| By
Comrade B Note:
this article is written tongue-in-cheek, intended to mock out both Commie and
anti-Commie crusaders. It is not intended as an endorsement of a Bolshevik or
Communist political agenda in the USA or anywhere else.
Not since the murderously xenophobic
and regretted days of the Conquistadors and Wounded Knee has the Western world
(including most of so-called "scholars" and "social scientists")
unilaterally reacted to an alien culture with such irrational, superstitious ignorance
and self-righteous, intolerant fanaticism as it has with Joseph Stalin's Soviet
Union. Historians routinely depict Stalin as a cartoon-caricature villain and
his society as an Orwellian nightmare that persecuted innocent political enemies
for invented crimes, projecting every evil from their own society and themselves
onto an Asiatic world more distant to their imaginations than the dark side of
the moon. They base this depiction on the testimony of political enemies and fringe
dissidents of Stalinism, tenuously-derived "estimates" of purged criminals
and other "victims" of Stalinism, and a calculated dismissal of reliable
first-hand witnesses whose accounts would justify Stalinist policies. However,
the clarity of historical hindsight will someday judge the Stalinist USSR to have
been the most advanced society of its time, and its collapse to have been one
of the great tragedies in human history. No
modern nation has been the subject of more unbalanced criticism, slander, and
deliberate misrepresentation than Stalin's Soviet Union. The most prominent spokesmen
of anti-Stalinism include imperialists, slave owners, fascist dictators, popes
(who nevertheless aided their fellow anti-Communist reactionaries, the Nazis),
diagnosed schizophrenics like Zhores Medvedev, generational manic depressives
like Winston Churchill, saboteurs, CIA propagandists, and every other kind of
scum that hates and fears the idea of a society that absolutely did not tolerate
exploitation, greed, racism, nepotism, or any other form of parasitism or obstruction.
Every single one of these anti-Stalin critics had a vested interest in defaming
Stalinism, making their testimony against the Soviet Union every bit as biased
and unreliable as the anti-American ravings of people like Ayatollah Khomeini,
Charles Manson, or the Unibomber. These kooks and crackpots, who contradict each
other and themselves, have created a tangled web of lies and confusion around
the entire subject of the Soviet Union, especially the Soviet Union during the
Stalin era. Anti-Stalin critics also include many small fry Soviet agents who
defected and made quite a bit of money writing books after claiming they'd been
in high positions. There was no profit in writing anything positive. Robert Conquest,
one of Western academia's most respected and "inventive" anti-Stalinist
writers, includes among his "scientific" sources fascist Nazi collaborators,
blatant CIA Cold War propaganda, forged accounts of the Ukrainian famine written
by a man who never set foot in the Ukraine, and even a novel! He did this because
the most outspoken opponents of Stalin have always been right-wing extremists,
left-wing anarchists, political opportunists, and similar liars and crackpots.
Conquest himself admitted that "truth can thus only percolate in the form
of hearsay" and that to him, "basically the best, though not infallible,
source is rumor." His reliance on such dubious sources to support his theses
demonstrates the extreme paucity of credible anti-Stalinist sources as well as
Conquest's ideological affiliation. The Harvard-based Ukrainian Research Institute
where Conquest worked was ostensibly a center of learning and study of the truth,
but McGeorge Bundy, a national security assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson
and former president of the Ford Foundation, admitted that it was really a quasi-governmental
agency. Conquest was not a scholar at all: he was a propagandist and a government
agent. Hard facts show that his figures of "excessive mortality" under
Stalin are wrong by orders of magnitude: instead of Conquest's guess of 25 million,
many modern estimates have independently put the number to be approximately 4
or 5 million. Despite the fact that
none of these anti-Stalin crackpots have been able to put forth accurately-researched
statistics or real data other than fairy-tale rumors and hyperbolic "estimates,"
their pronouncements that the Stalinist Soviet Union was an evil dictatorship
ruled by a paranoid, sadistic tyrant are commonly accepted by Western academia.
However, since glasnost, real archival data is gradually becoming available for
study to Western scholars for the first time, and is disproving almost everything
ever said by now-embarrassed "Kremlinologists" about what was to Americans
an unknown, closed society. Newly-available data on the Stalinist 1930's purges
(a major focus of anti-Stalinist criticism) utterly refutes not only every grossly-inflated
estimate of the number of people purged during the period, but also Western claims
about the nature of the purges, including who initiated them (it was mostly the
common peasants and workers), who the victims were (they were overwhelmingly political,
military, professional, and economic elite), and why they were carried out. As
bourgeois scholars (who nevertheless remain anti-Stalin) now finally admit, a
detailed factual analysis of Stalinism has yet to be made, and such a study could
be decades away. Such findings also indicate that scholars should reconsider previously
ignored accounts from loyal Americans and other non-Communist Westerners that
inconveniently discredit anti-Stalinist accusations. For example, U.S. Ambassador
and former U.S. Attorney General Joseph Davies visited the Soviet Union before
World War 2, and witnessed industrial sabotage and the infamous "Show Trials"
first hand. Davies, who was an expert courtroom veteran, reported that the confessions
given at the trials were genuine. D.N. Pritt, an experienced English lawyer who
also observed Soviet Show Trials himself, reported that the accused were given
"a very fair trial" and good treatment, and that they spoke freely and
without any hint of coercion. These reports, both from reliable non-Soviet experts
who were there at the time, completely negate the arrogant, groundless assertions
by modern historians (none of whom have any legal expertise and none of whom were
there at the time) that the Show Trials were orchestrated purely as Stalinist
propaganda, the evidence fabricated, and the confessions forced. The trials were
conducted with immense public support and the accusations against the accused
were based on overwhelming evidence. These anti-Stalinist historians refuse to
believe contemporary eyewitness accounts that vindicate the fairness and legitimacy
Stalinist justice, including the personal confessions of guilt by the criminals
themselves and eyewitness reports by United States officials. However, some historians
are gradually beginning to realize that accumulating data negates the traditional
Western views of Stalinism, and will eventually force them to abandon much of
the old Cold War dogma concerning the Soviet Union. For now, no one can honestly
repeat the same tired old accusations against Stalinism, because the only real
data available completely refutes them. The
real reason that the demagogues of the capitalist world have invested so much
frantic energy in discrediting Stalinism even now, so many years later, is that
the Stalinist Soviet Union was living proof of the tremendous power of successfully
applied Communism. The capitalist world watched in trepidation as Stalin's Soviet
Union developed in just a few years from a disorganized, poor, and extremely primitive
agricultural and wild nomadic tribal society into a futuristic, industrial, democratic,
and populist superpower that spanned 11 time zones and inspired hope and pride
in its citizens as well as in people all over the world. When the stock market
crashed in 1929 and heralded the Great Depression that crippled the capitalist
world, the socialist and centrally planned Soviet Union survived unharmed. Probably
the most terrifying (to the West) accomplishment of the Soviet Union was that
after the inconceivably devastating loss of a third of its newly-created wealth
at the hands of the Nazis, the Red Army and Soviet citizenry (using guerrilla
warfare) rose up and destroyed the Nazis and imperialist Germany, repaying Germany's
brutality by demolishing German cities, raping German women, and annexing half
of Germany's land and people into the Soviet Bloc. The Soviet people fought with
superhuman perseverance, sacrificing 20 soldiers for every one that the other
Allies lost, and won the war for the Allies. This proved the strength of Communism
and the Soviet Union to the capitalist world, and this power terrified them. The
Soviet Union was the world's first society systematically organized towards fulfilling
the needs of the majority, instead of the elite minority. Nationalism was outlawed,
and the primitive, divisive concept of ethnicity or race (which remains the number
one problem in capitalist America) was superseded by a sincere feeling of Soviet
Socialist pride. Soviet women enjoyed a true social and economic equality while
their Western counterparts remained the helpmeets of bourgeois patriarchs. Soviet
children of illiterate peasants enjoyed the best educational system in the world,
and looked forward to employment in a true meritocracy. Soviet leaders at all
levels were chosen democratically by popular secret-ballot elections to represent
the people, not purchased by whoever invested the most money on advertising in
a Hobson's Choice election. To this day, Capitalism has accomplished none of these
things, yet the socialist Soviet Union did all of this without the jump-start
that American capitalism had of genocide of indigenous people (which enabled Americans
to take the best land in the world and all its resources), slavery, and colonialism
whereby Americans accomplished their industrialization and made the billions that
lay the foundation of modern American affluence. What angered capitalists most
about the Stalinist Soviet Union was that it closed its walls to the profit-hungry
Western world, and turned within to cultivate its own social development, which
surpassed that of even the most advanced capitalist nations. Self-righteous
Americans have much to say about supposed "human rights abuses" by the
Stalinist Soviet Union (and hence Communism), but consistently fail to make comparisons
with similar policies in their own nation's history. They criticize Stalinism
for being exceptionally tough on traitors and other criminals, yet do not mention
how, for example, George Washington hunted down and destroyed American Indian
tribes who had supported the British enemy during the American Revolution. They
criticize Stalin for sending in People's Commissars of Internal Affairs (NKVD)
to support the peasant-initiated class war against the kulaks (the slave-owning
and landlord class that had bought and sold peasants in pre-revolutionary days,
and are often misportrayed by anti-Stalinists as simply "wealthy peasants"),
yet do not compare this to Abraham Lincoln's far bloodier war against America's
slave-owning South (however, anyone who thinks that the war was fought to free
the poor Africans is a brainwashed idiot. The reasons for that war were purely
economic). The popular Western portrayal of the so-called "forced collectivization,"
which glorifies the kulaks and portrays them as unfortunate victims, is more totalitarian
paradigm hokum originated by Trotsky and spread by the capitalist West. It is
an indisputable, absolute fact that the peasants had repeatedly tried to collectivize
since the 1600's, when historically, Stepan Timofiyevich Razin, a.k.a. Stenka
Razin, led a peasants' revolt and killed the kulaks, who were then known as barons,
counts, and princes. Think of such monsters as Countess Bathory and Count Vlad
Tepish Dracul. "Kulak" does not mean "peasant" or "wealthy
peasant" in Russian; it means "fist." The folk legends that Western
people make horror movies out of are based on fact, if you eliminate the supernatural
element. The Soviet peasants wanted collectivization, fought for it, and liked
it when they got it. They wanted it, they strove for it, they killed kulaks to
try to get it again, they thought Stalin's NKVD was going to stop them from killing
the kulaks as had always happened under the Tsar. They were more than happy when
Komsomol people and volunteers not only let them collectivize, but also helped
them to organize it even better. Western writers unfairly blame Stalinist policies
for famines, yet fail to mention that famines are common in the Soviet area, due
to a climate and geography that are unsuitable for agriculture. Blaming a political
system or a leader for these things is like blaming President Clinton for drought
or when hurricanes destroy the American eastern seaboard. A centralized socialist
economy is the best insurance for individuals against such unpredictable natural
disasters. During the Stalinist Collectivization, the kulaks exacerbated a famine
by spreading rumors among the peasantry that Stalin was the Antichrist and similar
nonsense, and deliberately destroyed grain and livestock to prevent it from being
collectivized. Western critics criticize Stalinism's system of gulags (forced
labor camps for prisoners), yet seem to forget about American chain-gang labor
and even modern prison labor, not to mention black slavery and pre-New Deal era
labor conditions, next to which life on the harshest gulag pales in comparison,
or the fact that to this day the United States has the highest per capita incarceration
rate in the world, along with the highest crime rate. They criticize Stalinism
for relocating certain minority groups (most of which were Muslim extremists and
other nationalists who had sided with the Nazis during World War Two), yet make
no comparison to the United States' systematic relocation and extermination of
the Native Americans. To claim that such similar American policies are any better
is to lie. The Unites States remains the transparently hypocritical schoolyard
bully of the international scene, promoting misery, and chaos abroad for the sake
of the petty greed of influential megacorporations. For example, the CIA publicly
admits that during the 1950's it staged a phony coup against a democratically
elected socialist Guatemalan president because his land reform policies threatened
Chiquita Banana's ability to exploit the local labor force. Bourgeois apologists
and anti-Communists downplay, ignore, rationalize, and sometimes even glorify
the overwhelming inequality and misery created by Capitalism for the majority
of humanity, yet gasp in horror whenever some of the oppressed turns the tables
and repay their parasitic masters with even a fraction of the suffering that they
have endured for millennia. They are like the grade school bully, who is the first
to cry "no fair!" when someone has the courage and strength to stand
up to him and fight back. The elite minority (who tried to oppress the majority)
that was purged under Stalinism does not even begin to equal one hundredth the
number of those oppressed, exploited, and murdered under Tsarism in Russia or
one thousandth that of global Capitalism. Stalinism
is infamous in the bourgeois world for its harsh criminal justice system, which
outlawed exploitation of the common worker, and defined exploiters and obstructers
as "enemies of the people" to be identified and neutralized or destroyed.
Bourgeois enemies of Stalin criticize Stalin for brutally oppressing "his
own people," but do not realize that to Communists, racial, ethnic, and national
divisions are secondary to class divisions: Stalin defended his own people from
the parasitic vermin posing as their "countrymen." The Stalinist regime
supported the vindictive worker- and peasant-led campaigns against segments of
the bureaucratic, military, and economic elite. These campaigns included the liquidation
of the exploitative kulak ("fist") class in the countryside (which included
many ex-Whites [Czarists] who had settled in rural districts) and the often anti-managerial
Stakhanovite industrial movement, as well as suppression and relocation of nationalist
and religious extremists. The victims of these purges were often imprisoned, sent
to forced labor camps, or killed. However, bourgeois critics of Stalinism often
overlook some of its most heinous "crimes against humanity": in World
War 2, Stalinist Soviets killed millions of Nazi Germans and other wartime enemies.
The "tyrannical" Stalinists also promoted the use of modern medicine,
killing billions of bacteria, forcefully relocated crops to inhospitable territories,
and improved sanitation, denying countless rodents and other urban animals their
animal rights. We have also heard rumors that the "amoral" Stalinist
Soviets (including the "archfiend" Joseph Stalin himself) drank, partied,
ate red meat, and even smoked (God forbid)! To
condemn Stalinism based on the doubtful testimony of a small group of fringe dissidents
and political enemies is unfair, since every political regime has its malcontents.
John Adams estimated that only one third of the American colonialists supported
the American Revolution, and that another third actively opposed it. In comparison,
the vast majority of Soviet citizens truly loved Stalin, as evidenced by the millions
of thankful letters they personally wrote to him and other officials, and the
incontestably genuine heartbreak that they expressed at his funeral (which is
preserved on film). The imprisonment and/or death of every saboteur, nationalist,
fascist, wrecker, and obstructer that was purged by the Stalinist system made
room for happy, productive lives of thousands of ordinary Soviet citizens. The
purges opened important positions that once were filled with relics of the old
bourgeoisie and careerist elite to truly qualified people from proletarian backgrounds
who would never have had a chance to blossom under Capitalism. As former steelworker
and NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov said, the main error of Stalinism was that not enough
class enemies were purged. Every enemy of the people that managed to escape arrest
and survive merely waited for their chances, and resurfaced as anti-Stalinists
who led the Soviet Union down a road towards stagnation, fear, war, bankruptcy,
and eventually full-fledged Capitalism. However, to completely expunge every enemy
of the people would have been a monumentally difficult (if not impossible) task,
especially in a nation as vast as the Soviet Union, even though it was infected
with far fewer destructive anti-democratic types than the more decadent nations
to the East and the West. When people condemn Stalinism, they ignore the primary,
absolute, and undeniable fact that under Stalinism, hundreds of millions of people
who would otherwise have had no hope of salvation except for religious fantasies
were able to live happy, free, and fulfilling lives in a modern democratic society.
Under Communism, the Soviet people not only gained the human rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness, but, since many of them had previously been wage
slaves and feudal serfs, the more primary and basic right of simply being humans.
Anti-Communists often speak of lack of freedom under Stalin, but the primary freedom
denied under Communism is the freedom to parasitically profit like a fat maggot
from the toil and misery of another human being. According
to Stalinist thinking, bourgeois CEOs, owners, Wall Street pimps, and other decadent
human leeches are just as despicable as the kings of old and the modern American
"welfare queens:" they are both equally parasitic. True inner freedom
includes freedom from fear and from material want, two evils that rule capitalist
society. Citizens of the Stalinist USSR were always allowed to speak from their
hearts about the regime. For example, the famous scientist Pavlov was a Christian
and vocal critic of Stalinism, but he was never imprisoned or punished. However,
capitalist American society, routinely represses free expression, which is a thousand
times more totalitarian than any prison or Gulag. Here, insincerity, even about
trivial things, is enforced by social and political taboos. In the Stalinist Soviet
Union, insincerity was grounds for an interrogation from the NKVD. Every
human society, including our own, causes human misery of various kinds and degrees,
and for various kinds and numbers of people. People who want to dismiss the Stalinist
USSR for the misery it inflicted must first point to another society that persecuted
fewer or more deserving people to a lesser extent, or else retract their objections.
American capitalist society does not meet any of these criteria, even if one only
considers the suffering endured by blacks, Native Americans, women, or other minorities,
and especially if one considers the suffering inflicted by American capitalist
exploitation or militarism on e.g. 19th-century wage workers and citizens of foreign
countries (such as Vietnam, Hawaii, Guam, Japan, Cuba, and Russia, to name just
a few), as well as the persecution of Confederate rebels, British loyalists, Nazis,
and other enemy armies. An even treatment demands that no ideological justifications
can excuse the persecution of any of these groups, since such excuses are not
afforded Stalinism. In such an even
comparison, the Stalinist Soviet Union (which was a society under extreme stress
of poverty, war, and sabotage) was actually more lenient than, for example, the
post-Civil War United States: while the American Reconstructionists banned all
ex-Confederates from holding office, the naïve, more liberal Soviets allowed their
former enemies to hold office, only to have them resurface later and undermine
the Soviet system. Another example of Soviet leniency is that while the NKVD (People's
Commissariat of Internal Affairs) was headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, convicted criminals
were set free if the police expected no ulterior motives, in order to demonstrate
that the Soviet regime would be different. Unfortunately, these criminals continued
to be criminals. The British openly brag about having infiltrated the Cheka (secret
police) during the early days of the Soviet Union. These blatant abuses of Bolshevik
liberalism eventually led to the much stricter Stalinist policies, which Western
liars label "paranoid" and excessive. After
Stalin died, Nikita Khrushchev assumed power and dismantled the system of Peoples'
Commissariats (NKs), which the organizational genius Felix Dzerzhinsky had created
decades before as the basic socialist framework and foundation of the Soviet Union.
Khrushchev re-instituted the capitalist profit motive in the Soviet economy, and
corruption (formerly prevented by the NKVD) was allowed to prosper. Khrushchev
exacerbated the Churchill-initiated Cold War arms race with the West, which eventually
bankrupted the Soviet Union and almost the U.S. Treasury. Soviet funds were spent
on military technology instead of luxury items for the Soviet people. From the
time of Khrushchev onward, Soviet Socialism was dead. Two generations later, Boris
Yeltsin's truly dictatorial regime has openly restored capitalism in the former
Soviet Union, along with all of its evils of gangsterism, prostitution, poverty,
and hopelessness. Western capitalist imperialism has finally gotten what it wanted
(and what Stalinism prevented) all along: the opportunity to turn the Central
Asian lands into more Indian reservations with exploitable resources and enslaved
or discarded human populations. Western criticism of Stalinism, behind every ostensible
form it has opportunistically assumed, has always really been about jealousy and
greed. Communism is democracy (rule of the people) applied to the economic sphere,
and is a reaction to exploitation by powerful minorities. The reason that bourgeois
thinkers lie and distort the truth about Communism versus Capitalism is that they
seek to hide the truth not only from others, but also from themselves. They could
not endure the pain and insanity of seeing themselves as they truly are: exploitative
parasites whose society is going downhill, despite their delusional morality and
hypocritical "human rights" rhetoric. They pretend their capitalist
system "prospers" without force, violence, threat, and "the barrel
of a gun." The West ego-projected its own hellish tendency towards using
new technology or any other material advantage (especially weapons) to dominate
weaker peoples. Examples of technological genocide include Nazi Germany, where,
unlike with the American Indians and Africans in the past, Western man orchestrated
methodical, assembly-line technological genocide. The only reason why American
blacks were not exterminated wholesale when they demanded civil rights is that
Hitler shamed the West into an embarrassed distaste for genocidal practices. Instead
of self-righteously hurling abuse at the Soviet Union and gibbering half-truths
and lies about Stalinism, the pontificating Western pundits should look in the
mirror and write about the callous brutality, injustice, and elitism of Capitalism
and bourgeois democracy. The first people
that should be for Communism are often the ones rooting for Capitalism, siding
with the vampire. They can only imagine that collectivism and cooperation would
have to be dictated from the top because they did not get along with their siblings
unless mommy and daddy came along and threatened them with a whip. Not all people
have sibling rivalry. The Trobriand Islanders are a documented example. They do
not have that kind of malice in their hearts that is bred into them by their own
repressed (usually Christian) society. Metaphorically speaking, Stalin is the
good guy with the stake ready to drive it through the vampire's heart. However,
Western people who hear these stories usually immediately identify with the vampire
and are willing to be its victim. It will become obvious to the American people
when there's even more downsizing, more corporate relocation to cheap labor countries,
and the American worker is rendered obsolete unless he's willing to work for $1
an hour. After all, $1 is more than $0. Then, the fictional paradigms about Stalin
will be thrown to the wind, as people pick up the stakes and go vampire hunting.
Selected Bibliography: 1.
Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives edited by J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning.
2. "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust:
A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right" by Jeff Coplon. The Village Voice (New
York City), January 12, 1988. Available on the Internet at http://chhss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html.
Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens.
Available on the Internet at http://www.tiac.net/users/knut/Stalin/book.html.
or
http://www.geocities.com/redcomrades/index.html 3.
Review of PBS Series: Stalin (six articles) by the Progressive Labor Party. Available
on the Internet at http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/pbsstal1.htm (first article). 4.
Stalin by Edvard Radzinsky. 5. MIM Theory
6: The Stalin Issue. Ordering information at http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/mt/index.html.
6. "Stalin and Yezhov - An Extra-Paradigmatic
View" by Philip Marsh at
http://www.geocities.com/redcomrades/jsny.html
7. The Moscow Trial was Fair by D.N.
Pritt and Pat Sloan. Interlibrary loan at any library. 8.
Felix Dzerzhinsky. By Arsenii Tishkov. Interlibrary loan at any library.
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