So begins the eminently readable recent biography of Joe Stalin by Kenneth Neill Cameron, Stalin: Man of Contradiction, (New Canada Publications, Toronto, 1987). Cameron, an English literature professor at New York University, is a man of impeccable bourgeois academic credentials. His book, The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical, on the English poet Shelley, won the Modern Language Association Prize for the best work of scholarship in 1950. Yet Mr. Cameron was also the executive secretary of the Canadian League Against War and Fascism in 1935 and traveled to the Soviet Union during the 1930's. His book has the virtue of being a concise, easy to read presentation of Stalin's life and accomplishments. It has the defect of criticizing Stalin for the wrong reasons because Mr. Cameron still believes the Soviet Union to be a socialist state.
His criticism negates a left aspect of Stalin's thought that Mao and later the Chinese Red Guards built upon, namely the importance of an all out attack on bourgeois ideology. We in PL have carried this line of thought yet further in the document Road to Revolution IV by pointing out that for the ideology and social practice of communism to triumph, the wage slavery system must be immediately abolished after the revolution. The principle of from each according to their ability and commitment, to each according to their need must be implemented right away to guarantee that communist ideology is not drowned in a sea of capitalist economic relations.
Nonetheless, Cameron's book is quite good in its discussion of Stalin as a young revolutionary, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the Stalin-Trotsky debates, the Five Year Plans, the Moscow Trials and Stalin's leadership during WWII. This article uses his book as the basis for a discussion of these historical events for our readers not familiar with this period. Throughout, however, it has been necessary to put Cameron's view in the proper context by using the arguments against revisionism made by PL publications such as Road to Revolution III and IV. Stalin's revolutionary career and program will be compared to Gorbachev's attempt to push the Soviet Union further down the road to capitalism. We shall conclude by showing how Stalin's honest political errors paved the way for Gorbachev's revisionist crimes.
He took part is protests and read widely. His bookshelves contained Marx, Darwin, the British economists, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and the Georgian nationalist poets for example. He studied philosophy and wrote poetry. But Stalin always combined his studies with action. He was expelled from the seminary for subversive activities. Eventually he made contact with Marxist study circles led by Russian railway workers who Stalin says, "taught me everything I know about practical revolutionary organizing." He went on to help lead major strikes among the Baku oil workers. He supported Lenin in his ideological struggle against the Mensheviks, and thus was one of the founders of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party. He went on to become the first editor of Pravda and to head the secret party underground operating in Russia during Lenin's exile in Switzerland.
Stalin's rival, Leon Trotsky, joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917 after years of opposing Lenin's views. Stalin was a lifelong communist of undeviating devotion to the Party and to the working class. Five times he was exiled to Siberia, several times he escaped. In both life and death he was slandered by his bourgeois enemies. The bourgeoisie hated and feared Stalin because as someone once said, "Joe Stalin plays for keeps."
He served on the Central Committee at the time of the Russian Revolution and voted with Lenin and the majority of the Central Committee to seize state power in 1917. he personally led Red Army detachments on several fronts during the Civil War.
After the revolution and Civil War, Russia was in shambles. Thousands died from starvation caused by the invasion of Russia, first by Germany, then after World War I by Poland, Britain, the U.S., France and several other countries. These bourgeois powers aided the counter-revolutionary armies led by former aristocrats, generals, and bourgeois industrialists. These forces, called the White Armies, were similar in some ways to the contras operating today in Nicaragua. If the bourgeoisie today launches campaigns of sabotage, spying, murder and civil war against Nicaragua which is not even communist as the Soviet Union was aspiring to be after the revolution and is not nearly as big as the Soviet Union (world capitalism lost one sixth of the world when capitalism was crushed in Russia) is: imagine the campaigns what were launched overtly and covertly against the Soviet Union. The threats, internal and external to the Soviet Union were real - no as some bourgeois "scholars" suggest were the figment of Stalin's imagination.
The Bolsheviks, in an attempt to quickly deal with the problems of food shortages, made the mistake of not trying to win the peasants immediately to communism. They divided the land among the peasants into individual plots. Soon due to competition, a class of rich peasants (kulaks) grew and began to develop large privately owned farms in the countryside, using poorer peasants as a source of cheap labor. The began to raise food prices to take advantage of starving workers in the cities.
Britain, which controlled Russia through its banking capital before the revolution, had prevented industrial development. The industries that existed before the revolution and war had been largely destroyed. Lenin in his New Economic Policy (NEP) -- see CD, January 20 and 27, 1988 -- sought to deal with the crisis situation by making what he realized were concessions to capitalist forms of production in the factories as well as on the farms. He realized that this was a danger to the development of communism and warned that the policy was a short term tactical necessity that should be abandoned as soon as possible.