The Damning Consequences of Stalin and Stalinism

 By David Starr

 

On February 25, 1956 Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev made a shocking report at the 20^th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR in Moscow. The report was long but provided necessary details of the subject Khruschev was speaking about: the legacy of Josef Stalin and Stalinism. While the report was at times rhetorical it finally exposed “Uncle Joe.” The following is Part 1.

 

Khruschev used the term, “the cult of the individual,” and in Stalin’s case individuality was stretched beyond sanity. Khruschev mentioned how the cult of the individual was denounced by “the classics of Marxism-Leninism.” Marx wrote a letter to Wilhelm Bloss, a German political worker. It stated, “From my antipathy to any cult of the individual, I never made public during the existence of the [1^st] international the numerous addresses from various countries which recognized my merits and which annoyed me. I did not even reply to them, except sometimes to rebuke their authors.” 

 

And Vladimir Lenin, Khruschev said, “being a militant Marxist-revolutionist, always unyielding in matters of principle, Lenin never imposed his views upon his co-workers by force. He tried to convince. He patiently explained his opinion to others. Lenin always diligently saw to it that the norms of party life were realized, that party statues were enforced, that party congresses and plenary sessions of the central committee took place at their proper intervals.”

 

Further, “In December 1922, in a letter to the party congress, [Lenin] wrote: ‘After taking over the position of general secretary [of the communist party], comrade Stalin accumulated immeasurable power in his hands and I am not certain whether he will always be able to use his power with required care.’” Lenin also said, “Stalin is excessively rude, and this defect, which can be tolerated among us Communists, becomes a defect which cannot be tolerated in one holding the position of general secretary. I propose that the comrades consider the method by which Stalin would be removed from this position and by which another man would be selected for it, a man, above all, would differ in one quality, namely, greater tolerance, greater loyalty, greater kindness, and more considerate among the comrades, a less capricious temper, etc.”

 

Khruschev was quoting Lenin’s “Testament,” the last wishes from Lenin before he died. 

 

Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was a target of Stalin’s wrath. Angry, Lenin wrote to him: 

 

“Dear Comrade Stalin!

 

You permitted yourself a rude summons of my wife to the telephone and a rude reprimand of her. Despite the fact that she told you she agreed to forget what was said. I have no intention to forget so easily that which is being done against me. I need not stress here that I consider as directed against me that which is being done against my wife. I ask you, therefore, that you weigh carefully whether you are agreeable to retracting your words and apologizing, or whether you prefer the severance of relations between us.

 

Sincerely: Lenin, March 5, 1923”

 

Because of the overall circumstances, Lenin coped with anxiety as well as trying to recover from a serious illness. Khruschev said, “…we must be convinced that Lenin’s fears were justified” about Stalin. 

 

A monumental work was originally published in 1972 titled “Let History Judge” by Soviet historian and Marxist Roy Medvedev. It was initially banned in the USSR. But the book was updated and published in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s during the Gorbachev era.

 

Medvedev provides a detailed analysis about Stalin and Stalinism regarding his actions as a tyrant. For example:

 

• “[Stalin] was trying to combine the new social system with an anti-democratic regime of absolute personal power.”

 

• “It is acknowledged by historians of all persuasions that Stalin was responsible for the Germans’ great advantage of surprise [during World War II] and for the Soviet troops’ unpreparedness. It is also generally acknowledged the Soviet Union entered the worst war in history with its best military and civilian leaders recently destroyed.”

 

• “Stalin was in fact a mediocre commander. [His] personal qualities–his nastiness and narrow-mindedness, his contempt for people and the boundless love of power, his suspiciousness, and his bureaucratic style of leadership–were bound to effect his behavior as a commander. Most of Stalin’s wrong decisions were so extravagantly and senselessly costly that they cannot be condoned.”

 

• “Many commanders of the projected guerrilla units, who were in civilian work in peacetime, were arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ and ‘diversionists.’”

 

• “Stalin’s absence from his post as head of the state and the party from June 23 to the beginning of July was an important reason why the Nazis penetrated so swiftly and deeply into the USSR.”

 

• “Stalin considered himself an expert on the nationality question, but he had a highly biased view of the different nationalities inhabiting the USSR. To some nationalities he applied the criminal policy of mass deportation. More than five million people were deported.”

 

There is much more information Medvedev writes about in his analysis of Stalin and Stalinism. It is an interesting read. 

 

Another book, “Lenin’s Final Fight – Speeches and Writings, 1922 – 1923,” published by Path Finder Press, offers what circumstances Lenin was dealing with in the early years of the October Revolution in his eventual opposition to Stalin. Rather than go into the contents of the book, here are reviews written about it that reflect its’ analysis:

 

“Supports the argument against the thesis that Stalinism was a direct projection of Leninism.”

–Robert V. Daniels, Professor Emeritus, University of Vermont

 

“Some of the issues he addressed were: how to forge a union of workers and peasants republics…Many of the documents were suppressed by Joseph Stalin’s regime for more than 30 years.”

–Crescent

 

“This condensed version of tumultuous occurrences is very well chronicled and authenticated.”

–U.S.I. Journal (India)

 

“He argued that Russia should respect the rights of the independent republics (Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc.) ‘I declare war to the death on dominant national chauvinism.”

–Socialist Review

 

“The collection aims to demonstrate that Lenin was opposed to the trajectory that the politically victorious Stalin and his allies were to embark upon following Lenin’s death.”

–Book News

 

Looking further at Lenin’s Testament, Wikipedia composed detailed descriptions of the document, and quoting Lenin’s words:

 

Lenin gave his views of Stalin and Leon Trotsky, another leader of the 1917 October Revolution: 

 

“Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle with the C.C. [Central Committee] on the question of the People’s Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by his outstanding ability. He is perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work. These two qualities of two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.”

 

A split did occur, as the government’s leaders took a side, only to change and there became a switching of individuals to different sides. As a result, Stalin took full advantage of these changing of sides, playing one leader off against another and so on.

 

The contributors of Wikipedia wrote about an article Lenin had composed, “In the December 1922 article, “Nationalities issue,” Lenin criticized the actions of Felix Dzerzhinsky, Grigory Ordzhonikidze and Stalin in the Georgian Affair by accusing them of ‘Great Russian Chauvinism.’” Lenin was quoted as saying, “I think that a fatal role was played here by hurry and the administrative impetuousness of Stalin and also his infatuation with the renowned ‘social-nationalism.’ Infatuation in politics usually plays the worst role.”

 

In an irony of all ironies, Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were not Russian, they were Georgian, and were trying to impose “Great Russian Chauvinism.”

 

Wikipedia’s contributors further wrote, “Lenin’s testament presented by the ruling triumvirate (Josef Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev) with an uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand, they would have preferred to suppress the testament since it was critical of all three of them as well as their ally Nikolai Bukharin and their opponents, Leon Trotsky and Georgy Pyatakov. Stalin stood to lose the most since the only practical suggestion in the testament was to remove him from the position of the General Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee.

 

“On the other hand, the leadership dared not go directly against Lenin’s wishes after his death, especially with his widow insisting on having them carried out.” A compromise was made and the testament was made available on the following conditions:

 

• “The testament would be read by representatives of the party leadership to each regional delegation separately.”

 

• “Taking notes would not be allowed.”

 

• “The testament would not be referred to during the plenary meeting of the Congress.”

 

So, yes, there were attempts to keep it away from the general public, and only a select number of officials could see it. It was made, at the least, partially available after Stalin’s death in 1953.

 

Lenin continued to be concerned about “Stalin’s harsh leadership and the split between Trotsky and Stalin,” resulting in “Trotsky being expelled from the Soviet Union by the Politburo in February 1929.”  Trotsky continued to oppose Stalin and Stalinism in the years that followed, writing books and pamphlets. He founded the Fourth International to counter the Communist International headed by Stalin.

 

Perhaps Trotsky’s most well-known book is titled “The Revolution Betrayed.” In it, Trotsky details how the original Bolshevik government denigrated into a bureaucratic entity, thanks mainly to the Stalin faction, of which Zinoviev and Kamenev were at one time a part of, with all of them leading the USSR. But, eventually, Zinoviev and Kamenev became “enemies of the people” after they joined forces with Trotsky to try and stop Stalin from getting more power.

 

Regarding the change in the government, it could be called a gradual Stalinist coup, where Stalin did indeed gain absolute power. Trotsky wrote, “The bureaucracy conquered something more than the Left Opposition [which was lead by Trotsky to oppose Stalin] . It conquered the Bolshevik party. It defeated the program of Lenin, who had seen the chief danger in the conversion of the organs of the state ‘from servants of society to lords over society.’ It defeated all these enemies, the Opposition, the party and Lenin, not with ideas and arguments, but with its own social weight. The leaden rump of bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution.

 

“The entire effort of Stalin was thenceforth directed to freeing the party machine from the control of the rank-and-file members of the party. In this struggle for ‘stability’ of the Central Committee, Stalin proved the most consistent and reliable among his colleagues.”

 

Trotsky and the Left Opposition tried to stop persecution of those being critical. “Demands for party democracy were through all this time the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they were hopeless. The platform of the Left Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written into the Criminal Code “punishing as a serious state crime every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism.” Instead of this, there was introduced into the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself.”

 

When it came down to it, “The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The prohibition of factions ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders. The police-manufactured monolithism of the party resulted in a bureaucratic impunity which has become the sources of all kinds of wantonness and corruption.”

 

Examples of Communist Party members who were persecuted were Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev. Medvedev provides information in his book. 

Trotsky, having been exiled out of the USSR, “was condemned to death in absentia. He was stripped of all his positions in the government. A special group was set up within the NKVD [security] to get him. Several attempts were made on his life. On August 20, 1940, Trotsky was murdered in his carefully guarded house near Mexico City.” His “crime?” Being “an enemy of the people.”

 

As for Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, they were imprisoned, no doubt tortured to get confessions out of them, and after that executed. In his final words at the “Show Trials,” Bukharin did speak up about his persecution, saying, “Confessions of the accused are not essential. Confessions of the accused are a medieval juridical principle.” Bukharin also had more to say when being questioned, being tactical in his words. The “crimes” by these three revolutionaries? Instigating a “counterrevolution,” and “being enemies of the people.”

 

It would be interesting to read quotes from Stalin, although some critics say the following are not attributable to him. But given Stalin’s nature, it would make sense to think that Stalin did say these things:

 

(The following are from the Thought Catalog.) 

 

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths a statistic.”

 

“Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don’t let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?”

 

“Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem.”

 

“People who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

 

It’s unfortunate that Stalin set a precedence for the practice of socialism. But, as hard as it is, Stalinism must be separated from socialism, as well as Marxism and communism. For socialism and Marxism, there have been varying degrees of both. For communism, it actually hasn’t existed, since it is an epoch and would take perhaps hundreds of years to be established and developed.

 

Khruschev made a very important decision when he exposed the crimes of Stalin. They must be known further.