Long Live Stalin

LONG LIVE STALIN

Just when the French were celebrating the 200^th anniversary of their revolution, a very similar bourgeois revolution was fast changing the face of Eastern Europe and striking at the shores of the Soviet Union. The slogans were also the same. Freedom, democracy and market economy!

Perestroika and Glasnost might as well be the code name their action plan. The key man was of course Gorbachey, the biggest traitor to the working class, history has every produced.

Between him and the treachery stood one colossus figure – Joseph Stalin. Without destroying Stalin, Gorbachey could not have gifted the Eastern Europe to his Western allies and thus started, perhaps, the most vulgar distortion of history. Never before has history been so systematically falsified and twisted to demolish one single personality who had defied to die even after his death. But Stalin shall never die in the eyes of the working class – Long Live Stalin!

Yes, this shall forever be the slogan of the oppressed classes and no amount of slander or abuses will diminish the revolutionary character of Stalin. On the contrary, the more the bourgeois heaps abuses on Stalin, the more certain the working class becomes of his revolutionary credentials. What else can be expected from the bourgeois towards their most hasted enemy? They call him a dictator, a tyranny, a murderer! They say that between 1933-36, he killed innumerable countrymen to consolidate his dictatorship! There could not have been more blatant lies than these.

Yes, there were people killed. Those were the tumultuous years before the actual beginning of the 2^nd world war. By 1934, Hitler had consolidated his power in Germany and fascism had triumphed. It was Stalin, who had before any otherworld leader, recognized the dangers of fascism and the possibility of the 2^nd war. Speaking in the 17^th congress of the Party in 1934. This is what Stalin said:

“Chauvinism and preparation of war as the main elements of foreign policy: repression of the working class and terrorism in the sphere of home policy as a necessary means for strengthening the rear of future war fronts – that is what is now particularly engaging the minds of contemporary imperialist politicians.

It is not surprising that fascism has now become the most fashionable commodity among war-mongering bourgeois politicians. I am referring not only to fascism in general, but primarily, to fascism of the German type.”

After having warned the world about the war preparedness of the German fascist, Stalin went on the declare the resolve of USSR to fight this menace:

“There can be hardly any doubt that such a war would be the most dangerous war for the bourgeoisie. It would be the most dangerous war, not only because the people of the USSR would fight to the death to preserve the gains of the revolution; it would be the most dangerous war for the bourgeoisie for the added reason that it would be waged not only at the fronts, but also in the enemy’s rear. The bourgeoisie need have no doubt that the numerous friends of the working class of the USSR in Europe and Asia will endeavour to strike a blow in the rear at their oppressors who have launched a criminal war against the father land of the working class of all countries.”

No other leader at that time had any clear-sighted view regarding the aims and ambitions of Hitler and it was only Stalin’s Russia that had started preparation to meet the blitzkrieg of Hitler. It is of common knowledge that the Nazis won their war not just by their army. Before they actually attacked, for years together they infiltrated every organ of the other countries – bureaucracy, military, police, politics, everywhere. These were the famous fifth column of Hitler; USSR was also not spared from the virus of fifth column. On the contrary during 1933-36, thousands of Russians were bought off in the party, bureaucracy, military and police. Top party functionaries started working secretly for the Nazi masters. History has shown that because of this fifth column infiltrations, the French, Australia and numerous other countries could not even put up a token fight against the advancing armies of Hitler. De-Ciaul’s shameful run for the safety at the first sound of the approaching German army is a fact of history.

Stalin and his comrades had therefore realized that without purging the different organs of the State of USSR of the fifth columnists, the war could not be won. No country has ever won a war while being sabotaged from inside. The purges to root out the spies and saboteurs from the party and the other state organs. The foreign press in fact had fullest knowledge of the purges carried out in USSR during that period. It did not accuse Stalin of “murdering people” at that time but were actually trying to paint a picture to make the people believe that USSR was not so pure after all and was packed with Hitler spies and saboteurs and the massive purges had shaken up the foundation of USSR. Replying to such nonsense, Stalin in his report in the eighteenth congress I n 1938 said:

“Certain foreign pressmen have been taking drivel to the effect that the purging of Soviet organizations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Bukharin and other friends has “shaken” the Soviet system and caused its ‘demoralization’. All this cheap drivel deserves is laughter and scorn. How can the purging of Soviet organizations of noxious and hostile elements shake and demoralize the Soviet system? This Trotsky-Bukharin bunch of spies, assassins and wreckers, who kowtowed to the foreign world, who were possessed by a slavish instinct to grovel before every foreign bigwig and were ready to serve him as spies – this handful of people who did not understand that the humblest Soviet citizen, being free from the fetters of capital, stands head and shoulders about any high placed foreign bigwig whose neck wears the yoke of capitalist slavery – who needs this miserable band of venal slaves, of what value can they be to the people, and can they ‘demoralize’?

Yes today also it is people like Gorbachey and his western cronies who stand for the spies and wreckers and in turn support the fascism of Hitler. The ungrateful capitalist world has forgotten that it was Stalin and millions of comrades like him who stood between Hitler and his dream of world domination. If it was not for USSR of 1941-42, the world would have been under the boosts of Hitler.

Where these purges without any mistake? Were innocent people also killed during these purges? Yes there were. Wartime, with the fascism advancing is not a picnic time. It is not a time when one can pathologically alienate the bacteria. But it was Stalin who in 1938 itself admitted such mistakes. In the same report to the 18^th Congress he said:

“It cannot be said that the purges was not accompanied by grave mistakes. There were unfortunately more mistakes than might have been expected. Undoubtedly, we shall have no need to resort to the method of mass purges any more. Nevertheless the purges of 1933-36 was unavoidable and its results, on the whole were more beneficial……”

Do these words reflect the mood of a “Dictator” as the bourgeois historians are trying to make out of Stalin? Or does it show the sensitivity of a person who had to participate in a decision which though harsh, had to be taken to save the mankind from the onslaught of Nazi fascism??

Bruce Franklin, an American researcher, in the introduction to his book, “Essentials of Stalin” has presented the real extracts from the letters and communications of the Ambassador of America to Russia at the relevant time with his Government. The Ambassador, a staunch anti-communist had to admit to his Government that each of the trials which convicted the party functionaries like Bukharin etc., were the most fair trials he had ever seen. They were all open trials. Further, the American engineers who had worked during that period in Russia had openly admitted that the fifth column was every where in the production sector of USSR and could smash the country from within, thus making it a walkover to Hitler.

Those who criticize Stalin for carrying out the purges of 1933-36 are essentially those who are deeply disappointed at the defeat of the German fascism and the victory of working class of USSR under the leadership of Stalin.

Take for instance the other slander that is being spread at present regarding the “bureaucratic machination” of Stalin. But before one delves into the historical truth regarding this piece of lie, it is important to understand the significance of this allegation in the present context.

The mass upheavals in the East European countries has now proven beyond doubt the deep-rooted hatred the people had for the regimes ruling over them for the past thirty six years. The reactionary and fascist character of Causescue regime in Rumania cannot any longer be covered by the Red flag. Almost all the governments, from East Germany to Poland were in fact slightly different variations of the Causescue regime and have now been rightly dumped in the sewerage of history as “Communists”. Friends like Causescue had nothing in common with the communist but were in reality the traitors who usurped power from the communists after the death of Stalin. These were the representatives of the bureaucratic class which in collaboration with the free marked representatives wrested power after a protracted struggle between 1953-56. These were the very traitors whom Stalin fought and lost in his last days. But after coming to power, these rascals did not drop their communist pretensions for the fear of immediate reprisal from the working class. By fluttering the red flag, they had actually numbed the red movement.

But the bourgeois propagandists, instead of unmasking these friends, have in fact deliberately attacked the mask to defame communism. And to their greatest aid has come Gorbachev himself. Wearing the same mask of a communist, Gorbachev encourages the attack on Stalin by never once contradicting this bourgeois propaganda. The greatest enemies of Stalin are to-day being dubbed as “Stalinist” and the genuine mass movements which are uprooting the friends that have ruled Eastern Europe, are being portrayed as struggles against “Stalinism” to defame Stalin. Such are the massive distortions of history.

But such blatant lies cannot forever bury the truth. The struggle against the bureaucratic classes did not start in 1989 but had started emerging in the Soviet Union by the late 1920 and was initiated by Stalin himself. In his famous article “Organise mass criticism from below” written in 1988, Stalin had warned the working class regarding the dangers of the “communist bureaucrats” and had called upon them to fight his newly emerging danger. This is what Stalin said in the article:

“If it were only a question of the old bureaucrats, the fight against bureaucracy would be very easy. The trouble is that it is not a matter of the old bureaucrats. It is the matter of new bureaucrats, bureaucrats who sympathise with the Soviet government, and finally, the communist bureaucrats. The communist bureaucrats is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of party member……

How is this evil to be combated? I think that there is not and cannot be any other way of combating this evil than by organizing control from below by the Party masses, by inner party democracy. What objection can there be to rousing the fury of the Party membership against such corrupt elements and giving it the opportunity of sending such elements packing?”

After vividly bringing out the fact that almost all party organization like the Young Communist League, Trade Unions etc. were getting infested with the corrupt bureaucratic communists, Stalin posed the question:

“How are we to put an end to bureaucracy in all these organizations? There is only one sole way of doing this and that is to organize control from below, to organize criticisms of the bureaucracy in our institutions, of their shortcomings and their mistakes, by the vast mass of the working class. I know that by rousing the fury of the masses of the working people against the bureaucratic distortions in our organizations, we sometimes have to tread on the toes of some of our comrades who have past services to their credit. For their past services we should take off our hats to them, but for their present blunders and bureaucracy it would be quite in order to give them a good drubbing ……

From this follows the immediate task of the Party: to wage a ruthless struggle against bureaucracy, to organize mass criticism from below … (Emphasis supplied).

The greatest misfortune of Stalin and the working class was that the mass movement to destroy the newly emerging bureaucratic class could not be waged for more than a couple of years beyond 1980. Due to the victory of fascism in Germany and the threat of the second world war, the party had to close in ranks and go for a higher degree of centralism. In the entire was period, it was the same bureaucratic classes which consolidated itself without any mass opposition possible during was period except the purges from the top and finally emerged as the victorious class after defeating Stalin and the working class. It must of course be admitted that Stalin’s unshakable faith in his party and his party comrades and to an extent his failure to rouse the masses of the working people after the war, contributed to his own defeat. Such are therefore the inevitable truths of history.

In Stalin therefore we find a leader, who considered the fury of the grass workers the sole check to keep the erring leaders at bay. Which world leader, other than Mao Tse Tung, openly called upon the ordinary masses of workers to criticize their leaders and give them a drubbing and if necessary send them packing?? It is in this backdrop of history that we have to examine the policy and attitude of Stalin towards the peasantry. On this issue, the present slander campaign of the bourgeosie is to paint Stalin as an archenemy of the peasantry. First of all let us see how Stalin himself formulated the peasant question. Writing in 1925, in his article “Proletariat and Peasantry” he wrote:

“The second question for our making the question of the peasantry the corner-stone of our policy at the present moment is that our industry, which is the basis of socialism and basis of our regime rests on the home market, the peasant market … The fact that the peasant market is at the present moment the chief basis of an industry is precisely the reason why we, as the government, and we, as the proletariat, are interested in improving to the utmost the conditions of peasant economy, in improving the material conditions of the peasantry, in raising the purchasing power of the peasantry, in improving the relation between the proletariat and peasantry, in establishing the bond which Lenin spoke about, but which we have not yet established properly.

One thing or the other, either our local comrades will realize how very serious the question of the peasantry is, in which case they will really set about drawing the peasantry in our constructive work, improving peasant economy and strengthening the bond, or the comrades will fail to realize it, in which case things may end in the collapse of the Soviet power.”

This is how Stalin assessed the importance of the peasantry in the building up of the socialism. Improve their economy, improve their material conditions, improve the relation between the working class and peasantry or else the Soviet power would be dammed. Stalin continued to caution and reprimand the local communist comrades in rushing matters or coercing the peasantry. Instead of ever wanting to force the peasantry into a set pattern of production or do anything against their whishes, Stalin in fact said in the same article:

“On arriving at Moscow, comrades often trying to show the ‘right side of the cloth’ saying that all is well in the countryside where they are. This official optimism is sickening for it is obvious that all is not well, nor can it be. Obviously, there are defects, which must be exposed without fear of criticism and then eliminated. The issue is as follows:

Either we, the entire party, allow the non-party peasants and workers to criticize us, or we shall be criticized by means of revolts. The revolt in Georgia was a criticism. The revolt in Tambov was also a criticism. The revolt in Kronstadt was it not a criticism? One thing or the other; either we abandon this fear of criticism and allow us to be criticized by the non-party workers and peasants, who, after all, are once to feel the effects of our mistakes, or we do not do this, and discontent will accumulate and grow, and we shall have criticism in the form of revolts.”

We should always evaluate a person in the context in which he was working. The entire policy of allowing the peasantry to criticize the mistakes of the party, in many occasions the mistakes committed by the over enthusiastic local comrades of rushing the peasantry towards collectivism, was formulated by Stalin in 1925, the time when Soviet Union was transforming itself from the New Economic Policy to a socialist form. At that time Leon Trotsky was shouting from rooftop that Stalin was being soft towards the peasantry and that the only way of inducting the vacillating peasantry to socialist form was to force them in collectivization. At that very juncture it was Stalin who stood for total democracy for the peasantry, as his clear policy enunciation would reveal.

Whereas the above policy clearly demolishes the present stand against Stalin regarding his attitude towards the peasantry in general, it is important to demolish yet another blatant lie that is spread by the bourgeoisie. The allegation that Stalin collectivized the peasantry under gunpoint. While giving the report to the 17^th Congress of the party in February 1934, Stalin specifically dealt with this issue and warned the party members that any attempt to force the farmers to get collectivized without the farmers being convinced about such a step would prove disastrous.

It may not be out of place to recall the specific issue. At that time the Soviet Union was going through a revolutionary transformation in the agricultural sector. From the old form of private peasant farming, new forms were being adopted to accelerate the agricultural production. At that stage the most acceptable form was the ‘articles’ which were cooperatives of the farmers where the means of production including land were collectivized but the farmers continued to own poultry, small live stock, a cow, grain and household land. Side by side with these artels the ‘communes’ were also coming into existence. In the communes the individuals no longer owned any livestock, grain or household land. The commune form was undoubtedly a higher form of organization since with the help of higher technology it freed the farmer from taking care of his day to day needs like poultry products, bakery and the whole gamut of day to day essentials. But a change over from the artels to commune would mean the ‘losing’ of certain rights of ownership. Could this be achieved by the wishes of the party-members alone?? Or by coercing the farmers into the commune form as attempted by certain local enthusiastic comrades who wanted to make radical changes overnight? This is how Stalin concluded in his report to the 17^th Congress in 1934 after dwelling on great details on this issue:

“When will that be? (Stalin was referring to the establishment of communes) Not soon, of course. It would be criminal artificially to accelerate the process of transition from artel to further commune must proceed gradually, to the extent that all the collective farmers become convinced that such a transition is necessary.”

Such are the incontrovertible facts. Could there by a worser distortion of history by alleging that Stalin had collectivized the farmers by use of force?

But then, let us once again revert back to the bourgeois propaganda. After having painted a gruesome picture of Stalin as a tyrant, barbaric, bureaucrat and a murderer of millions etc. etc., the bourgeois propaganda links all these ‘despicable’ qualities of Stalin to the economy of the Soviet Union and the East European countries which have been steadily declining since the past 20 years or so to almost a moribund stage. They point at the empty shelves, the long queues and the falling standard of living of the people of these countries and shout – That is the result of Stalin’s misdeeds. The bureaucratic command system that Stalin built was bound to end up in shambles!

The empty shelves, the long queues, the falling standard of living and the moribund economy – all these are hard facts and not fictions, the last being the cause of the former three. These are the hard realities that gave birth to Gorbachey, the new messiah who has to-day become the main spokesman and celebrity of the capitalist world.

Being the part and parcel of the ruling class of the Soviet Union, Gorbachey would be the last person to expose the exploitative class nature of the ruling elite of USSR and the Eastern European countries. Because if he did so, he cannot escape to reveal the fact that this class had actually come to power between 1953-56 after the death of Stalin. He would have to further reveal that the free market (plain capitalist) representatives in the party had in fact allied with the bureaucratic class before and after 1953 to overthrow Stalin and his comrades. He has to also reveal that the decline in the economy really started only after 1956 and was due to the massive appropriation of the surplus of the working class of USSR and Eastern European countries by the bureaucratic classes of these countries. He has also to admit that the fortunes and luxuries that the mass struggles of the Eastern European countries have unearthed are the result of this appropriation. He has to finally also reveal his own class-nature and leadership and the character and contradictions of the present struggle in USSR and East European countries.

But Gorbachev will not do any of these exercises, for his aim is not to overthrow exploitation in general but to replace the present vulgar consumerist mode of appropriation by the bureaucratic classes by a capitalist mode of appropriation. While the former mode of appropriation can only kill any economy like cancer, the latter mode atleast does not cease all developments of the society till the point when the production relations come into irreconcilable contradiction with the productive forces.

Let us therefore turn to the irrefutable facts that fly in the face of the present bourgeois propaganda. The following comparable table will speak for itself.

Growth of Industry in the USSR and the Principal Capitalist Countries in 1913-38

Country	1913	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938
USSR	100	380.5	457.0	562.6	732.7	816.4	908.8
USA	100	108.7	112.9	128.6	149.8	156.9	120.0
Great Britain	100	87.0	97.1	104.0	114.2	121.9	113.3
Germany	100	75.4	90.4	105.9	118.1	129.3	131.3
France	100	107.0	99.0	94.0	98.0	101.0	93.0

This period is chosen as in important epoch in the industrial development because this starts before the first world war (1913) and ends at the beginning of second world war (1939). 1913 is chosen as the base year and 100 denotes the existing industrial output in 1913 in the respective country. This table would show that USSR under the rule of the working class with Stalin at the head had a growth rate of more than 990% compared to the pre-first-world-war level. Whereas none of the capitalist country could cross even 20%. No body has been able to contradict the figures given in the table which was first presented in the 18^th Congress Report to the CPSU in March 1939. On the contrary, even Gorbachev had to admit gudgingly that Soviet Union did achieve such dizzy heights of production which was unheard of in the history. This trend continued till around 1960 and then the decline started. Do these figures even remotting suggest the sluggish and alcoholic work culture of the working class in the Khruschev-Breznev era?? Till 1953, the working class was the class in power and they produced for themselves and this alone can explain the dizzy heights of production. As vanquished, they stopped producing. That explains the decline beyond 1960’s.

Summing up the historical achievements of the working class during the period 1933-38, this is what Stalin reported in the 18^th Congress:

“The bourgeoisie of all countries asserts that the working class, having destroyed the old bourgeois system, will be incapable of building anything new to replace the old. The working class of our country has proved in practice that It is quite capable not only of destroying the old system but of building a new and better system, a socialist system, a socialist system, a system, moreover, to which crises and unemployment are unknown.

The bourgeoisie of all countries asserts that the peasantry is incapable of taking the path of socialism. The collective-farm peasants of our country have proved in practice that they can do so quite successfully.”

Even as late as in 1952, before in death, in a letter written to L.D. Yavoshenko on May 22, 1952, Stalin’s main concern was the well-being of the working class and as its true representative, he then wrote:

“It would be wrong to think that such a substantial advance in the cultural standard of the members of society can be brought about without substantial changes in the present status of labour. For this, it is necessary, first of all, to shorten the working day at least to six, and subsequently to five hours. This is needed in order that the members of society might have the necessary free time to receive an all-round education. It is necessary, further, to introduce universal compulsory polytechnical education, which is required in order that the members of society might be able freely to choose their occupations and not be tied to some one occupation all their lives. It is likewise necessary that housing conditions should be radically improved, and that real wages of workers and employees should be at least doubled, if not more, both by means of direct increase of wages and salaries, and, more especially, by further systematic reductions of prices for consumer goods.

These are the basic conditions required to pave the way for the transition to communism.”

It is this Stalinism; the working class would once again raise the slogan- Long Live Stalinism.

But the bourgeois propaganda wants the world to believe that Stalinism is not what Stalin stood for but the façade behind which Khrushchev, Breznev, Caucescue and such people work.

The form is being attempted to be confused with the content. The arch enemies of Stalin being passed on as