[Marxism] Re: Deaths under Stalin

[Ozleft <ozleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stalinist mass murders. The issue is not Trotsky versus Stalin but the
real history of Russia in the 20th century versus psychopathic Stalin
holocaust historical revisionism

By Bob Gould

In the 1930s Trotsky described Stalinism as the syphilis of the labour
movement, and the weird outbreak on Marxmail of disturbed and almost
pathological historical denial about Stalin's crimes looks like a very
advanced case of that unfortunate illness.

What's amazing to me is that apart from John Lacny and Einde
O'Callaghan, no one much else has taken up the propositions put forward
by the strange Stalinists on this list.

Particularly striking is the fact that the discussion proceeds with
little reference to the enormous new literature about Stalin's crimes
that is now available, written mainly by serious academics who have dug
into the Soviet archives.

There has always been a large memoir literature of people who survived
the gulags: horrifying and moving books such as the memoir of the
founder of the Palestine Communist Party, a survivor of the camps,
"Weissberg's Conspiracy of Silence", and many many others.

Historians, both Soviet and international, did a pretty fair job over
the past 30 years, people such as Robert Conquest, Antonov Ovseenko, the
two Medvedevs, etc.

The primitive Stalinists pour abuse on Conquest's head, but the fact
that he's a right-winger politically doesn't invalidate his pioneering
work on the great purges, which still stands the test of time. Shoot the
messenger if you like, but consider his evidence seriously, which these
Stalinists are quite incapable of doing.

It was necessary in the past for opposition communists of all stripes,
and honest historians, to assemble the evidence about Stalin's crimes
with great difficulty, although it was possible. I have in my library
useful books such as a New Park publication about Khrushchev's Secret
Speech, published in 1967 and Ernest Germain/Mandel's book, "20
Questions on the History of the CPSU(B)", which we published laboriously
here in Australia in 1963.

In those days, most of the members of the Communist Party rejected the
evidence of the Stalin regime's crimes, but over time the truth
permeated just about all of the older generation of Australian
communists, except for a few cantankerous diehards.

Since the opening of the Stalinist archives in the early 1990s the
amount of definitive evidence of Stalin's crimes has grown enormously.
The primitives who've been belting out Stalinist prejudices on Marxmail
in the past couple of days must have had their heads buried in the sand.

Two major academic studies of the gulag system have been published in
the past two years: the Yale University Press series based on archive
material now numbers about 20 books, and Sebag Montefiore's book on
Stalin's court is a major, well-documented work.

The literature is enormous and impressively documented from Soviet
archival sources. The evidence about the nature of the Stalin regime is
definitive.

Cranks who still deny the evidence deserve to be locked up in the same
intellectual psychiatric ward as the Hitler holocaust denier David
Irving. They're the same kind of people.

A Russian Australian, Mara Mustafeen, has written a major work based on
her investigations in the Soviet archives of the fate of her family, who
were among the Harbinsky -- about 30,000 Russians from Harbin, in China,
who were unfortunate enough to return to the Soviet Union in 1936. They
were almost all murdered by Stalin's regime.

The Stalin holocaust denier who referred to the 700,000 or so people
murdered in 1937-38 as Trotskyists displays pathological ignorance of
well-established and widely available facts. In addition, the
overwhelming majority of these people were not Trotskyists. The term
Trotskyism was just a Stalinist catch-all term for any Communist
opposition to Stalin's rule.

I have sitting on my desk a powerful and important book, Stalin's
Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, edited by
Barry McLaughlin and Kevin McDermott, a paperback published by Palgrave
McMillan in 2004. The cover reproduces a photo of Ezhov and Stalin taken
in 1937, overlaid with plan of the Butovo execution grounds of the
Soviet secret police, where more than 20,000 people were shot in front
of open pits in 1937-38.  This extraordinary collection of essays
contains serious studies of various aspects of the Stalinist repression.

Mass campaigns were conducted by the Stalinist secret police for the
murder and repression of about 12 categories of people, including
Germans, Poles, Greeks, Afghans, Koreans, Chinese, Finns, Latvians,
Estonians and even handicapped people. In 1938, 37 members of a
deaf-mute society in Moscow were murdered.

Of the 4000-odd German-speaking Communists in the USSR, 70 per cent were
arrested and 90 per cent of those were killed; 128,000 Poles were
arrested, including tens of thousands of Polish Communists, and 110,000
of the Poles were murdered.

The overwhelming majority of Finnish, Latvian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and
Estonian Communists in the USSR were arrested and most of them were
murdered by the regime. Ten of the 14 commissars of the Hungarian soviet
republic, in exile in the USSR, were killed.

The officer corps of the Red Army was decimated, with the obvious result
that the Soviet army suffered serious defeats in the early stages of
World War II.

Most of the Communist Party central committee members elected at the
1934 Stalinist so-called Congress of Victors most had been murdered by
1939, as had most of the delegates to the congress.

Anyone who thinks that the Stalinist repression in any way assisted the
Soviet Union and the Communist movement is at best willfully ignorant.
They also display a frightening lack of anything resembling common
humanity, which in my view is an essential requirement for a useful
contribution to the socialist project.

Anyone who could read any of the representative books of memoirs of the
gulag survivors, or the sombre material now available from the archives,
without some degree of disturbance, has to be lacking in human sympathy.

I lived through the 1950s and the 1960s, during which time many old
Communists in Australia became acquainted with the real history of
Stalin's crimes, and the emotional response of many of them was
palpable. A representative example is the prominent Communist writer
Frank Hardy's essay, The Heirs of Stalin
http://members.optushome.com.au/spainter/Heirs.html.

In due course I will assemble a bibliography of all this important
material and post it on Marxmail. The issue in these historical matters
is not simply Trotsky versus Stalin, it's the real history of the 20th
century versus Stalin holocaust revisionism.




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