Review
By Andy Brooks
STALIN'S PURGES' OF 1937-38: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? by Yuri
Emelianov, Scientific Socialism Research Unit, West Bengal India 2015, 80pp, illus,
£3.00.
IN RUSSIA today Joseph Stalin is
remembered as a great war-time leader. But he is still reviled by the
powers-that-be as a tyrant who had his rivals shot on trumped up charges and
sent millions of innocent people to Siberia during the massive purges that
swept the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Much of this narrative comes from Stalin’s
successor, Nikita Krushchov, whose anti-Stalin critique, which began after the
20th Communist Party Congress, was used to remove and disgrace all those who
opposed his revisionist line.
Khrushchov’s
lies were used by bourgeois and Trotskyist historians alike to portray this
period as the time of "Stalin's terror". Ludicrous figures were given
of the numbers sent to labour camps during the crackdown and astronomic numbers
were said to have died in the camps. Most claim "millions" perished.
The most rabid talk about "25 million" in an effort to equate Stalin
with the very real number of people who died on the orders of Adolf Hitler and
the German Nazis during the Second World War.
But when the
archives were opened up in the 1990s a different picture emerged. Two academicians discovered that the total number
held in the Gulags was much lower, little more than half-a-million, and that most
were common criminals. Other Russian academicians are now challenging the very
foundations of the myth of the “great terror”. Yuri Emelianov is one of them.
Back
in 2012 Emelianov, a social scientist in the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation, wrote a series of articles on the purges that were published in Communist Review, the theoretical
journal of the Communist Party of Britain. Now an Indian progressive publishing
house has made them available to a much larger audience.
The
author draws on archival documents and direct past experiences in an attempt to
answer the old questions of why did the purges happen and who was to blame for
breaches of Soviet legality.
Emilianov starts
off by debunking the figures for those executed during the purges and the
numbers sent to the Gulags that are regularly trotted out by Russian bourgeois
historians, even today. He then looks at the Moscow Trials. Most of this is
familiar ground for New Worker
readers. Some of it is not.
The purges followed
the assassination of Sergei Kirov in Leningrad in 1934. Kirov, regarded as
second only to Stalin himself in the Party leadership, was shot dead by an
agent of those long opposed to Stalin within the Bolshevik party. Stalin’s
enemies within the Soviet leadership were arrested and charged with treason. All
the accused confessed to being members of a secret "Block of Rights and
Trotskyites" that was responsible for all sorts of anti-Soviet crimes in
preparation of a coup to overthrow the Stalin leadership.
Emilianov says that “though some of the
accusations were plausible most of them now appear far-fetched”. But he adds: “Practically no-one in the Soviet Union had
doubted the indirect responsibility of the two opposition leaders (Zinoviev and
Kamenev) for Kirov’s murder; so it was
easy to believe that both of them, as well as their supporters, were directly involved in organising the
murder not only of Kirov but of other Soviet leaders as well.”
The
author then startlingly argues that while Stalin was battling against his old
foes inside the Party there were other hidden enemies, like Krushchov, who
posed as loyalists while encouraging mass arrests to sabotage the new “Stalin” constitution
plans for secret ballots and multiple choices at elections.
Emilianov says: “The leaders of the provinces
and republics were afraid that they would lose the first general, direct, equal
and secret elections with alternative candidates. By resorting to reprisals
they wanted to create an atmosphere of Red Terror, characteristic of the
situation in Russia during the Civil War. In such an atmosphere it would be
impossible to conduct political debates between different candidates but it
would be easy to make loud speeches against class enemies.”
Though
Emilianov defends Stalin he also criticises the Soviet leader for not bothering
to “check many of the dubious accusations made at the Moscow Trials”; condoning
false accusations; failing to make a profound analysis of “these tragic events”
and not finishing the political reform of the Soviet Union that he, himself,
had initiated in the first place.
There is plenty more of this in the profusely
illustrated, quality publication from India. It’s an important contribution to
the study of Soviet history and it’s available for just £4.50 including postage
from:
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