By Rob Gowland
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| The victors -- Churchill, Truman and Stalin in Berlin |
I yield to no one in my admiration for Comrade Stalin. He led the Soviet
Union from the 1920s to the 1950s. He combated the counter-revolution both
outside the USSR and within the country, especially from those who had
penetrated the ranks of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
He fought tenaciously to make the new Soviet state secure from internal
sabotage and espionage even as he led the Party’s efforts to put the country’s
agriculture on a collective basis so they could feed their people whilst they
proceeded with the essential and massive process of industrialisation.
After the death of Lenin, he led the Party, and through the Party, the
country, as the USSR patiently and cleverly broke through the isolation of the
blockade imperialism sought to impose on the upstart Socialist state. As
frightened capitalism increasingly turned towards fascism, Stalin led the
efforts of the Communist International to counter it, and especially to prevent
the imperialist states from uniting to attack the USSR, which was demonstrating
to the people of the world that Socialism could work.
When the imperialist states eventually began their second global stoush
to rearrange the world’s markets and the ownership of its natural resources,
Soviet diplomacy under Stalin’s direction was able to keep the Soviet Union out
of the conflict, at least initially. Whilst two imperialist blocs found
themselves fighting each other instead of their preferred target, the USSR, the
latter under Stalin’s astute leadership was free frantically to devote its
efforts to developing its industrial capacity and military strength east of the
Urals, clear of possible attack by either German or Anglo-French forces.
When Nazi Germany finally did invade the USSR, with an overwhelmingly
huge invasion force, it was largely because of Stalin’s pre-war leadership that
the Fifth Column, which had played such a crucial role in Germany’s defeat of
so many European states, proved to be relatively insignificant in the USSR: it
had been pre-emptively eliminated in the 1930s, in what bourgeois commentators
derisively called “show trials”.
Stalin’s wartime leadership inspired not only the USSR but all the
countries fighting Hitler and his associates. In Australia, the appearance of
Stalin on cinema screens in a newsreel was greeted with spontaneous
applause. As the war progressed and the
size and scale of the Red Army’s achievements against Hitler’s forces became
clear, people in the Allied countries watched in awe. Even the famous American
propaganda documentary feature, The True Glory, about the USA’s part
in the Second World War, had to acknowledge – referring to the Soviet Army − “We did
pretty well, but I hate to think where we’d have been without them!”.
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, various efforts were made by
imperialist politicians to persuade US and British soldiers to “go on and
finish the job” by marching on Moscow – with singular lack of support from
either the soldiers or their families at home. Recognising this, imperialist
politicians – notably Churchill, and Roosevelt’s successor Truman – set out to
wage a “Cold War” to overturn the public’s favourable view of the Soviet Union
and of Stalin in particular.
Even as the Soviet army, with great loss of life and at huge material
cost, had been tearing the guts out of Hitler’s forces, there were those in the
West – notably the Reader’s Digest – who maintained a steady diatribe
of rabidly anti-Communist and anti-Russian propaganda. When the War was over
the capitalist media and politicians joined in a new anti-Soviet campaign with
gusto: every anti-Soviet slur that had ever been used before the War was
revived. The USA especially, recruited an enormous civilian army of college
graduates, fired them up with patriotic arguments about the USA as the bastion
of democracy whilst simultaneously filling their heads with the most vile and
extraordinarily crude tales of the supposed barbarism of “godless Communism”.
Nuns in Russia, it was alleged, were routinely beaten and tortured, suffering
such sadistic horrors as having their tongue nailed to a table! As intended,
these bright but brain-washed young men and women eagerly undertook the defence
of their way of life from the alleged horrors and misery of Communism.
It was a multi-pronged campaign, alleging that Soviet Russia was intent
on world domination, just as Hitler had been. Trotsky’s followers, of course,
joined in the attack, but as always in their case ‘from the Left’. Even before
the War, they had been prominent supporters (and contributors to) the campaign
in the monopoly press that asserted that “Stalin is betraying the revolution!”.
If he had been, of course, the monopoly media would have been offering him all
the help he could want!
Before and after the War, the USSR was denigrated in capitalist
propaganda as drab, oppressed, miserable, poverty-stricken and devoid of
initiative, its people living in constant fear of the “secret police”. An
all-encompassing economic blockade was imposed on it, intended to prevent the
purchase of modern technology by anyone “behind the iron curtain”. The lack of
this technology was then held up as evidence of the “failure” of Socialism.
At the same time there was a general assault upon the progressive forces
and sentiments that had developed during the wartime alliance against fascism.
Throughout Western Europe, British and US intelligence services, with the aid
of the fiercely anti-Communist Catholic church, set out to slander and divide
the progressive forces that had evolved from the war-time Resistance to Nazism.
Wherever they thought these measures might not be enough to bring about the defeat
of left-leaning groups – whom they thought of solely as ‘tools of the Kremlin’ − they
readily resorted to deadly terrorist campaigns, successfully scaring people
away from the untried ‘Left’ and back to the traditional and ‘safe’ Christian
Democrats.
The USA and Britain both intervened to prevent the progressive forces in
Greece from throwing out the pro-fascist ‘Royal Family’ and opting for
Socialism. Although the presence of the Soviet Army meant Anglo-US forces could
not directly intervene in Eastern Europe, active efforts were made nevertheless
to overthrow the governments of countries there that had opted for a
Socialist future. Albania was invaded by a rag-tag army of counter
revolutionaries but the move was thwarted by Soviet intelligence agent Kim
Philby. East Germany and China were also subjected to similar disruption in the
early 1950s but, to the surprise and obvious disappointment of Washington’s
propagandists, the populace did not rush to rise up and embrace their
‘liberators’.
For the first four to five years after the Second World War, Stalin had
to contend with a US leadership that revelled in its possession of a “nuclear
monopoly”. As Sayers and Kahn reported in their splendid book The Great
Conspiracy Against Russia: “Speaking before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee on March 31, 1947, Representative Fred L Crawford of Michigan
proposed that the US Government issue an ultimatum to the Soviet Government
demanding that they immediately scuttle their weapons of war and stating that,
in the event of their failure to do so, the American air force would start
dropping atomic bombs on Soviet cities. Conceding the Russians might choose to
fight rather than disarm under such terms, Representative Crawford observed
that the issue must be faced ‘now or in a few months anyway’.
“He added: ‘Take our spokesmen and tell them to shove their chins right
up against the chins of Mr Molotov, Mr Stalin and Mr Vishinsky. Tell them to
shove their stomachs right up against the stomachs of those gentlemen, physically,
and say this is our programme: either disarm or we proceed’.”
In Hungary, which had been fascist since before Mussolini
marched on Rome, a counter-revolutionary campaign was begun that united the
Catholic Church, remnants of the pre-War Greenshirt Fascists, and those who
simply hankered for a return to the ‘good old days’ of Hungarian capitalism. It
took 10 years but was finally launched in 1956 (three years after Stalin had
died). It caused enormous destabilisation – as it was intended to – and was a
colossal propaganda success for imperialism. When it was defeated, having
failed to gain the mass support of the workers, the many thousands of
Greenshirt supporters and others who favoured Hungarian capitalism over a
social system that gave preference to common workers fled over the border to
West Germany (quite a few ended up in Australia).
Anti-Soviet propaganda held that the USSR was
so backward it would take many years for its science and armed forces to catch
up to the USA, if in fact they ever would. Under Stalin’s leadership,
the Soviet government held its nerve in the face of US threats whilst it
campaigned everywhere for peace and a ban on nuclear weapons. These Soviet
initiatives were routinely dismissed by Western media and politicians as
“propaganda”. After all, they reasoned, the USA had the Bomb – why should it
give up that advantage? Then, in 1949, China went Socialist and the USSR
revealed that it too had the Bomb.
In 1950 the desperate US-orchestrated attempts to “roll back Communism”
in Europe and Asia reached their Zenith with the launching of the Korean War.
It would be another six years before the propaganda war being waged against the
USSR and its long-time leader, Josef Stalin, also reached its zenith. Stalin
died in 1953, to be succeeded by his colleague Georgi Malenkov.
Only a couple of years later, Malenkov’s team were all ousted in a
leadership ‘spill’ orchestrated by the Soviet leader in the Ukraine, Nikita
Krushschev, with the support of a number of regional Party secretaries, at
least one of whom thought that her support of Krushschev would see her elevated
to a leading position nationally. Khrushchev became General Secretary but
ironically the regional secretary who had persuaded the others to support the
removal of Stalin’s designated successors was herself passed over.
As leader, Khrushchev initiated a number of policies that were not well
received because of their departure from previous practice under Stalin. In
1956, Khrushchev moved to nullify this opposition within the Party and
consolidate his position once and for all: he used the Party Congress to launch
a wide-ranging attack on Stalin’s record as leader, his personality, his
policies, even his war-time record. Khrushchev's so-called “secret speech” −
the text of which was circulated widely, especially in the West − was a massive
propaganda coup for capitalist intelligence services. Within the Soviet Union,
Khrushchev ensured that pictures and statues of Stalin were hastily removed
from their previous places of honour, and not just statues. A larger-than-life
image of Stalin in one of Moscow’s Metro stations was simply white-washed all
over. Even a quote about peace in bas-relief on the station’s exterior wall was
‘de-Stalinised’: the quote was allowed to remain but Stalin’s name, as the
person who said it, was carefully chipped off!
Outside the USSR, those Communist parties that had left the development
of ideology solely to their leadership found themselves ill-equipped to cope
with the turmoil Khrushchev's ‘revelations’ unleashed. In Australia, leading
Comrades, particularly prominent propagandist Bill Brown, traversed the country
rooting out any lingering manifestations of ‘Stalinism’. In the 1970s, I
attended a large class on philosophy given by Bill Brown on behalf of the
Central Committee at which the State Secretary of the Building Workers’
Industrial Union in South Australia was so impressed by the content of the
class that he tried to pay Bill Brown a compliment: “I think this class could
become as important to our Party as Stalin’s History of the CPSU was for the
Soviet Party,” he said.
Bill Brown put his head in his hands: “Oh, don’t say that!” he
exclaimed, to the bewilderment of the chap who had offered the praise. The
Communist Party of China astutely saw through Khrushchev's motives and rejected
his criticism. In the Soviet Union, it took several decades before the mischief
done by Khrushchev could begin to be undone during Brezhnev’s time as General
Secretary. I led a delegation to the USSR in the 1980s from the SPA (as we were
then) [Socialist Party of Australia]. Whilst visiting Lenin’s rather Spartan
quarters in the Smolny, the CPSU person showing us around pointed to the large
photograph of the Party in the early days of the USSR and made only one –
startling [to us] − comment: “Stalin is second from the left”. And then he
grinned at us. He knew the effect his words were having. This was at a time
when mentioning Stalin was still strictly taboo in our Party and we had thought
it was in the CPSU too.
Unfortunately, this rehabilitation of Stalin that was beginning to
become evident under Brezhnev came to a shuddering stop after the latter’s
death.
Mikhail Gorbachev had worked very hard to impress the members of the
CPSU that he was man who could lead a renewal of the Party after the stagnation
in so many areas during the Brezhnev years. Nevertheless, his motives were
viewed with distrust by experienced Party cadres and Yuri Andropov was elected
as General Secretary instead. Andropov had great potential as Soviet leader and
there is no doubt that had he lived the process of renewal that he began would
have flourished. Unfortunately, his health collapsed abruptly. After his
premature death, an ageing Chernenko sought to block Gorbachev but Gorbachev’s
accession to the top position had now become virtually inevitable.
As soon as he attained his goal as General Secretary, Gorbachev stole a
leaf from Khrushchev's play-book and denounced his opponents as “Stalinists”
and, to cut the ground from under them, promptly whipped up a new round of
denunciations of − and attacks on − Stalin himself. Ironically, given the slow
but steady progress towards rehabilitating Stalin under Brezhnev, Gorbachev’s
opponents to some extent were Stalinists. After he had successfully dissolved
the USSR, in defiance of a referendum result showing that the country’s
population wanted to retain it, Mikhail Gorbachev boasted in an interview of
how he and his Georgian colleague Shevardnadze had plotted for years how they
would bring about the overthrow of Socialism in the USSR and its replacement by
bourgeois democracy.
Gorbachev not only abolished the Soviet Union, he condemned Socialism
itself and declared – all evidence to the contrary not withstanding − that the
Communist Party’s mistrust of the capitalist West was misplaced: capitalist
governments wanted peace and trade, not war! After all, they said so all the
time, so the USSR should take them at their word and stop worrying about
nuclear defence.
In Australia, Trotskyists celebrated their new hero, chanting “Gor-by!
Gor-by!” whilst an unimpressed SPA General Secretary Peter Symon exposed
Gorbachev’s anti-Communist position at public meetings, in the face of
opposition from a handful of SPA members who refused to believe that the leader
of the CPSU could be so treacherous or naïve. Life itself proved Comrade
Symon’s dire assessment to be correct.
Naturally, anti-Communist propagandists had a field day. Inevitably,
they did as they had in the past and focused on attacking Stalin once more,
reasoning that the accumulated weight of the propaganda barrage against him
since 1956 made him easily the weakest link. And now they were able to add in
the material thrown up by Gorbachev and other Russians who had also embraced
his contempt for Socialism.
Stalin may have been rude, uncouth and even arrogant when dealing with
people who questioned, in word or deed, the validity of Socialism. He certainly
did not suffer fools gladly within the Party. On the other hand, he was
infinitely patient with ordinary people who may not have understood the
significance of particular policies at certain times. He always took the time
to explain matters for their benefit because he knew that people more readily
supported policies and actions when they understood the reasoning behind them.
However, in the renewed ‘Cold War’ being waged against Socialism across
the globe, Stalin ‘the monster’ is too valuable a weapon to be discarded
because of a little inconvenience like the truth! Capitalism’s propagandists
feel free to attribute all manner of ridiculous ‘crimes’ to him. I have seen
one attack on the Soviet Union that baldly asserted that Stalin murdered no
less than fifty million people!
Communists need to reject these absurd examples of capitalist
propaganda. At the same time we need to be aware of the overwhelming success to
date of capitalism’s anti-Stalin campaign. To counteract it we need to be
clever, subtle and firm. Simply rushing in with a large picture of Stalin
convinces no one. Just as we have to win people to our belief in the
superiority of Socialism, so we have to convince them that our assessment of
Stalin’s contribution is also correct.
But we have the advantage of knowing that it is correct. It is based on
truth and historical accuracy, and is supported by any genuine study of the
facts.
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