] How many people died in the labour camps?

[4] How many people were condemned to death in the years before1953, especially in the purges of 1937-38?

[5] How long, on average, were the prison sentences?

After answering these five questions, we will discuss the punishments imposed on the two groups which are most frequently mentioned in connection with prisoners and deaths in the Soviet Union, namely the kulaks convicted in 1930 and the counter-revolutionaries convicted in 1936-38.

Labour camps in the penal system
[1] Let us start with the question of the nature of the Soviet penal system

After 1930 the Soviet penal system included prisons, labour camps, the labour colonies of the gulag, special open zones and obligation to pay fines. Whoever was remanded into custody was generally sent to a normal prison while investigations took place to establish whether he might be innocent, and could thus be set free, or whether he should go on trial. An accused person on trial could either be found innocent (and set free) or guilty. If found guilty he could be sentenced to pay a fine, to a term of imprisonment or, more unusually, to face execution. A fine could be a given percentage of his wages for a given period of time. Those sentenced to prison terms could be put in different kinds of prison depending on the type of offence involved.

To the gulag labour camps were sent those who had committed serious offences (homicide, robbery, rape, economic crimes, etc.) as well as a large proportion of those convicted of counter-revolutionary activities. Other criminals sentenced to terms longer than 3 years could also be sent to labour camps. After spending some time in a labour camp, a prisoner might be moved to a labour colony or to a special open zone.

The labour camps were very large areas where the prisoners lived and worked under close supervision. For them to work and not to be a burden on society was obviously necessary. No healthy person got by without working. It is possible that these days people may think this was a terrible thing, but this is the way it was. The number of labour camps in existence in 1940 was 53.

There were 425 gulag labour colonies. These were much smaller units than the labour camps, with a freer regime and less supervision. To these were sent prisoners with shorter prison terms – people who had committed less serious criminal or political offences. They worked in freedom in factories or on the land and formed part of civil society. In most cases the whole of the wages earned from his labour belonged to the prisoner, who in this respect was treated the same as any other worker.

The special open zones were generally agricultural areas for those who had been exiled, such as the kulaks who had been expropriated during collectivisation. Other people found guilty of minor criminal or political offences might also serve their terms in these areas.

454,000 is not 9 million
[2] The second question concerned how many political prisoners there were, and how many common criminals.

This question includes those imprisoned in labour camps, gulag colonies and the prisons (though it should be remembered that in the labour colonies there was, in the majority of cases, only partial loss of liberty). The Table on the next page shows the data which appeared in the American Historical Review, data which encompasses a period of 20 years beginning in 1934, when the penal system was unified under a central administration, until 1953, the year Stalin died.

From the Table, there are a series of conclusions which need to be drawn. To start with we can compare its data to those given by Robert Conquest. The latter claims that in 1939 there were 9 million political prisoners in the labour camps and that 3 million others had died in the period 1937-1939. Let the reader not forget that Conquest is here talking only about political prisoners! Apart from these, says Conquest, there were also common criminals who, according to him, were much greater in number than the political prisoners! In 1950 there were, according to Conquest, 12 million political prisoners! Armed with the true facts, we can readily see what a fraudster Conquest really is. Not one of his figures corresponds even remotely to the truth. In 1939 there was a total in all the camps, colonies and prisons of close to 2 million prisoners. Of these 454,000 had committed political crimes, not 9 million as Conquest asserts. Those who died in labour camps between 1937 and 1939 numbered about 160,000, not 3 million as Conquest asserts. In 1950 there were 578,000 political prisoners in labour camps, not 12 million. Let the reader not forget that Robert Conquest to this day remains one of the major sources for right-wing propaganda against communism. Among right-wing pseudo-intellectuals, Robert Conquest is a godlike figure. As for the figures cited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn – 60 million alleged to have died in labour camps – there is no need for comment. The absurdity of such an allegation is manifest. Only a sick mind could promote such delusions.

Let us now leave these fraudsters in order that we may ourselves concretely analyse the statistics relating to the gulag. The first question to be asked is what view we should take about the sheer quantity of people caught up in the penal system? What is the meaning of the figure of 2.5 million? Every person that is put in prison is living proof that society was still insufficiently developed to give every citizen everything he needed for a full life. From this point of view, the 2.5 million do represent a criticism of the society.

continued
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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:56 pm

Part II

The internal and external threat

The number of people caught up in the penal system requires to be properly explained. The Soviet Union was a country which had only recently overthrown feudalism, and its social heritage in matters of human rights was often a burden on society. In an antiquated system like tsardom, workers were condemned to live in deep poverty, and human life had little value. Robbery and violent crime was punished by unrestrained violence. Revolts against the monarchy usually ended in massacres, death sentences and extremely long prison sentences. These social relations, and the habits of mind associated with them, take a long time to change, a fact which influenced the development of society in the Soviet Union as well as attitudes towards criminals.

Another factor to be taken into account is that the Soviet Union, a country which in the 1930s had close to 160-170 million inhabitants, was seriously threatened by foreign powers. As a result of the great political changes which took place in Europe in the 1930s, there was a major threat of war from the direction of Nazi German, a threat to the survival of the Slav people, and the western bloc also harbouring interventionist ambitions. This situation was summed up by Stalin in 1931 in the following words:“We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We have to close that gap in 10 years. Either we do it or we will be wiped out.” Ten years later, on 22 June 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies. Soviet society was forced to make great efforts in the decade from 1930-1940, when the major part of its resources was dedicated to its defence preparations for the forthcoming war against the Nazis. Because of this, people worked hard while producing little by way of personal benefits. The introduction of the 7-hour day was withdrawn in 1937, and in 1939 practically every Sunday was a work day. In a difficult period such as this, with a great war hanging over the development of society for two decades (the 1930s and 1940s), a war which was to cost the Soviet Union 25 million deaths with half the country burnt to a cinder, crime did tend to increase as people tried to help themselves to what life could not otherwise offer them.

During this very difficult time, the Soviet Union held a maximum number of 2.5 million people in its prison system, i.e., 2.4% of the adult population. How can we evaluate this figure? Is it a lot or a little? Let us compare.

More prisoners in the US

In the United States of America, for example, a country of 252 million inhabitants (in 1996), the richest country in the world, which consumes 60% of the world resources, how many people are in prison? What is the situation in the US, a country not threatened by any war and where there are no deep social changes affecting economic stability?

In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,0000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8%, and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.

As far as the Soviet labour camps were concerned, it is true that the regime was harsh and difficult for the prisoners, but what is the situation today in the prisons of the US, which are rife with violence, drugs, prostitution, sexual slavery (290,000 rapes a year in US prisons). Nobody feels safe in US prisons! And this today, and in a society richer than ever before!

An important factor – the lack of medicines
[3] Let us now respond to the third question posed.

How many people died in the labour camps?

The number varied from year to year, from 5.2% in 1934 to 0.3% in 1953. Deaths in the labour camps were caused by the general shortage of resources in society as a whole, in particular the medicines necessary to fight epidemics. This problem was not confined to labour camps but was present throughout society, as well as in the great majority of countries of the world. Once antibiotics had been discovered and put into general use after the Second World War, the situation changed radically. In fact, the worst years were the war years when the Nazi barbarians imposed very harsh living conditions on all Soviet citizens. During those 4 years, more than half a million people died in the labour camps – half the total number dying throughout the 20-year period in question. Let us not forget that in the same period, the war years, 25 million people died among those who were free. In 1950, when conditions in the Soviet Union had improved and antibiotics had been introduced, the number of people dying while in prison fell to 0.3%.

[4] Let us turn now to the fourth question posed.

How many people were sentenced to death prior to 1953,

especially during the purges of 1937-38?

We have already noted Robert Conquest’s claim that the Bolsheviks killed 12 million political prisoners in the labour camps between 1930 and 1953. Of these 1 million are supposed to have been killed between 1937 and 1938. Solzhenitsyn’s figures run to tens of millions who are supposed to have died in the labour camps – 3 million in 1937-38 alone. Even higher figures have been quoted in the course of the dirty propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The Russian, Olga Shatunovskaya, for example, cites a figure of 7 million dead in the purges of 1937-38.

The documents now emerging from the Soviet archives, however, tell a different story. It is necessary to mention here at the start that the number of those sentenced to death has to be gleaned from different archives and that the researchers, in order to arrive at an approximate figure, have had to gather data from these various archives in a way which gives rise to a risk of double counting and thus of producing estimates higher than the reality. According to Dimitri Volkogonov, the person appointed by Yeltsin to take charge of the old Soviet archives, there were 30,514 persons condemned to death by military tribunals between 1 October 1936 and 30 September 1938. Another piece of information comes from the KGB: according to information released to the press in February 1990, there were 786,098 people condemned to death for crimes against the revolution during the 23 years from 1930-1953. Of those condemned, according to the KGB, 681,692 were condemned between 1937 and 1938. It is not possible to double check the KGB’s figures but this last piece of information is open to doubt. It would be very odd for so many people to have been sentenced to death in only two years. Is it possible that the present-day pro-capitalist KGB would give us correct information from the pro-socialist KGB? Be that as it may, it remains to be verified whether the statistics which underlie the KGB information include among those said to have been condemned to death during the 23 years in question common criminals as well as counter-revolutionaries, rather than counter-revolutionaries alone as the pro-capitalist KGB has alleged in a press release of February 1990. The archives also tend to the conclusion that the number of common criminals and the number of counter revolutionaries condemned to death was approximately equal.

The conclusion we can draw from this is that the number of those condemned to death in 1937-38 was close to 100,000, and not several million as has been claimed by Western propaganda.

It is also necessary to bear in mind that not all those sentenced to death in the Soviet Union were actually executed. A large proportion of death penalties were commuted to terms in labour camps. It is also important to distinguish between common criminals and counter revolutionaries. Many of those sentenced to death had committed violent crimes such as murder or rape. 60 years ago this type of crime was punishable by death in a large number of countries.

Question [5] How long was the average prison sentence?

The length of prison sentences has been the subject of the most scurrilous rumour-mongering in Western propaganda. The usual insinuation is that to be a convict in the Soviet Union involved endless years in prison – whoever went in never came out. This is completely untrue. The vast majority of those who went to prison in Stalin’s time were in fact convicted for a term of 5 years at most.

The statistics reproduced in the American Historical Review show the actual facts. Common criminals in the Russian Federation in 1936 received the following sentences: up to 5 years: 82.4%; between 5-10 years: 17.6%. 10 years was the maximum possible prison term before 1937. Political prisoners convicted in the Soviet Union’s civilian courts in 1936 received sentences as follows: up to 5 years: 44.2%; between 5-10 years 50.7%. As for those sentenced to terms in the gulag labour camps, where the longer sentences were served, the 1940 statistics show that those serving up to 5 years were 56.8% and those between 5-10 years 42.2%. Only 1% were sentenced to over 10 years.

For 1939 we have the statistics produced by Soviet courts. The distribution of prison terms is as follows: up to 5 years: 95.9%; from 5-10 years: 4%; over 10 years: 0.1%.

As we can see, the supposed eternity of prison sentences in the Soviet Union is another myth spread in the West to combat socialism.

The lies about the Soviet Union: A brief discussion as to the research reports
The research conducted by the Russian historians shows a reality totally different to that taught in the schools and universities of the capitalist world over the last 50 years. During these 50 years of the cold war, several generations have learnt only lies about the Soviet Union, which have left a deep impression on many people. This fact is also substantiated in the reports made of the French and American research. In these reports are reproduced data, figures and tables enumerating those convicted and those who died, these figures being the subject of intense discussion. But the most important thing to note is that the crimes committed by the people who had been convicted is never a matter of any interest. Capitalist political propaganda has always presented Soviet prisoners as innocent victims and the researchers have taken up this assumption without questioning it. When the researchers go over from their columns of statistics to their commentaries on the events, their bourgeois ideology comes to fore – with sometimes macabre results. Those who were convicted under the Soviet penal system are treated as innocent victims, but the fact of the matter is that most of them were thieves, murderers, rapists, etc. Criminals of this kind would never be considered to be innocent victims by the press if their crimes were committed in Europe or the US. But since the crimes were committed in the Soviet Union, it is different. To call a murderer, or a person who has raped more than once, an innocent victim is a very dirty game. Some common sense at least needs to be shown when commenting on Soviet justice, at least in relation to criminals convicted of violent crimes, even if it cannot be managed in relation to the nature of the punishment, then at least as regards the propriety of convicting people who have committed crimes of this kind.

The kulaks and the counter-revolution
In the case of the counter-revolutionaries, it is also necessary to consider the crimes of which they were accused. Let us give two examples to show the importance of this question: the first is the kulaks sentenced at the beginning of the 1930s, and the second is the conspirators and counter-revolutionaries convicted in 1936-38.

According to the research reports insofar as they deal with the kulaks, the rich peasants, there were 381,000 families, i.e., about 1.8 million people sent into exile. A small number of these people were sentenced to serve terms in labour camps or colonies. But what gave rise to these punishments?

The rich Russian peasant, the kulak, had subjected poor peasants for hundreds of years to boundless oppression and unbridled exploitation. Of the 120 million peasants in 1927, the 10 million kulaks lived in luxury while the remaining 110 million lived in poverty. Before the revolution they had lived in the most abject poverty. The wealth of the kulaks was based on the badly-paid labour of the poor peasants. When the poor peasants began to join together in collective farms, the main source of kulak wealth disappeared. But the kulaks did not give up. They tried to restore exploitation by use of famine. Groups of armed kulaks attacked collective farms, killed poor peasants and party workers, set fire to the fields and killed working animals. By provoking starvation among poor peasants, the kulaks were trying to secure the perpetuation of poverty and their own positions of power. The events which ensued were not those expected by these murderers. This time the poor peasants had the support of the revolution and proved to be stronger than the kulaks, who were defeated, imprisoned and sent into exile or sentenced to terms in labour camps.

Of the 10 million kulaks, 1.8 million were exiled or convicted. There may have been injustices perpetrated in the course of this massive class struggle in the Soviet countryside, a struggle involving 120 million people. But can we blame the poor and the oppressed, in their struggle for a life worth living, in their struggle to ensure their children would not be starving illiterates, for not being sufficiently `civilised’ or showing enough `mercy’ in their courts? Can one point the finger at people who for hundreds of years had no access to the advances made by civilisation for not being civilised? And tell us, when was the kulak exploiter civilised or merciful in his dealings with poor peasants during the years and years of endless exploitation.

The purges of 1937
Our second example, that of the counter-revolutionaries convicted in the 1936-38 Trials which followed the purges of party, army and state apparatus, has its roots in the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Millions of people participated in the victorious struggle against the Tsar and the Russian bourgeoisie, and many of these joined the Russian Communist Party. Among all these people there were, unfortunately, some who entered the party for reasons other than fighting for the proletariat and for socialism. But the class struggle was such that often there was neither the time nor the opportunity to put new party militants to the test. Even militants from other parties who called themselves socialists and who had fought the Bolshevik party were admitted to the Communist Party. A number of these new activists were given important positions in the Bolshevik Party, the state and the armed forces, depending on their individual ability to conduct class struggle. These were very difficult times for the young Soviet state, and the great shortage of cadres – or even of people who could read – forced the party to make few demands as regards the quality of new activists and cadres. Because of these problems, there arose in time a contradiction which split the party into two camps – on the one hand those who wanted to press forward in the struggle to build a socialist society, and on the other hand those who thought that the conditions were not yet ripe for building socialism and who promoted social-democracy. The origin of these ideas lay in Trotsky, who had joined the party in July 1917. Trotsky was able over time to secure the support of some of the best known Bolsheviks. This opposition, united against the original Bolshevik plan, provided one of the policy options which were the subject of a vote on 27 December 1927. Before this vote was taken, there had been a great party debate going on over many years and the result left nobody in any doubt. Of the 725,000 votes cast, the opposition secured 6,000 – i.e., less than 1% of party activists supported the united opposition.

As a consequence of the vote, and once the opposition started working for a policy opposed to that of the party, the Central Committee of the Communist Party decided to expel from the party the principal leaders of the united opposition. The central opposition figure, Trotsky, was expelled from the Soviet Union. But the story of this opposition did not end there. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Zvdokine afterwards made self-criticisms, as did several leading Trotskyists, such as Pyatakov, Radek, Preobrazhinsky and Smirnov. All of them were once again accepted into the party as activists and took up once more their party and state posts. In time it became clear that the self-criticisms made by the opposition had not been genuine, since the oppositionist leaders were united on the side of the counter revolution every time that class struggle sharpened in the Soviet Union. The majority of the oppositionists were expelled and re-admitted another couple of times before the situation clarified itself completely in 1937-38.

Industrial sabotage
The murder in December 1934 of Kirov, the chairman of the Leningrad party and one of the most important people in the Central Committee, sparked off the investigation that was to lead to the discovery of a secret organisation engaged in preparing a conspiracy to take over the leadership of the party and the government of the country by means of violence. The opposition, having lost the political struggle in 1927, now hoped to win by means of organised violence against the state. Their main weapons were industrial sabotage, terrorism and corruption. Trotsky, the main inspiration for the opposition, directed their activities from abroad. Industrial sabotage caused terrible losses to the Soviet state, at enormous cost, for example, important machines were damaged beyond possibility of repair, and there was an enormous fall in production in mines and factories.

One of the people who in 1934 described the problem was the American engineer John Littlepage, one of the foreign specialists contracted to work in the Soviet Union. Littlepage spent 10 years working in the Soviet mining industry – from 1927-37, mainly in the gold mines. In his book, In search of Soviet gold, he writes: “I never took any interest in the subtleties of political manoeuvring in Russia so long as I could avoid them; but I had to study what was happening in Soviet industry in order to do my work. And I am firmly convinced that Stalin and his collaborators took a long time to discover that discontented revolutionary communists were his worst enemies.”

Littlepage also wrote that his personal experience confirmed the official statement to the effect that a great conspiracy directed from abroad was using major industrial sabotage as part of its plans to force the government to fall. In 1931 Littlepage had already felt obliged to take note of this, while working in the copper and bronze mines of the Urals and Kazakhstan. The mines were part of a large copper/bronze complex under the overall direction of Pyatakov, the people’s Vice Commissar for heavy industry. The mines were in a catastrophic state as far as production and the well-being of their workers was concerned. Littlepage reached the conclusion that there was organised sabotage going on which came from the top management of the copper/bronze complex.

Littlepage’s book also tells us from where the Trotskyite opposition obtained the money that was necessary to pay for this counter-revolutionary activity. Many members of the secret opposition used their positions to approve the purchase of machines from certain factories abroad. The products approved were of much lower quality than those the Soviet government actually paid for. The foreign producers gave Trotsky’s organisation the surplus from such transactions, as a result of which Trotsky and his co-conspirators in the Soviet Union continued to order from these manufacturers.

Theft and corruption
This procedure was observed by Littlepage in Berlin in the spring of 1931 when buying industrial lifts for mines. The Soviet delegation was headed by Pyatakov, with Littlepage as the specialist in charge of verifying the quality of the lifts and of approving the purchase. Littlepage discovered a fraud involving low quality lifts, useless for Soviet purposes, but when he informed Pyatakov and the other members of the Soviet delegation of this fact, he met with a cold reception, as if they wanted to overlook these facts and insist he should approve the purchase of the lifts. Littlepage would not do so. At the time he thought that what was happening involved personal corruption and that the members of the delegation had been bribed by the lift manufacturers. But after Pyatakov, in the 1937 Trial, confessed his links with the Trotskyist opposition, Littlepage was driven to the conclusion that what he had witnessed in Berlin was much more than corruption at a personal level. The money involved was intended to pay for the activities of the secret opposition in the Soviet Union, activities which included sabotage, terrorism, bribery and propaganda.

Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, Radek, Tomsky, Bukharin and others much loved by the Western bourgeois press used the positions entrusted to them by the Soviet people and party to steal money from the state, in order to enable enemies of socialism to use that money for the purposes of sabotage and in their fight against socialist society in the Soviet Union.

Plans for a coup
Theft, sabotage and corruption are serious crimes in themselves, but the opposition’s activities went much further. A counter-revolutionary conspiracy was being prepared with the aim of taking over state power by means of a coup in which the whole Soviet leadership would be eliminated, starting with the assassination of the most important members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The military side of the coup would be carried out by a group of generals headed by Marshal Tukhachevsky.

According to Isaac Deutscher, himself a Trotskyite, who wrote several books against Stalin and the Soviet Union, the coup was to have been initiated by a military operation against the Kremlin and the most important troops in the big cities, such as Moscow and Leningrad. The conspiracy was, according to Deutscher, headed by Tukhachevsky together with Gamarnik, the head of the army political commissariat, General Yakir, the Commander of Leningrad, General Uborevich, the commander of the Moscow military academy, and General Primakov, a cavalry commander.

Marshal Tukhachevsky had been an officer in the former Tsarist army who, after the revolution, went over to the Red Army. In 1930 nearly 10% of officers (close to 4,500) were former Tsarist officers. Many of them never abandoned their bourgeois outlook and were just waiting for an opportunity to fight for it. This opportunity arose when the opposition was preparing its coup.

The Bolsheviks were strong, but the civilian and military conspirators endeavoured to muster strong friends. According to Bukharin’s confession in his public trial in 1938, an agreement was reached between the Trotskyite opposition and Nazi Germany, in which large territories, including the Ukraine, would be ceded to Nazi Germany following the counter-revolutionary coup in the Soviet Union. This was the price demanded by Nazi Germany for its promise of support for the counter-revolutionaries. Bukharin had been informed about this agreement by Radek, who had received an order from Trotsky about the matter. All these conspirators who had been chosen for high positions to lead, administer and defend socialist society were in reality working to destroy socialism. Above all it is necessary to remember that all this was happening in the 1930s, when the Nazi danger was growing all the time and the Nazi armies were setting Europe alight and preparing to invade the Soviet Union.

The conspirators were sentenced to death as traitors after a public trial. Those found guilty of sabotage, terrorism, corruption, attempted murder and who had wanted to hand over part of the country to the Nazis, could expect nothing else. To call them innocent victims is completely mistaken.

More numerous liars
It is interesting to see how Western propaganda, via Robert Conquest, has lied about the purges of the Red Army. Conquest says in his book The Great Terror that in 1937 there were 70,000 officers and political commissars in the Red Army and that 50% of them (i.e., 15,000 officers and 20,000 commissars) were arrested by the political police and were either executed or imprisoned for life in labour camps. In this allegation of Conquest’s, as in his whole book, there is not one word of truth. The historian Roger Reese, in his work The Red Army and the Great Purges, gives the facts which show the real significance of the 1937-38 purges for the army. The number of people in the leadership of the Red Army and air force, i.e., officers and political commissars, was 144,300 in 1937, increasing to 282,300 by 1939. During the 1937-38 purges, 34,300 officers and political commissars were expelled for political reasons. By May 1940, however, 11,596 had already been rehabilitated and restored to their posts. This meant that during the 1937-38 purges, 22,705 officers and political commissars were dismissed (close to 13,000 army officers, 4,700 air force officers and 5,000 political commissars), which amounts to 7.7% of all officers and commissars – not 50% as Conquest alleges. Of this 7.7%, some were convicted as traitors, but the great majority of them, it would appear from historical material available, simply returned to civilian life.

One last question. Were the 1937-38 Trials fair to the accused? Let us examine, for example, the trial of Bukharin, the highest party functionary to work for the secret opposition. According to the American ambassador in Moscow at the time, a well-known lawyer called Joseph Davies, who attended the whole trial, Bukharin was permitted to speak freely throughout the trial and put forward his case without impediment of any kind. Joseph Davies wrote to Washington that during the Trial it was proved that the accused were guilty of the crimes of which they were charged and that the general opinion among diplomats attending the trial was that the existence of a very serious conspiracy had been proved.

Let us learn from history
The discussion of the Soviet penal system during Stalin’s time, on which thousands of lying articles and books have been written, and hundreds of films have been made conveying false impressions, leads to important lessons. The facts prove yet again that the stories published about socialism in the bourgeois press are mostly false. The right wing can, through the press, radio and TV that it dominates, cause confusion, distort the truth and cause very many people to believe lies to be the truth. This is especially true when it comes to historical questions. Any new stories from the right should be assumed to be false unless the contrary can be proved. This cautious approach is justified. The fact is that even knowing about the Russian research reports, the right is continuing to reproduce the lies taught for the last 50 years, even though they have now been completely exposed. The right continues its historical heritage: a lie repeated over and over again ends up being accepted as true. After the Russian research reports were published in the west, a number of books began to appear in different countries aimed solely at calling into question the Russian research and enabling the old lies to be brought to public attention as new truths. These are well-presented books, stuffed from cover to cover with lies about communism and socialism.

The right-wing lies are repeated in order to fight today’s communists. They are repeated so that workers will find no alternative to capitalism and neo-liberalism. They are part of the dirty war against communists who alone have an alternative to offer for the future, i.e., socialist society. This is the reason for the appearance of all these new books containing old lies.

All this places an obligation on everybody with a socialist world outlook on history. We must take on the responsibility of working to turn communist newspapers into authentic newspapers of the working class to combat bourgeois lies! This is without doubt an important mission in today’s class struggle, which in the near future will arise again with renewed force.

Translated and presented by Ella Rule to the Stalin Society 7th March 1999

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Re: Stalin is trending

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Anarchism Or Socialism ? 1
December, 1906 — January, 1907
Source : Works, Vol. 1, November 1901 - April 1907
Publisher : Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
Transcription/Markup : Salil Sen for MIA, 2008
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

The hub of modern social life is the class struggle. In the course of this struggle each class is guided by its own ideology. The bourgeoisie has its own ideology — so-called liberalism. The proletariat also has its own ideology —this, as is well known, is socialism.

Liberalism must not be regarded as something whole and indivisible: it is subdivided into different trends, corresponding to the different strata of the bourgeoisie.

Nor is socialism whole and indivisible: in it there are also different trends.

We shall not here examine liberalism — that task had better be left for another time. We want to acquaint the reader only with socialism and its trends. We think that he will find this more interesting.

Socialism is divided into three main trends : reformism, anarchism and Marxism.

Reformism (Bernstein and others), which regards socialism as a remote goal and nothing more, reformism, which actually repudiates the socialist revolution and aims at establishing socialism by peaceful means, reformism, which advocates not class struggle but class collaboration — this reformism is decaying day by day, is day by day losing all semblance of socialism and, in our opinion, it is totally unnecessary to examine it in these articles when defining socialism.

It is altogether different with Marxism and anarchism: both are at the present time recognised as socialist trends, they are waging a fierce struggle against each other, both are trying to present themselves to the proletariat as genuinely socialist doctrines, and, of course, a study and comparison of the two will be far more interesting for the reader.

We are not the kind of people who, when the word "anarchism" is mentioned, turn away contemptuously and say with a supercilious wave of the hand: "Why waste time on that, it's not worth talking about!" We think that such cheap "criticism" is undignified and useless.

Nor are we the kind of people who console themselves with the thought that the Anarchists "have no masses behind them and, therefore, are not so dangerous." It is not who has a larger or smaller "mass" following today, but the essence of the doctrine that matters. If the "doctrine" of the Anarchists expresses the truth, then it goes without saying that it will certainly hew a path for itself and will rally the masses around itself. If, however, it is unsound and built up on a false foundation, it will not last long and will remain suspended in mid-air. But the unsoundness of anarchism must be proved.

Some people believe that Marxism and anarchism are based on the same principles and that the disagreements between them concern only tactics, so that, in the opinion of these people, it is quite impossible to draw a contrast between these two trends.

This is a great mistake.

We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the "doctrine" of the Anarchists from beginning to end and weigh it up thoroughly from all aspects.

The point is that Marxism and anarchism are built up on entirely different principles, in spite of the fact that both come into the arena of the struggle under the flag of socialism. The cornerstone of anarchism is the individual, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the masses, the collective body. According to the tenets of anarchism, the emancipation of the masses is impossible until the individual is emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: "Everything for the individual." The cornerstone of Marxism, however, is the masses, whose emancipation, according to its tenets, is the principal condition for the emancipation of the individual. That is to say, according to the tenets of Marxism, the emancipation of the individual is impossible until the masses are emancipated. Accordingly, its slogan is: "Everything for the masses."

Clearly, we have here two principles, one negating the other, and not merely disagreements on tactics.

The object of our articles is to place these two opposite principles side by side, to compare Marxism with anarchism, and thereby throw light on their respective virtues and defects. At this point we think it necessary to acquaint the reader with the plan of these articles.

We shall begin with a description of Marxism, deal, in passing, with the Anarchists' views on Marxism, and then proceed to criticise anarchism itself. Namely: we shall expound the dialectical method, the Anarchists' views on this method, and our criticism; the materialist theory, the Anarchists' views and our criticism (here, too, we shall discuss the socialist revolution, the socialist dictatorship, the minimum programme, and tactics generally); the philosophy of the Anarchists and our criticism; the socialism of the Anarchists and our criticism; anarchist tactics and organisation — and, in conclusion, we shall give our deductions.

We shall try to prove that, as advocates of small community socialism, the Anarchists are not genuine Socialists.

We shall also try to prove that, in so far as they repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Anarchists are also not genuine revolutionaries. . . .

And so, let us proceed with our subject.

I
The Dialectical Method
Everything in the world is in motion. . . . Life changes, productive forces grow, old relations collapse.
— Karl Marx
Marxism is not only the theory of socialism, it is an integral world outlook, a philosophical system, from which Marx's proletarian socialism logically follows. This philosophical system is called dialectical materialism.

Hence, to expound Marxism means to expound also dialectical materialism.

Why is this system called dialectical materialism?

Because its method is dialectical, and its theory is materialistic.

What is the dialectical method?

It is said that social life is in continual motion and development. And that is true: life must not be regarded as something immutable and static; it never remains at one level, it is in eternal motion, in an eternal process of destruction and creation. Therefore, life always contains the new and the old, the growing and the dying, the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary.

The dialectical method tells us that we must regard life as it actually is. We have seen that life is in continual motion; consequently, we must regard life in its motion and ask: Where is life going? We have seen that life presents a picture of constant destruction and creation; consequently, we must examine life in its process of destruction and creation and ask: What is being destroyed and what is being created in life?

That which in life is born and grows day by day is invincible, its progress cannot be checked. That is to say, if, for example, in life the proletariat as a class is born and grows day by day, no matter how weak and small in numbers it may be today, in the long run it must triumph. Why? Because it is growing, gaining strength and marching forward. On the other hand, that which in life is growing old and advancing to its grave must inevitably suffer defeat, even if today it represents a titanic force. That is to say, if, for example, the bourgeoisie is gradually losing ground and is slipping farther and farther back every day, then, no matter how strong and numerous it may be today, it must, in the long run, suffer defeat. Why? Because as a class it is decaying, growing feeble, growing old, and becoming a burden to life.

Hence arose the well-known dialectical proposition: all that which really exists, i.e., all that which grows day by day is rational, and all that which decays day by day is irrational and, consequently, cannot avoid defeat.

For example. In the eighties of the last century a great controversy flared up among the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia. The Narodniks asserted that the main force that could undertake the task of "emancipating Russia" was the petty bourgeoisie, rural and urban. Why? — the Marxists asked them. Because, answered the Narodniks, the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie now constitute the majority and, moreover, they are poor, they live in poverty.

To this the Marxists replied: It is true that the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie now constitute the majority and are really poor, but is that the point? The petty bourgeoisie has long constituted the majority, but up to now it has displayed no initiative in the struggle for "freedom" without the assistance of the proletariat. Why? Because the petty bourgeoisie as a class is not growing; on the contrary, it is disintegrating day by day and breaking up into bourgeois and proletarians. On the other hand, nor is poverty of decisive importance here, of course: "tramps" are poorer than the petty bourgeoisie, but nobody will say that they can undertake the task of "emancipating Russia."

As you see, the point is not which class today constitutes the majority, or which class is poorer, but which class is gaining strength and which is decaying.

And as the proletariat is the only class which is steadily growing and gaining strength, which is pushing social life forward and rallying all the revolutionary elements around itself, our duty is to regard it as the main force in the present-day movement, join its ranks and make its progressive strivings our strivings.

That is how the Marxists answered.

Obviously the Marxists looked at life dialectically, whereas the Narodniks argued metaphysically — they pictured social life as having become static at a particular stage.

That is how the dialectical method looks upon the development of life.

But there is movement and movement. There was movement in social life during the "December days," when the proletariat, straightening its back, stormed arms depots and launched an attack upon reaction. But the movement of preceding years, when the proletariat, under the conditions of "peaceful" development, limited itself to individual strikes and the formation of small trade unions, must also be called social movement.

Clearly, movement assumes different forms.

And so the dialectical method says that movement has two forms: the evolutionary and the revolutionary form.

Movement is evolutionary when the progressive elements spontaneously continue their daily activities and introduce minor, quantitative changes into the old order.

Movement is revolutionary when the same elements combine, become imbued with a single idea and sweep down upon the enemy camp with the object of uprooting the old order and of introducing qualitative changes in life, of establishing a new order.

Evolution prepares for revolution and creates the ground for it; revolution consummates the process of evolution and facilitates its further activity.

Similar processes take place in nature. The history of science shows that the dialectical method is a truly scientific method: from astronomy to sociology, in every field we find confirmation of the idea that nothing is eternal in the universe, everything changes, everything develops. Consequently, everything in nature must be regarded from the point of view of movement, development. And this means that the spirit of dialectics permeates the whole of present-day science.

As regards the forms of movement, as regards the fact that according to dialectics, minor, quantitative changes sooner or later lead to major, qualitative changes — this law applies with equal force to the history of nature Mendeleyev's "periodic system of elements" clearly shows how very important in the history of nature is the emergence of qualitative changes out of quantitative changes. The same thing is shown in biology by the theory of neo-Lamarckism, to which neo-Darwinism is yielding place.

We shall say nothing about other facts, on which F. Engels has thrown sufficiently full light in his Anti-Duhring.

Such is the content of the dialectical method.

* * *

How do the Anarchists look upon the dialectical method?

Everybody knows that Hegel was the father of the dialectical method. Marx purged and improved this method. The Anarchists are aware of this, of course. They know that Hegel was a conservative, and so, taking advantage of this, they vehemently revile Hegel as a supporter of "restoration," they try with the utmost zeal to "prove" that "Hegel is a philosopher of restoration . . . that he eulogizes bureaucratic constitutionalism in its absolute form, that the general idea of his philosophy of history is subordinate to and serves the philosophical trend of the period of restoration," and so on and so forth (see Nobati, 2 No. 6. Article by V. Cherkezishvili.)

The well-known Anarchist Kropotkin tries to "prove" the same thing in his works (see, for example, his Science and Anarchism, in Russian).

Our Kropotkinites, from Cherkezishvili right down to Sh. G., all with one voice echo Kropotkin (see Nobati).

True, nobody contests what they say on this point; on the contrary, everybody agrees that Hegel was not a revolutionary. Marx and Engels themselves proved before anybody else did, in their Critique of Critical Criticism, that Hegel's views on history fundamentally contradict the idea of the sovereignty of the people. But in spite of this, the Anarchists go on trying to "prove," and deem it necessary to go on day in and day out trying to "prove," that Hegel was a supporter of "restoration." Why do they do this? Probably, in order by all this to discredit Hegel and make their readers feel that the "reactionary" Hegel's method also cannot be other than "repugnant" and unscientific.

The Anarchists think that they can refute the dialectical method in this way.

We affirm that in this way they can prove nothing but their own ignorance. Pascal and Leibnitz were not revolutionaries, but the mathematical method they discovered is recognised today as a scientific method. Mayer and Helmholtz were not revolutionaries, but their discoveries in the field of physics became the basis of science. Nor were Lamarck and Darwin revolutionaries, but their evolutionary method put biological science on its feet. . . . Why, then, should the fact not be admitted that, in spite of his conservatism, Hegel succeeded in working out a scientific method which is called the dialectical method?

No, in this way the Anarchists will prove nothing but their own ignorance.

To proceed. In the opinion of the Anarchists, "dialectics is metaphysics," and as they "want to free science from metaphysics, philosophy from theology," they repudiate the dialectical method (see Nobati, Nos. 3 and 9. Sh. G. See also Kropotkin's Science and Anarchism).

Oh, those Anarchists! As the saying goes: "Blame others for your own sins." Dialectics matured in the struggle against metaphysics and gained fame in this struggle; but according to the Anarchists, dialectics is metaphysics!

Dialectics tells us that nothing in the world is eternal, everything in the world is transient and mutable; nature changes, society changes, habits and customs change, conceptions of justice change, truth itself changes — that is why dialectics regards everything critically; that is why it denies the existence of a once-and-for-all established truth. Consequently, it also repudiates abstract "dogmatic propositions, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart" (see F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach). 3

Metaphysics, however, tells us something altogether different. From its standpoint the world is something eternal and immutable (see F. Engels, Anti-Duhring), it has been once and for all determined by someone or something — that is why the metaphysicians always have "eternal justice" or "immutable truth" on their lips.

Proudhon, the "father" of the Anarchists, said that there existed in the world an immutable justice determined once and for all, which must be made the basis of future society. That is why Proudhon has been called a metaphysician. Marx fought Proudhon with the aid of the dialectical method and proved that since everything in the world changes, "justice" must also change, and that, consequently, "immutable justice" is metaphysical nonsense (see K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy). The Georgian disciples of the metaphysician Proudhon, however, keep reiterating that "Marx's dialectics is metaphysics"!

Metaphysics recognises various nebulous dogmas, such as, for example, the "unknowable," the "thing-in-itself," and, in the long run, passes into empty theology. In contrast to Proudhon and Spencer, Engels combated these dogmas with the aid of the dialectical method (see Ludwig Feuerbach); but the Anarchists — the disciples of Proudhon and Spencer — tell us that Proudhon and Spencer were scientists, whereas Marx and Engels were metaphysicians!

One of two things: either the Anarchists are deceiving themselves, or else they do not know what they are talking about.

At all events, it is beyond doubt that the Anarchists confuse Hegel's metaphysical system with his dialectical method.

Needless to say, Hegel's philosophical system, which rests on the immutable idea, is from beginning to end metaphysical. But it is also clear that Hegel's dialectical method, which repudiates all immutable ideas, is from beginning to end scientific and revolutionary.

That is why Karl Marx, who subjected Hegel's metaphysical system to devastating criticism, at the same time praised his dialectical method, which, as Marx said, "lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary" (see Capital, Vol. I. Preface).

That is why Engels sees a big difference between Hegel's method and his system. "Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion" (see Ludwig Feuerbach).

The Anarchists fail to see this difference and thoughtlessly maintain that "dialectics is metaphysics."

To proceed. The Anarchists say that the dialectical method is "subtle word-weaving," "the method of sophistry," "logical somersaults" (see Nobati, No. 8. Sh. G.), "with the aid of which both truth and falsehood are proved with equal facility" (see Nobati, No. 4. Article by V. Cherkezishvili).

Thus, in the opinion of the Anarchists, the dialectical method proves both truth and falsehood.

At first sight it would seem that the accusation advanced by the Anarchists has some foundation. Listen, for example, to what Engels says about the follower of the metaphysical method :

". . . His communication is: 'Yea, yea; nay, nay, for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.' For him a thing either exists, or it does not exist; it is equally impossible for a thing to be itself and at the same time something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another . . ." (see Anti-Duhring. Introduction).

How is that? — the Anarchists cry heatedly. Is it possible for a thing to be good and bad at the same time?! That is "sophistry," "juggling with words," it shows that "you want to prove truth and falsehood with equal facility"! . . .

Let us, however, go into the substance of the matter.

Today we are demanding a democratic republic. Can we say that a democratic republic is good in all respects, or bad in all respects? No we cannot! Why? Because a democratic republic is good only in one respect: when it destroys the feudal system; but it is bad in another respect: when it strengthens the bourgeois system. Hence we say: in so far as the democratic republic destroys the feudal system it is good — and we fight for it; but in so far as it strengthens the bourgeois system it is bad — and we fight against it.

So the same democratic republic can be "good" and "bad" at the same time — it is "yes" and "no."

The same thing may be said about the eight-hour day, which is good and bad at the same time: "good" in so far as it strengthens the proletariat, and "bad" in so far as it strengthens the wage system.

It was facts of this kind that Engels had in mind when he characterised the dialectical method in the words we quoted above.

The Anarchists, however, fail to understand this, and an absolutely clear idea seems to them to be nebulous "sophistry."

The Anarchists are, of course, at liberty to note or ignore these facts, they may even ignore the sand on the sandy seashore — they have every right to do that. But why drag in the dialectical method, which, unlike anarchism, does not look at life with its eyes shut, which has its finger on the pulse of life and openly says: since life changes and is in motion, every phenomenon of life has two trends: a positive and a negative; the first we must defend, the second we must reject.

To proceed further. In the opinion of our Anarchists, "dialectical development is catastrophic development, by means of which, first the past is utterly destroyed, and then the future is established quite separately. . . . Cuvier's cataclysms were due to unknown causes, but Marx and Engels's catastrophes are engendered by dialectics" (see Nobati, No. 8. Sh. G.).

In another place the same author writes: "Marxism rests on Darwinism and treats it uncritically" (see Nobati, No. 6).

Now listen!

Cuvier rejects Darwin's theory of evolution, he recognises only cataclysms, and cataclysms are unexpected upheavals "due to unknown causes." The Anarchists say that the Marxists adhere to Cuvier' s view and therefore repudiate Darwinism.

Darwin rejects Cuvier's cataclysms, he recognises gradual evolution. But the same Anarchists say that "Marxism rests on Darwinism and treats it uncritically," i.e., the Marxists repudiate Cuvier's cataclysms.

In short, the Anarchists accuse the Marxists of adhering to Cuvier's view and at the same time reproach them for adhering to Darwin's and not to Cuvier's view.

This is anarchy if you like! As the saying goes: the Sergeant's widow flogged herself! Clearly, Sh. G. of No. 8 of Nobati forgot what Sh. G. of No. 6 said.

Which is right: No. 8 or No. 6?

Let us turn to the facts. Marx says:

"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations. . . . Then begins an epoch of social revolution." But "no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed . . ." (see K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Preface). 4

If this thesis of Marx is applied to modern social life, we shall find that between the present-day productive forces, which are social in character, and the form of appropriation of the product, which is private in character, there is a fundamental conflict which must culminate in the socialist revolution (see F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Part III, Chapter II).

As you see, in the opinion of Marx and Engels, revolution is engendered not by Cuvier's "unknown causes," but by very definite and vital social causes called "the development of the productive forces."

As you see, in the opinion of Marx and Engels, revolution comes only when the productive forces have sufficiently matured, and not unexpectedly, as Cuvier thought.

Clearly, there is nothing in common between Cuvier's cataclysms and Marx's dialectical method.

On the other hand, Darwinism repudiates not only Cuvier's cataclysms, but also dialectically understood development, which includes revolution; whereas, from the standpoint of the dialectical method, evolution and revolution, quantitative and qualitative changes, are two essential forms of the same motion.

Obviously, it is also wrong to assert that "Marxism . . . treats Darwinism uncritically."

It turns out therefore, that Nobati is wrong in both cases, in No. 6 as well as in No. 8.

Lastly, the Anarchists tell us reproachfully that "dialectics . . . provides no possibility of getting, or jumping, out of oneself, or of jumping over oneself" (see Nobati, No. 8. Sh. G.).

Now that is the downright truth, Messieurs Anarchists! Here you are absolutely right, my dear sirs: the dialectical method does not, indeed, provide such a possibility. But why not? Because "jumping out of oneself, or jumping over oneself" is an exercise for wild goats, while the dialectical method was created for human beings.

That is the secret! . . .

Such, in general, are the Anarchists' views on the dialectical method.

Clearly, the Anarchists fail to understand the dialectical method of Marx and Engels; they have conjured up their own dialectics, and it is against this dialectics that they are fighting so ruthlessly.

All we can do is to laugh as we gaze at this spectacle, for one cannot help laughing when one sees a man fighting his own imagination, smashing his own inventions, while at the same time heatedly asserting that he is smashing his opponent.

II
The Materialist Theory
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary,
their social being that determines their consciousness."
— Karl Marx
We already know what the dialectical method is. What is the materialist theory?

Everything in the world changes, everything in life develops, but how do these changes take place and in what form does this development proceed?

We know, for example, that the earth was once an incandescent, fiery mass; then it gradually cooled, plants and animals appeared, the development of the animal kingdom was followed by the appearance of a certain species of ape, and all this was followed by the appearance of man.

This, broadly speaking, is the way nature developed.

We also know that social life did not remain static either. There was a time when men lived on a primitive-communist basis; at that time they gained their livelihood by primitive hunting; they roamed through the forests and procured their food in that way. There came a time when primitive communism was superseded by the matriarchate — at that time men satisfied their needs mainly by means of primitive agriculture. Later the matriarchate was superseded by the patriarchate, under which men gained their livelihood mainly by cattle-breeding. The patriarchate was later superseded by the slave-owning system — at that time men gained their livelihood by means of relatively more developed agriculture. The slave-owning system was followed by feudalism, and then, after all this, came the bourgeois system.

That, broadly speaking, is the way social life developed.

Yes, all this is well known. . . . But how did this development take place; did consciousness call forth the development of "nature" and of "society," or, on the contrary, did the development of "nature" and "society" call forth the development of consciousness?

This is how the materialist theory presents the question.

Some people say that "nature" and "social life" were preceded by the universal idea, which subsequently served as the basis of their development, so that the development of the phenomena of "nature" and of "social life" is, so to speak, the external form, merely the expression of the development of the universal idea.

Such, for example, was the doctrine of the idealists, who in the course of time split up into several trends.

Others say that from the very beginning there have existed in the world two mutually negating forces — idea and matter, consciousness and being, and that correspondingly, phenomena also fall into two cate-gories — the ideal and the material, which negate each other, and contend against each other, so that the development of nature and society is a constant struggle between ideal and material phenomena.

Such, for example, was the doctrine of the dualists, who in the course of time, like the idealists, split up into several trends.

The materialist theory utterly repudiates both dualism and idealism.

Of course, both ideal and material phenomena exist in the world, but this does not mean that they negate each other. On the contrary, the ideal and the material sides are two different forms of one and the same nature or society, the one cannot be conceived without the other, they exist together, develop together, and, consequently, we have no grounds whatever for thinking that they negate each other.

Thus, so-called dualism proves to be unsound.

A single and indivisible nature expressed in two different forms — material and ideal; a single and indivisible social life expressed in two different forms — material and ideal—that is how we should regard the development of nature and of social life.

Such is the monism of the materialist theory.

At the same time, the materialist theory also repudiates idealism.

It is wrong to think that in its development the ideal side, and consciousness in general, precedes the development of the material side. Socalled external "non-living" nature existed before there were any living beings. The first living matter possessed no consciousness, it possessed only irritability and the first rudiments of sensation. Later, animals gradually developed the power of sensation, which slowly passed into consciousness, in conformity with the development of the structure of their organisms and nervous systems. If the ape had always walked on all fours, if it had never stood upright, its descendant — man — would not have been able freely to use his lungs and vocal chords and, therefore, would not have been able to speak; and that would have fundamentally retarded the development of his consciousness. If, furthermore, the ape had not risen up on its hind legs, its descendant — man — would have been compelled always to walk on all fours, to look downwards and obtain his impressions only from there; he would have been unable to look up and around himself and, consequently, his brain would have obtained no more impressions than the brain of a quadruped. All this would have fundamentally retarded the development of human consciousness.

It follows, therefore, that the development of consciousness needs a particular structure of the organism and development of its nervous system.

It follows, therefore, that the development of the ideal side, the development of consciousness, is preceded by the development of the material side, the development of the external conditions: first the external conditions change, first the material side changes, and then consciousness, the ideal side, changes accordingly.

Thus, the history of the development of nature utterly refutes so-called idealism.

The same thing must be said about the history of the development of human society.

History shows that if at different times men were imbued with different ideas and desires, the reason for this is that at different times men fought nature in different ways to satisfy their needs and, accordingly, their economic relations assumed different forms. There was a time when men fought nature collectively, on the basis of primitive communism; at that time their property was communist property and, therefore, at that time they drew scarcely any distinction between "mine" and "thine," their consciousness was communistic. There came a time when the distinction between "mine" and "thine" penetrated the process of production; at that time property, too, assumed a private, individualist character and, therefore, the consciousness of men became imbued with the sense of private property. Then came the time, the present time, when production is again assuming a social character and, consequently, property, too, will soon assume a social character — and this is precisely why the consciousness of men is gradually becoming imbued with socialism.

Here is a simple illustration. Let us take a shoemaker who owned a tiny workshop, but who, unable to withstand the competition of the big manufacturers, closed his workshop and took a job, say, at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in Tiflis. He went to work at Adelkhanov's factory not with the view to becoming a permanent wage-worker, but with the object of saving up some money, of accumulating a little capital to enable him to reopen his workshop. As you see, the position of this shoemaker is already proletarian, but his consciousness is still non-proletarian, it is thoroughly petty-bourgeois. In other words, this shoemaker has already lost his petty-bourgeois position, it has gone, but his petty-bourgeois consciousness has not yet gone, it has lagged behind his actual position.

Clearly, here too, in social life, first the external conditions change, first the conditions of men change and then their consciousness changes accordingly.

But let us return to our shoemaker. As we already know, he intends to save up some money and then reopen his workshop. This proletarianised shoemaker goes on working, but finds that it is a very difficult matter to save money, because what he earns barely suffices to maintain an existence. Moreover, he realises that the opening of a private workshop is after all not so alluring: the rent he will have to pay for the premises, the caprices of customers, shortage of money, the competition of the big manufacturers and similar worries — such are the many troubles that torment the private workshop owner. On the other hand, the proletarian is relatively freer from such cares; he is not troubled by customers, or by having to pay rent for premises. He goes to the factory every morning, "calmly" goes home in the evening, and as calmly pockets his "pay" on Saturdays. Here, for the first time, the wings of our shoemaker's petty-bourgeois dreams are clipped; here for the first time proletarian strivings awaken in his soul.

Time passes and our shoemaker sees that he has not enough money to satisfy his most essential needs, that what he needs very badly is a rise in wages. At the same time, he hears his fellow-workers talking about unions and strikes. Here our shoemaker realises that in order to improve his conditions he must fight the masters and not open a workshop of his own. He joins the union, enters the strike movement, and soon becomes imbued with socialist ideas. . . .

Thus, in the long run, the change in the shoemaker's material conditions was followed by a change in his consciousness: first his material conditions changed, and then, after a time, his consciousness changed accordingly.

The same must be said about classes and about society as a whole.

In social life, too, first the external conditions change, first the material conditions change, and then the ideas of men, their habits, customs and their world outlook change accordingly.

That is why Marx says:

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

If we can call the material side, the external conditions, being, and other phenomena of the same kind, the content, then we can call the ideal side, consciousness and other phenomena of the same kind, the form. Hence arose the well-known materialist proposition: in the process of development content precedes form, form lags behind content.

And as, in Marx's opinion, economic development is the "material foundation" of social life, its content, while legal-political and religious-philosophical development is the "ideological form" of this content, its "superstructure," Marx draws the conclusion that: "With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed."

This, of course, does not mean that in Marx's opinion content is possible without form, as Sh. G. imagines (see Noboati, No. 1. "A Critique of Monism"). Contentis impossible without form, but the point is that since a given form lags behind its content, it never fully corresponds to this content; and so the new content is "obliged" to clothe itself for a time in the old form, and this causes a conflict between them. At the present time, for example, the form of appropriation of the product, which is private in character, does not correspond to the social content of production, and this is the basis of the present-day social "conflict."

On the other hand, the idea that consciousness is a form of being does not mean that by its nature consciousness, too, is matter. That was the opinion held only by the vulgar materialists (for example, Buchner and Moleschott), whose theories fundamentally contradict Marx's materialism, and whom Engels rightly ridiculed in his Ludwig Feuerbach. According to Marx's materialism, consciousness and being, idea and matter, are two different forms of the same phenomenon, which, broadly speaking, is called nature, or society. Consequently, they do not negate each other5 ; nor are they one and the same phenomenon. The only point is that, in the development of nature and society, consciousness, i.e., what takes place in our heads, is preceded by a corresponding material change, i.e., what takes place outside of us; any given material change is, sooner or later, inevitably followed by a corresponding ideal change.

Very well, we shall be told, perhaps this is true as applied to the history of nature and society. But how do different conceptions and ideas arise in our heads at the present time? Do so-called external conditions really exist, or is it only our conceptions of these external conditions that exist? And if external conditions exist, to what degree are they perceptible and cognizable?

On this point the materialist theory says that our conceptions, our "self," exist only in so far as external conditions exist that give rise to impressions in our "self." Whoever unthinkingly says that nothing exists but our conceptions, is compelled to deny the existence of all external conditions and, consequently, must deny the existence of all other people and admit the existence only of his own "self," which is absurd, and utterly contradicts the principles of science.

Obviously, external conditions do actually exist; these conditions existed before us, and will exist after us; and the more often and the more strongly they affect our consciousness, the more easily perceptible and cognizable do they become.

As regards the question as to how different conceptions and ideas arise in our heads at the present time, we must observe that here we have a repetition in brief of what takes place in the history of nature and society. In this case, too, the object outside of us preceded our conception of it; in this case, too, our conception, the form, lags behind the object—behind its content. When I look at a tree and see it—that only shows that this tree existed even before the conception of a tree arose in my head, that it was this tree that aroused the corresponding conception in my head. . . .

Such, in brief, is the content of Marx's materialist theory.

The importance of the materialist theory for the practical activities of mankind can be readily understood.

If the economic conditions change first and the consciousness of men undergoes a corresponding change later, it is clear that we must seek the grounds for a given ideal not in the minds of men, not in their imaginations, but in the development of their economic conditions. Only that ideal is good and acceptable which is based on a study of economic conditions. All those ideals which ignore economic conditions and are not based upon their development are useless and unacceptable.

Such is the first practical conclusion to be drawn from the materialist theory.

If the consciousness of men, their habits and customs, are determined by external conditions, if the unsuitability of legal and political forms rests on an economic content, it is clear that we must help to bring about a radical change in economic relations in order, with this change, to bring about a radical change in the habits and customs of the people, and in their political system.

Here is what Karl Marx says on that score:

"No great acumen is required to perceive the necessary interconnection of materialism with . . . socialism. If man constructs all his knowledge, perceptions, etc., from the world of sense . . . then it follows that it is a question of so arranging the empirical world that he experiences the truly human in it, that he becomes accustomed to experiencing himself as a human being. . . . If man is unfree in the materialist sense—that is, is free not by reason of the negative force of being able to avoid this or that, but by reason of the positive power to assert his true individuality, then one should not punish individuals for crimes, but rather destroy the anti-social breeding places of crime. . . . If man is moulded circumstances, then the circumstances must be moulded humanly" (see Ludwig Feuerbach, Appendix: "Karl Marx on the History of French Materialism of the XVIII Century"). 6

Such is the second practical conclusion to be drawn from the materialist theory.

* * *
What is the anarchist view of the materialist theory of Marx and Engels?

While the dialectical method originated with Hegel, the materialist theory is a further development of the materialism of Feuerbach. The Anarchists know this very well, and they try to take advantage of the defects of Hegel and Feuerbach to discredit the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. We have already shown with reference to Hegel and the dialectical method that these tricks of the Anarchists prove nothing but their own ignorance. The same must be said with reference to their attacks on Feuerbach and the materialist theory.

For example. The Anarchists tell us with great aplomb that "Feuerbach was a pantheist . . ." that he "deified man . . ." (see Nobati, No. 7. D. Delendi), that "in Feuerbach's opinion man is what he eats . . ." alleging that from this Marx drew the following conclusion: "Consequently, the main and primary thing is economic conditions . . ." (see Nobati, No. 6, Sh. G.).

True, nobody has any doubts about Feuerbach's pantheism, his deification of man, and other errors of his of the same kind. On the contrary, Marx and Engels were the first to reveal Feuerbach's errors. Nevertheless, the Anarchists deem it necessary once again to "expose" the already exposed errors. Why? Probably because, in reviling Feuerbach, they want indirectly to discredit the materialist theory of Marx and Engels. Of course, if we examine the subject impartially we shall certainly find that in addition to erroneous ideas, Feuerbach gave utterance to correct ideas, as has been the case with many scholars in history. Nevertheless, the Anarchists go on "exposing." . . .

We say again that by tricks of this kind they prove nothing but their own ignorance. It is interesting to note (as we shall see later on) that the Anarchists took it into their heads to criticise the materialist theory from hearsay, without any acquaintance with it. As a consequence, they often contradict and refute each other, which, of course, makes our "critics" look ridiculous. If, for example, we listen to what Mr. Cherkezishvili has to say, it would appear that Marx and Engels detested monistic materialism, that their materialism was vulgar and not monistic materialism :

"The great science of the naturalists, with its system of evolution, transformism and monistic materialism, which Engels so heartily detested . . . avoided dialectics," etc. (see Nobati, No. 4. V. Cherkezishvili).

It follows, therefore, that natural-scientific materialism, which Cherkezishvili approves of and which Engels "detested," was monistic materialism and, therefore, deserves approval, whereas the materialism of Marx and Engels is not monistic and, of course, does not deserve recognition.

Another Anarchist, however, says that the materialism of Marx and Engels is monistic and therefore should be rejected.

"Marx's conception of history is a throwback to Hegel. The monistic materialism of absolute objectivism in general, and Marx's economic monism in particular, are impossible in nature and fallacious in theory. . . . Monistic materialism is poorly disguised dualism and a compromise between metaphysics and science . . . " (see Nobati, No. 6. Sh. G.).

It would follow, therefore, that monistic materialism is unacceptable, that Marx and Engels do not detest it, but, on the contrary, are themselves monistic materialists—and therefore, monistic materialism must be rejected.

They are all at sixes and sevens. Try and make out which of them is right, the former or the latter! They have not yet agreed among themselves about the merits and demerits of Marx's materialism, they have not yet understood whether it is monistic or not, and have not yet made up their minds themselves as to which is the more acceptable, vulgar or monistic materialism—but they already deafen us with their boastful claims to have shattered Marxism!

Well, well, if Messieurs the Anarchists continue to shatter each other's views as zealously as they are doing now, we need say no more, the future belongs to the Anarchists. . . .

No less ridiculous is the fact that certain "celeblated" Anarchists, notwithstanding their "celebrity," have not yet made themselves familiar with the different trends in science. It appears that they are ignorant of the fact that there are various kinds of materialism in science which differ a great deal from each other: there is, for example, vulgar materialism, which denies the importance of the ideal side and the effect it has upon the material side; but there is also so-called monistic materialism—the materialist theory of Marx—which scientifically examines the interrelation between the ideal and the material sides. But the Anarchists confuse these different kinds of materialism, fail to see even the obvious differences between them, and at the same time affirm with great aplomb that they are regenerating science!

P. Kropotkin, for example, smugly asserts in his "philosophical" works that anarcho-communism rests on "contemporary materialist philosophy," but he does not utter a single word to explain on which "materialist philosophy" anarcho-communism rests: on vulgar, monistic, or some other. Evidently he is ignorant of the fact that there are fundamental contradictions between the different trends of materialism, and he fails to understand that to confuse these trends means not "regenerating science," but displaying one's own downright ignorance (see Kropotkin, Science and Anarchism, and also Anarchy and Its Philosophy).

The same thing must be said about Kropotkin's Georgian disciples. Listen to this :

"In the opinion of Engels, and also of Kautsky, Marx rendered mankind a great service in that he. . ." among other things, discovered the "materialist conception. Is this true? We do not think so, for we know . . . that all the historians, scientists and philosophers who adhere to the view that the social mechanism is set in motion by geographic, climatic and telluric, cosmic, anthropological and biological conditions — are all materialists" (see Nobati, No. 2).

It follows, therefore, that there is no difference whatever between the "materialism" of Aristotle and Holbach, or between the "materialism" of Marx and Moleschott! This is criticism if you like! And people whose knowledge is on such a level have taken it into their heads to renovate science! Indeed, it is an apt saying: "It's a bad lookout when a cobbler begins to bake pies! . . ."

To proceed. Our "celebrated" Anarchists heard somewhere that Marx's materialism was a "belly theory," and so they rebuke us, Marxists, saying :

"In the opinion of Feuerbach, man is what he eats. This formula had a magic effect on Marx and Engels," and, as a consequence, Marx drew the conclusion that "the main and primary thing is economic conditions, relations of production. . . ." And then the Anarchists proceed to instruct us in a philosophical tone: "It would be a mistake to say that the sole means of achieving this object of social life) is eating and economic production. . . . If ideology were determined mainly, monistically, by eating and economic conditions—then some gluttons would be geniuses" (see Nobati, No. 6. Sh. G.).

You see how easy it is to refute the materialism of Marx and Engels! It is sufficient to hear some gossip in the street from some schoolgirl about Marx and

Engels, it is sufficient to repeat that street gossip with philosophical aplomb in the columns of a paper like Nobati, to leap into fame as a "critic" of Marxism!

But tell me, gentlemen: Where, when, on which planet, and which Marx did you hear say that "eating determines ideology"? Why did you not cite a single sentence, a single word from the works of Marx to back your assertion? True, Marx said that the economic conditions of men determine their consciousness, their ideology, but who told you that eating and economic conditions are the same thing? Don't you really know that physiological phenomena, such as eating, for example, differ fundamentally from sociological phenomena, such as the economic conditions of men, for example? One can forgive a schoolgirl, say, for confusing these two different phenomena; but how is it that you, the "vanquishers of Social-Democracy," "regenerators of science," so carelessly repeat the mistake of a schoolgirl?

How, indeed, can eating determine social ideology? Ponder over what you yourselves have said: eating, the form of eating, does not change; in ancient times people ate, masticated and digested their food in the same way as they do now, but ideology changes all the time. Ancient, feudal, bourgeois and proletarian — such are the forms of ideology. Is it conceivable that that which does not change can determine that which is constantly changing?

To proceed further. In the opinion of the Anarchists, Marx's materialism "is parallelism. . . ." Or again: "monistic materialism is poorly disguised dualism and a compromise between metaphysics and science. . . ." "Marx drops into dualism because he depicts relations of production as material, and human striving and will as an illusion and a utopia, which, even though it exists, is of no importance" (see Nobati, No. 6. Sh. G.).

Firstly, Marx's monistic materialism has nothing in common with silly parallelism. From the standpoint of this materialism, the material side, content, necessarily precedes the ideal side, form. Parallelism, however, repudiates this view and emphatically affirms that neither the material nor the ideal comes first, that both develop together, side by side.

Secondly, even if Marx had in fact "depicted relations of production as material, and human striving and will as an illusion and a utopia having no importance," does that mean that Marx was a dualist? The dualist, as is well known, ascribes equal importance to the ideal and material sides as two opposite principles. But if, as you say, Marx attaches higher importance to the material side and no importance to the ideal side because it is a "utopia," how do you make out that Marx was a dualist, Messieurs "Critics"?

Thirdly, what connection can there be between materialist monism and dualism, when even a child knows that monism springs from one principle — nature, or being, which has a material and an ideal form, whereas dualism springs from two principles — the material and the ideal, which, according to dualism, negate each other?

Fourthly, when did Marx depict "human striving and will as a utopia and an illusion"? True, Marx explained "human striving and will" by economic development, and when the strivings of certain armchair philosophers failed to harmonise with economic conditions he called them utopian. But does this mean that Marx believed that human striving in general is utopian? Does this, too, really need explanation? Have you really not read Marx's statement that: "mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve" (see Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), i.e., that, generally speaking, mankind does not pursue utopian aims? Clearly, either our "critic" does not know what he is talking about, or he is deliberately distorting the facts.

Fifthly, who told you that in the opinion of Marx and Engels "human striving and will are of no importance"? Why do you not point to the place where they say that? Does not Marx speak of the importance of "striving and will" in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in his Class Struggles in France, in his Civil War in France, and in other pamphlets of the same kind? Why then did Marx try to develop the proletarians' "will and striving" in the socialist spirit, why did he conduct propaganda among them if he attached no importance to "striving and will"? Or, what did Engels talk about in his well-known articles of 1891-94 if not the "importance of will and striving"? True, in Marx's opinion human "will and striving" acquire their content from economic conditions, but does that mean that they themselves exert no influence on the development of economic relations? Is it really so difficult for the Anarchists to understand such a simple idea?

Here is another "accusation" Messieurs the Anarchists make: "form is inconceivable without content . . ." therefore, one cannot say that "form comes after content (lags behind content. K.) . . . they 'co-exist.'. . . Otherwise, monism would be an absurdity" (see Nobati, No. 1. Sh. G.).

Our "scholar" is somewhat confused again. It is quite true that content is inconceivable without form. But it is also true that the existing form never fully corresponds to the existing content: the former lags behind the latter, to a certain extent the new content is always clothed in the old form and, as a consequence, there is always a conflict between the old form and the new content. It is precisely on this ground that revolutions occur, and this, among other things, expresses the revolutionary spirit of Marx's materialism. The "celebrated" Anarchists, however, have failed to understand this, and for this they themselves and not the materialist theory are to blame, of course.

Such are the views of the Anarchists on the materialist theory of Marx and Engels, that is, if they can be called views at all.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... 12/x01.htm

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Sun Apr 22, 2018 1:41 pm

An Audience with Grover Furr

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Re: Stalin is trending

Post by blindpig » Sun Jul 15, 2018 4:32 pm

In Memoriam Domenico Losurdo by Grover Furr

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In Memoriam Domenico Losurdo

By Grover Furr

July 1, 2018

I first learned about Professor Domenico Losurdo, who died on June 28, because of his 2008 book Stalin: storia e critica di una leggenda nera (Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend) and the storm of protests against it published in 2009 in the pages of Liberazione, the newspaper of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista.[1]

I read the attacks on Losurdo’s defense of Stalin with interest. My book on Nikita Khrushchev’s lies in his “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress of February 25, 1956, had just been published in Russian, in Moscow, in December 2008, as Antistalinskaia podlost’ (Moscow: Algoritm). The discovery that Khrushchev had evidently not been able to identify a single genuine “crime” of Stalin’s had led me to wonder whether there really were any such crimes.

So I obtained Losurdo’s book on Stalin, scanned it to PDF (I still have this copy), and studied it. I found Losurdo’s firm defense of Stalin, particularly on the basis of the Soviet Union’s and the Comintern’s fight against imperialism, to be a breath of fresh air, a sign that there were others who questioned the demonization of Stalin and the consequent rejection of the communist movement of the 20th century.

In 2012 Losurdo engaged French anticommunist scholar Nicolas Werth in a debate over Stalin.[2] I noticed something that Losurdo could not: that Werth was citing recent publications about collectivization of agriculture and the Soviet famine of 1932-33 in a dishonest manner. I wrote about this to Losurdo, who thanked me and put my remarks on his blog.[3]

In 2014 I was on a panel at the Left Forum in Manhattan, New York City. At the end of the panel a gentleman approached and introduced himself to me as Domenico Losurdo. Delighted, I introduced him to the still-full room as the renowned communist philosopher. In town to present a new book of his own, Losurdo had come to hear my talk!

An updated English version of my book on Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, Khrushchev Lied, had been published in 2011. Losurdo offered to introduce me to an Italian publisher, Città del Sole, and to write an introduction to the Italian translation. With his permission, Losurdo’s introduction appears in the Italian, German, and French editions. Losurdo graciously agreed to write a back-cover comment for my book The Murder of Sergei Kirov (2013) and a longer introduction to that book which remains unpublished.

Losurdo, as he himself always insisted, was a philosopher, not a historian. He did not read Russian. And in any case he would not have delved into the primary sources from the former Soviet archives that now permit us to see how fraudulent the anticommunist scholarship about Stalin, capitalist as well as Trotskyist, has always been and still is today.

But Losurdo was a deeply historical philosopher. Marxist philosophy is called dialectical and historical materialism. Losurdo’s deep knowledge of the history of the twentieth century, and particularly of the real horrors of imperialism on the part of the Western “democracies,” detailed and defended the role of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and the Communist International in combatting imperialism.

Losurdo surmised, as have many others, that the contradiction between the liberatory struggles led by the communist movement and endorsed by Stalin, and the purported “crimes” of Stalin, was too great. Something about this story did not make sense! He was right.

The purpose of philosophy, as Karl Marx wrote, was to change the world. We can add that the purpose of honest, materialist history is to learn the lessons, positive and negative, from the past, so we can contribute to those forces that are building a better, brighter world for future generations.

Above everything else Domenico Losurdo was a fighter for the truth. His contribution to the eventual liberation of the oppressed and exploited remains with us and with the generations of fighters that will come after us.



[1] The debate over Losurdo’s book can be found at the Internet Archive, at https://web.archive.org/web/20100116001 ... azione.it/ Liberazione stopped publication in 2014 and its web site is no longer on line.
[2] Werth’s contribution is here: http://www.lafauteadiderot.net/Staline- ... dans-l,854 ; Losurdo’s response is here: http://www.lafauteadiderot.net/Staline- ... dans-l,855
[3] See http://domenicolosurdo.blogspot.com/201 ... -furr.html


FOR DOMENICO LOSURDO WRITINGS AND SPEECHES

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogsp ... t-and.html

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogsp ... -marx.html

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspo ... ria-e.html

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogsp ... m-and.html

https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogsp ... rover.html
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