This is Part 3 of a four-part series. Here's a jump to Part One; and here you can go to Part Two. At the bottom there's a link to the fourth and final part.
The third and concluding part of the PBS series Stalin rams home the producer's basic idea, the Big Lie that communism equals fascism 1 At the beginning Soviet émigré Lev Kopelev equates "Stalinism" with Hitlerism and fascism, returning at the end to remind us that "Stalinism" threatens "the survival of the human race." Meanwhile, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva assures us that "Stalinism" was in reality "the terror of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, of the one-party régime" -- in other words, communism. The Big Lie is made up of little ones; this review can only expose a few of them. Next week's bibliography will help the interested reader explore what did happen in the first working-class state in world history.
The film begins with the bald assertion that Stalin had already killed "25 million" people -- a nonsensical figure (see last week's review), the purpose of which is simply to equate Stalin with Hitler in viewer's minds. Recent researchers have once again confirmed that there was neither widespread "fear of the Gulag" nor "total control" by Stalin or the Party. 2
And this has been going on for decades! In 1953 Henry Shapiro, long-time Moscow correspondent for United Press, called tales of 10-20 million victims "part of the Cold War gone crazy":
When I was in the States in 1950 I was up against the same kind of thing... in those days even the simplest two-and-two- make-four commonsense made you suspect of communist sympathies.
The film concentrates upon belittling the tremendous soviet victory over the Nazis in World War 2. A Professor Samsonov doubles previous soviet figures for officers arrested as a result of the Tukhachevsky military plot, and then claims these commanders were `the most experienced, the most loyal," whose arrest was "one of the reasons for the defeats and failure when Hitler attacked."
Hitler himself knew better:
The Führer [Hitler] recalled the case of Tukhachevsky and expressed the opinion that we were entirely wrong then in believing that Stalin would ruin the Red Army by the way he handled it. The opposite was true: Stalin got rid of all opposition in the Red Army and thereby brought an end to defeatism." 3
According to the film, the British and French sent a mission to the USSR in the summer of 1939, but Stalin did not trust them "saw pickings for himself there." All these statements are stone lies! First, even anti-Communist historians hold that this mission, of obscure officers, on a slow boat, without any right to negotiate for their governments, proved the British and French were not serious about allying with the Soviets. The Soviets, who had tried hard to ally with the French and British -- in effect, trusting them more than the Nazis -- had no choice but to turn to Germany.4
Second, the part of Eastern Poland which the soviets occupied in 1939 was simply a part of Russia which the Polish imperialists had seized by invasion in 1920, with Allied (mainly French) help. Also, the Soviets waited for over two weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland, until it was clear that Britain and France, despite their declarations of war against Germany, would do nothing in Poland's defense (this was the beginning of the period known in England as the "phony war"; it lasted until Hitler turned against France in the spring of 1940). All this is suppressed in the film! Samsonov appears again to claim that, early in the war, Stalin secretly offered Hitler the Ukraine and other lands in exchange for peace. Of course no evidence is given for this statement, which no one has ever heard of before! Is it a "new discovery"? Remember, the Nazi diplomatic archives were all captured, and microfilmed, by the Allies in 1945. As Samsonov admits, the purpose of this "fact" is simply to make Stalin's wartime leadership look bad. 4a
Anti-Communists have been wrestling with this for years, beginning with Hitler himself:
Hitler himself was confused. In the Great War [World War One -- ed.] the Russian infantrymen had fought poorly; now they were tigers. Why? (John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Vol 2., p. 791).
...the Russians fought far more bitterly than had the Poles or Allied troops... (Joachim Fest, Hitler, p. 679).
They are still trying to figure it out. The film tells us that the Stalingrad victory was "due in part to the heroism of the Red Army," and that the Battle of Moscow was won by an extra 100,000 men. Remember, the Nazi defeat at Moscow was the first defeat for the Wehrmacht in the war. All the armies of capitalist Europe, including the British, had been crushed. A British professor tells us that Soviet production was outstripping all of German and occupied Europe -- "indeed an achievement." But we never learn what made this possible.
What's the mystery? Haven't the experiences of the Russian Revolution, the Resistance movement, the Chinese Communist Revolution, the heroic Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism, and countless other examples shown the bosses that workers, under the influence of communist ideas, can perform miracles? Capitalists can never admit this.
The film lies about the Warsaw uprising of 1943, accusing Stalin of delaying the Red Army so the anti-Communist (and intensely anti-Semitic -- the film never tells us that) Home Army would be defeated. In fact, Soviet commanders Rokossovsky and Chiukov, as well as German commanders Tippelskirch and Guderian, agree that Nazi resistance is what held the Red Army up. 5 Perhaps the most cynical part of the film blames Stalin for the Nazi murder of millions of Soviet POWs because he refused to sign the Geneva Convention! This is really a disgusting lie. The Nazis treated civilians no better; they considered all Slavs to be "subhuman." It's hard to sink lower than this.
We are told that in 1948 Stalin personally planned the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Jewish actor-director. Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva claims to have overheard her father planning this. There are two aspects to this lie. First, the account of this even in Svetlana's second book shows nothing of the kind. His daughter overhears him say, "Well, it's an auto accident, then," to someone over the phone, and later tells her Mikhoels has been killed in a car accident. She fabricates the rest.
Second, Svetlana mentions Mikhoels' death in her first book, but in a way that shows the does not at all think her father had anything to do with it. Her second volume was written after moving to the US and befriending several virulent anti- Communists at Princeton (who are thanked in the book). Clearly it was they who "convinced" her of what she heard 6
But Svetlana helps us unravel the lie about the "Doctor's Plot." In January 1953 some Kremlin doctors were charged with murder, then released six months later after Stalin's death and the later execution of Beria (chief of the political police). The film blames this squarely on Stalin, who "apparently wanted a new terror." But Stalin had told his daughter he thought all the Doctor were innocent! The film's writers simply suppress this, as they did her statements that Stalin was devastated by the murder of Kirov (see last week's review). 7
We have limited space, and there are many, many other provable lies in this film and in the series. Once again, ask yourself: Why would they lie if the truth were on their side?
Next week: a final article on the series will explore what's behind the attack on Stalin, and give a bibliography of good historical works to read.
1. "The Lie that Stalin Was Worse than Hitler," Challenge/Desafio, March 18, 1987, pp. 11 ff. Click here to read this article. Back.
2. Robert W. Thurston, "Fear and Belief in the USSR's Great Terror: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939," Slavic Review, 45 (Summer 1986), pp. 213-244. See also the works by Getty and Manning in the bibliography, to be printed in next issue (Click here to go to this article now). Back.
3. Goebbels' diary, May 8, 1943. Back.
4. Jonathan Haslam; Alexander Werth, Russia At War. Back .
4a. Ed. note, 1996: the late anti- Communist Soviet historian General Dmitry Volkogonov's biography of Stalin reveals the source of this tale. According to a document which he footnotes, someone raised the alternative of ceding land to the Nazis at a Politburo meeting right after the start of the war. This suggestion was immediately rejected, and apparently never raised again. There is no evidence that it was Stalin who raised this point. Back.
5. Werth, Russia At War, pp. 795- 800 (paperback edition). Back.
6 . Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 154; Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 196. Back.
7. Twenty Letters, p. 207. Back.
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