(The following is a review of Stalin, Part II, part of a three-part television series on PBS channels. Part One was reviewed in the last issue of Challenge-Desafio)
During the period from 1929 to 1932 a great "turn to the left" took place in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of activist workers went from the cities to help the poor peasants collectivize the countryside. The five-year plan, to begin the industrialization of the country, was begun. Brand-new industries sprang up; whole cities, like Komsomolsk and Magnitogorsk, were built from nothing, through the communist enthusiasm and dedication of hundreds of thousands of workers and youth. In the throes of this enthusiasm, a recruitment drive brought the majority of the Soviet working class into the Communist Party.
Parallel with these economic developments, left-wing forces pushed for a working-class line in literature, art, and education. Schools and colleges gave preferential admission to workers; communist writers and artists challenged themselves and their colleagues to "serve the working class" in whatever they did. It was truly a "cultural revolution," as some bourgeois scholars have termed it. 1
Taken together, these developments can be seen as the first attempt in human history to create an entirely new society based upon the working class! The profound importance of this ¨period for workers and their allies everywhere cannot be overestimated.
These advances could be unleashed only because a left-wing line -- Stalin's line -- had won out in the central Communist Part debates of the 1920s. Naturally, this period horrifies capitalists and anti-working class forces. They would like to portray it, and everything that came after it, as a terrible time. And so they do in this program, through lies -- saying things happened that never did -- as well as by omission -- leaving out important events, like those mentioned above. This article will concentrate on exposing the lies.
There was much real support for collectivization among the poorer peasants, and among peasant women especially. Many hated the "kulaks" -- the rich peasants who, along with the priests, traditionally controlled village life -- as did many workers, most of whom were first- or second-generation away from the village and who remembered its oppression. But you would never guess it from this program, which portrays collectivization as an inhuman onslaught against a defenseless peasantry.
The lies about the "man-made famine" of 1932-33 are repeated, with the fabricated stories of 5 to 7 million deaths and phony photographs taken, without acknowledgement, from the ¨Volga famine of 1921-22. A long series appeared in Challenge-Desafio three years ago on this question; 3 ; its arguments will not be repeated here, except to say that bourgeois, capitalist scholars have themselves long since exposed this nonsense [ed. -- to go to the first article of this earlier series on the "Hoax of the 'Man-Made Famine' in the Ukraine", click here .]
A long section of the film is devoted to trying to show that Stalin was responsible for the murder of Kirov, his closest ally in the leadership of the Communist Party. The film takes its argument from a recent book by professional anti-communist liar and British Secret Service agent Robert Conquest. 4 Though Conquest repeats over and over in his book that Stalin's guilt is "proven," in fact he has no decent evidence at all! A recent (and very polite) review of Conquest's book points out how dishonest it is, and repeats that there is apparently no Soviet evidence of Stalin's guilt -- for the best of reasons, we might add! 5
Just over one minute of the program is devoted to the Communist International, or Comintern. We are told that "it was all Trotsky's idea," "Stalin disliked foreigners," -- complete lies! The Comintern also partook of the "left turn" during the period 1929-32, which witnessed the most class-conscious, revolutionary efforts of workers towards the goal of communist revolution. Far from a xenophobic madman, as the film portrays him, Stalin himself led the struggle, ultimately unsuccessful, to rid the communist parties of their right-wing leadership and tendencies during this period.
The most striking part of Stalin, Part II focuses on the arrests, imprisonments, trials and executions which followed Kirov's murder in December 1934. The period from 1934 to the war is described as one of "terror," when millions were wrongly killed and everyone lived in fear (although, incongruously, we are also told that "for many people, life was better"). The film portrays all this as a result of Stalin's "greed for power," and paranoia. This too is all rubbish.
Some important trials were held in 1935 and 1936, of high-ranking Party officials who were accused of anti-Party conspiracies and industrial sabotage. That the conspiracies, including contact with Trotsky abroad, and secret factionalizing existed, has been proven by bourgeois scholars. 6 As for the sabotage, both émigrés and American engineers working as consultants in the USSR at the time attest to it, particularly suspecting Yuri Pyatakov, in fact charged with sabotage in his 1936 trial 7
The real wave of arrests, imprisonments, and executions, during which many innocent people were unquestionably punished or killed, did not in fact occur until the Soviet government uncovered a massive treasonable conspiracy involving top party and military leaders, in May 1937. Much circumstantial evidence exists to confirm this plot, and the NKVD (political police) reacted in panic. 8
Following Conquest, Cohen and other liars, the film estimates 8 to 14 million persons killed as a result of the "terror." Conquest's death figures have been disproven and mocked by more responsible bourgeois scholars. 9
One of them (still a ferocious anti-Communist) recently estimated the death toll at 75,000 - 200,000 10 , or one one-hundredth of the figures given in the film and book!
Why the numbers game? Isn't this level of deaths "bad enough" for the anti-Communists? No! They realize that their audience knows millions have been killed by capitalists in the name of anti- communism and for exploitation. They know that anti-Communism can be effective only if workers can be convinced that communism is worse than the worst form of capitalism -- fascism. Hitler killed 20 million Soviet citizens [ed. -- actually, more like 28 million, as the Russian government revealed a few years ago], Hitlerism was capitalism -- therefore, they must "prove" that Stalin was even worse! Hence the lies.
1. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Indiana University Press, 1978). Back.
2. Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); "Bab'y Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization," The Russian Review, 45 (Jan. 1986). For the mixed response of peasants to the early stages of collectivization including the support of many peasants for the Soviets, see Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (Indiana U. Pr., 1988; original edition, 1931). Hindus grew up in this village and then emigrated to the US; he came back to see how the people were reacting to Soviet power. Back.
3. Challenge-Desafio, February 26 through April 1, 1987. This series is now available on the Worldwide Web: click here to go to the first article in the series of six, with links to the rest. Back.
4. Stalin and the Murder of Kirov New York: Oxford, 1989. Back.
5. J. Arch Getty, review of Conquest's book in The Russian Review, 48 (July, 1989), 348-351. Back.
6. J. Arch Getty, "Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International," Soviet Studies, 38 (Jan. 1986); Pierre Broué, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, Number 5. Broué is a leading Trotskyite, but admits the evidence shows his hero lied. Back.
7. Americans: see John Littlepage, "Red Wreckers in Russia," Saturday Evening Post, January 1, 1938; Carroll G. Holmes, "I Knew Those Wreckers," Soviet Russia Today, April, 1938; for the émigré, see N. Valentinov-Volsky, "Sut' bol'shevizma v izobrazhenii Yu. Pyatakova," Novy Zhurnal (New York), No. 52 (1958), 146- 149. Back.
8. J. Arch Getty, The 'Great Purges'
Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist Party, 1933-1939 (Ph.D.
dissertation, Boston College, 1979), 422-457. For Tukhachevsky,
see the very cautious article by Grover Furr, "New Light on Old
Stories About Marshal Tukhachevskii: Some Documents
Reconsidered," Russian History / Histoire Russe, 13
(1986), 293-308 [ed. - now available on the Worldwide Web; click
here to go to this article].
Some anti-communist émigrés like Grigori Tokaev
(Betrayal of an Ideal and Comrade X) wrote openly
about a military conspiracy; their works are often cited by anti-
communist scholars, but this fact is never mentioned. Back.
9. See the series in Challenge-Desafio referred to in note 3 above, and the bibliography cited there. Back.
10. The Nation (New York), August 7/14, 1989, p. 184 Back.
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