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Stalin’s shadow
Last month was the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death in
March 1953. MANNY THAIN reviews the press coverage of this event.
JOSEPH STALIN, the man who had terrorised the Soviet Union
for almost 30 years, was pronounced dead on 5 March 1953, aged 73. Recent
evidence suggests that he may have been killed by fellow members of the ruling
elite – somehow administering a dose of the anticoagulant, warfarin, and leaving
him to die from internal bleeding. It is said that medical attention was not
sought until it was far too late. Those around his successor, Nikita Khrushchev,
feared another major purge of the leadership was being planned. Stalin’s closest
henchman, Lavrenti Beria (head of the secret police), was summarily tried and
executed shortly afterwards, to tidy things up.
The half-century anniversary was used by the British and US
media, in particular, to attack socialist ideas. Stalinist-type dictatorships
are portrayed as inevitable consequences of revolutionary struggle. ‘The left’
(simplistically represented as a single bloc) stands accused of downplaying the
viciousness of Stalinism, including ignoring anti-Jewish purges. Parallels drawn
between Stalin and Saddam Hussein are being used in a desperate attempt to
discredit today’s anti-war movement. Above all, the message is that Stalinism
‘proves’ that it is impossible to radically change society.
At the time of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917,
Russia was an extremely impoverished country, ravaged by the first world war.
Soon after, imperialist armies invaded from all sides. The priority was to
defend the Soviet Union until other workers’ states were established and
international socialist federations could provide material assistance and
solidarity. The revolutionary wave which swept the world, however, did not
result in working-class control of any other country. The Soviet Union was
isolated.
It was impossible under those conditions to introduce a
system of democratic working-class control, management and planning. Workers
were needed in the factories, with production geared towards the defence of the
new workers’ state, providing (at best) subsistence levels of food and goods.
Working-class people were also required on the frontline. As they became less
and less able to participate in the running of society, the administration of
the state fell to a relatively small number of people. Step by step, a
bureaucratic elite crystallised. It consolidated its power through carrying out
a bloody political counter-revolution, removing all the elements of workers’
democracy achieved in the 1917 revolution.
Once established, the regime’s primary objective was the
preservation of its power and privileged position. An increasingly rigid,
centralised control spread over everything from economic and foreign policy to
social and cultural life. The repression grew harsher. Anyone perceived as a
threat to Stalin and the bureaucracy was eliminated.
This often led to sudden shifts in policy, sometimes with
devastating results. The Soviet Union’s remarkable industrial development had
given the world a glimpse of the potential for economic planning – transforming
an economically backward state into a world superpower. But it came at an
immense human cost. Millions of people died of starvation after the forced
collectivisation of land after 1927. Systematic purges saw millions of others
arrested, tortured, dispatched to labour camps or executed. The total number of
Stalin’s victims is incalculable. Many estimates fall around 20 million dead.
The media has focused on the suffering. It is also
important, however, to recognise the heroic struggle against the regime. Above
all, Leon Trotsky – one of the leaders of the revolution alongside Vladimir
Lenin – organised the Left Opposition against the regime on a programme of
workers’ democracy and internationalism. Ultimately, the Soviet Union’s
isolation as the world’s only workers’ state was an insurmountable obstacle. In
August 1940, after twelve years in exile, Trotsky was brutally murdered by one
of Stalin’s agents in Mexico.
Many commentators have remarked on the shock, sometimes
hysteria, which greeted Stalin’s death. He had loomed over every aspect of
people’s lives – the ‘cult of the personality’. But the dictator’s demise was a
joyous occasion for many. Nadezhda Levitsky, now 78 years old, was in a labour
camp when she heard the news: "I remember one day a Tatar girl told me fearfully
that Stalin was ill. Then another shouted: ‘I wish he’d die like a dog’.
Everyone fell silent. But the next day, we were working in the fields, cutting
out a line of trees, when the same girl came running towards us, screaming that
he really was dead. We started hugging and kissing each other. We were so happy
as we knew that something would change. We stopped working immediately that day.
And the next". (The Guardian, 5 March 2003)
Despite the bloody trail of shattered hopes and lives, the
anniversary of Stalin’s death saw hundreds of Russian people file past his
monument in Moscow’s Red Square. A survey quoted in the International Herald
Tribune found that 6% of Russians ‘approved of Stalin’ in 1990, rising to 32.9%
in 2001 (11 March 2003). That is because of the cataclysmic collapse of the
Russian economy since capitalism has been restored. The last decade has seen an
immense widening of the wealth gap, with extreme poverty at the bottom and
untouchable, gangster capitalists gorging themselves at the top. The Guardian
journalist, Jonathan Freedland, wrote: "Economic hardship, chaos and corruption
in government and collapsing health and welfare systems have fed a sense of
hopelessness: 67% tell pollsters that the last decade is the worst they can
remember". (5 March 2003)
Another theme of media’s anniversary coverage has been an
attempt to draw a link between Stalin and Saddam Hussein. Apparently, Stalin’s
number one fan is Saddam. A Wall Street Journal editorial stated: "Many who have
been to Saddam’s personal library attest to it being replete with books on
Stalin. The Iraqi has crammed on the great man’s techniques of terror and
studiously applied them. From the use of show trials and purges to the cult of
the personality, Stalin lives on in Saddam". (5 March 2003)
Although the methods of repression may be similar, their
respective systems were founded on fundamentally different lines. The former
Soviet Union was based on a non-capitalist, nationalised, planned economy, and
the task facing the working class was to wrest control from the bureaucracy and
implement workers’ democracy on the existing economic base – a political
revolution. Saddam’s regime built links with the former Soviet Union and
nationalised the oil industry and other key sectors – and vastly increased arms
expenditure. It was a form of military state capitalism, still at root a
capitalist economy. In Iraq a social revolution is required to transform the
economy from one based on private property, dominated by big business and
landlords, to one based on workers’ control and management.
As with Saddam, the West’s attitudes towards the Soviet
Union shifted. In the early years after the revolution, its very existence
represented a mortal threat to the whole capitalist system. Once the Stalinist
bureaucracy had been consolidated – Lenin died in January 1924, with Trotsky
forced into exile in January 1928 – it became increasingly clear that the
regime’s survival was more important to its rulers than the emancipation of the
working class internationally. Stalin was ‘pragmatic’ in his dealings with the
West – note the Stalin/Hitler pact before the second world war and the Yalta
conference with Winston Churchill and Franklin D Roosevelt in 1945 to carve up
post-war Germany.
That approach was rewarded by the imperialist powers. Nick
Cohen observed: "The establishment became pro-Soviet when the Soviet Union
became Britain’s ally in the second world war. The Times switched from admiring
Hitler to admiring Stalin". (The Observer, 9 March 2003) In the International
Herald Tribune, Serge Schmemann writes: "The New York Times of March 6 1953, in
which Stalin’s death got a banner headline, made no mention of the purges or the
gulag. But it did declare that his death ‘brought to an end the career of one of
the great figures of modern times – a man whose name stands second to none as
the organiser and builder of the great state structure the world knows as the
Soviet Union’." (11 March 2003)
Capitalist powers have no principles when it comes to
working with dictatorships, so long as their interests are served.
Cohen’s real anger, however, is directed against ‘the left’
– to justify his support for the war against Iraq: "Yet virtually everyone I
meet doesn’t want to hear about Saddam’s crimes or read the fraternal requests
for support from democrats and socialists in the Iraqi opposition. Like the Left
of the 1930s, they put their hands over their ears and scream whenever either
subject is mentioned".
The Stalinist regimes used brutal methods to maintain their
control, including forced mass deportations and anti-Jewish purges. And there
were many apologists in the West for their acts. The so-called ‘Communist’
Parties were mass organisations in many countries and they toed the Moscow line.
Many social democratic parties and other groups and individuals backed the
Stalinist state, especially when it came to foreign policy. It is, however,
totally misleading to present ‘the left’ as if it were some homogenous bloc.
Another nauseating mantra is the binding of Lenin to Stalin:
Stalin became Communist Party general secretary in 1922, Lenin died in 1924 and
Stalin took over. Night follows day. Here, the champions of ‘Western democracy’
join hands with Stalin’s apologists. In order to bolster his authority in the
Soviet Union, Stalin cloaked himself in the revolutionary mantle of Lenin, whose
political activity was severely limited in the last couple of years of his life
due to ill health. The history of the Bolshevik party and the revolution was
systematically falsified, exaggerating Stalin’s role and minimising the
contributions of others, especially Trotsky, who was recognised as Lenin’s
closest comrade. Prominent Bolsheviks were got rid of.
Without offering any evidence for his assertions, Simon
Sebag Montefiore, in the Financial Times, brings the fabrication up to date:
"When the Baathists took power in 1968, Saddam played a role of brutal
troubleshooter to his political master, General al-Bakr, that was very similar
to the role Stalin played to Lenin". (1 March 2003)
One reference to the conflict between Lenin and Stalin could
be found in the Financial Times, however: in its Food & Drink section, in a
throwaway remark by Andrew Jack. "When Lenin predicted the suffering to come
under his successor Stalin, with the words, ‘That cook will concoct nothing but
peppery dishes’, it was no accident that he chose a culinary metaphor". (1 March
2003) No accident because Georgian food is spicy. But Lenin was not writing a
cookbook on his deathbed. One of Lenin’s last documents was a ‘testament’, in
which he warned of the dangers of the encroaching bureaucracy, specifically
naming Stalin. In it, he proposed a joint campaign with Trotsky to counter this
process.
A number of commentators have pointed to the damage done by
Stalinism to people’s perceptions of socialism. Robert Manne wrote that "it was
Stalin, more than anyone else, who cut the utopian 19th-century idea of
socialism from its humanitarian moorings and transformed it into a 20th century
nightmare". (Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2003)
Jonathan Freedland developed that point: "The fear is that
any revolutionary ambition for society will always end in disaster, that any
goal larger than gradual reform will lead to a bloodbath – and it is Stalin who
stands as the cold, unbudging precedent. This has been disabling for the left".
(The Guardian, 5 March 2003)
The collapse of the Stalinist regimes and the attendant
pro-capitalist propaganda onslaught set back socialist consciousness
internationally. That was amplified after the Gulf war of 1990-91 when George
Bush senior, then US president, pronounced a ‘New World Order’. Francis
Fukuyama, a US political commentator, famously announced the ‘end of history’.
In the decade since then, the world has become more unequal and unstable than
ever: economic turmoil, Middle Eastern conflict, 9/11 terrorist attacks on the
US, war in Afghanistan, invasion and occupation of Iraq…
Stalinism was a grotesque distortion of socialism – almost
unrecognisable from the original ideal. However, the fact that it was based on a
centralised planned economy and represented a serious military threat to the
West meant that Stalinism provided a counterbalance to capitalism. Once it
imploded, the neo-liberal offensive ran rampant around the globe. The task of
Marxists in the 1990s was to continue to explain the case for a genuine
socialist alternative.
The anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist protests and partial
general strikes seen over the last few years, and now an unprecedented global
anti-war movement, show there is a new generation prepared to fight against the
injustices of this rotten, class-ridden system. The ideas of genuine, democratic
socialism offer a way out of today’s misery and inequality. And can finally put
an end to Stalin’s poisonous legacy.
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