Was Stalin really that evil?

[TheStinger]

Murdering 20 million of your own citizens!

Nah he wasn't evil he was just misunderstood.

[molly bloom]

Russian manufacturing production increased by 400% between 1929 and 1939. In the same period, British production increased 17% and Germany's by 27%.

By 1938, Russia was the second industrial power in the world, trailing only the United States.

[Alexander's Horse]

Those figures are pretty meaningless unless you give the base figures. A 400% increase off a small base versus a 27% increase off a mature base? You need to compare apples with apples.

And what was happening up to 1929? Was Russia already at take off point anyway? After all, it was Lenin and Trostky, Bucharin and the gang who masterminded war communism and the command economy. All of which of course Stalin later took credit for.

[TheStinger]

My answer to the point about the increase in production is so what. It doesn't make him any less of a murdering bastard

[Alexander's Horse]

Its also important to note that Molly quotes figures from 1929-39. Up until the end of 1934 and the Kirov murder Stalin was part of a collective leadership, responsible for mainly for party matters as general secretary, not the economy. He seized dictatorial power between 1934 and 1937. By this stage The Soviet Union's crash industrialisation program was already well underway. If anything the purges were a huge and costly distraction from The Soviet Union's industrialisation and military build up on the brink of war. And war was expected at any time from 1936 onwards.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I think moron's a bit harsh. He certainly wasn't a brilliant light, but he was very good at small scale organizing. He was the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia while most of the intellectual leadership was in exile. Stalin oversaw distribution of materials and funds, organization of comrades, and activities. He was the most important man in Russia up to 1917, when events surpassed him and a new generation of militants took control. He played a rather unimportant role in the Revolution itself.

Because of his organizational skills and the need to reward him for his decades of work, he was promoted to General Secretary of the Communist Party, which, at that time, was felt to be a buziwork position with no real power. Basically, the Communists thought they were promoting him out of the way.

In large organizations, however, Stalin's skills failed him. He tended towards a hamhanded approach. If a square peg wouldn't fit in a hole, he'd pound it till it went in.

Stalin was responsible for the failure of the counter-strike against Poland, disoberying orders and keeping his army seperated from the other Russian army, allowing the Poles to concetrate their forces and defeat one and then the other.

When Stalin was ordered to negotiate with the Transcaucasian Republic (it was led by the Mensheviks at the time), to try and get them to join Russia, Stalin instead took an army down and conquered it. (One wonders how he was allowed to do this, bad communications one supposes.)

As General-Secretary, however, Stalin was able to move his own people into important positions. Able and dedicated comrades were sent on "important" missions to places which put them out of the way. For example, while Trotsky was convelescing from illness, Lenin died. Trotsky was going to come back, but Stalin cabled him and ordered him to continue getting better. After all, it would not do for the revolution to lose both its greatest leaders.

At the same time, Stalin opened the party up to bureaucrats and former Tsarist officials with the so-called Leninist Levy. These people's loyalty was not to the revolution, but to Stalin, upon whom they depended for party memebership and for jobs. Stalin was able to move these people into central areas, like Moscow and the newly renamed Leningrad. Withthose who would oppose him out of the way, Stalin was able to outmanuver first Trotsky, on the left of the party, and then Bukharin, on the right of the party.

You are correct in ascerting that Stalin had little to do with the Revolution itself, but his actions preceding the Revolution were important on their own meits. In the early 1900 years, Stalin organized armed insurrections in the Caucasus region, he also led union struggles against the aristocracy in Baku which helped the workers gain some say in their own affairs. He was also an important figure for the Bolsheviks, towing their line, before the Bolsheviks had any real support. He kept Pravda alive, even after being imprisoned numerous times for publishing it.

Now, as for Poland, you are incorrect. Stalin was ordered to defend the city of Lvov, in Ukraine, against approaching Polish forces. He was also sent to Crimea to defend it against Wrangel's White troops. He successfully liquidated Wrangel's troops and defended Crimea, as he was ordered. On the Western front, Tukhachevsky successfully pushed the Poles out of Ukraine and back to Warsaw. Because of poor coordination and contradictory orders, Tukhachevsky was pushed out of Poland, by a surprise counter-attack by the Poles, as was Budeyonni. The fault of this cannot be blamed on Stalin or Tukhachevky, but on the central government.

Now, about the Transcaucasian Republic. Krasnov's White Army was threatening the region, which was an important Bolshevik grain growing region. Stalin found the region in complete dissaray. Stalin had cabled Lenin, saying `I myself, without formalities, will remove those army commanders and commissars who are ruining things'. Stalin was then named President of the Southern War Front Council, and given full powers over the region. Lenin regarded `the measures decided on by Stalin' as a model.

Now, of course, you are wrong about Stalin "opening up" the Party to bureaucracts and White officers. The truth is, the Party had been open to those even during Lenin's time. John Scott, a U.S. engineer, who worked years at Magnitogorsk reiterates this. Scott was not Communist and often criticized the Bolshevik system. But when reporting what he experienced in the strategic complex of Magnitogorsk, he made us understand several essential problems that Stalin had to confront.

Scott described the ease with which a counter-revolutionary who served in the White Armies but showed himself to be dynamic and intelligent could pass as a proletarian element and climb the ranks of the Party. His work also showed that the majority of active counter-revolutionaries were potential spies for imperialist powers. It was not at all easy to distinguish conscious counter-revolutionaries from corrupted bureaucrats and `followers' who were just looking for an easy life.

Scott also explained that the 1937--1938 purge was not solely a `negative' undertaking, as it is presented in the West: it was mostly a massive political mobilization that reinforced the antifascist conscience of the workers, that made bureaucrats improve the quality of their work and that allowed a considerable development of industrial production. The purge was part of the great preparation of the popular masses for resisting the coming imperialist invasions. The facts refute Khrushchev's slanderous declaration that Stalin did not adequately prepare the country for war.

Here is John Scott's testimony about Magnitogorsk.

"Shevchenko ... was running (in 1936) the coke plant with its two thousand workers. He was a gruff man, exceedingly energetic, hard-hitting, and often rude and vulgar ....

With certain limitations ..., Shevchenko was not a bad plant director. The workers respected him, and when he gave an order they jumped ....

Shevchenko came from a little village in the Ukraine. In 1920, Denikin's White Army occupied the territory, and young Shevchenko, a youth of nineteen, was enlisted as a gendarme. Later Denikin was driven back into the Black Sea, and the Reds took over the country. In the interests of self-preservation Shevchenko lost his past, moved to another section of the country, and got a job in a mill. He was very energetic and active, and within a surprisingly short time had changed from the pogrom-inspiring gendarme into a promising trade-union functionary in a large factory. He was ultra-proletarian, worked well, and was not afraid to cut corners and push his way up at the expense of his fellows. Then he joined the party, and one thing led to another --- the Red Directors Institute, important trade-union work, and finally in 1931 he was sent to Magnitogorsk as assistant chief of construction work ....

In 1935 ... a worker arrived from some town in the Ukraine and began to tell stories about Shevchenko's activities there in 1920. Shevchenko gave the man money and a good job, but still the story leaked out ....

One night he threw a party which was unprecedented in Magnitogorsk .... Shevchenko and his pals were busy the rest of the night and most of the next consuming the remains ....

One day ... Shevchenko was removed from his post, along with a half-dozen of his leading personnel .... Shevchenko was tried fifteen months later and got ten years.

Shevchenko was at least fifty per cent bandit --- a dishonest and unscrupulous careerist. His personal aims and ideals differed completely from those of the founders of Socialism. However, in all probability, Shevchenko was not a Japanese spy, as his indictment stated, did not have terrorist intentions against the leaders of the party and the government, and did not deliberately bring about the explosion (that killed four workers in 1935).

The `Shevchenko' band was composed of some twenty men, all of who received long sentences. Some, like Shevchenko, were crooks and careerists. Some were actual counter-revolutionaries who set out deliberately to do what they could to overthrow the Soviet power and were not particular with whom they cooperated. Others were just unfortunate in having worked under a chief who fell foul of the NKVD.

Nicolai Mikhailovich Udkin, one of Shevchenko's colleagues, was the eldest son in a well-to-do Ukrainian family. He felt strongly that the Ukraine had been conquered, raped, and was now being exploited by a group of Bolsheviks ... who were ruining the country .... He felt, furthermore, that the capitalist system worked much better than the Socialist system ....

Here was a man who was at least a potential menace to the Soviet power, a man who might have been willing to cooperate with the Germans for the `liberation of the Ukraine' in 1941. He, also, got ten years."

.

Scott, op. cit. , pp. 175--180.


"During the course of the purge hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats shook in their boots. Officials and administrators who had formerly come to work at ten, gone home at four-thirty, and shrugged their shoulders at complaints, difficulties, and failures, began to stay at work from dawn till dark, to worry about the success or failure of their units, and to fight in a very real and earnest fashion for plan fulfillment, for economy, and for the well-being of their workers and employees, about whom they had previously lost not a wink of sleep."

Now, for Trotsky. He came to Russia, by British help, carrying an American visa. Wall Street thought of him as a man they could do business with. Lenin, in 1905, had made a strong critique of Trotsky, calling him of all things a "Judas," an opportunistic bureaucrat and a Menshevik.

Don't forget that in December 1919, Trotsky proposed the `militarization of economic life' and wanted to mobilize the workers using methods he had applied for leading the army. With this line, the railroad workers were mobilized under military discipline. A wave of protests passed through the union movement. Lenin declared that Trotsky "committed errors that endangered the dictatorship of the proletariat: by his bureaucratic harassment of the unions, he risked separating the Party from the masses".


V. I. Lenin, The Trade Unions, the Present Situation, and Trotsky's Mistakes (30 December 1920). Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960--1970), vol. 32, pp. 19--42.

Trotsky's actions speak louder than his words.

[Sirotnikov]

Horsie, I am interested if you could read some recent theories by russian hisotirans about stalin actually not only preparing wwii, but anticipating it, and preparing a counter-attack, which germany pre-emptively prevented.

according to that theory, it weren't simply "summer exercises" but rather a surprise attack that never took place.

i saw a series of interviews with the historians and they make a compelling case, if you listen to their evidence.

as far as when stalin took power - several pictures based on stories that happenned in the 30, make me think that stalin took power earlier on.

i can't bring well supported proof, other than evidence of russian citizens, that was later turned into film.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

No he was just a good citizen trying to help.

[GePap]

Siro:

The whole pre-emptive Soviet strike notion is pretty absurd. I would recommend Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia by Gabriel Gorodetsky, who is the Samuel Rubin Chair of Russian and East European Studies at Tel Aviv University.

[Propaganda]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Once in control, Stalin set about assuring that his control was safe. All challenges would be dealt with, in the most efficient way possible, extermination. By the time of WWII, almost every original Bolshevik leader was dead, with the exceptions of Stalin himself, and the feminist Alexandra Kollentai, who had stopped being political in the early 20s, and was no threat to his power.

The peasantry, having grown richer under the NEP system, chaffed under the controls of the socialist state. All foreign trade was conducted by the state, and there were few Soviet made goods to purchace. The richest peasants were growing restless and were becomming a threat to the state, thus they had to be liquidated as a class. Stalin engineered a famine which killed millions, even a close approximation of which will never be truely known (figures vary from three to twenty million). Legend has it that the famine was so extensive that census takers in 1937 were executed because the census showed evidence of a mass decline in the population of the USSR.

Once the peasants were dealt with, it was time to deal with the Trotskyists. After Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR, Stalin took Trotsky's plan for collectivization and industrialization and made it his own. While Trotsky's plan was gradual, Stalin decided to speed it up, implimenting the famous "Five Year Plans." Because of the similarity of the plans, many Trotskyists went over to Stalin, thinking that Stalin had come over to them. Stalin merely used them to break the peasant wing of the party. Now he meant to deal with them as well. Thus began the show trials and purges.

Because Trotsky had built the Red Army from scratch, many of the officers were personally loyal to him. Had Trotsky ever asked, they would have mounted a coup and overthrown Stalin. Trotsky, however, didn't believe that replacing a bureaucratic dictatorship with a military one was an answer, or that it would help the socialist cause (I would have to say he was wrong). This allowed Stalin time to purge the military of Trotskyist-loyalists. Tens of thousands of party members and officers were imprisoned, executed, and exiled. Trotsky himself was executed by a GPU agent in Mexico (in Diego Rivera's and Frieda Kahlo's house).

"How does the alleged Great Purge of the Old Bolsheviks stand up to empirical evidence? The answer is simple: it falls! Based on newly available archival material, J. Arch Getty, William Chase, Roberta Manning, and other historians performed interpretative statistical analyses of victims of the Yezhovshchina, such as Getty’s and Chase’s analysis of 898 members of the Soviet bureaucratic elite who held positions of power in 1936 (the start of Yezhovshchina), and Manning’s study of the numbers of Party members expelled in the Belyi Raion (Belyi district) of the Soviet Union.

Manning’s results show they were "local party members who joined (the Party) during the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1921 - 1927... ." (The New Economic Policy was the Communist Party’s 1921 withdrawal from its previous policy of doctrinaire centralized socialism, which had been set forth in Lenin’s "21 conditions" at the Third International or Comintern. The NEP permitted freedom of trading, encouragement to foreign capitalists, ownership of private property, and other economic features that had just been abolished by the Revolution, permitting what may be called Lenin’s program of allowable private enterprise or private business under the control of the Proletarian Government.) Manning continues: "But the brunt of the purges fell most heavily on Communists who joined the party during the Civil War." This fact had already been pointed out by Khrushchev decades ago in his much attended to "secret speech" to the Twentieth Party Congress, but has been completely ignored, since it does not conform well to the dominant paradigm. This is a good example of how an entrenched shared paradigm takes precedence over something everyone should have noticed before. According to Getty and Chase, there is "little support for Conquest’s assertion that there was a ‘plan to destroy the Old Bolsheviks,’ or for Armstrong’s claim that the ‘Great Purge almost eliminated from the apparatus the Old Bolsheviks, who entered the Party before the Revolution.’"

Who, then, according to these more scientific analyses of a greater amount of empirical evidence, was at risk to be purged? The statistically arrived at "profile" for a member of the risk group turns out to be someone who was village born, as opposed to urban born; not highly educated, but educated enough to have risen to some bureaucratic position or high rank in a certain field, especially a technical or military field; a Party member, as opposed to a non-Party member (many ardent Bolsheviks and Stalin-supporters, like the agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko, were non-Party); and who participated in the revolution in some way but later joined the opposition. To narrow it further, the most likely to be purged was a peasant who had joined the Party in 1912 - 1920; who was a military specialist and an opposition member. According to Getty and Chase, "the most striking finding (of their study) is that elite members of the intelligentsia working in intellectual/artistic/scientific activities in 1936 were safest [my emphasis] from arrest." This controverts the claim of Roy Medvedev, for example, that the diplomatic profession and especially the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs were "savagely purged." Also controverted by this study are the "histories" written by Roy’s brother Zhores and by Harvard’s indefatigable David Joravsky, both of whom have presented extensive studies on alleged purges of the intelligenty in artistic and scientific fields, such as genetics under Lysenko. Contrary to Zh. Medvedev and Joravsky, a member of this group - a poet, playwright, cosmologist, chemist - was safest from arrest. This fact clashes with the Orwellian version of the totalitarian paradigm for Stalinist society in which all scientific and artistic creation is minutely scrutinized and censored by "Big Brother’s thought police," the NKVD.

There is no doubt that there were many Old Bolsheviks among those purged in Getty’s and Chase’s sampling of members of the Soviet elite. As noted above, of the 898 sampled, 47.6% overall were purged. But only about 31% of all Old Bolsheviks perished. "Statistically, being an Old Bolshevik was not related to one’s vulnerability in the terror" (Getty and Chase, op. cit., p. 237). According to these analysts, "Old Bolsheviks in the present group suffered not because they were Old Bolsheviks, but because they held prominent positions within the Party, economic, and military elite," positions to which they no doubt rose in part because they had been Old Bolsheviks. This is quite different from what the totalitarian paradigmists have been asserting. Getty and Chase go on to say, "Old Bolsheviks were among the victims because of where [my emphasis] they worked rather than because they were Old Bolsheviks." If one wanted to be safe during the Yezhovshchina then, it helped to be "an apolitical urban-born intellectual from the middle or upper class who received a higher education before the revolution and who avoided political or economic administrative work. ... Statistically, it was a purge of politicians - oppositionist or otherwise."

Source: Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio

Now, on to collectivization.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a specialist on Russian peasant life wrote as follows:

`Every village commune has always three or four regular kulaks, as also some half dozen smaller fry of the same kidney .... They want neither skill nor industry; only promptitude to turn to their own profit the needs, the sorrows, the sufferings and the misfortunes of others.

`The distinctive characteristic of this class ... is the hard, unflinching cruelty of a thoroughly educated man who has made his way from poverty to wealth, and has come to consider money-making, by whatever means, as the only pursuit to which a rational being should devote himself.'

.

Stepniak, quoted in Webb, op. cit. , pp. 563--564.


Dr. Émile Joseph Dillon lived in Russia from 1877 to 1914. Professor at several Russian universities, he was also the chief editor of a Russian newspaper. He had traveled to all areas of the empire. He knew the ministers, the nobility, the bureaucrats and the successive generations of revolutionaries. His testimony about the Russian peasantry warrants a few thoughts.

`And of all the human monsters I have ever met in my travels, I cannot recall so malignant and odious as the Russian kulak.'

He first described the material misery in which the majority of the peasantry lived:

`(T)he Russian peasant ... goes to bed at six and even five o'clock in the winter, because he cannot afford money to buy petroleum enough for artificial light. He has no meat, no eggs, no butter, no milk, often no cabbage, and lives mainly on black bread and potatoes. Lives? He starves on an insufficient quantity of them.'

.

Émile Joseph Dillon, quoted in Webb, op. cit. , p. 809.


Then Dillon wrote about the cultural and political backwardnesss in which the peasants were held:

`(T)he agricultural population ... was mediaeval in its institutions, Asiatic in its strivings and prehistoric in its conceptions of life. The peasants believed that the Japanese had won the Manchurian campaign by assuming the form of microbes, getting into the boots of the Russian soldiers, biting their legs, and bringing about their death. When there was an epidemic in a district they often killed the doctors `for poisoning the wells and spreading the disease'. They still burn witches with delight, disinter the dead to lay a ghost, strip unfaithful wives stark naked, tie them to carts and whip them through the village .... And when the only restraints that keep such a multitude in order are suddenly removed the consequences to the community are bound to be catastrophic .... Between the people and anarchism for generations there stood the frail partition formed by its primitive ideas of God and the Tsar; and since the Manchurian campaign these were rapidly melting away.'


Collectivization and a planned economy allowed the Soviet Union to survive the total, barbaric war waged against it by the German Nazis. During the first years of the war, wheat consumption was reduced by one half but, thanks to planning, the available quantities were equitably distributed. The regions occupied and ravaged by the Nazis represented 47 per cent of the area of cultivated land. The fascists destroyed 98,000 collective enterprises. But between 1942 and 1944, 12 million hectares of newly cultivated land were sown in the eastern part of the country.

Ibid. , p. 83, 90.


Thanks to the superiority of the socialist system, agricultural production was able to reach the 1940 level by 1948.

.

Ibid. , p. 85.


In a few years, a completely new system of organization of work, a complete upheaval of technique and a profound cultural revolution won the hearts of the peasants. Bettelheim noted:

`(T)he overwhelming majority of peasants were very attached to the new system of exploitation. The proof came during the war, since in the regions occupied by the German troops, despite the efforts made by the Nazi authorities, the kolkhozian form of exploitation was maintained.'

(On a site note, Goebbels had written to Hitler about the kolkzhoz and how EFFECIENT it was.)

.

Ibid. , pp. 113--114.


This opinion by someone who favored the Communist system can be completed with the testimony of Alexander Zinoviev, an opponent of Stalin. As a child, Zinoviev was a witness to the collectivization.

`When I returned to the village, even much later, I often asked my mother and other kolkhozians if they would have accepted an individual farm if they were offered the possibility. They all refused categorically.'

.

Zinoviev, op. cit. , p. 53.


`(The village school) had only seven grades, but acted as the bridge to the region's technical schools, which trained the veterinarians, agronomists, mechanics, tractor drivers, accountants and other specialists needed for the new `agriculture'. In Chukhloma, there was a secondary school with ten grades that offered better perspectives to its finishing students. All these institutions and professions were the result of an unprecedented cultural revolution. The collectivization directly contributed to this upheaval. Besides these more or less trained specialists, the villages hosted technicians from the cities; these technicians had a secondary or higher education. The structure of the rural population became closer to that of urban society .... I was a witness to this evolution during my childhood .... This extremely rapid change of rural society gave the new system huge support from the masses of the population. All this despite the horrors of the collectivization and the industrialization.'

.

Ibid. , p. 56.


The extraordinary achievements of the Soviet régime ensured it `a colossal support' from the workers and `a disgust of the horrors' from the exploiting classes: Zinoviev constantly wavers between these two positions. Student after the war, Zinoviev recalls a discussion that he had with another anti-Communist student:

`If there had been no collectivization and no industrialization, could we have won the war against the Germans?

`No.

`Without the Stalinist hardships, could we have have kept the country in an orderly state?

`No.

`If we had not built up industry and armaments, could we have preserved the security and independence of our State?

`No.

`So, what do you propose?

`Nothing.'

Source: Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens.

Continued..

[Propaganda]

...

Now, on to the causes of the Ukrainian fame.

The 1932-1933 Ukrainian famine had four causes.

First of all, it was provoked by civil war led by the kulaks and the nostalgic reactionary elements of Tsarism against the collectivization of agriculture.

Frederick Schuman traveled as a tourist in Ukraine during the famine period. Once he became professor at Williams College, he published a book in 1957 about the Soviet Union. He spoke about famine.

`Their [kulak] opposition took the initial form of slaughtering their cattle and horses in preference to having them collectivized. The result was a grievous blow to Soviet agriculture, for most of the cattle and horses were owned by the kulaks. Between 1928 and 1933 the number of horses in the USSR declined from almost 30,000,000 to less than 15,000,000; of horned cattle from 70,000,000 (including 31,000,0000 cows) to 38,000,000 (including 20,000,000 cows); of sheep and goats from 147,000,000 to 50,000,000; and of hogs from 20,000,000 to 12,000,000. Soviet rural economy had not recovered from this staggering loss by 1941.

`... Some [kulaks] murdered officials, set the torch to the property of the collectives, and even burned their own crops and seed grain. More refused to sow or reap, perhaps on the assumption that the authorities would make concessions and would in any case feed them.

`The aftermath was the ``Ukraine famine'' of 1932--33 .... Lurid accounts, mostly fictional, appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921 .... The ``famine'' was not, in its later stages, a result of food shortage, despite the sharp reduction of seed grain and harvests flowing from special requisitions in the spring of 1932 which were apparently occasioned by fear of war in Japan. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.'

.

Tottle, op. cit. , pp. 93--94.


It is interesting to note that this eyewitness account was confirmed by a 1934 article by Isaac Mazepa, leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, former Premier under Petliura in 1918. He boasted that in Ukraine, the right had succeeded in 1930--1932 in widely sabotaging the agricultural works.

`At first there were disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustation of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest .... The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921--1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown, in addition when the crop was being gathered ... in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.'

.

Ibid. , p. 94.


The second cause of the famine was the drought that hit certain areas of Ukraine in 1930, 1931 and 1932. For Professor James E. Mace, who defends the Ukrainian far-right line at Harvard, it is a fable created by the Soviet régime. However, in his A History of Ukraine, Mikhail Hrushevsky, described by the Nationalists themselves as `Ukraine's leading historian', writing of the year 1932, claimed that `Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions'.

.

Ibid. , p. 91.

Professor Nicholas Riasnovsky, who taught at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, wrote that the years 1931 and 1932 saw drought conditions. Professor Michael Florinsky, who struggled against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, noted: `Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions'.

.

Ibid. , p. 92.


The third cause of the famine was a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ukraine and North Caucausus. Dr. Hans Blumenfeld, internationally respected city planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, worked as an architect in Makayevka, Ukraine during the famine. He wrote:

`There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number .... Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.'

.

Ibid. , p. 96.


Horsley Grant, the man who made the absurd estimate of 15 million dead under the famine --- 60 per cent of an ethnic Ukrainian population of 25 million in 1932 --- noted at the same time that `the peak of the typhus epidemic coincided with the famine .... it is not possible to separate which of the two causes was more important in causing casualties.'

.

Ibid. , p. 97.


The fourth cause of the famine was the inevitable disorder provoked by the reorganization of agriculture and the equally profound upheaval in economic and social relations: lack of experience, improvization and confusion in orders, lack of preparation and leftist radicalism among some of the poorer peasants and some of the civil servants.

The numbers of one to two million dead for the famine are clearly important. These human losses are largely due to the ferocious opposition of the exploiting classes to the reorganization and modernization of agriculture on a socialist basis. But the bourgeoisie would make Stalin and socialism responsible for these deaths. The figure of one to two million should also be compared to the nine million dead caused by the 1921--1922 famine, essentially provoked by the military intervention of eight imperialist powers and by the support that they gave to reactionary armed groups.

The famine did not last beyond the period prior to the 1933 harvest. Extraordinary measures were taken by the Soviet government to guarantee the success of the harvest that year. In the spring, thirty-five million poods of seeds, food and fodder were sent to Ukraine. The organization and management of kolkhozy was improved and several thousand supplementary tractors, combines and trucks were delivered.

Hans Blumenfeld presented, in his autobiography, a résumé of what he experienced during the famine in Ukraine:

`[The famine was caused by] a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the ``kulaks,'' but less eager to organize a cooperative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses .... After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it could hardly be otherwise ....

`In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.'

.

Ibid.


Hans Blumenfeld underscored that the famine also struck the Russian regions of Lower Volga and North Caucasus.

`This disproves the ``fact'' of anti-Ukrainian genocide parallel to Hitler's anti-semitic holocaust. To anyone familiar with the Soviet Union's desperate manpower shortage in those years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource
is absurd ....'

Source: Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens.

Continued..

[Propaganda]

As for numbers, well, let's see:

In 1990, Zemskov and Dugin, two Soviet historians, published detailed statistics of the Fulag. Hence the exact figures are now available and they refute most of Conquest's lies.

During the most violent period of the collectivization, in 1930--1931, the peasants expropriated 381,026 kulaks and sent their families to unplowed land to the East. These included 1,803,392 persons. As of 1 January 1932, there were 1,317,022 people in the new establishments. The difference is of 486,000. The disorganization helping, many of the deported were able to escape during the trip, which often took three months or more. (To give an idea, of the 1,317,022 settled, 207,010 were able to flee during the year 1932.)

.

Nicolas Werth, `Goulag: les vrais chiffres'. L'Histoire 169 (September 1993), pp. 38--51. More details can be found in J. Arch Getty, Gábor T. Rittersporn and Viktor N. Zemskov. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence. The America Historical Review, October 1993, pp. 1017--1049.

Others, whose case was reviewed, were allowed to return home. An undetermined number, that we have estimated at 100,000, died during the travels, mainly because of epidemics. The considerable number of deaths during displacements must be seen in the context of that epoch: a weak administration, precarious living conditions for the entire population, sometimes chaotic class struggles among the peasant population overtaken by leftism. Of course, for each death during displacement, the Right affirms that the guilty party is the Party, is Stalin. But in fact the contrary is true. The Party's position is clearly stated in one of the numerous reports about this problem, this one dated 20 December 1931 by the person responsible for a work camp at Novossibirsk.

`The high mortality observed for convoys nos 18 to 23 coming from the North Caucasus --- 2,421 persons out of 10,086 upon departure --- can be explained by the following reasons:

`1. A negligent, criminal approach to the selection of deported contingents, among whom were many children, aged over 65 years of age and sick people;

`2. The non-respect of directives about the right for deportees to bring with them provisions for two months of transfer.

`3. The lack of clean water, which forced the deported to drink unclean water. Many are dead of dysentery and of other epidemics.'

.

Werth, op. cit. , p. 44.


All these deaths are classed under the heading `Stalinist crimes'. But this report shows that two of the causes of death were linked to the non-respect of Party directives and the third had to do with the deplorable sanitary conditions and habits in the entire country.

Conquest `calculated' that 3,500,000 kulaks were `exterminated' in the camps.

.

Conquest, op. cit. , p. 306.


But the total number of dekulakized in the colonies never exceeded 1,317,022! And between 1932 and 1935, the number of departures exceeded by 299,389 the number of arrivals. From 1932 to the end of 1940, the exact number of deaths, essentially due to natural causes, was 389,521. And this number does not just include dekulakized, since after 1935 other categories were in the colonies as well.

What can one say about Conquest's affirmation of 6,500,000 `massacred' kulaks during the different phases of the collectivization? Only part of the 63,000 first category counter-revolutionaries were executed. The number of dead during deportations, largely due to famine and epidemics, was approximately 100,000. Between 1932 and 1940, we can estimate that 200,000 kulaks died in the colonies of natural causes. The executions and these deaths took place during the greatest class struggle that the Russian countryside ever saw, a struggle that radically transformed a backward and primitive countryside. In this giant upheaval, 120 million peasants were pulled out of the Middle Ages, of illiteracy and obscurantism. It was the reactionary forces, who wanted to maintain exploitation and degrading and inhuman work and living conditions, who received the blows. Repressing the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries was absolutely necessary for collectivization to take place: only collective labor made socialist mechanization possible, thereby allowing the peasant masses to lead a free, proud and educated life.

Source: Another view of Stalin by Ludo Martens

Continued...

[Propaganda]

Now, as for aiming to purge Trotskyists, Bukharinists and others, well, this is not true.

Now, the main reason for the "Great Purge":

Americans have difficulty understanding the Soviet crime of vreditel’stvo or "wrecking." This was an extraordinary crime for novel circumstances, but paradigmists and propagandists have confused almost everyone by promulgating the misleading idea that wrecking is a fake crime or trump charge used during the Great Purges as an excuse by the NKVD to arrest Stalin’s personal and political enemies. The Soviet system had an entire branch of its court system dedicated to jurisdiction over this and related crimes. "Wrecking" was chronic business mismanagement or economic malpractice, often involving behaviors demoralizing to underlings (of the kind alluded to in the previous paragraph). The crime was accompanied by what Western jurisprudence calls the mens rea or mental state of intention to do it. That someone consciously allowed abuses was a lesser charge. However, in all degrees of this crime, the accused was held to a higher degree of responsibility and care than many Westerners might consider "reasonable." Such "reasonableness" is a cultural artifact, however, and is therefore relative, not "objective," as writers like David Joravsky think. (Compare what were "reasonable working conditions" during the heyday of the American sweatshop to what employees expect as "reasonable" today.)

When a grain supply in the Soviet Union was contaminated with mud and filth, a Soviet official’s desire to investigate to find out if someone was to blame, and to what extent blame could be apportioned, has almost invariably been caricatured in the West as "scapegoating" for an economic and social system that could not work anyway. This requires one to believe that Soviet bureaucrats already expected or suspected immanent failure of their system, as if they did not believe in their own ideals, and were aware of a need to keep a step ahead of impending doom by a kind of dishonest "hedging" and irrational ritualistic exorcism of bogeymen blamed for ruining projects.

Totalitarian paradigmists are reluctant to concede that the Great Terror had any legitimate aims at all, or that it actually carried out any, despite cases like Kovalev’s that have now come to light. If the allegedly painful and repressive means used by Stalin and Yezhov were so obviously and egregiously "immoral," as Western critics assert, that should be immorality enough for plenty of negative propaganda. What need is there, then, to also misrepresent the ends or goals they pursued as irrational or evil? (When those that adhere to a paradigm know [on some level] that they’re wrong, their resistance to counter-evidence that would refute their paradigm is the fiercest.) Why? Because the paradigm is threatened by almost any good intention existing among high-level Soviet bureaucrats. Good deeds and gestures must be presented as anomalies or cynical power ploys. The idea that a provincial Soviet official like Kovalev would find himself in very serious or even mortal trouble with Moscow if he ignored a report of rape in his jurisdiction, for example, and especially if he did so and was carrying a Communist Party card, is the kind of event that new archival evidence and the statistics show to be typical, however. The evidence shows that lax officials and covert saboteurs were specifically targeted by Yezhov, especially if they had been opposition members, such as a White during the post-revolution Civil War, or had joined the Party during or after the Civil War. Such late-joining bogus "Reds" were rightly suspect. Defeated former White leaders needed a hideout and a refuge - those who could not just "disappear" into the bowels of Manchuria, as many did in the Soviet Union’s Far East at the very end of the Civil War in 1923. These stowaways in the Communist Party sought Party jobs and positions in rural areas a thousand miles from Moscow. Only the foolhardy dared to seek employment in that city of watchful eyes or its immediate environs.

American readers may be familiar with the bitter feelings that prevailed in the former Confederate States of America after the defeat of the Confederate Army in the U.S. Civil War. The defeated Southern states, which had seceded from the Union, not only had to surrender - to which many of their citizens, after a great deal of bloodshed, were at long last agreeable - but also had to acquiesce to re-admittance to the Union state by state. Some states were not re-admitted until five years after the war ended, and this only after the Union had established military governments to supervise and reconstruct them according to the plans of the North’s Radical Republicans. These reconstructed state governments were generally run by newly emancipated Black appointees, by carpetbaggers (Northerners who had gone to the South for this purpose), and by scalawags (collaborators with these others). As is well known, a majority of the populace of the South and many of their organizations opposed this system, covertly destabilizing, frustrating, and sabotaging it, like the defeated Whites (not to be confused with the "racial" Whites of the U.S. South) did after the Russian Civil War ended, becoming Yezhov’s chief suspects for the wrecking of collectivization and other Communist programs. The most notorious of these organizations in the U.S. South were the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of White Camellia. They used any means available to them: fraud, intimidation, covert violence, and the little discussed but highly effective day-to-day thwarting of the Freedmen’s Bureau - most analogous to the wrecking of Soviet economic plans.

During the post-Civil War Reconstruction in the U. S., a bitter issue arose in the U.S. Congress as to the degree of force that should be used to compel the uncooperative defeated States to obey. Terror was avoided. "Thwarting" was not nominated as a crime. President Lincoln demurred on all but the mildest of measures, and has been criticized for it to this day. As a result, the Reconstruction of the South was a failure for the very people whose rights were supposed to have been at stake - the former Black slaves of the South. Within a decade of the end of the war, the Democratic Party, which had been the pro-slavery party of the Old South, was back in power in each of the former Confederate states, having thrown appointed Blacks out of their offices. Things would have been entirely different if someone like Yezhov and an NKVD-like police organization had existed then and there with a free hand to compel obedience to "Force Laws" (as they were called in the U.S. at the time) and to the contemptuously ignored dictates of the Freedmen’s Bureau. While, as pointed out above, historical comparisons are never exact, there was little difference in attitude and behavior between the attitude and actions of a former White army officer in the Soviet Union who joined the Communist Party in 1921 - with his concealed contempt for, disregard of, and opposition to Moscow and the Communists Party’s economic plans - and a Confederate Army lieutenant ordered to obey and show respect for a Black mayor newly appointed by the Freedmen’s Bureau to run the lieutenant’s home town and care for his family.

Many would consider Lincoln’s indulgence, mercy, and leniency praiseworthy, as opposed to Yezhov’s ruthless thoroughness, but the suspicion remains that if the rights of an esteemed or valued European Christian group had been at stake in the U.S. South, instead of the rights of former Black slaves, Lincoln would have supported more vehement action. The obviously troublesome moral issue here is whether or not, and how far, one can compel human obedience, and at what cost. The "cost" is assessed in the currency of what is otherwise valued. The value or esteem enjoyed by groups whose interests would be lost, compromised, or sacrificed by such draconian measures is something Lincoln must have - at least unconsciously - weighed in all of this. This is what opened the door for charges of racism against him. This criticism has focused on Lincoln’s openly avowed greater concern to preserve the Union than to free Blacks or safeguard their human rights. Lincoln is known to have emancipated Blacks primarily as a war measure, i.e. to produce more soldiers for the Union, but this fact is not highly publicized. When Stalin did something similar, on the other hand, it is underlined with the greatest cynicism.

The problems Yezhov encountered in ferreting out former Whites were due in part to Moscow’s great leniency in the early Stalin years toward former opposition members, greater leniency than was shown by the U.S. Congress toward former Confederate leaders. During the early Stalin years, a former White army officer (like Kovalev in the example given above) was allowed to rise to any high position in government or Party apparatuses that his performance merited. This was not so in the post-Civil War U.S. in which, under President Andrew Johnson (who replaced the assassinated Lincoln just after the South’s surrender), the U.S. Congress passed legislation prohibiting former Confederate leaders from holding any offices in Southern states that were said to be under "reconstruction." President Andrew Johnson, who vetoed but was unable to stop such legislation, was regarded, like Lincoln, as an intractable frustrater of the Radical Republicans’ strong measures - the "Force Laws." Johnson was impeached but was acquitted by a margin of only one vote. The same Congress that forbade former Confederate leaders from holding any offices also dismantled Lincoln’s early Reconstruction work, putting the former Confederate states back under military control. The Soviets never went as far as the U.S. Congress in this shameful and little discussed chapter in American history. Perhaps if Lenin and Stalin had been as illiberal and vindictive as this majority of U.S. Congressmen, and had continued this policy, instead of being so permissive toward former White leaders, there would have never been a need for Show Trials, a Great Terror, or a "Yezhov," who was said, using a pun on the meaning of his name in Russian, to hold his writhing enemies in an "Iron Gauntlet" ("Yezhovye rukavitsy" after "derzhat v yezhovykh rukavitsakh").

Continued...

[Propaganda]

About purge "excesses" committed by Yezhov and why he was appointed:

Yezhov was suspected of "going too far" in the purges not only by Western critics but also by his own comrades A. Zhdanov, Molotov, by Stalin himself and by many others in the Party elite at the time. This was especially so when he instituted regional quotas for purges and conviction of entire lists of people who had been arrested and had been liable to verdict by military tribunal. These lists were sometimes signed for approval - convicting everyone on the list at once - by Molotov with Stalin’s approval. Yezhov was determined to completely liquidate what he believed to be a vast underground network of opposition: wreckers, Trotskyists, Zinovievists, German and other foreign spies and saboteurs, et. al. He openly and frankly said he would "get rid of all that scum which the revolution and the Civil War [my emphasis] had sent sloshing into the organs of state security." This statement accords completely with the new archival evidence as well as with the statistical analyses outlined above as to whom Yezhov actually targeted, refuting the fictional view of the totalitarian paradigmists that the targets were Stalin’s personal enemies, Old Bolsheviks, hopelessly uncooperative comrades, et. al.. This open, truthful, and clear statement by Yezhov has been disregarded because it does not fit the dominant paradigm well. In another paradigmatically disregarded statement, Stalin said, "we will destroy such enemies, even if [my emphasis] he is an old Bolshevik." Note the "even if," which takes on a new, clear, and sensible meaning in light of the new evidence. This is an instance in which the application and use of hair-splitting interpretative semantics and sociolinguistics would have been salutary. Kremlinologists have always employed these methods to make up for a painfully felt dearth of hard facts about what was really going on behind the "Iron Curtain." Every word in statements by Soviet leaders - even seemingly insignificant adverbs, conjunctions, and function words, like "even if" - was literally squeezed for every possible nuance in the hope that some hard facts would drip out. Yet, in the case of this statement by Stalin, Kremlinologists were remiss. The "even if" was elided or ignored because accounting for it would generate facts that run counter to the dominant paradigm. The "even if" could lead to the anti-paradigmatic inference that Stalin may have been hesitant to accept evidence against an Old Bolshevik. Read it again with emphasis on the "even if" and see.

The totalitarian paradigm gives a coherent but simple (and again fictional) account as to why Stalin selected Yezhov to head the NKVD, though much of it is very general. Yezhov is said to have been the "perfect puppet," the ideal Stalin-sycophant who was granted his big chance to prove what he had always craved and worked so hard for: recognition for loyalty. Or else Yezhov is caricatured as by Tsitriniak: as a homicidal, pathologically compulsive and fastidious trigger-man, a folklore caricature briefly but vividly acted out in the film Stalin, mentioned on page one of this essay. These are believable personalities, of course, but the new evidence yields a much different, equally coherent, and more detailed picture: Stalin selected Yezhov not for his excellence as a "hit man," but because it was known that during many years of Yezhov’s work in the Party, as Manning puts it, he "tended to heed worker complaints against managers and regard economic troubles as manifestations of wrecking" (op. cit., p. 139). This was so because Yezhov had been a metalworker for eight years, starting at age fourteen. This industry was considered the most radically Bolshevik and Stakhanovite. Complaints from the factory floor had, as historian Robert Thurston puts it, "particular resonance" with Yezhov (Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, p. 159). Yezhov knew, by experience, what it meant to be a worker - something that cannot be said for most Western theorists discussing the working class.

The Stakhanovites were a Soviet workers’ elite emulating the example set by Aleksey Grigoriyevich Stakhanov, who had broken norms for coal production in a single shift (102 tons mined). But there was much more to Stakhanovism than setting brute production records. Stakhanovites experimented with new ways of using machinery and new methods of expediting production. A Stakhanovite worker might recommend to a manager or foreman that a colored flag or other signaling device be set up at each work station in a factory so that if a worker’s tool broke or he needed other assistance, he could set off an "alarm" that told the manager to report immediately to the worker’s impaired work bench for corrective action. Many managers who had been officers of the White army in the Civil War were affronted at the idea that an "underling" could make them jump and run.

The negative effects of Stakhanovism on other "ordinary" workers due to the supposedly deleterious "tension" it created has been commented upon endlessly by writers who marshal every ounce of imagination to compile negatives about the former Soviet system. But the tensions Stakhanovism actually did create between workers and managers, experienced and well-understood by Yezhov, have been given little attention. Deserving Stakhanovites, based purely on merit, rose to replace numerous inefficient and suspect factory, farm, mine, and industrial managers during this era. In the Harvard émigré interview project commended above for having at least the merit of being empirical, there appeared only one case of a Stakhanovite being arrested for wrecking: he spent funds foolishly.
When these fresh facts are adduced, the totalitarian paradigmists rise up from their usual trough of credulity on a wave of newfound skepticism. This is because the new evidence, impartially examined, begets the belief that Yezhov was the right choice for NKVD head, and was chosen for reasons that conflict with the dominant paradigm. The new evidence seems to point to the idea that the NKVD entered industrial and other economic situations whenever complaints "arose from below," i.e. when protests of wrecking or other trouble were voiced by workers experiencing frustration, opposition, and sabotage by middle managers. The NKVD’s primary role was therefore economic police work, not political police work, which would have been a secondary role. The totalitarian paradigmists have inflated the latter role, eclipsing and excluding the former. This implies that national leaders in the Soviet Union, such as Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Ordzhonikidze, Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, and others were highly responsive to workers’ interests, demands, and criticisms. (As the Kovalev case previously described shows, local - especially rural - officials often were not, especially, and not surprisingly, if they had been Whites during the Civil War and formerly - or presently - members of the opposition.) This is a coherent and factually supported construction of the "Terror" that the totalitarian paradigmists seek to side step. As mentioned early in this part of the essay, the paradigm that one accepts and views the world through largely determines what one "notices" and does not notice. In this case, it is the NKVD’s previously "unnoticed" original and primary role in industrial and economic situations.

Continued...

[Propaganda]

On the assasination of Kirov and whether Yezhov's appointment precipitated from this and led to the "Great Purge":

The timing of the appointment of Yezhov makes more sense without the dominant paradigm. The assassination of Stalin’s purported "apparent successor," S. M. Kirov, on December 1, 1934 is usually cited as the event which triggered the appointment of Yezhov as NKVD head and the start of the Great Terror, as if an alarm had then gone out that do-or-die assassins and saboteurs were abroad and that "Marshall Yezhov" was needed to hold the line. To repeat, there is almost invariably something trite, melodramatic, and simplistic about the totalitarian paradigm’s explanations, an important reason for their widespread appeal and the ease with which they are retained in memory. (In these respects, they resemble much folklore.) Yezhov, at first enjoying the complete confidence of Stalin, is known to have been appointed at Stalin’s personal request to head a government commission controlling the course of the investigation of Kirov’s murder in the name of the Politburo. However, Yezhov was not appointed to the lofty post of General Commissar of State Security of the USSR (NKVD head) until shortly after September 25, 1936. This is a long interval of about 21 months after Kirov’s death, surely too long to be an "emergency response" to Kirov’s assassination. The more immediate incidents, which explain Yezhov’s appointment at this late date, were two major mine accidents that occurred in the spring and fall of 1936. In the spring accident in May, a mine collapsed, and men of the best Stakhanovite brigade were buried alive. Six managers were convicted of wrecking, and the assistant technical director of the mine was held responsible and was shot. The hunt for wreckers was not only already on before Yezhov’s appointment, but had reached its zenith in the national press at almost the same moment he received his post. A former Stakhanovite like Yezhov was the logical and best choice, not a paranoid triggerman, obsessive super-cop, or malefic Marxist equivalent to a "McCarthyite," which would have been more likely choices if the murder of Kirov had really been the reason for his appointment.

Source: Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio

Now, on to the purge of the Red Army officers. Here's an interesting read on the subject.

Journalist Alexander Werth wrote in his book Moscow 41 a chapter entitled, `Trial of Tukhachevsky'. He wrote:

`I am also pretty sure that the purge in the Red Army had a great deal to do with Stalin's belief in an imminent war with Germany. What did Tukhachevsky stand for? People of the French Deuxieme Bureau told me long ago that Tukhachevsky was pro-German. And the Czechs told me the extraordinary story of Tukhachevsky's visit to Prague, when towards the end of the banquet --- he had got rather drunk --- he blurted out that an agreement with Hitler was the only hope for both Czechoslovakia and Russia. And he then proceeded to abuse Stalin. The Czechs did not fail to report this to the Kremlin, and that was the end of Tukhachevsky --- and of so many of his followers.'

Something else that's interesting..

In 1937, Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov was working for the Central Commitee of the Bolshevik Party. A bourgeois nationalist, he had close ties to opposition leaders and with the Central Committee members from the Caucausus. In his book The Reign of Stalin, he regrets that Tukhachevsky did not seize power in 1937. He claims that early in 1937, after his trip to England, Tukhachevsky spoke to his superior officers as follows:

`The great thing about His Britannic Majesty's Army is that there could not be a Scotland Yard agent at its head (allusion to the rôle played by state security in the USSR). As for cobblers (allusion to Stalin's father), they belong in the supply depots, and they don't need a Party card. The British don't talk readily about patriotism, because it seems to them natural to be simply British. There is no political ``line'' in Britain, right, left or centre; there is just British policy, which every peer and worker, every conservative and member of the Labour Party, every officer and soldier, is equally zealous in serving .... The British soldier is completely ignorant of Party history and production figures, but on the other hand he knows the geography of the world as well as he knows his own barracks .... The King is loaded with honours, but he has no personal power .... Two qualities are called for in an officer --- courage and professional competence.'

More..

Churchill wrote in his memoirs that Benes `had received an offer from Hitler to respect in all circumstances the integrity of Czechoslovakia in return for a guarantee that she would remain neutral in the event of a Franco-German war.'

`In the autumn of 1936, a message from a high military source in Germany was conveyed to President Benes to the effect that if he wanted to take advantage of the Fuehrer's offer, he had better be quick, because events would shortly take place in Russia rendering any help he could give to Germany insignificant.

`While Benes was pondering over this disturbing hint, he became aware that communications were passing through the Soviet Embassy in Prague between important personages in Russia and the German Government. This was a part of the so-called military and Old-Guard Communist conspiracy to overthrow Stalin and introduce a new régime based on a pro-German policy. President Benes lost no time in communicating all he could find out to Stalin. Thereafter there followed the merciless, but perhaps not needless, military and political purge in Soviet Russia ....

`The Russian Army was purged of its pro-German elements at a heavy cost to its military efficiency. The bias of the Soviet Government was turned in a marked manner against Germany .... The situation was, of course, thoroughly understood by Hitler; but I am not aware that the British and French Governments were equally enlightened. To Mr.\ Chamberlain and the British and French General Staffs the purge of 1937 presented itself mainly as a tearing to pieces internally of the Russian Army, and a picture of the Soviet Union as riven asunder by ferocious hatreds and vengeance.'

The best evidence of the plot:

On May 8, 1943, Göbbels noted in his journal some comments made by Hitler. They show that the Nazis perfectly understood the importance of taking advantage of opposition and defeatist currents within the Red Army.

`The Führer explained one more time the Tukhachevsky case and stated that we erred completely at the time when we thought that Stalin had ruined the Red Army. The opposite is true: Stalin got rid of all the opposition circles within the army and thereby succeeded in making sure that there would no longer be any defeatist currents within that army ....

`With respect to us, Stalin also has the advantage of not having any social opposition, since Bolshevism has eliminated it through the purges of the last twenty-five years .... Bolshevism has eliminated this danger in time and can henceforth focus all of its strength on its enemy.'

. Göbbels, Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1942--1943, (Zurich, 1948), p. 322. Quoted in Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, La seconde guerre mondiale: caractères fondamentaux de la politique et de la stratégie, vol. 1, pp. 213--214.

Here's also Molotov's opinion. Apart from Kaganovich, Molotov was the only member of the Politburo in 1953 who never renounced his revolutionary past. During the 1980s, he recalled the situation in 1937, when the Purge started:

`An atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period; it was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Rykov and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle; the number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler. That far. Trotsky had similar links, without doubt. Hitler was an adventurist, as was Trotsky, they had traits in common. And the rightists, Bukharin and Rykov, had links with them. And, of course, many of the military leaders.'


Hope you enjoyed the reading.