The following article is the first of four articles which review Stalin, the PBS television series, and the accompanying book Stalin: A Time for Judgment, by Jonathan Lewis and Phillip Whitehead (New York: Pantheon, 1990).
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has produced a three- part series on the life of Joseph Stalin, part 1 of which was broadcast on Monday, May 28.
This series coincides with an unprecedented attack on the entire concept of communism, unleashed by the overt return to capitalism in Eastern Europe and sponsored by Gorbachov. This policy of "perestroika" is nothing but a hug attack upon the working class. Under the name of economic "reform" wages are being drastically cut, and prices of all necessities -- food, shelter, transportation -- drastically raised. Fascist nationalism has been unleashed to get workers fighting amongst themselves. Like racism, nationalist rivalries dim class consciousness, encouraging workers to ally with bosses of "their own" ethnic or linguistic group and fight other workers.
The political "reforms" -- capitalist-style elections, multi- party systems, and the accession to power of openly capitalist and fascist parties -- are necessary in order to prevent rebellion against this attack. Workers are more likely to accept these drastic cuts if the bosses that oversee them have more credibility. As Lenin, for one, noted long ago, capitalist democracy serves this purpose.
These attacks on the working class -- that is, this attempt to raise the level of exploitation of the working class, get them to provide a source of cheap labor in order to profit a few capitalists -- cannot succeed without an all-out assault on the ideas of communism, internationalism, working-class dictatorship and class consciousness. For it was during the period of working-class power that subsidies for food, clothing and housing, free medical care, day care, guaranteed jobs, and other pro-worker benefits were put into effect. this period and the benefits which survive from it are associated with Joseph Stalin. Therefore, the Soviet and East European bosses, who are now removing the last vestiges of the benefits won by the communist movement, must justify their acts by saying that the period of Stalin was horrible.
As this review shows, Part One of the series fails to conform even to the facts accepted by pro-capitalist, bourgeois scholars concerning the Russian Revolution and the left of Stalin. (Naturally, we could not expect the series to have a pro-working class, communist outlook.) The lies and distortions in it are very crude, and can be effective only because most people are not aware of the facts.
As you read these reviews, ask yourself: Does someone lie if the truth is on his side? Obviously the real facts, even as established by capitalist research, do not paint a bad enough picture to justify a return to exploitation and all its horror and misery.
Part One opens with Stalin's portrait superimposed upon drawings of skeletons and skulls, and then upon mass graves. A Soviet archeologist describes the murders as though he witnessed them. However, there has been no independent study of these mass graves near Minsk, in a part of Byelorusssia (one of the USSR's republics, now the independent state of Belarus) which was the scene of literally millions of murders by the Nazis in 1941-44. In other words: there is no evidence that these killings were not Nazi killings.
The book mentions the very similar mass graves uncovered by the Nazis in 1943 in Vinnitsa, in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, which were certainly either mainly or totally of Nazi victims. The only source for this conclusion -- that the victims were killed by the Soviets -- is a Nazi propaganda report, which is contradicted by post-war evidence. A German soldier swore to both American and Soviet interrogators in 1945 that these were graves of Nazi victims whom he saw the Nazis kill; but this well-known source is never even mentioned. The fact that the Soviets have recently "admitted" these were victims of Stalin's time suggests that they may be doing the same with these other mass graves.
The point here is not that there were not many killings during the `30s -- there were -- but that these anti- Communist Soviet and Western writers attribute these mass murders to Stalin without the evidence they would unquestionably demand if, say, somebody were alleging they were done by Americans.
The main form of distortion in the film and book is the dishonest use of evidence. For example, the narrator tells us a "school friend" said of young Stalin: "To gain victory and be feared was triumph for him"; "he was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will." Later, we are told that Stalin told a `friend" at the funeral of his first wife in 1909 that "this creature softened my heart of stone." With her died my last warm feelings for people." This "friend" was Joseph Iremashvili, who later became a Nazi and published his book in Berlin in 1932. Once again, a Nazi source is used without admitting it.
The narrator tells us that Stalin may have informed on his comrades to the Tsarist secret police at times, whereupon a Soviet author, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, appears and tells us Stalin really did inform.
This is famous nonsense. Bourgeois historians have established that Antonov-Ovseyenko's book is full of falsifications and exaggerations. 1 Second, the film at this point is following Robert C. Tucker's 1973 biography of Stalin. 2 According to Tucker, the only allegations that Stalin ever informed on them were made by anti-Communist Mensheviks in exile in the `20s. Thought Tucker wants to believe them, he admits he can prove nothing, and goes on to show that a later book alleging Stalin's role as an informer was a complete fake (Tucker, pp. 108-114).
The point here is that the film goes out of its way to make viewers aware of this allegation, despite the fact that its authors know there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The accompanying book dismisses the whole "informer" matter as rumors in a single sentence.
This is termed an attack on democracy. We are not told that the Bolsheviks had been elected to a majority of the Soviets in Petrograd and other cities by October 1917, and had the second largest delegation to the Assembly; that the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party with the majority in the Assembly, had split, with the largest section voting to support the Bolsheviks; or that, since the vote, the Bolsheviks had seized state power and had given the land to the peasants and had promised peace -- the major peasant demands.
E. H. Carr, the eminent British bourgeois historian of the Russian Revolution, makes it clear that the Assembly did not in fact express the will of the population and that, if any one group did, it was the Bolsheviks. 3
The larger point here, though, is the equation of elections, held under capitalist domination of the mass media, the schools, churches, and government, with "democracy." In fact, at best such elections are the attributes of capitalist dictatorship. No act, however arrived at, can be considered "democratic" unless it suits the interest of the mass of the population. The Bolshevik victory, working-class power, an end to the bosses' rule, to the murderous war, and giving the land to the peasants and the factories to the working class, was the most democratic act imaginable!
This is not even mentioned in the accompanying book, but is taken from Tucker, who interprets it as evidence of Stalin's envy of Trotsky. In fact, Stalin's actions in dismissing the Tsarist Generals in whom Trotsky had confidence, and replacing them with communist commanders like Voroshilov and Frunze, saved the day, and was the principle behind the military feud with Trotsky, here as elsewhere far to the right of Stalin. 4
These stories follow the Soviet revisionist line of glorifying anything Lenin ever said. The Georgia affair had to do with Stalin's and Ordzhonikidze's hostility to Georgian nationalists, and Lenin's desire to placate them. Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were both of them of Georgian nationality themselves, and had spent years organizing workers in Georgia, largely against nationalists such as these. This was a principled disagreement in which Lenin, in desiring to placate the nationalists, was wrong. We are not told that, in his Testament, Lenin attacked, not merely Stalin, but Trotsky, Bukharin, and virtually everyone in the Soviet leadership. 5
The final major falsehood concerns the way in which Stalin became the main leader in the Party after Lenin's death. Here the series adopts the line made famous by Trotsky: that Stalin had used his position as General Secretary to "stack" the Party in his favor:
"By controlling appointments within the Party, Stalin gradually acquired greater real power than his rivals. A country-wide network of Party members owing allegiance only to Stalin lay at the end of the telephone."
Nadyezhda Yoffe, daughter of one of Trotsky's most loyal allies, and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky's own grandson, are quoted on this point, as well as Lewin.
This elitist position treats workers as idiots. Lewin says openly that Stalin's victory depended upon his control of the uneducated workers in the Party "because he has below a mass of people who don't understand what it's all about, listen to what they were told." It is worthy of any capitalist, and exposes Trotsky, as well as Lewin and the producers of the film. But Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (later a Nazi collaborator, but a Stalin supporter in the `20s) and a worker, Yelizaveta Tyomkina, are quoted as saying that they thought Stalin the best of the leaders. Even Stephen Cohen's very anti-Stalin book admits that Stalin won the allegiance of party activists and his victory cannot be attributed to his "stacking" the Party. 6 Cohen is interviewed and attacks Stalin several times in the film, but is not quoted here.
Part One ends at the beginning of the collectivization movement, caused by the utter failure of capitalist methods (in the form of the New Economic Policy, NEP) to provide a decent standard of living for the workers plus the funds to industrialize.
1. See Leo van Rossum, "A. Antonov- Ovseyenko's Book on Stalin: Is It Reliable? A Note," Soviet Studies, July 1984, pp. 445-7. Back.
2. Stalin as Revolutionary 1879- 1929. This work is a "psychohistory," full of unsubstantiated psychological guesswork, a completely invalid historical procedure even by bourgeois capitalist standards -- except when applied to Stalin, apparently! It is so poorly regarded by other scholars that the second volume took twenty years to appear. See the review of this shoddy work in PL Magazine, Vol . 10, No. 4 (July, 1976), pp. 58-73, "The Name and the Game of the Anti- Stalinists." Back.
3. E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I, Chapter 5. A White Russian émigré noted a year later that "The Constituent Assembly was blamed more than the Bolsheviks who dispersed it." Car concludes that "it was one more demonstration of the lack of any solid basis, or any broad popular support, in Russia for the institutions and principles of bourgeois democracy." (p. 130) Back.
4. For a thorough discussion see John Erickson, The Soviet High Command. New York: St Martin's Press, 1961. Back.
5. Under the influence of his final illness, cut off from all activity, Lenin wrote and did things he had never done before. The essays he wrote at this time advocate the promotion of capitalist relations. As Pyatakov, a Politburo member, said later, the party leadership regarded all this as uncharacteristic of Lenin. They even considered not printing his final essays at all! Back.
6. Steven F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 325-28. This book is also critically reviewed in the PL Magazine review published in 1976; see the citation in note 2 above. Back.
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