Markin comment:
In 2007-2008 I, in vain,
attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American
presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed
election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the
event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious,
in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who
really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the
Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world
politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially
the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois
commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things
to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies,
the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for
a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some
of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on if you like
************Stalin
An October 5, 2007 Associated
Press news item out of Moscow concerning discovery of some long buried bodies
that had been shot caught my eye. It seems that some workers on a
reconstruction site in that city have unearthed a few dozen bodies buried since
the 1930’s, many of them showing signs of having been shot in the head. The
newsworthy point is that this building was adjacent to the infamous KGB
headquarters at the Lubiyanka Prison, site of many political executions during
the time of the Stalinist reign of terror at that time. The unearthed bodies
are presumed victims of those purges. It brought to my mind that this is the 70th
Anniversary of the height of that madness. This is hardly an anniversary occasion
for celebration, except for those few unreconstructed Stalinists who are
muttering in their mush about Trotskyite conspiracies, agents of Hitler and the
Mikado and other such babble. It is an appropriate time, however, to make a few
comments about what all that evil time meant politically and on the destructive
nature of Stalinism as the ‘face ‘of socialism that still has ramifications for
the international working class these many years later.
Many years ago I read British historian Robert Conquest’
s study The Great Terror that vividly describes the arbitrariness of the
prosecutions and executions, their extent and the chilling atmosphere on the
political life, such as it was, of the times. The book is still worthwhile
reading with the following caution in order to get a partial flavor of the bleakness
of the times and the extent of the political freeze placed on Russian society. Conquest
had his own axe to grind and was using his study as prima facie evidence that
Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ was a retrograde step in the fight for
human progress. He thus comfortably took his place as an active anti-communist
agent on behalf of Western imperialism. Alas, he was not alone in such
endeavors. A virtual cottage industry grew
up around that premise, especially at the height of the Cold War in the 1950’s
and especially by the ‘god that failed’ crowd. I would only add that
anti-Stalinist, pro-communist militants, led during the 1930’s by the Bolshevik
revolutionary Leon Trotsky and others, did,
and today can, quote chapter and verse
the crimes, high and low, of Stalinism with the best of the anti-communist
cottage artisans. The difference, and no small matter, is that we did not
‘outsource’ this fight to international imperialism.
One cannot mention the
Stalinist purges without mentioning the name of Leon Trotsky, a central figure
in this drama. Yes, there was a general mopping up of any and all previous political
oppositions, including a significant number of former Stalinist factionists
(particularly from the so-called “Congress of Victors” of 1934). Yes, anyone
conceivably political, or who knew anyone conceivably political, or who just
ran afoul of the KGB was rounded up. And beyond that anyone who, for the most
bizarre and arbitrary reasons, including wrong nationality was suspect. But in
the end it was the three well-known political trials that not only captured the
headlines but can serve today as an explanation for the rationale, if that is
the word, of those events. And at the center was the hated figure of Trotsky,
who also faced the Stalinist executioner’s blade later. I might add that the
vaunted Western press of the times, notably in America, the New York Times and
the liberal Nation magazine took the accusations at the trials as good coin.
They were more than willing to give Vyshinsky a prosecutorial good conduct
certificate. Of course, those were the ‘popular
front against fascism days’ of blessed liberal memory and they were all good
fellows and true- Stalinists included. Oh well, the names change but some
things never change.
Let us be clear Zinoviev,
Kamenev, Radek, Rykov, Bukharin and the other lesser prisoners in the dock for
the most part were at that time political opponents of Trotsky’s who, for the
most part, had capitulated more than once to Stalin. But they were also the
core of the Bolshevik Party that made the revolution in 1917. To suspect that
cadre who had spent their whole lives in the service of the revolution to have
really spent that time trying to destroy the revolution defies description.
Even the editors of the Nation, in their more lucid moments, should have been
able to fathom that. But here is the point- these may not have been our people,
but they were our people. It may be not be important today to most people but
these were in no need of good conduct certifications by a later generation of
Stalinists, like Khrushchev and Gorbachev. Particularly not Trotsky, who fought
Stalinism to the end.
During much of the Cold War the
‘face’ of Stalinism to the Western public was the Gulags, the labor concentration
camps. To those of us with a greater political focus the ‘face’ of Stalinism was
the purge trials and political murders. Under either impression we are very,
very far away from the promises held out by the socialist vision. The sad
political fact is, however, that Stalinism was never politically defeated by
anti-Stalinist, pro-socialist militants. Rather the demise of the Soviet Union
and the other Eastern European states run by Stalinist bureaucracies imploded.
The various causes of that implosion are beyond the scope of what I want to
comment on here. However, we have, and we continue to pay a huge political
price for the fact that we were unable to do that political task of politically
defeating Stalinism. As a result the general political consciousness of the
vast majority of the international working class has turned against socialism
as a solution to the pressing human problems of the day. In short, we have been
left with the Promethean task of putting socialism as a societal solution back
on the agenda. If there is one more reason to hate the Stalinist betrayal of
socialism that, my friends, says it in a nutshell.
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