The Game and the Aim of the Anti-Stalinists
A review of Medvedev, Roy A., Let History Judge. The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Salisbury, Harrison E., The 900 Days. The Siege of Leningrad. Tucker, Robert C. Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929.
PL Magazine Vol. 10 No. 4 September, 1976, 56 – 79.
INTRODUCTION
The U.S. ruling class is stepping up anticommunism in all sectors of society. They know that the relative decline of U.S. capitalism and the hardships -- price increases, wage freezes, unemployment, cutbacks in essential services -- they must impose on the American working class mean years of increased militancy and struggle. They well know that it is precisely such conditions which can lead to rejection of capitalist dictatorship by millions of working people, given the presence of a revolutionary communist Party. Racism and anti-communism are the two principal ideological weapons the bosses have to weaken workers’ struggles and preserve their system.
These aspects of bourgeois ideology are foisted off upon petty-bourgeois intellectuals as well as upon workers. This article will examine three books which, masquerading as objective scholarship, aim to push anti-communism upon intellectuals. That an intellectual audience is aimed at ln each case is clear from the following facts:
(I) these books do not discuss the working class at all. They reflect, and try to inculcate, the idealist notion that communism can be intelligently considered from the point of view of ideas alone, or of certain petty-bourgeois forces, and not from the conditions of, and relations among, the masses of working people. Many intellectuals, unfortunately, believe this (perhaps unconsciously). (2) They are written in a bookish language, foreign to the language of the masses, conforming to the language of intellectual discourse. Intellectuals in general feel more comfortable reading this kind of material, workers less so. (3) They are loaded with pseudo-scholarly paraphernalia: bibliographies of rare works in foreign languages, many footnotes, etc. This isn’t to knock real scholarship, which -- provided it is guided by revolutionary practice -- is necessary to find out the truth about anything. But “scholarship” these writers provide is a total sham, intended only to deceive, and shoddy even .by their own bourgeois historical standards. This is to fool the intellectual reader, who has been trained to respect footnotes rather uncritically as the hallmarks of “expertise.”
This review does not pretend to deal thoroughly with all important aspects of Stalin’s. political career, and omits some important questions altogether (the question of the class struggles of the 30s and the “purges,” for example). Some of these have been dealt with excellently in past issues of PL Magazine (see “Trotsky: Just Another Right-Winger,” in PL Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, March-April, 1974, pp. 25-44; “Solzhenitsyn Slanders the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” PL Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 5, Oct.-Nov., 1974, pp. 51-66). The reader should also read the PLP publication “Road to Revolution, III,” which examines the period of Stalin’s leadership of the CPSU in relation to the forward development of the international communist working-class movement. The review does examine each of these three recent, anti-Stalin books in some detail; exposes the phoniness of their scholarship, and thereby points out how the authors lie.to the reader; and examines the political basis of their anti-Stalinism.
The most important conclusion is that anti-Stalinism is, and always has been, a masquerade for anti-communism. The attacks on Stalin are, when looked at with a little care, really attacks on Leninism and Lenin, on the concept of a democratic-centralist communist party, and on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary essence of Marx’ and Engels’ work. In general, the “myth” of “Stalinism” is a form of anti-communism and anti-working-class ideology tailor-made to appeal to petty-bourgeois intellectuals, to win them to ally with the ruling class, and so to acquiesce, however reluctantly, to the bosses’ plans for continued exploitation and world war. Ultimately, these books harm intellectuals, try to blind us to our own best interests -- unity with the working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat -- and try to get us to be sheep led to the slaughter for the imperialists. So, it is important to expose these, and all such books. The essay will: (1) Examine the use of source materials by Medvedev, Tucker, and Salisbury, and show its dishonest nature; (2) Expose the internal contradictions, often very glaring, which these propagandists’ attempt to re-write history forces them into; (3) Expose the political line in each book, and the way attacks on Stalin are really poorly disguised attacks on socialism.
I. THE SOURCES
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 introduced the first workers’ dictatorship, the first attempt of the bourgeoisie was to crush it by force. However. the young Soviet state proved stronger than the Entente powers had expected. Large-scale intervention by Japan, and smaller invasions by British and American forces were beaten back by the workers’ and peasants’ armies. Further invasions by Polish fascist troops under Pilsudski, and massive foreign aid to “white” armies inside Russia failed to overthrow the communist government. Rebellions against intervention broke out among British troops; whole “White” armies deserted to the Soviet side. Workers’ governments were set up briefly in Berlin and Munich, and in Hungary and Finland. In Britain, thousands of miners threatened violence if British aid to the “Whites” continued, and solidarity with the workers’ state played a large role in many strikes of war-weary workers in the U.S., especially in the Seattle General Strike (1919). Economies exhausted by war, torn by internal class struggle, and still deadly suspicious of one another, imperialists were not in a position to overthrow the Bolshevik state at once.
With external invasion temporarily shelved as a tactic to stop communism, the bourgeoisie settled into a more long -- range campaign of undermining and isolating the Soviet Union. In this “cold war” the bourgeoisie first began to develop anti-communist “scholarship” to back up their lies about the Soviet state. Their first source of such “scholarship” was the thousands of counterrevolutionaries who had fled the Soviet Union as their wealth and privileged positions were taken away. Important among these were the (overwhelmingly intellectual) leaders of various counter-revolutionary political Parties -- such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats -- the liberal bourgeois party under the Tsars), many (unfortunately, not all) of the Mensheviks, whose party had unashamedly collaborated in the bourgeois governments of Feb.-Oct. 1917 and who had plotted Lenin’s arrest and death, and others.
These émigrés established publishing houses and journals, through which they churned out tons of “scholarly” anti-Soviet propaganda. In return, they were given money and positions in the Western European capitalist countries, and some of their leaders were made professors in prestigious universities (Kerensky, the S-R leader who was overthrown by the Bolshevik workers in Oct. 19I7, eventually became a Professor at Stanford University, site of what is probably the largest center for “scholarly” anti-communism, the Hoover Institution). A few of these émigré presses still survive, though the political parties have died out. The most important (for the bourgeoisie) today are in Paris (YMCA and Kontinent), and in Munich (Grani). All openly receive money from the CIA, West German fascists like Axel Springer, etc., for smuggling anti-Soviet material into the USSR.
For some years in the 20s and 30s, the émigré press was the bourgeoisie’s main source of ‘‘scholarly’’ anti-communist information (although additional information was provided in other ways, particularly by the American Relief Administration, sent to gain “full information ... without the risk of complication through government action” during the famine of 1921-2) (Carr, Bolshevik Revolution vol. 3, p. 342). But natural processes rapidly deprived émigrés’ reminiscences of any relevance, while the end of the Civil War cut down their contacts within the USSR and shut off their sources of information.
Bourgeois scholars today use émigré writings as minor sources of information only. All recognize they are biased as hell and apt to lie (Medvedev and Tucker each expose one or two incidents of such lying in their books). That they are used at all is, however, precisely because of these “limitations.” They give an authentically Russian “ring” to their stories, and are fanatically anti-socia1ist, anti-Stalin, and loyal to their masters.
Another source of information is the books by political defectors. These, again, are unreliable and well-known for lies. In addition. both defector and émigré tales are usually told in an anecdotal way, from a very limited viewpoint, with heavy reliance upon third-hand rumor and gossip. Most or all author-defectors were bureaucrats of some kind. and reflect the self-serving attitudes of such petty-bourgeois drones, viciously anti-working class and anxious to build little careers for themselves.
However, modern bourgeois scholars are not left solely with this dubious materials, which provides only meager fare for their anti-communism The voluminous writings of Leon Trotsky and the Soviet materials published during Nikita Khrushchev’s tenure as chief revisionist of the USSR, gives them much to chew on.
Trotsky
It is clear even to serious bourgeois historians that Trotsky’s works cannot be taken as primary documents – that is, as evidence that certain events of which there is no other record actually happened. It is even clearer to them that Trotsky’s evaluations of events, and particularly his discussions of Stalin and of the circumstances of his own expulsion as a counter-revolutionary, are not acceptable as “history” by bourgeois standards.
Robert H. McNeal, for example, a professional anti-communist historian (he has written for the Hoover Institution) dismisses Trotsky’s work as a product of his intellectual egotism and elitism. He describes Trotsky as “a typically self-righteous puritanical intelligent (Russian for “intellectual”) who thought “intellectual capacity meant talent for theoretical treatises.” (McNeal, “Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalin,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 1961, p.89).
To the end of his life he could not believe that so vulgar a person as Stalin was capable of the most staggering social and economic undertakings or that “history” could continue to suffer such a creature. (p.97)
So McNeal is disturbed that other serious bourgeois historians have accepted Trotsky’s interpretations so completely:
Rarely has the historical image of a major leader ben shaped as much by his arch-enemy as the generally accepted conception of Stalin has been shaped by the writings of Trotsky. (p. 87)
However, the bourgeoisie has no intention even now of dismissing Trotsky as a “historical” source for attacks on Stalin. Stalin was, according to such as McNeal, a good Leninist, who made creative contributions to Lenin’s thought and helped the “communizing” of Europe. Attacks on Stalin are attacks on Leninism, and on internationalism, and therefore useful.
Origin of Myth of “Stalinism”
The bourgeoisie has gone to much trouble during the last 50 years to promote a certain image of the character of the Soviet state between Lenin’s death in 1924 and Stalin’s death in 1953. The image they have tried to create is the myth of “Stalinism.” According to virtually every single bourgeois “historian,” Stalin was: a totally unprincipled power-grabber; a ruthless dictator completely oblivious to human suffering; a mass murderer with a third-rate intellect, but at the same time a devilishly clever bureaucrat, always able to “stack” any Party committee with loyal servants; an omniscient overlord, who was personally responsible for every policy initiated in the USSR during his “rule”; finally a psychopath, a “sick” personality who dreamed up policies out of his own primitive fantasies and urges, and who, therefore, was and remains, essentially incomprehensible and inscrutable.
The three books examined here are designed to reinforce this myth. Salisbury’s work is nothing more than a popularization of much of the material of the Khrushchev era, with a dash of openly capitalist anti-communism thrown in. Medvedev’s version of the myth reflects the viewpoint of that large part of Soviet intelligentsia which has been opposed to communism consistently since the Revolution, although indisposed to emigrate, and despite opportunist attempts on many occasions by the CPSU to placate or woo them. Tucker, finally, just presents the logical conclusion of the general “Stalinist” myth. He emphasizes the historical role of Stalin’s “sick” personality, and seeks to explain the history of the class struggles in the USSR through a bogus psychological profile. This myth of “Stalinism” is totally false. The theory of historical causation, the “Will of the Great Man,” which it offers has been intellectually bankrupt in capitalist countries for 150 years. As this review will point out, there is virtually no evidence to support any of the elements of the “Stalinist” myth. It is a crude, a very crude, form of anti-communism.
That it is crude does not prevent it from being very influential, however. The bourgeoisie has a virtual monopoly of the means of propaganda. No one can escape the influence of bourgeois ideas. The myth of “Stalinism” is put out as proven fact by bourgeois historians such as these men. They act as though it were indisputable. Their works abound with phrases such as “as is well known,” “it is indisputable that ... “ and so on. In the mouths of bourgeois ‘‘experts’’ such as these men, this “Big Lie” technique (as Goebbels and Hitler, , who understood it very well, called it) is one of the most persuasive of propaganda methods.
The power of the “Big Lie” about “Stalinism” affects communists as well, we who must struggle for a better world while still mired in the swamp of decaying capitalist culture, breathing in the bourgeoisie’s rotten lies every day. Fighting capitalist lies, and recognizing the positive contributions of great revolutionaries of the past like Stalin, while learning from their mistakes, is a hard struggle for us. But it is essential to our ultimate success.
Trotsky’s great service to the international bourgeoisie -- the favor in return for which Trotsky was magnified into a “great historical figure” and lionized by capitalists the world over -- was his creation of the myth of “Stalinism” as a bureaucratic dictatorship of one power-hungry individual. During the twenties, Trotsky invented this notion to “explain” how Stalin the uneducated proletarian won greater and greater support within the CPSU, while Trotsky and the other ‘‘oppositionists’’ became increasingly isolated. Incapable of recognizing that he had lost because of his defeatist line, Trotsky could only attribute his demise to Stalin’s skill at “stacking” the Party with his supporters. Totally lacking in any understanding of Communist self-criticism (even his admirers acknowledged Trotsky’s egotism), he was convinced that no one else was ever right, and that any defeat he suffered must be due to dishonesty. An incorrigible factionalist himself (factionalism survives as a principle in all Trotskyist parties), Trotsky portrayed Stalin as a more dishonest, but essentially similar, factionalist. Trotsky’s writings poured out during the 30s and were eagerly published and translated by the bourgeoisie. ALL anti-communist biographers of Stalin from the earliest days have drawn heavily upon Trotsky’s work (Levine, Souvarine, Deutscher, Hyde, Payne, Ulam, Tucker, to name a few, and of course Trotsky himself), and he is a major influence on the more “objective” bourgeois historians as well (e.g., E.H. Carr’s, Socialism in One Country, I, Ch. 4 gives a sketch of Stalin based mainly on Trotsky’s views).
Use of Trotsky as Source
Tucker cites Trotsky as primary evidence literally dozens of times (see: pp. 45; 155; 200-202; 203 ff.; 211; 216; 240; 264; 269-76; 277-8; 289ff; 311; 315-319; 320; etc.). He takes care not to agree with Trotsky on every point. Too many of Trotsky’s arguments and interpretations have been refuted by bourgeois historians, being simply too crude to pass. No writer making any pretense at serious bourgeois “scholarship” can any longer use Trotsky uncritically. Tucker evidently hopes his projected three-volume biography of Stalin will replace the notorious Trotsky sympathizer Isaac Deutscher’s work, which was the most widely read “scholarly” work for twenty years. Deutscher’s work has been outdated, not only by his crude reliance on Trotsky (whose admirers and followers grow fewer with passing decades), but by the emergence of a great deal of Soviet material since Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, all of which came too late for Deutscher to make full use of. However, in attacking Stalin, this material tends to elevate Trotsky “despite itself,” as Medvedev admits, who draws the logical conclusions from it somewhat more boldly than the strictly “orthodox” Soviet writers of the day dare to do. So Tucker does not discard Trotsky, but instead embraces him, though with a few minor reservations.
In late 1939 Trotsky, his reputation on the decline, published a sensational magazine article, accusing Stalin of poisoning Lenin. Even anticommunist bourgeois writers at the time recognized that there was no evidence to support Trotsky’s accusation. The “evidence” Trotsky cited consisted only of Trotsky’s own recollection of a conversation in the presence of Stalin, and of Kamenev and Zinoviev (both executed as counterrevolutionaries by 1939). As Tucker himself remarks, Trotsky’s story is contradicted by the journal of Lenin’s principal secretary, Lydia Fotieva (in her eighties, Fotieva published her very anti-Stalin memoirs of Lenin’s last years in 1964; here, too, she mentions nothing of Stalin’s meeting with the bedridden Lenin any time after his relapse in December 1922). Yet Tucker declares his faith in Trotsky’s story: “Whatever the answer, it was not in Trotsky’s character simply to fabricate an historical happening.” (Tucker also concludes that Stalin did not poison Lenin; no doubt he includes the incident because it puts Stalin in an unfavorable light, actually asking the horrified Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev whether it ought to be done.)
Tucker relies upon Trotsky for his accounts of several important events. He repeats the hoary tale of Stalin’s responsibility for the defeat of the Red Army in the attack against Warsaw in August 1921. Now, there is no unanimity among bourgeois, anti-Stalinist historians on this point. Adam Ulam’s crassly unscholarly Stalin: The Man and His Era defends Stalin’s failure to co-operate with Marshal Tukhachevsky on military grounds. But Tucker uses only Trotsky’s own, self-serving account seconded by a Khrushchev-era collection of essays and by Tukhachevsky’s own memoirs (Tukhachevsky was executed during the Army purges of 1938). When faced with explaining why no contemporary account blames Stalin’s actions, Tucker is at a loss. He can only cite Trotsky’s unsubstantiated allegation that Stalin’s attempt to blame another was rejected at a “closed session” (therefore not in the published minutes) of the Tenth Party Congress in 1921.
Trotsky’s first sally into factionalism, in open opposition to Lenin, came in the debate over the role of the Trade Unions in 1920-21. In defeating Trotsky’s position, the Tenth Party Congress passed a resolution, formulated by Lenin, forbidding factionalism and ordering the disbanding of inner-party groups or factions organized around a particular platform other than the Party’s line. Among other things, it was Trotsky’s repeated open violation of this basic tenet of democratic centralism which helped lead to his isolation within, and ultimately his expulsion from, the Party.
In dealing with this important debate, Tucker admits, “my treatment of the trade union conflict relies on the detailed accounts in Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed; Trotsky, 1879-1921 ... “ He never says why he chooses Deutscher over other possible secondary accounts. That of the most prominent bourgeois historian of the period, E.H. Carr (in The Bolshevik Revolution II, 223-229), is far less complimentary to Trotsky. Nor does he mention that Lenin went so far as to write a lengthy pamphlet against Trotsky and Bukharin (his supporter). And, of course, he does not tell us why he does not himself have recourse to the primary documents, which are all available.
Tucker uses Trotsky as his only source to “prove” that Stalin was not in fact regarded as a hero in saving the city of Tsaritsyn from the White armies in 1918. In his account of the battle itself, his only source is a volume of anti-Stalinist military writings edited in the USSR in 1965, during an intense campaign by the present revisionist leaders of the USSR to blacken Stalin’s reputation. Tucker never te1ls why Tsaritsyn was in fact renamed “Stalingrad” in 1925, if Stalin’s role was so inglorious. Tucker uses Trotsky as his source for the defense of Petrograd in 1919 against Yudenich’s White armies (200-201), accepts Trotsky’s (otherwise unattested) tale that Stalin, as well as himself, received a medal for this action only because Lenin wanted to soothe Stalin’s feelings, and then concludes that Trotsky was “the savior of Red Petrograd” (478)! Tucker even goes one better than Trotsky. In explaining why Stalin’s political line won out over Trotsky’s in the inner-party debates overbuilding socialism in the USSR, Tucker blames Stalin for the positions Trotsky adopted!
He (Stalin) pushed and prodded his prominent opponents into taking positions that he knew would be ill received by a great many in the party. (389)
Thus Stalin even maneuvered Trotsky into taking unpopular positions so he could crush him! What could be more nasty, underhanded, and unprincipled than that!
The British historian Christopher Hill, once a communist, now a revisionist, finds that rejection of “the Trotskyite myth” is one of the few strong points of Tucker’s book! (New York Review of Books, 1/24/74, p. 9). This is more a statement about Hill than about Tucker. However it is true in a very relative sense. Tucker takes a little greater care in using Trotsky than, for example, in his use of post-1956 Soviet materials, virtually all of which he swallows whole-hog.
Roy A. Medvedev is a self-styled “Leninist,” ex-member of the CPSU. His book, Let History Judge, written for a Soviet audience, is superficially somewhat more critical of Trotsky, whose cult within the Soviet Union was never large, and whose counter-revolutionary activities many still vividly remember. So Medvedev gives no testimonials to the honesty of Trotsky’s character, for example.
Nevertheless, Medvedev’s attempt to blacken every phase of Stalin’s political activity cannot help but put Trotsky in a more favorable light. So it is not a wonder that his “analysis” “verifies” some of Trotsky’s own conclusions. It also leads Medvedev into some howling contradictions with himself. Medvedev is anxious to deprive Stalin of any merit in the political defeat of the various “Opposition” groups within the CPSU in the Twenties, of which Trotsky was usually the central figure. This is not the place to discuss these political debates in detail (see the PL Magazine article “Trotsky -- Just Another Right-Winger”). Suffice it to say that their positions were so counter-revolutionary and defeatist that the “Opposition” became completely isolated. Not even Medvedev is prepared to “rehabilitate” them openly. Still, he feels, they could not have been “all bad,” if they were the ones leading the attack on Stalin.
For example, Trotsky’s attacks on the Party line in 1923-4 centered on the “opportunistic degeneration of the older generation” of Bolsheviks, and on “bureaucratic centralism.” By this Trotsky was principally referring to the rejection of his ideas by the CPSU leadership and the resolution of the Tenth Party Congress of 1921 forbidding factionalizing around any platforms.
Medvedev is forced to conclude that “the erroneousness of most of Trotsky’s assertions and demands in 1923-4 is obvious today, as it was then .... These statements can be interpreted as political exaggeration, especially when it is remembered that they refer to the conditions of 1923-4” (40). Yet, in the same breath, he asserts that ‘‘ ... some of their criticisms contained a considerable measure of truth;” “ ... it is impossible to deny that many of these warnings were justified by later events.”
So Medvedev wants it both ways: Trotsky, though wrong, was “really” (ultimately) right. In fact, Medvedev thinks Trotsky was the only principled critic of Stalin after his exile in 1927. None of the other members of the “United Opposition” spoke out against Stalin. Stalin “was increasingly slipping into adventurism and arbitrary rule, but Trotsky alone tried to continue the struggle.” (61) Trotsky’s writings in exile were not incorrect; though ‘‘one-sided,’’ they contained much “justified criticism.”
Medvedev concludes “Trotsky remained a supporter of the proletarian revolution and not a fascist counterrevolutionary, as Stalin soon labeled him” (61). Yet by the mid-’Thirties as Medvedev admits, Trotsky was advocating Stalin’ s murder (140). Medvedev never criticizes the decision of the Party to expel and then to exile Trotsky, yet he deplores the fact that some former Trotskyites were arrested in the early ‘Thirties for maintaining contact with Trotsky abroad. And, having admitted that Trotskyite circles did exist in the USSR in covert contact with Trotsky abroad, and that Trotsky was advocating Stalin’s murder by the mid- ‘Thirties, Medvedev still finds Zinoviev’s confession about his contacts with Trotsky and plot to murder Stalin incredible.
Finally, when Stalin spoke against persecuting former Trotskyites and restricting repression to active ones in March, 1937, Medvedev can only call it a lie (188). Had Medvedev proved his account true, it no doubt would be. It is certainly incompatible with his unproved contention that Stalin was out to unjustly murder the only constructive critics of his regime.
Bourgeois and revisionist historians admit that Trotsky’s writings are valueless as primary historical evidence. The fact that they continue to use them nevertheless, and even come to agree
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*NOTE: The only ‘‘evidence’· that Zinoviev’s confession was forced seems to be that of Alexander Orlov, a former NKVD official who defected in the ‘Thirties. This is the source cited by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, the “definitive” bourgeois history of the purges. Furthermore, in one of his attempts to dissociate himself from more fanatical anti-Communist writers, Medvedev exposes a later article of Orlov’s (in which Orlov accuses Stalin of having been a Tsarist secret police agent) as an utter fabrication, containing forged documents and obvious misstatement of historical fact (316-8). Medvedev himself cites no source at all for questioning the sincerity of Zinoviev’s confession!
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with them, results from the uncompromising hatred of Stalin Trotsky expresses. Trotsky tried to rewrite the whole history of the Bolshevik Party, the Revolution, and the Soviet Union to convince the world that he, Trotsky, had been defeated, not on his politics, but by a criminal and diabolical conniver -- Stalin. The ruling classes proved an eager audience then, and they still do. Trotsky’s unprincipled anti-Stalinism is a great service to the bourgeoisie, which no sober rejection of his worth as a historical source can outweigh.
Soviet Sources of Khrushchev’s era (1956-1965)
In 1956 Khrushchev read a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in which he attacked Stalin at great length. This “secret” speech (which the Soviet leaders had smuggled to the capitalist press beforehand) began an era of “re-evaluation” within the USSR of the whole period of Stalin’s leadership.
This new political line of Khrushchev’s was gradually developed in books, articles and historical memoirs published by the official press in the Soviet Union. After the 1957 defeat of the “Anti-Party” Group (the minority in the Presidium of the CPSU who tried to remove Khrushchev from power in his absence), several of whom (Kaganovich and Molotov) had been closely associated with Stalin for 30 years, the number of publications attacking Stalin increased.
Thousands of books and articles were published after the 22nd Congress of the CPSU in 1961, at which several leaders gave speeches strongly attacking Stalin. Between 1961 and 1965, Stalin was accused of every conceivable crime and incompetence in a flood of publications:
1. Official party histories, of the CPSU and the Parties in the different republics, were written or rewritten to reflect Stalin’s “crimes.” Documents were often cited from “party archives” to back up these accusations (these documents, like those quoted by Khrushchev in his speech in 1956, however, are not open to public scrutiny).
2. Biographies of Communists and others active during the period of Stalin’s leadership were published, again often citing “original (but unverifiable) sources” accusing Stalin of every kind of crime and containing harsh attacks on his character as well.
3. Memoirs of certain more or less prominent Soviet citizens were authorized, which make the same kind of remarks, such as those of the well-known writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Citations from unpublished memoirs of people who were involved in the purges of the ‘Thirties, or who otherwise had some contact with Stalin, were published in a book by Yuri Trifonov, Otblesk kostra (Reflections of a Bon-fire, 1966).
4. The military history of the Soviet Union, and particularly of the Second World War, was completely re-written. An official, multivolume history of the war was issued, full of scathing indictments of Stalin’s military leadership. Hundreds of war memoirs were authorized which had the same line. A large number of memoirs of military leaders of the Second World War were issued in book or journal form, mainly during 1964-5, which put the blame for most of Russia’s military defeats on Stalin’s shoulders.
5. A good deal of anti-Stalinist fiction was authorized (Khrushchev himself personally authorized the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1961, which then received very favorable reviews).
6. Several large official conferences of professors and writers of history were called. The new line on Stalin and on Soviet history was expounded, and the texts and minutes published as authoritative “scholarly” guidelines for future teaching and research.
All these publications were used as the basis for a propaganda onslaught against Stalin in the popular media.
In early 1965, Khrushchev was ousted by a clique in the Presidium of the CPSU led by the present leadership (Kosygin and Brezhnev). Almost immediately, the publication of sharp anti-Stalinist material stopped. Some memoirs and books, such as the memoirs of the Soviet admiral of the Second World War, Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, which had appeared in one installment only, took a totally different line on Stalin in the second installment. Other anti-Stalin books which had been favorably reviewed at first came under sharp official attack. Still other “scholars” of the official Party line changed the line in their articles. A campaign was begun in the official Soviet press to “rehabilitate” Stalin, praising him as a wide leader and good general, and reaffirming the guilt of some of those tried and purged during the ‘Thirties; while some persons “rehabilitated” under Khrushchev were officially criticized again. The official journal Kommunist published several articles praising Stalin in 1968 and 1969.
Since the mid-’Sixties, then, Soviet and bourgeois historians have been using this material in their books about Stalin and the period of his leadership of the Soviet state. However, even bourgeois historians have recognized that this Soviet material cannot be taken at face value as historical documents. The basic reason for this is that the “documents” on which these “revelations” of Stalin’s crimes and inadequacies are based are not open to scrutiny and verification. There is no way of knowing how many of them are outright fabrications or forgeries. (Obviously, Khrushchev and his successors felt their stories might be open to question, because large gaps exist in official documents of all kinds during Stalin’s life. The archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU, of the NKVD, and of the Supreme Court of the USSR, for the period 1930-40, have never been released or opened even to Soviet historians. The Stenographic record of the 14th Party Congress; the transcripts of the Central Committee plenums of 1932-35, and of Feb.- Mar. 1937 (those concerned with discussion of the “purges”) have not been published.)
The British revisionist historian Christopher Hill states this about the “Khrushchev myth of Stalin’’:
To this we owe a great deal of information previously unavailable, but it has to be used with caution. Khrushchev had his own political axe to grind, his own skeletons to keep locked up in cupboards ... In consequence of all this the revelations were incomplete, one-sided, and need almost as much interpretation as the Stalinist and Trotskyist myths. A great many essential facts about Stalin’s life (and death) are still totally unknown.
As another anti-Communist American historian has put it,
... The literature of the de-Stalinization period is used with insufficient attention paid to the particularistic personal and political motives animating much of it (clearly, these are relevant considerations for an assessment, say, of Khrushchev’s secret speech or of Ehrenburg’s memoirs. (Gitelman, in Studies in Comparative Communism, Jan. ‘69, p. 170.)
Finally, Alexander Werth, in the preface to Russia at War, 1941-1945, states:
... I have made extensive use of recent Russian books on the war-most of which might be classified as “Khrushchevite,” and ipso facto anti-Stalinite. There is, however, a danger taking all these as gospel truth. merely because they are anti-Stalinite.
Werth goes on to give several examples of deliberate distortions for political reasons in the official Soviet History of the Second World War, published under Khrushchev, and in the memoirs of a Soviet General, who was Werth’s personal friend, who also wrote during Khrushchev’s years.
Despite these warnings, however, the Khrushchev era materials are too tempting to be omitted, or even used carefully, by anti-communist historians. All three of the works under discussion here rely mainly upon them. Medvedev is simply the most honest when he states:
This work is based on the numerous Soviet publications that have followed the policy of the XXth and XXIInd Party Congress (1956 and 1961 respectively) in examining Stalin’s cult honestly and truthfully.
Harrison Salisbury gives a list of Russian language sources at the end of his book The 900 Days. Of the 325 books listed there. only 14 are pre- 1956 works, while of the 182 articles he lists, every one is post-1956! Tucker’s Stalin as Revolutionary which draws more heavily than the other two on non-Soviet sources, and only deals with the period up to 1929, still has over 70 separate references to post-1956 Soviet sources.
None of these three works make any serious attempt to evaluate the accuracy, or trustworthiness of these sources, even to the extent that other bourgeois historians such as Werth or Hill recommend. Tucker simply states baldly: “For an account of the course that history subsequently (i.e., after Lenin’s death) took, we may turn to Nikita S. Khrushchev ... “
In general, as will be seen, all three of these writers accept whatever accounts attack Stalin, and reject those which do not, especially when there is any disagreement in the sources.
Salisbury and Khrushchev-era sources
In The 900 Days, Salisbury mainly uses military histories and memoirs of the Second World War. While using the most viciously anti-Stalin passages uncritically, however, Salisbury is perfectly aware that his sources cannot be trusted. He consistently picks out whichever version of the “facts” can be most easily fit into his overall schema -- i.e., that the siege of Leningrad and the deaths of over 1-1/2 million of its inhabitants, were Stalin’s fault.
Salisbury recognizes the untrustworthy nature of Khrushchev-era writings. He points out that all mention of the role played by Malenkov and Molotov is omitted from these sources after 1957 (the year of their unsuccessful attempt to get rid of Khrushchev) (307 -8). In fact, the same sources omit all but the briefest mention of the role of Andrei Zhdanov, the Party official who masterminded the defense of Leningrad from within, and who died in 1948. (308 n.). Again, he admits that Marshall Zhukov’ s name is omitted from most Soviet accounts of the Leningrad battle, including the memoirs of Zhdanov’s closest associate, Meretskov (629). He admits that the main Soviet source for the actions of the Soviet embassy in Berlin before the war, Berezhkov’s 1966 book, omits any mention whatsoever of the name of the Soviet Ambassador to Germany (an associate of Lavrentii Beria’s, executed by Khrushchev and Co. in December, 1953). After outlining a theory, derived from published memoirs of Soviet generals, that Stalin had no idea, in the face of incontrovertible evidence on all sides, that the Nazi invasion was imminent, Salisbury then reports that Marshall Semyon Budyonniy, named commander of the Reserve Army by Stalin, refuted this as ridiculous. Nevertheless, Salisbury sticks to the generals’ stories, since they accord with his (and Khrushchev’s) anti-Stalinist purposes.
The point of this is to show that Salisbury is aware of the limitations and contradictions of the post-1956 sources, and is capable of using them critically or of rejecting them when he to do so. That he chooses not to do so is simply because they provide too much grist for his mill.
In general, Salisbury chooses to believe Khrushchev-era sources rather than post-1965 sources where the two differ. This is clearly because the former are far more blatantly anti-Stalinist. However, he is equally capable of ignoring both when it suits his purposes. An example is his zeal to try to show that Stalin suffered a collapse, brought on by fear, after the Nazi invasion of June 22, and did no work whatever until July 123, when he had pulled himself together. The main source for this story of “Stalin’s breakdown” is none other than Khrushchev’s “secret speech” itself, which was later echoed in other books.
Salisbury makes a great deal of this point in his attacks on Stalin. Inconveniently, however, many accounts do not support it. According to the journals of Marshal Grechko (1966), Zhukov frequently reported to Stalin during the first days of the war. According to an even earlier account (1964, while Khrushchev was still in power). Stalin was directing war production after the Nazi invasion in June, 1941.
Salisbury’s response to these sources is to deny their validity: “It does not seem likely. in fact, that Stalin participated in Stavka (General Staff) decisions during this period”; “the conversation with Stalin must have occurred much later than June ... “ (167;173).
Salisbury is aware of the contradictions in stories about Stalin’s ‘‘collapse” in Soviet sources He notes that the first installment of Adm. Kuznetsov’ s memoirs (1965) speaks of Stalin’s “collapse,” while the second speaks of Stalin’s “energetic” work on June 22-24 (103; 167). Former Ambassador to London Ivan Maisky’s memoirs, published in journal form in Dec. 1964. had remarks critical of Stalin’s policies and leadership; all these, Salisbury notes, were removed by the time of the appearance of the book version six months later. (103)
Had Salisbury cared to, he could have checked out some other sources. Part of his argument relies upon the nature of Stalin’s public speech, which indisputably occurred on July 3. He describes it, after Maisky’s earlier account, as “the effort of a man barely in control of himself” (251-2). Alexander Werth’s accounts of the speech (given on the day of his arrival in the Soviet Union) directly contradict this. Werth refers to the deep, patriotic impression it made (142). He quotes Fedyuninsky’s memoirs (1961) -- a source also used by Salisbury, but not in this context -- to illustrate the great effect of encouragement Stalin’s speech had on the troops (158). “There could be no doubt about Stalin’s authority, especially since that July 3 broadcast. He was the khoziain, the boss ... ‘“ (181)
Of course Salisbury is happier with the pre-1965, anti-Stalin Soviet sources than with those published later, which he calls censored and “tendentious” (as though his own book is not!). But he is clearly capable of choosing any source which suits his purposes. He is least critical in his use of Khrushchev’s own “speech,” and such orthodox memoirs as Ehrenburg’s, which are said to be least trustworthy by bourgeois scholars (Werth mildly terms Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin’s military abilities “at times even exaggerated,” 142). Salisbury does not select his facts according to the reliability of his sources, but according to what he wishes to prove.
Medvedev and Khrushchev-era sources
Medvedev is similar. Recognizing the contradictions among Soviet sources, he is concerned to choose and believe those which are the most anti-Stalin, regardless of their credibility otherwise.
(Some facts about Medvedev are relevant here. His father was an academic shot during the purges of the late ‘Thirties. Medvedev himself joined the CPSU after Khrushchev’s “De-Stalinization” speech of 1956, and began working on a long manuscript -- the present book -- after the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 reaffirmed de-Stalinization, and many anti-Stalin works of an “official” nature began to be published in the USSR. No doubt he thought his work might be officially published within the country. But it was finished too late, after Khrushchev’s fall. A letter of his attacking the 1968 Kommunist article in favor of Stalin led to his expulsion from the CPSU).
Medvedev is aware of the discrepancies between Soviet sources of the 1956-65 era and those since then. He is a loyal believer of anything Khrushchev or his camp say. He uses Khrushchev’s 1956 speech, his articles in Pravda, and speeches of officials at the 22nd Party Congress of the CPSU (1961) as primary documents many times. It is interesting to note his defense of Khrushchev’s account of Stalin’s “breakdown,” the debate over which has been discussed above.
All the marshals of the USSR were at the 20th Congress; so were Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Bulganin, and none of them found it necessary to correct Khrushchev ( 457).
Khrushchev, of course, would have welcomed such “correction,” had it been forthcoming!*
In general, Medvedev gives no reasons whatsoever for preference for the Khrushchev-era, anti-Stalin accounts -- no reasons on historical grounds, that is. He repeats the story of Stalin’s fleeing Moscow during the “panic” of Oct. 16, 1941, begun by Khrushchev. This favorite anti-Stalin legend has proven too flimsy even for most anti-Stalinists. Both Alexander Werth (351) and Salisbury (424) conclude it is false, Werth because he was in the USSR at the time and heard no mention of it, Salisbury reluctantly, because even the anti-Stalinist memoirs contained no mention of it! Only Medvedev mentions it as an established fact.
Medvedev is essentially a supporter of Khrushchev’s, willing to swallow his lies and anxious to speed the USSR toward more openly capitalist forms of “constitutional” government. He includes in his volume an apology for Khrushchev (by now out of power) which echoes the latter’s own views about Molotov, Malenkov, and Kaganovich.
Tucker and Khrushchev-era sources
Tucker puts himself forward as innovator of a “psychological history” of Stalin. The school of “psychohistory” is a presently fashionable trend in bogus historical writing in the USA. Users of this method feel themselves free of the usual obligations of historical accuracy. Tucker follows this practice enthusiastically.
As noted above, Tucker accepts Khrushchev’s 1956 speech as a primary document. He occasionally feels it necessary to justify using earlier Soviet sources however (99). Mainly, Tucker does not work from sources at all. In fact, one of his principal “sources” is Medvedev’s book itself. Medvedev’s word is good enough for Tucker that a fact is true, that an event actually occurred, even in cases where Medvedev himself simply makes assertions, without any kind of evidence whatsoever. Nor is Tucker ignorant of internal inconsistencies within Medvedev’s book (there are so many of them, and they are so glaring, that the American editor of Medvedev’s book feels obliged to point several out himself). He just doesn’t allow them to make him question the accuracy of Medvedev’s statements when it suits his own purposes.
Tucker does go Medvedev one better occasionally, however. In a section of a chapter on Stalin’s alleged “connections” with the Tsarist police before the revolution, Tucker picks up on Medvedev’s account, taken
__________
*NOTE: Kaganovich, Molotov, and Bulganin tried to “correct” Khrushchev by plotting his overthrow in 1957.
__________
from unpublished memoirs, that supposedly show Stalin was an informer for the Tsarist Okhranka (secret police). Medvedev, he notes, thoroughly discounts these stories as without substantiation, and likely to be false, since composed by strongly anti-Stalin authors (would Medvedev were always so scrupulous in evaluating his sources!). After adducing even more evidence that Stalin was not connected with the Tsarist police, and adding no more evidence that he was, Tucker, in a paragraph added after the book went to press, concludes his confused chapter by stating that Stalin, while not a Tsarist agent, “very probably” informed on his comrades from time to time for his own benefit! (114)
Further remarks as to Tucker’s efforts at verifying and using his historical sources are superfluous.
Tucker and Medvedev -- Use of pre-1956 Soviet sources
It might be expected that anyone so ready to accept, at face value, the accounts of Khrushchev-era writers (even when they cannot overlook the contradictions and inconsistences in these sources) would be equally unwilling to accept pre-1956 Soviet sources. For Soviet sources published during Stalin’s lifetime paint a very different picture of the development of Soviet society and the international Communist movement, than the documents of Khrushchev’s time do. There is a sharp difference in the political line of the Soviet Union before Stalin’s death and afterwards, which shows up unmistakably in the documents.
We are not disappointed. Medvedev and Tucker play fast and loose with pre-1956 sources. In fact they do not hesitate to draw conclusions exactly opposite to those which the available sources indicate when it suits their purposes to do so.
They do not systematically differentiate between those documents which they deem accurate and others. Their practice is totally unscientific and irregular. Convinced that they are able to “sniff out” falsehood by intuition, Tucker and Medvedev do not blush to use certain sources as evidence in one case, and to discount them in another.
The Attitude of Stalin Toward the “Cult of Personality’’
Both writers are anxious to “prove” that Stalin deliberately fostered a cult of adulation of himself. The contradictions they are forced into in their efforts at “proof” clearly illustrate their general attitude toward their source material.
Of course, it is clear from the practice within the Soviet Union after about the time of the 17th Party Congress (1934) that there was in fact a glorification of Stalin’s achievements and leadership which went beyond the bounds of Marxism-Leninism. But this is not what Tucker and Medvedev are at pains to establish. What they want to show is that Stalin himself consciously fostered this “cult.”
In order to show this, they are forced into what must be termed a travesty even of bourgeois historical methodology.
Their embarrassment comes principally from the fact that they can find not a single statement of Stalin which gives encouragement to the “cult of personality.” On the contrary, Stalin consistently criticized both the cult of his own accomplishments, and the glorification of individuals in general, as incompatible with Communism. Thus: on pp. 149-50, Medvedev cites passages from Marx, Engels, and Lenin where these revolutionaries express stern opposition to any tendencies toward exaggerated adulation of themselves. Yet he then quotes Stalin’s remarks, in an interview with Lion Feuchtwanger in 1937:
At this point he (Stalin) became serious. He suggested that these (i.e. those who “obviously had taste” and “put up busts and portraits of him ... in utterly inappropriate places, for example at a Rembrandt exhibition”) are people who have accepted the existing regime rather late, and now are trying to prove their loyalty with doubled zeal. Yes, he considers it possible that this could be a plot of wreckers to discredit him. “A time serving fool,” said Stalin angrily, “does more harm than a hundred enemies.”
Medvedev had accepted, at face value, Lenin’s undoubtedly sincere denunciations of any “adulation” of himself -- although (Medvedev does not mention this) all parades and Party functions were decorated with large portraits of Lenin, even during his lifetime. Yet he dismisses Stalin’s anger as “insincere;” “it was Stalin himself who directed and encouraged this praise,” (150) he says.
Unfortunately for Medvedev, the facts seem to say the opposite. Stalin in 1930:
That (devotion to Stalin or to any individual) is not a Bolshevik principle. Have devotion to the working class, to its Party, to its state, but don’t mix that up with devotion to individuals, which is an inane and unnecessary toy of the intelligentsia. (Medved., 547).
Stalin in 1932:
I am against it (i.e. the proposal to open an exhibition of documents concerning his own life and activity) because such enterprises lead to the establishment of a ‘cult of personality,’ which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of the Party. (Medved., 547).
Stalin in 1938:
I am strongly opposed to the publication of “Stories about Stalin’s Childhood.” The book is filled with a mass of factual distortions, untruths, exaggerations, and undeserved encomia. The author has been misled by lovers of fairy tales -- by liars (perhaps “honest liars”) and timeservers. A pity for the author, but facts remain facts. But that isn’t the main thing. The main thing is that the book has the tendency to inculcate in Soviet people (and people in general) the cult of the personality of chiefs and infallible heroes. That is dangerous, harmful. The theory of “heroes and the mob” is not Bolshevik but Socialist Revolutionary. The Socialist Revolutionaries say that “Heroes make a people, turn it from a mob into a people.” “The people makes heroes,” reply the Bolsheviks. This book is grist for the Socialist Revolutionaries’ mill, it will harm our general Bolshevik cause. My advice is to burn the book -- J. Stalin (Medv., 507).
Medvedev can only lamely call this “hypocritical” (507).
Similarly, he can only conclude Stalin was “hypocritical,” “talked one way and behaved another” when faced with the following statement by Stalin in 1928:
The fact that the chiefs rising to the top become separated from the masses, while the masses begin to look up at them from below, not daring to criticize them -- this fact cannot but create a certain danger of isolation and estrangement between the chiefs and the masses. This danger may reach the point where the chiefs get conceited and consider themselves infallible. And what good can come of the leaders on top growing conceited and beginning to look down on the masses from above? Clearly, nothing but disaster for the Party can come from this. (Medv., 538).
In a similar vein Medvedev finds evidence of duplicity in Stalin’s refusal to put a manuscript of the History of the CPSU (Short Course) in a museum:
Comrade Samoilov, I didn’t think that in your old age you would occupy yourself with such trifles. If the book is already published in millions of copies, why do you want the manuscript? To put your mind at rest, I burned all the manuscripts.-J. Stalin (Medv., 512).
Medvedev at one point retorts that Stalin “abandoned such hypocritical disclaimers” after the war, citing Khrushchev’s ‘‘secret speech’’ as evidence that Stalin personally inserted praise for himself in an authorized biography (507). There is no need to refute any assertion made solely on the authority of Khrushchev’s “secret speech.” As for attacks on the “cult of personality,’’ note the following remarks (from Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, 1952):
8) Should there be a special chapter in the textbook on Lenin and Stalin as the founders of the political economy of socialism?
I think that the chapter, “The Marxist Theory of Socialism, Founding of the Political Economy of Socialism by V.I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin,” should be excluded from the textbook. It is entirely unnecessary, since it adds nothing ...
Tucker, too, who is tireless in his efforts to find some kind of “evidence” for the conclusion he has already reached concerning Stalin’s egotism, suffers constant frustration by the sources.
... in all references to himself and his party past, he presented himself as a good and faithful disciple of Lenin’s, no more. So insistent was he on this point that when Ksenofontov in his 1926 letter spoke of himself as “a disciple of Lenin and Stalin,” Stalin reproved him for this usage. Call yourself a disciple of Lenin, he advised in reply, because it would be groundless and out of place for anyone to call himself “a disciple of a disciple of Lenin’s.” Thus, Stalin’s theme in the politics of revolutionary biography was discipleship to Lenin rather than partnership with him. (Tucker, 356.)
Tucker also refers to Stalin’s talk to the Railway workers in Tiflis ( 427), in which Stalin firmly refutes any talk about himself as being “a hero of the October Revolution, the leader of the Communist Party ... a legendary warrior-knight and all the rest of it,” and states “I really was, and still am, one of the pupils of the advanced workers of the Tiflis railway workshops.” (For the full text of this document, see PL Magazine, Vol. 9, No. 4, March-April 1974, p. 44.)
Stalin had two important opportunities during the twenties to show publicly his attitude towards the “cult of individuals.” These were Lenin’s 50th birthday celebration in 1920, and his own 50th birthday celebration, in 1929. Stalin’s behavior at both of these events is consistent with the statements quoted above in which he shows he held little patience for glorification of individuals, even of Lenin.
Lenin disliked exaggerated tributes to himself, and only arrived at his celebration after the speeches had been delivered. The speeches delivered were fulsome indeed. Maxim Gorki compared Lenin to Columbus and Peter the Great; Preobrazhensky called him “the soul and brain of the October Revolution”; Trotsky (not to be outdone in oratory) called him the Luther and Robespierre (among other things) of Russia. Stalin alone forbore to join the others on the heights of rhetoric. He recounted two episodes in which Lenin had been mistaken, and had been self-critical about it. Tucker used this as just an example of the tendency of the Party to idolize its leaders. Medvedev tries to make it appear as though Stalin were malicious in his criticism of Lenin. In fact, Stalin was attacking the notion of a “cult of personality,” and something else as well. He was illustrating the necessity for openness to criticism, so well illustrated by Lenin’s practice. Despite Medvedev’s best attempt, his criticism here won’t stick. No Bolshevik at the time or since has read any desire at self-aggrandizement into Stalin’s remarks. Tucker himself, who uses Medvedev frequently as a source, quietly ignores his tirade here. (505)
Tucker is clearly surprised at Stalin’s response to the (once again) fulsome tributes paid to him at his own 50th birthday celebration. It is true that Stalin chose (unlike Lenin) to attend and listen to the speeches. In his response, however, Tucker notes “Stalin’s transparent attempt to preserve his modest pose amid the eulogies by pretending that they were really meant for the party rather than for him” ( 466). Stalin closed by reaffirming his loyalty to “the cause of the working class, to the cause of the proletarian revolution and world Communism.”
Despite his best efforts, then, Tucker can only lamely conclude that “as a result of all this, Stalin’s enormous egocentricity remained hidden from general view” (444). Well hidden, indeed!
Astounding as it may seem, neither of these bourgeois “experts” can give any other kind of evidence for Stalin’s “fostering” the cult of personality (except for Khrushchev’s word). And these passages from Stalin’s works are too well known to simply ignore. So they are forced to quote them as “psychological” evidence that Stalin was not only egocentric, but a cunning liar as well, always saying the opposite of what he “really thought”! A new principle of bourgeois historical scholarship, no doubt!
One further example from each book (one of many which could be chosen) will have to suffice to illustrate the contempt with which these “scholars” regard their sources.
Attempting again to find evidence for Stalin’s megalomania, Medvedev states that
Engels was also unfairly attacked for his comment in 1891 that a democratic republic was a possible form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Short Course cited this remark as evidence that Marx’s idea concerning the Commune as the form of proletarian dictatorship was ‘consigned to oblivion’ (515).
Now, overlooking the fact that elsewhere in his book Medvedev states that Stalin did not write the History of the CPSU (Short Course) (511-12) this statement of Medvedev’s is an outright lie. The authors of Short Course in fact quoted Engels in order to show how Marxism is a living process, not an ossified body of dogma.
As a result of a study of the experience of the two Russian revolutions, Lenin, on the basis of the theory of Marxism, arrived at the conclusion that the best political form for the dictatorship of the proletariat was not a parliamentary democratic republic, but a republic of Soviets ... The opportunists of all countries clung to the parliamentary republic and accused Lenin of departing from Marxism and destroying democracy. But it was Lenin, of course, who was the real Marxist, who had mastered the theory of Marxism, and not the opportunists, for Lenin was advancing the Marxist theory by enriching it with new experience, whereas the opportunists were dragging it back and transforming one of its propositions into a dogma. (Short Course, 356)
Far from being an “attack” on Engels, the Short Course illustrates here how Marxism progresses, and how the hallmark of the opportunists -- the Social-Democrats, with whom Medvedev is so much in sympathy -- is to adhere to the letter of Marx and Engels, treating them like scholastic “authorities,” and not as scientists of revolution.
A similar misuse of sources may serve to illustrate Tucker’s shady practice. After a discussion of the anti-factionalist resolution introduced by Lenin and directed specifically at Trotsky at the Xth Party Congress in 1920, Tucker begins to speak of ‘‘Stalin’s faction,’’ and continues throughout the book (218-299; 411; 435).
This is, of course, totally unjustified, as would be clear if Tucker had dared to quote the text of the resolution, in which a faction is very carefully defined. According to E. H. Carr,
The word ‘fractionalism’ became a popular one in party vocabulary during the next few years. It was defined in the resolution as “the appearance of groups with special platforms and with the ambition to form in some degree a unit and to establish their own group discipline.” Thus ‘groups’ were not in themselves illegitimate; ‘fractions’ were. (Carr, History, I, 207, n. 2).
Lest it be thought that Tucker is using the word “factionalism” and “faction’ (which Carr translates into British political jargon as “fractionalism,” etc.) in a special way which justifies his usage, let his wording be noted:
Accordingly, the resolution declared such ‘‘factionalism’’ inadmissible, instructed the Central Committee to root it out, and ordered the disbanding of all party groups formed around particular platforms (Tucker, 218).
Nowhere does Tucker even try to show that Stalin tried to organize a ‘‘faction” in this sense, around a platform, with a special group discipline. If he had, it would certainly be evidence of dishonesty, for it was one of Stalin’s (and others’) strongest criticisms of Trotsky and the other ‘‘Oppositionists,’’ and was ultimately the reason for their expulsion from the Party. But Tucker cannot find any evidence that Stalin did so. Therefore, he simply asserts that he did. This is anti-communist “scholarship” and “honesty.”
II. INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS AND LIES
The cavalier use of sources by these three bourgeois propagandists can be disclosed with a little digging. The internal contradictions in their volumes are even more naked.
Harrison Salisbury does not hesitate to come to conclusions which his own arguments refute. His primary aim is, not to write history, but to slander Stalin. For example, Salisbury calls the Soviet attack on Finland in 1939-40 “brutal.” Needless to say, in Salisbury’s respect for “national sovereignty,” he neglects to mention that the Finnish government was Fascist and pro-German, and that Finland had rejected all diplomatic offers of much larger tracts of northern land to be exchanged for the Karelian peninsula (and that even after the Russian victory, Stalin did not exact any more than he had once offered peacefully). Still, even on the same page, Salisbury admits that the new territory acquired to Leningrad’s north gave the Soviet Union valuable maneuvering space, enabling defenses to be concentrated in the south, where the Nazis would attack, rather than (as they had always had to be) in the north, to repel any Finnish invasion. Later on, Salisbury reiterates that this, and the seizure of the Baltic states (“liberated” by the Germans in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ruled by fascist aristocratic elites, and fanatically pro-German and anti-Soviet) made Leningrad’s defensive position “infinitely better than in 1939” (141).
This is a minor embarrassment, however, in comparison with one of Salisbury’s major themes in the book -- “Stalin’s hatred of Leningrad.” Salisbury begins by baldly stating, without any evidence (only Khrushchev has ever implied it), that Stalin murdered Leningrad Party Secretary and member of the Politburo Sergei Kirov on 1 Dec. 1934. He uses this to spin a theory of “a persisting fear, if not hatred, of Leningrad on the part of Stalin” (156).
There were many who thought that Stalin felt that the northern city might challenge, and perhaps had already challenged, his power. Possibly a lurking feeling of inferiority towards Leningrad’s superior culture and vivid revolutionary tradition may have played a role in Stalin’s attitude toward that city. (162)
Salisbury’s only “evidence” for this pathological hatred on Stalin’s part is Stalin’s (presumably) orders to mine the central Leningrad railway system and all its approaches, in case of a Nazi conquest. This horrifies Salisbury:
This clearly was Stalin’s intention: destroy the city of revolution and march out to final battle with the Nazis ... Hitler would have no chance to erase the hated cradle of Marxism from the earth. It would be erased by its creators. (389-90).
And on this tone he concludes the story of the siege as well:
And so it went. Murderous, suicidal politics came first, before everything. In this atmosphere the death of a man was nothing, the death of a million men little more than a problem in the mechanics of propaganda, the destruction of a great city a complicated but conceivable gambit in the unceasing game of power. (663-emphasis added.)
Perhaps. But between these statements, all the evidence Salisbury gives of Stalin’s role in the defense of Leningrad points in the opposite direction. By the very evidence that Salisbury cites, it is clear that Leningrad had first priority with Stalin and the Soviet leadership, and that they authorized every possible sacrifice to lift the siege!
Salisbury “clearly” recognizes that Stalin “was clearly under pressure to abandon Leningrad” from some of his commanders. The city was in an exposed position, easy to cut off from supplies (as in fact happened), and the Nazi armies in 1941 were making rapid inroads elsewhere in the USSR. If the Baltic fleet were in danger of Nazi capture it would have to be sunk, and this would make the defense of Leningrad impossible. From a military standpoint, the situation looked grim.
Nevertheless, Salisbury himself catalogs a striking series of moves by Stalin to guarantee Leningrad’s defense.
1. On September 12 Stalin replaced Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, commander of the defense of Leningrad, with Marshal Georgii Zhukov. Voroshilov was one of Stalin’s oldest political associates. It was Voroshilov whom Stalin had put in charge of defenses of Tsaritsyn in 1919, when he sacked Trotsky’s Tsarist commanders and saved the city. Stalin had demanded a counterattack. Voroshilov had said that it was impossible. His explanations were backed up by Leningrad Party Secretary A. A. Kuznetsov and by Andrei Zhdanov, representative of the General Staff (Stavka) and chief of the Leningrad Military District.
Nevertheless Stalin relieved Voroshilov for “passivity in the face of the enemy,” replacing him with Marshal Zhukov, whose actions proved decisive in saving Leningrad. (370-71). Zhukov’s draconian measures -- the firing squad for any failure to carry out an order, no matter how dangerous -- saved the city from virtually certain conquest in the week of Sept. 12-18, when the Nazis came closest to breaking through to Leningrad. By the 17th, German forces were being pulled back to the Moscow front. The records of the Nazi General Halder showed the Germans were certain that only a siege could take the city. The Germans had over-estimated the men and materiel available for Leningrad’s defense, based on the stiff resistance they had encountered in their drive on the city. Zhukov’s tactics saved Leningrad.
2. Stalin’s plans (if they were his, and not as is more likely, the General Staff’s) to destroy Leningrad rather than let i.t fall into the hands of the Nazis-were proved wise by the recovery of Hitler’s plans for Leningrad:
Hitler insisted that von Leeb (his commander) draw the tightest kind of circle around Leningrad. Secretly, the Fuehrer instructed von Leeb that the city’s capitulation was not to be accepted. The population w.as to die with the doomed city. Random shelling of civilian objectives was authorized. If the populace tried to escape the iron ring, they were to be shot down. (383)
The Nazi directive on “The Future of the City of Petersburg (the Nazis had never accepted the revolutionary name Leningrad)” read:
1. The Fuehrer had decided to raze the City of Petersburg from the face of the earth. After the defeat of Soviet Russia there will be not the slightest reason for the future existence of this large city. Finland has also advised us of its lack of interest in the further existence of this city immediately on her new frontiers (so much for the Soviet Union’s “brutality” in attacking her “small northern neighbor”).
2. The previous requests of the Navy for the preservation of the wharves, harbor and naval installations are known to the OKB (Berlin High Command). However, their fulfillment will not be possible in view of the general line with regard to Petersburg.
3. It is proposed to blockade the city closely and by means of artillery fire of all caliber and ceaseless bombardment from the air to raze it to the ground.
If this creates a situation in the city which produces calls for surrender, they will be refused ...
This order was reaffirmed, as Salisbury informs us, on Oct. 7, 1941. (465-6)
3. On November 16, 194l, Kalinin(President of the USSR) and Stalin arranged to have special flights of high-calorie food, desperately needed everywhere, to be sent daily to Leningrad, and ordered Zhukov to take an immediate offensive against Tikhvin, to reopen the road to Leningrad. (463-4)
4. On November 30, Stalin personally intervened to order the commander of the Soviet forces near Tikhvin, General Meretskov, to stop making excuses and attack the enemy. Meretskov had been temporizing, complaining of large German superiority in strength. Stalin sent one of his trusted NKVD generals to shake up the Soviet command and guarantee an attack. In the resulting attack, Tikhvin was recaptured by the Soviet troops.
Even Salisbury must admit that “Tikhvin was a real victory” (468).
Alexander Werth, a source which Salisbury uses elsewhere (but not here), states flatly that “By driving the Germans out of Tikhvin and beyond the Volkhov river between December 9 and 15 General Meretskov’s troops literally saved Leningrad ... Had Tikhvin remained in German hands, it is impossible to see how Leningrad could have been supplied ... “ (Werth, 309).
From Salisbury’s own admission, Stalin and the General Staff were more correct in their estimation of what was possible than those within Leningrad itself!
While not conceding Werth’s remarks, Salisbury is forced to report the words of one of his sources:
Without exaggeration, the defeat of the German Fascist troops at Tikhvin and the recapture of the Northern Railroad line up to Mga station saved from starvation thousands of people. (Dmitri Pavlov, head of food supplies in Leningrad, p. 477).
5. Stalin intervened again to speed up Leningrad’s liberation on December 24, 1941:
Unsatisfied with the pace at which Meretskov was moving, Stalin sent one of his police generals, L.Z. Mekhlis, to the Volkhov front on December 24. The task of Mekhlis was to chivy and hurry the operation. (559).
But Stalin and the Stavka were anxious not to have the counterattack begin before the Soviet troops were ready:
On Jan. 10 Stalin and Marshal Vasilevsky talked with him (i.e. Meretskov) by direct wire. They expressed the frank opinion that the operation would not be ready even by Jan. 11 and that it would be better to put it off another two or three days. ‘There’s a Russian proverb,’ Stalin said. ‘Haste makes waste. It will be the same with you: hurry to the attack and not prepare it and you will waste people’ (559).
6. Stalin consistently supplied more reinforcements and arms to the Leningrad front than could have been expected. In September, 1942:
Meretskov got more in reinforcements and arms than he had expected from Moscow in the light of the Stalingrad crisis. Stalin sent him 20,000 rifles and tommy guns, although he had asked for only 8,000 to 10,000 (620).
In November 1942, Stalin again intervened personally to guarantee massive supplies to Leningrad for a counterattack. Salisbury, in admitting this, calls the armaments provided “probably the greatest concentration of fire power ever assembled -- more than the Russians had massed at Stalingrad” (645).
Even within Salisbury’s own book, there is no evidence whatsoever to support his contention that Stalin “feared” or “hated” Leningrad, or “contemplated its destruction” as part of a power struggle. Salisbury, like Tucker and Medvedev, is not interested in any conclusions which do not help support his preconceived political line, whatever the facts may be.
III. THE POLITICAL LINE OF THESE WRITERS
Medvedev’s Political Line
Medvedev’s blatant misuse of sources, outright lies, and self-contradictions show that he will stop at nothing to attack Stalin. But what is the political line behind this attack on Stalin? And what connection does it have with the “anti-Stalin” campaign carried on since 1956 by the revisionist Soviet leaders?
The political line of Medvedev’s book has two aspects. Primarily, Medvedev echoes the political line of the Soviet ruling class, both internal and external. Secondarily, he has some contradictions with their line, which, though they have had some serious consequences for Medvedev himself (he is not able to publish in the USSR, and has been expelled from the “C”PSU), are nevertheless minor in comparison to his unity with the rulers’ line.
The Political basis of the anti-Stalinism of the USSR rulers
As noted above, the ruling class of the USSR has engaged in a systematic attack on Stalin almost since the day of his death. They have done this to provide a fig-leaf for their sharp move away from the socialist policies followed, though less and less consistently, in the last years of Stalin’s life. Their political line can be characterized briefly as:
1. A sharp move to the right internally in the USSR.
2. A desire to work in collusion with capitalist rulers in other countries (replacing revolutionary struggle with normal capitalist competition, outside the limits of revolution); and therefore a desire to gain respectability in the capitalist world;
3. A turn to naked imperialism, rather than fraternal working-class internationalism, in foreign policy, with the USSR playing the familiar role of exploiter, and various countries (Eastern Europe; Cuba; various “Third World” countries) as the colonies.
Stalin basically upheld, despite all his errors, a socialist line in all these areas. The specific content of the attack on Stalin and the creation of the myth of “Stalinism” is an attack on the line the USSR held to in these areas during Stalin’s lifetime, and its replacement by a bourgeois line, under the name of a “more humane,” so-called ‘‘Leninist,’’ etc., socialism.
Medvedev’s book reflects this line very accurately on the whole. This is not surprising, since, as we have seen, his major sources are official Soviet documents and studies published since the 20th and 22nd Party Congresses.
Nationalism
Medvedev criticizes Stalin for lack of sympathy with bourgeois and cultural nationalists and nationalist movements as Commissar of Nationalities shortly after the revolution (in this he is only too happy to echo Lenin, who was to the right of Stalin on this issue) (16, 21-2). Stalin is attacked for greatly restricting the sphere of “national” independence and culture, especially with regard to the Ukraine, during the ‘Thirties, and for pointing out that it was in contradiction to proletarian internationalism and objectively aided the imperialists.
E.H. Carr noted that the Ukrainian national movement had little or no base among the peasantry or the workers, but “remained the creation of a small but devoted band of intellectuals drawn predominantly from the teaching and literary professions and from the priesthood” (Bolshevik Revolution, I, 296). Giving “independence” to such bourgeois “national” units always ends in dividing workers from one another and justifying the privileges and positions of various “national” elites.
Bourgeois specialists and their privileges
The internal struggle between the working class and the many petty-bourgeois elements who consciously or unconsciously oppose the workers’ dictatorship and socialism, try to retain their own privileges, etc., was cited by Lenin as a matter for unceasing concern for revolutionaries. As the reversal of the revolution in both the USSR and in China has shown, this internal danger is the main danger to a workers’ state. The history of the USSR since 1917 is one of struggle against, and ultimately capitulation to, bourgeois ideology from within. NEP, while necessary as a “breathing space” for the exhausted Soviet Union to recoup itself, was nevertheless recognized by Lenin and the Party as a temporary retreat. It was followed by the titanic internal struggles of the campaigns for industrialization and collectivization.*
__________
*Unpopular (in different degrees) among the peasantry and petty-bourgeois elements generally (including many in the Party) but supported enthusiastically by the working class.
__________
The “purges” and trials of the 1930s involved petty-bourgeois elements almost exclusively, whether in the Party, in the economy, or in the military. During the weakening of internal class struggle under the incorrect slogan of “national unity” for the War effort, these elements made great inroads in every aspect of Soviet society and soon gained the upper hand. Stalin’s last years were largely taken up with an unsuccessful attempt to mount a struggle against the forces which, at his death, moved to consolidate their hold on the whole society.
Medvedev criticizes Stalin sharply for his suspicions of petty bourgeois experts in all fields, military, technical, and intellectual. Though this is not the place for a full discussion of the purges of the ‘Thirties, it is clear that many mistakes were made in handling the contradictions among the people within the USSR, and that Stalin must share the responsibility for these errors. It is also clear that, even as Medvedev admits, there were plots and deliberate acts of sabotage, as well as groups of conspirators with clandestine connections with Trotskyite, “White” émigré, and imperialist groups abroad. Medvedev is critical of Stalin for his suspicions of bourgeois experts, and feels they should have been given much greater leeway than they were (12-13; 110-11; 137; 209-214).
Closely connected with this is Medvedev’s attack on Stalin for insisting that class struggle becomes sharper within a country after a revolution has occurred (475). Though inconsistent (Stalin said on several occasions during the ‘Thirties that classes and class struggle had been liquidated within the USSR), Stalin basically upheld the correct view that class struggle continued and even intensified after the revolution.
In this Stalin echoed (inconsistently) Lenin:
The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke ... But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke ... (Lenin goes on to enumerate the old ruling class’s material advantages which it retains even after its initial overthrow). In these circumstances, to assume that in a revolution which is at all profound and serious the issue is decided simply by the relation between the majority and the minority is the acme of stupidity, the silliest prejudice of a common liberal, an attempt to deceive the people by concealing from them a well-established historical truth. This historical truth is that in every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn and desperate resistance of the exploiters, who for a number of years retain important practical advantages over the exploited, is the rule. (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, Selected Works, Vol. 3, pp. 63-4)
The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration ... In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semi-defeat of the workers, grow nervous run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other .... (ibid., 65)
Of course Medvedev does not recognize the struggles within the Soviet Union during Stalin’s lifetime as examples of “class struggle.” They are just the acts of one “despot.” No class struggle, just “acts”-- a new category in “Marxist” historical thought.
Khrushchev and the Soviet rulers after him have not attacked the purges of the ‘Thirties because of the injustices and errors made at that time, nor from any love of “justice” or” humanity.” These butchers couldn’t care less about the lives of thousands of people, any more than could the U.S. rulers or any other ruling class. What Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Co. dislike in the ‘Thirties is the Leninist notion of the continuation of sharp class struggle against bourgeois ideology, the struggle to overcome petty bourgeois class elements and preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat. Since it is precisely the petty-bourgeois “experts” and bureaucrats -- the privileged elite within the USSR, such as the intellectuals Medvedev represents -- who are the greatest mainstay, internally, of their rotten political line (despite some contradictions, about which more later), the new rulers try to smear all Stalin’s attempts to struggle with and against these elements.
Material incentives
Medvedev’s criticisms of Stalin’s sharp class struggle in the countryside during the collectivization movement in 1929-31 echo those of the present Soviet ruling class. Despite all errors and difficulties, the collectivization movement of these years established collective and Soviet farms. Without them the great strides made in rapidly industrializing the USSR during the 1930s could not have taken place.
The collective farms were popular among the poor peasantry. Even during the Nazi occupation, collective and Soviet farms were rarely abolished, though this was the main promise made by the Nazi to the peasantry to try to enlist support.
After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev began the policy of giving larger and larger “private” plots of land to peasants on the collective farms, and giving them wider and wider latitude to spend time on them, and to sell the produce at market prices far above the prices of collectively-produced goods. He and the Soviet chiefs after him have deliberately cultivated and renewed a capitalist spirit, and a capitalist market economy in the countryside. This has been “justified” under the name of “material incentives.” (The Chinese ruling class has been doing the same thing.)
Therefore, one of Stalin’s worst sins, according to Medvedev (and Khrushchev) was his lack of sympathy with capitalist “material incentives” for production, especially in the countryside ( 487; 512; 420-1).
Internationally, as well, the brunt of Medvedev’s criticisms of Stalin reveal his support for the bankrupt, anti-working-class policies of the Soviet leadership.
Support for the “national bourgeoisie”
Medvedev attacks Stalin for the thesis that the bourgeoisie has abandoned the struggle for national liberation, and that only Communists can lead it. This is the theory which formed the basis for the Chinese Communist Party’s practice, as they acknowledge. Stalin did not recognize that the concept of “national liberation struggle” itself is revisionist (see Road to Revolution III). But his position was on the left of the struggle within the international Communist movement at the time. Medvedev cites Canada, Mexico, and Chile as countries where the “national” bourgeoisie are playing a “progressive” role!
Stalin exposed the myth of the “Third World,” or “neutrality,” as a fake. He correctly attacked Sukarno and Jawaharlal Nehru as imperialist agents. This infuriates Medvedev and his Kremlin cronies, who are using these nationalist leaders’ successors and others to gain economic colonies for the USSR rulers. Sukarno, Nehru, and all their ilk attacked Communists and workers viciously. Medvedev attacks Stalin and Mao Tse-tung for advocating armed struggle and insurrection, “peasant wars of the Chinese type,” instead of “broad national struggles.” (522-3) Stalin is also accused of having neglected the revisionists’ favorite line, “the struggle for peace and equal rights among nations.” (523)
That is, Medvedev points out how the USSR’s foreign policy under Stalin followed a basically different course from that under Khrushchev and since. Stalin’s line was much more internationalist and revolutionary, whatever errors it contained. The new Soviet rulers, who do all they can, from Korea to Vietnam, to smother the flames of revolution, try to discredit Stalin’s foreign policy by attacking Stalin personally.
“Shared Power” and the Social-Democrats
The new Soviet rulers are thoroughly against revolution. Instead, they promote the idea of “sharing state power with the bourgeoisie.” This policy had its origins in the “United Front Against Fascism” line of the Seventh Comintern Congress of 1935 (before that, “united fronts” with the S-D’s were confined to joint demonstrations or other actions, and were restricted in other ways as well). Immediately after the Second World War, also, Communists entered governments in France and Finland, among other countries. At that time, however, the honeymoon proved brief; the French bourgeoisie soon threw the Communists out. In 1947, the Comintern was reestablished in a weaker form as the “Cominform,” as part of Stalin’s belated strategy to revive the spirit of class struggle and internationalism abandoned in large part during the war for the sake of “unity” with the Allied powers.
Stalin had always been a sharp critic of phony socialism or ‘‘revisionism,” especially of the so-called “Second International” of the Social-Democratic parties of Europe. In the period immediately following the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the German and French “socialist” parties were the strongest opponents, not only of the new Soviet state, but also of any kind of workers’ struggles in their own countries. Time and again (as in the Kiel naval revolt of 1919 in Germany) the workers hoisted the red flag and appealed to “their” “socialist” party leaders to help them in the revolution, only to be betrayed.
It should be pointed out that many bourgeois historians, such as Seston Delmer (Weimar Germany) blame the German social-democrats for making the deals with the German General Staff and ruling class which greatly facilitated the rise of fascism in Germany.
Today the Soviet rulers eagerly seek alliances with these phony socialists, with whom they have so much in common. Therefore, they -- and Medvedev -- viciously attack Stalin for his hatred of them.
Stalin was only following in Lenin’s path when he made the rejection of alliances with Social-Democrats a principled issue within the Communist International. In Lenin’s day, during the formation of the Comintern (1920), the Soviet Communist Party made it a prerequisite of membership in the Comintern for a party calling itself Communist to attack, and refuse any alliances with, the local Social-Democratic party. Stalin attacked Trotsky and the “opposition” factions within the CPSU during the twenties as both objectively, and later deliberately, aiding the Social-Democrats in their attacks on the USSR.
All this calls .forth the sharpest attacks from Medvedev, who assails this “isolationist” line (52; 67; 124; 254; 518·9). Like his Kremlin bosses a strong proponent of the “good” ruling class line, Medvedev is a cringing admirer of “bourgeois democracy.’’
This hostility to all forms of bourgeois democracy had its own logic for Stalin. Constantly violating the elementary norms of any democracy instead of developing a Proletarian socialist democracy, Stalin could not acknowledge any positive value in bourgeois democracy. (439)
As elsewhere, this is really an attack on Lenin masquerading as an attack on Stalin. Lenin constantly attacked the sham of bourgeois democracy.
Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor ...
Take the bourgeois parliament. Can it be that the learned Kautsky has never heard that the more highly democracy is developed, the more the bourgeois parliaments are subjected by the stock exchange and the bankers? (Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” Selected Works, 3, 55, 57.)
Stalin’s revolutionary line against Social Democracy was reversed at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935 (see RRIII). It is interesting that Medvedev views the results of this Congress as very positive, and even hints that Stalin may have disagreed with them, since (1) they contradicted long-held views of his, and (2) he did not speak at the Congress (440).
Medvedev in general criticizes any attempts to sharpen class struggle with the ruling classes of the Western capitalist countries, and develops the notion of “shared power” for these countries as the only goal (443; 4 71). In addition, he defends Khrushchev’s slogan of “peaceful coexistence” with capitalism, and attacks Stalin for not having anticipated it, including for his support of the North Korean army when attacked by the South under Synghman Rhee (479; for the fact that the South, not the North, started the Korean War, see I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, Monthly Review Press). In general, Medvedev blames Stalin for the “cold war,” and shows much more trust of the capitalist ruling classes.
Criticism of “Rapid Industrialization” policy
The major internal struggle within the Soviet Union during the 1930s was the struggle for industrialization. This alone enabled the USSR to withstand the attack of the Nazis and repel it. It was a great inspiration to revolutionaries around the world. They could point proudly to the fact that an industrialized socialist society could be built by relying entirely on the efforts of the people, without massive influxes of foreign capital, and under conditions of encirclement by hostile capitalist powers. No country since the 19th century had been able to industrialize at all, being prevented by capitalist penetration from doing so; those few who made some strides towards industrialization were nothing but colonies for imperialist investment (Canada). None of this was accomplished without a fierce class struggle within the USSR. The bourgeois historians never tire of attacking this class struggle, greatly exaggerating its weaknesses while belittling its tremendous advances, in order to dissuade the working class from ever trying this again. They especially want to persuade intellectuals that the imperialist countries are needed for their capital to “help” the underdeveloped countries. The Soviet Union, since Stalin’s death, has joined the ranks of those capitalist countries which want to “help” underdeveloped countries industrialize by taking over their economies.
Therefore, Medvedev and the Soviet revisionists sing in unison of the “distortions” and horrors of the industrialization movement during the ‘Thirties. The Soviet Union’s line since Khrushchev has been to force the ruling groups in countries where the USSR predominates to stop attempts at rapid industrialization. They want such countries to become “colonies” of the USSR, supplying the USSR with (basically) raw materials, in return for manufactured goods. In other words, they are looking for sources of cheap materials, and for markets for their industries -- like any imperialists.
In the last years of Stalin’s life, Tito’s Yugoslavia was excluded from the Communist movement. One of the basic issues involved was the question of rapid industrialization, without seeking economic “aid” (read: imperialist penetration) from the West. Tito opted (and still does) for Western “aid” and for private ownership of the means of production to a large degree -- i.e., for exploitation of Yugoslav workers. Stalin was correct to call him a traitor to socialism for this.
With Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union’s line changed. Khrushchev began to demand that Eastern European countries stop attempts at rapid industrialization, and forced exploitative trade arrangements upon them. This went hand in hand with his attack on Stalin, as the Chinese leaders recognized. Khrushchev welcomed Yugoslavia back into the fold in 1959. Khrushchev stopped Stalin’s policy of economic and technical aid to China to help her industrialize, pulling out all Soviet technicians by 1961. During the 1960s, the USSR leaders gradually forced Castro to stop trying to diversify the Cuban economy away from total reliance upon sugar. The result was the disastrous push toward a one-crop economy, the “10 million ton” fiasco of 1968-69, and Cuba’s total dependence upon the USSR’s purchasing her sugar at above the world market price. Cuba is now heavily in debt to the USSR, which is able to enforce political adherence to the USSR’s line politically. Cuba has given up support for South American revolutionary movements, supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and most recently has been forced to send soldiers to fight for the Soviet-backed MPLA movement in Angola to become an international catspaw for Soviet foreign policy.
Praise for Revisionist Leaders
Medvedev goes out of his way to absolve the post-1956 leaders of the Soviet Union from any of the “blame” for Stalin’s “errors.” He praises Khrushchev mainly for his attack on Stalin, “an indisputable service that will never be forgotten” (350), and dutifully attacks only those members of the Presidium in Stalin’s time whom Khrushchev ousted himself in 1957 (Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich). He repeats speeches of Soviet leaders such as Khrushchev and Shelepin as the truth (see above; also 345). Finally, he draws a distinction between Stalin and the present “leaders”:
. .. Stalin had to bring into the leadership people of another type. They were comparatively young leaders who supported Stalin in almost everything but were not informed of many of his crimes. Though they shared certain characteristic faults of Stalin’s entourage, they also wanted to serve the people. They lacked sufficient political experience to analyse and rectify the tragic events of the Stalinist period, and some of them perished towards the end of it. But others survived, and after Stalin’s death gave varying degrees of support to the struggle against the cult. (417)
In all essential points, Medvedev’s criticism of Stalin reflects accurately the line of the CPSU under Khrushchev. A few words should be said though, about Medvedev’s present position as a ‘‘courageous’’ dissident.
Khrushchev was ousted from leadership of the CPSU and the USSR in early 1965. Since that time, criticism of Stalin under official auspices has been drastically toned down. Books and articles have appeared in which Stalin’s achievements have been cautiously praised. Memoirs which had only partly appeared by 1965 have been” retouched” to reflect the new line (this is not to imply that they were any more “truthful” when first published, under Khrushchev). Yet the general line of the USSR, with respect to economics internally, and internationally, has scarcely changed at all since 1965. How is this to be explained?
It appears that the present leaders of the CPSU agreed with the general direction of Khrushchev’s political line, but sharply disagreed with his methods of carrying it out. Khrushchev was too crudely imperialist and anti-communist to provide an effective “front” for the turn toward capitalism internally and toward imperialism internationally. His assaults on Stalin antagonized many within the USSR who remember the heroic achievements of the ‘Thirties and ‘Forties.
In addition, Khrushchev allied himself with certain forces who were more openly anti-communist than himself. This threatened (1) to “unmask the intentions of the regime as a whole; and (2) to destroy Soviet hegemony over the “Communist” movement, and thus to undermine Soviet imperialist foreign policy. It particularly threatened to drive countries engaged in struggle against imperialism -- and the ‘Sixties was an era of tremendous anti-imperialist struggle -- into the arms of the Chinese.
For these reasons Khrushchev had to go. Since then, there has been an attempt to “rehabilitate” Stalin within the USSR, but in form only -- to stifle internal criticism back toward internationalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Medvedev basically represents one of those forces Khrushchev allied with. He still supports policies which the present Kosygin-Brezhnev clique reject, such as:
1. The theory of “polycentrism,” or independence from Moscow of Communist parties. First put forward by Palmira Togliatti in the fifties this was tolerated by Khrushchev in seeking allies against the Chinese, but is vigorously opposed by the USSR leadership today, who want to use their “Communist” movement as support for Soviet imperialism. Medvedev approves of “polycentrism” (478), and criticizes Stalin for re-establishing the Cominform, something that -- in form only, of course -- the present Soviet leadership would be happy to do, if they could.
2. Medvedev goes so far in his admiration for the bourgeoisie that he supports (in a guarded manner) the proliferation of opposition parties within the USSR, and criticizes Stalin for too much “centralism” in his leadership of the CPSU. The present revisionist leadership wants no talk of any “democratic” challenges to their authority within the USSR (379, 381-3). Medvedev supports the existence of “opposition” within the CPSU, even of factions, and the present leadership wants none of this (387).
3. Medvedev wants a “free press” established so that all views may be aired. That is, he wants to have the bourgeois and fascist forces within the Soviet intelligentsia published without restriction (368). This would be bad enough for the new bosses. But it would also liberate the real Communist forces within the USSR to begin to organize and build an opposition from the left and they cannot permit this.
So, Medvedev and other right-wing intellectuals enamored of the Western bourgeoisie are on the outs with the present ruling clique in the USSR. They keep kicking up a fuss. however, and have greatly strengthened their ties with the Western ruling classes since Khrushchev’s overthrow.
Their books are regularly published in the West; manuscripts are smuggled in and out, a whole underground system of ‘‘samizdat’’ or private publication is in operation. This organized, and often (in the case of Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) perfectly open alliance with the Western ruling classes and the CIA, is a hindrance to Soviet bosses’ aims. So they try to suppress it to some extent. But this should not be confused (as Medvedev does) with a real “rehabilitation” of Stalinism. For if the dictatorship of the proletariat were really being exercised within the USSR, these imperialist agents would not be getting the relatively lenient treatment they get.
Political Line -- Salisbury
Salisbury and Tucker are engaged in writing propaganda for a political line. All historical writing, of course, has a political line. In this respect Salisbury and Tucker are no different from any other bourgeois historian. But reality and historical facts, do not support the political line the U.S. ruling class and these two writers, are trying to push. In fact, both Tucker and Salisbury have to deal with the embarrassing fact that the documents and available evidence really show something quite different from what they want to prove.
These two writers are not writing to provide strategic information for the bourgeoisie itself. For this purpose the ruling class supports research professors and institutes which are much more sophisticated. Reams of professional “Sovietology” studies are published every year. Tucker and Salisbury basically do not even use this material, not because it is not anti-communist, but because it is not so much aimed at convincing the reader of the evils of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rather, it is intended to show the already loyal imperialists how to understand Communism and to stop it.
Salisbury and Tucker are aiming at the “educated” petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the capitalist countries. Their hope is to be accepted as learned “experts” whose judgments are valid at face-value. They aim to persuade intellectuals -- who are hurt more and more by capitalism, and many of whom feel attracted to communism -- that they should never trust “Stalinists,” and never ever ally with the “ignorant” workers, whose support for Stalin was always the most firm (see Medvedev, p. 430, for admission of this fact).
This is the reason for Salisbury’s concentration on telling the story of the siege of Leningrad from the point of view of the intellectuals, particularly the writers and artists, of the city. Socialism is never as popular among this class of people as in the working class. Salisbury gives many examples of how they hated Stalin, and even wished for a Nazi victory:
She (Anastasia Vladimirovna) smiled sarcastically at the oratory of Lyubov. She had never bothered to conceal her hatred for the Soviet regime. With the onset of war she saw for the first time hope of rescue from the Bolsheviks.
Yelena Skryabina shared not a few of Vladimirovna’s sentiments. But she was wise and experienced ... Yet she knew that such a defeat might well be the only way of ending a regime which was cruel, eccentric and vicious. (Salisbury, 149)
Salisbury tells his story from only two kinds of viewpoints -- those of army men, drawing upon the Khrushchev-era military memoirs; and those of the intellectuals of Leningrad. Many Leningrad intellectuals were hostile to socialism. Many more were subjective, fearful, isolated by their profession from other people, and therefore give, in their account, a very defeatist impression of the struggle within the city. Anna Akhmatova, a Tsarist-era “vanguard” poet who was never ·socially involved at all, whose husband had been shot in 1921 as a “White” agent, turned to God in hopeless despondency. Marina Tsvetaeva killed herself on being evacuated from Leningrad and from her son. Others, like Olga Berggolts, wrote only about their worries:
Vishnevsky noted that even so fine a woman as Vera Inber (an older writer with a little more backbone) could not resist delicately “sticking a knife in the ribs” of her fellow poet, Olga Berggolts, for writing “minor, sad, old-fashioned” poems about the blockade. (640)
This same Vishnevsky is pictured as enraged when the government refused to publish a play about the blockage in which the Party representative, a Commissar, was portrayed as a fool.
Salisbury has many personal friends among the anti-communist intelligentsia of Leningrad. He tries to portray the siege through their eyes. The purpose of this is to make “intellectual” anticommunism palatable to Salisbury’s audience. This is. in the main, American intellectuals, who might be expected to have a “middle position “ neither for nor against the Soviet regime, and to identify with their Soviet counterparts. But Salisbury stacks the deck. We never hear from the large number of Soviet intellectuals who supported Communism. Only one of the writers he follows was even a member of the Communist Party -- Olga Berggolts, a thorough opportunist. Imprisoned briefly during the ‘Thirties, she was later treated in a privileged way, being commissioned to write the poem engraved on the memorial to the victims of Leningrad. This great hater of Stalin did not refuse the Stalin literary prize in 1950, but was heaped with honors for her anti-Stalinism during the late ‘50s and ‘60s (see her obituary in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 15, 1975).
Salisbury does not hesitate to stoop to the crassest snobbery in his attack on Stalin:
There were few Leningraders of intellectual capacity who would not have viewed the overthrow of Stalin with emotions ranging from grim satisfaction to unrestrained delight. (156 -- emphasis added)
That is to say, the “stupid” workers loved Stalin, but the “smart” intellectuals knew better. Generally, though, his elitism is more sophisticated. He tries to write for people who view themselves as “neutral” or “patriotic” rather than socialist, devoted only to themselves and to their “art.”
Salisbury’s main aim is, in shooting at Stalin to hit the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He blames all the errors of the war firstly on Stalin, but mainly on the lack of “constitutional government”:
But the Soviet experience reveals that neither the quantity nor the quality of intelligence reporting and analysis determines whether a national leadership acts in timely and resolute fashion ... unless there is a clear channel from lower to top levels, unless the leadership insists upon honest and objective reporting and is prepared to act upon such reports, regardless of preconceptions, prejudices, past commitments, and personal politics, the best intelligence in the world goes to waste -- or, even worse, is turned into an instrument of self-deceit. This was clearly the case with Stalin. Nothing in the Bolshevik experience so plainly exposed the fatal defects of the Soviet power monopoly as when the man. who held that power was ruled by his own internal obsessions. (87)
In this he does not differ at all from Medvedev who is similarly enamored of Parliaments.
Tucker’s political line
The audience of Tucker’s book is the same as that of Salisbury’s -- American intellectuals. Tucker is a professional popularizer of attacks on Marx, Lenin, and socialism. His books are scoffed at even by bourgeois historians (e.g. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx), but widely assigned for courses in political science and history. Politically, Tucker is a critic of the present U.S. ruling-class tactic of “detente” with the USSR. His recent article in Commentary (published by the American Jewish Committee), a conservative intellectual journal, proposed that the U.S. should be prepared to go to war in the Middle East over oil in the near future. The article had been rejected by Foreign Affairs, the official house organ of the ruling-class Committee on Foreign Relations, where detente is still the watchword.
Tucker concentrates upon a “psychohistorical” study of Stalin’s personality. “Psychohistory” is simply nonsense, a thin excuse for fabricating “truths” and facts out of thin air. What Tucker really concentrates on is the notion of “one-man dictatorship.” He makes Stalin’s “personality” the key to understanding Soviet history:
Here, then, was an historic instance -- neither the first nor the last -- in which a leader’s personality acquired critical importance. (483)
But once again, in aiming at Stalin, Tucker is really intent on hitting Lenin and the concept of a Communist party operating by democratic centralism:
... the outcome -- Stalin’s rise and later autocracy (this word was the Tsars’ description of their powers) -- has its explanation in the nature of Stalin, in the nature of Bolshevism as a political movement, in the nature of the Soviet regime’s historical situation in the 1920s, and in the nature of Russia as a country with a tradition of autocracy and popular acceptance of it. (XVI, emphasis added)
Like Medvedev and Salisbury, Tucker not surprisingly has a strongly elitist view of history. According to him, the “Russian people” (by this he means the peasantry) were predisposed toward autocracy and despotism, except for the “middle class,” which Tucker says was too “dispersed” (3-4). As usual with Tucker, he immediately admits that the opposite may well have been true, that by 1900 the peasants were “open” to non-Tsarist agitation, the intelligentsia more and more monarchist (6).
Tucker tries to derive Lenin’s understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat from the philosophy of the Russian terrorists of the late nineteenth century. These men, called “Russian Jacobins,” were basically petty-bourgeois anarchists with a disdain for the masses (except in theory), a great respect for authoritarianism (they really wanted a “great man,” like Napoleon, to rule benevolently), and a conspiratorial, rather than mass, theory of change. Lenin never had any truck with them or their theories except within the pages of Tucker’s book. But Tucker finds a quotation in a book attacking Lenin by the early revisionist and émigré Valentinov and. accepting it as the truth, makes Lenin get the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat from these terrorists! (Valentinov hated Lenin, and the feeling was mutual; Lenin smashed his inane revisions of Marxism in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, 1908.) As usual, Tucker later admits that Marx developed the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but sticks to his original theory. Lenin is made to derive What is To Be Done? from this “Russian Jacobin” idea of the “great men.” Tucker completely slanders and distorts Lenin’s book, making it a plea for a “party of heroes” (27). Centralism (24) and the concept of relying on the masses (22) Tucker has Lenin take from the “Jacobins” and from the Narodniks, or populists (against whom Lenin directed his earliest writings -- see “Who are the ‘Friends of the People’?”, 1895). Tucker finds the idea of a “charismatic” (read: superman) leader there, too (32).
From terrorist-monarchists, to Lenin, to Stalin -- it’s a simple progression for Tucker. Leninism not Stalinism, is the “byword for tyranny” for Tucker!
The Continuing Fight for Socialism
When the new Khrushchevite anti-Stalin line was announced in 1956, most of the existing Communist parties accepted it, after a more or less brief period of internal turmoil. The approval of Khrushchev’s all-out attack upon the entire period of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the USSR showed how rotted with revisionism the “Communist” movement had become. Even before Khrushchev spoke, internal capitulation to bourgeois politics -- nationalism, pacifism, fear of the ruling classes, different “justifications” for maintaining privileged elites, lack of reliance upon the working class -- had made great inroads in all parties.
Khrushchev’s speech touched off a sharp debate within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Although the same revisionist notions infected the Chinese leadership, solid ties with the common working people had been built over decades by millions of rank-and-file communists. In the mid-1950s, the Left forces, united with the poor peasantry, were making strong advances through the mass-led Rural People’s Commune movement. These Left forces sharpened the struggle against revisionist policies and ideas and obtained some influence within leading positions in the Party. These forces recognized, however imperfectly, that the denunciations of “Stalinism” were carbon copies of the bourgeois anti-Soviet line, a mask for the rejection of the fundamentals of Communism: the dictatorship of the proletariat; the need for a democratic-centralist, working-class-led Communist party; revolutionary proletarian internationalism. Hesitantly at first, then more firmly under pressure from the mass-based Left forces within and Khrushchev’s neo-imperialist foreign policy externally, the CPC attacked the Soviet line.
The so-called “Sino-Soviet dispute’’ which grew up around the Chinese defense of Stalin and the dictatorship of the proletariat led to the worldwide exposure of Soviet revisionism. The internal debate stirred up within China over this stimulated the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution(GPCR) of the 1960s, as Left forces within China began to recognize the same revisionist forces and tendencies in their own country as they saw and attacked in the USSR.
The forces on the right within the Chinese leadership also learned from the Soviet revisionists and imitated them. They dumped the openly Khrushchevite types from the leadership, as Brezhnev and Kosygin had dumped Khrushchev himself. They relied especially on using the “cult of personality” around Mao to mask their subversion of communist principles, as had been done by the right in the USSR.
The Left in the GPCR was defeated, but not before it had involved and affected literally millions of workers and peasants. The recent widespread strike movements in Hangchow and elsewhere show that working-class based left-wing forces are still organizing and fighting internally in China. The sellouts in the leadership have been forced to dump a few of the more extreme rightists (like Teng Shao-ping) temporarily. but are basically becoming more blatant every day. This can only lead to increased left-led struggles.
The Progressive Labor· Party was born in struggle against the revisionism of the old CPUSA in the period of Khrushchev. Our party was molded ideologically by the Chinese struggle against revisionism, and sharpened by the successes and failures of the Left in the Cultural Revolution. All this really began with Khrushchev’s “secret speech” of 1956, an attack on Stalin.
So the question of Stalin’s legacy, his successes and failures, is an extremely important one for our party. Since this is so, it behooves us to study and defend this legacy.
We need not, and must not, “apologize” for Stalin. Bourgeois historians have created the myth of “Stalinism.” They have done so by the kind of shoddy lies, tendentious arguments, and utterly unproven assertions that these three books are based upon. Medvedev, Salisbury, and Tucker are typical of what passes for scholarship about Stalin. The bourgeoisie hates Stalin. But they do not hate him for being “responsible for the deaths of innocent people.” Since when do the butchers of Vietnam and the murderers of ghetto rebellions in the U.S., the supporters of the CIA, of fascist, murderous regimes from Greece and South Korea to Chile and Israel -- since when do they care about killing innocent people? The bourgeoisie hates Stalin for the revolutionary aspect of his legacy. It is that which they want workers and intellectuals everywhere to reject.
So long as there is no concerted, Left-led opposition to the ruling class, the ruling class will be able to use intellectuals as judas goats in their bloody plan for world domination. Capitalism’s daily business-as-usual dwarfs Stalin’s error. Let us not forget that these errors were nothing compared to the great Communist gains throughout Stalin’s life.
Under Stalin the first socialist state was built and industrialized. The imperialists and their “scholars” will never forgive him for that. It is for us to give the correct evaluation of Stalin, as ‘we build the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party and the fight for a working-class dictatorship in the USA.
