INTRODUCTION

The U.S. ruling class is stepping up anti-communism in all sectors of society. They know that the relative decline of U.S. capitalism and the hardships—price increases, wage freezes, unemployment, cutbacks in essential services—they must impose on the American working class mean years of increased militancy and struggle. They well know that it is precisely such conditions which can lead to rejection of capitalist dictatorship by millions of working people, given the presence of a revolutionary communist party. Racism and anti-communism are the two principal ideological weapons the bosses have to weaken workers’ struggles and preserve their system.

These aspects of bourgeois ideology are foisted off upon petty- bourgeois intellectuals as well as upon workers. This article will examine three books* which, masquerading as objective scholarship, aim to push anti-communism upon intellectuals.

*Medvedev, Roy. A., Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Salisbury, Harrison E., The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. Tucker, Robert C., Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality.

That an intellectual audience is aimed at in each case is clear from the following facts:

(1) these books do not discuss the working class at all. They reflect, and try to inculcate, the idealist notion that communism can be intelligently considered from the point of view of ideas alone, or of certain petty-bourgeois forces, and not from the conditions of, and relations among, the masses of working people. Many intellectuals, unfortunately, believe this (perhaps unconsciously).

(2) They are written in a bookish language, foreign to the language of the masses, conforming to the language of intellectual discourse. Intellectuals in general feel more comfortable reading this kind of material, workers less so.

(3) They are loaded with pseudo-scholarly paraphernalia: bibliographies of rare works in foreign languages, many footnotes, etc. This is not to knock real scholarship, which—provided it is guided by revolutionary practice—is necessary to find out the truth about anything. But “scholarship” these writers provide is a total sham, intended only to deceive, and shoddy even by their own bourgeois historical standards. This is to fool the intellectual reader, who has been trained to respect footnotes rather uncritically as the hallmarks of “expertise.”

This review does not pretend to deal thoroughly with all important aspects of Stalin’s political career, and omits some important questions altogether (the question of the class struggles of the 30s and the "purges,"for example). Some of these have been dealt with excellently in past issues of PL Magazine (see “Trotsky: Just Another Right-Winger,” in PL, Vol. 9, No. 4, March-April, 1974, pp. 25-44; “Solzhenitsyn Slanders the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” PL, Vol. 9, No. 5, Oct.-Nov., 1974, pp. 51- 66). The reader should also read the PLP publication “Road to Revolution, III,” which examines the period of Stalin’s leadership of the CPSU in relation to the forward development of the international communist working-class movement.

The review does examine each of these three recent anti-Stalin books in some detail; exposes the phoniness of their scholarship, and thereby points out how the authors lie to the reader;and examines the political basis of their anti-Stalinism.

The most important conclusion is that anti-Stalinism is, and always has been, a masquerade for anti-communism. The attacks on Stalin are, when looked at with a little care, really attacks on Leninism and Lenin, on the concept of a democratic-centralist communist party, and on the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary essence of Marx’ and Engels’ work. In general, the “myth” of “Stalinism” is a form of anti-communism and anti-working class ideology tailor-made to appeal to petty-bourgeois intellectuals, to win them to ally with the ruling class, and so to acquiesce, however reluctantly, to the bosses’ plans for continued exploitation and world war. Ultimately, these books harm intellectuals, try to blind us to our own best interests—unity with the working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat—and try to get us to be sheep led to the slaughter for the imperialists. So, it is important to expose these, and all such books.

The essay will:

(1) Examine the use of source materials by Medvedev, Tucker, and Salisbury, and show its dishonest nature;

(2) Expose the internal contradictions, often very glaring, which these propagandists’ attempt to rewrite history forces them into;

(3) Expose the political line in each book, and the way attacks on Stalin are really poorly-disguised attacks on socialism.

I. THE SOURCES

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 introduced the first workers’ dictatorship, the first attempt of the bourgeoisie was to crush it by force. However, the young Soviet state proved stronger than the Entente powers had expected. Large-scale intervention by Japan, and smaller invasions by British and American forces were beaten back by the workers’ and peasants’ armies. Further invasions by Polish fascist troops under Pilsudski, and massive foreign aid to “White” armies inside Russia failed to overthrow the communist government. Rebellions against intervention broke out among British troops; whole “White” armies deserted to the Soviet side. Workers’ governments were set up briefly in Berlin and Munich, and in Hungary and Finland. In Britain, thousands of miners threatened violence if British aid to the “Whites” continued, and solidarity with the workers’ state played a large role in many strikes of war-weary workers in the U.S., especially in the Seattle General Strike (1919). Economies exhausted by war, torn by internal class struggle, and still deadly suspicious of one another, imperialists were not in a position to overthrow the Bolshevik state at once.

With external invasion temporarily shelved as a tactic to stop communism, the bourgeoisie settled into a more long-range campaign of undermining and isolating the Soviet Union. In this “cold war” the bourgeoisie first began to develop anti-communist “scholarship” to back up their lies about the Soviet state. Their first source of such “scholarship” was the thousands of counter-revolutionaries who had fled the Soviet Union as their wealth and privileged positions were taken away. Important among these were the (overwhelmingly intellectual) leaders of various counter-revolutionary political parties—such as the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats-the liberal bourgeois party under the Tsars), many (unfortunately, not all) of the Mensheviks, whose party had unashamedly collaborated in the bourgeois governments of Feb.-Oct. 1917 and who had plotted Lenin’s arrest and death, and others.

These emigres established publishing houses and journals, through which they churned out tons of “scholarly” anti-Soviet propaganda. In return, they were given money and positions in the Western European capitalist countries, and some of their leaders were made professors in prestigious universities (Kerensky, the S-R leader who was overthrown by the Bolshevik workers in Oct. 1917, eventually became a Professor at Stanford University, site of what is probably the largest center for “scholarly” anti-communism, the Hoover Institution). A few of these émigré presses still survive, though the political parties have died out. The most important (for the bourgeoisie) today are in Paris (YMCA and Kontinent), and in Munich (Grani). All openly receive money from the CIA, West German fascists like Axel Springer, etc., for smuggling anti-Soviet material into the USSR.

For some years in the 20s and 30s, the emigre press was the bourgeoisie’s main source of “scholarly” anti-communist information (al-though additional information was provided in other ways, particularly by the American Relief Administration, sent to gain “full information … without the risk of complication through government action” during the famine of 1921-2) (Carr, Bolshevik Revolution III, p. 342). But natural processes rapidly deprived émigrés’ reminiscences of any relevance, while the end of the Civil War cut down their contacts within the USSR and shut off their sources of information.

Bourgeois scholars today use émigré writings as minor sources of information only. All recognize they are biased as hell and apt to lie (Medvedev and Tucker each expose one or two incidents of such lying in their books). That they are used at all is, however, precisely because of these limitations. They give an authentically Russian “ring” to their stories, and are fanatically anti-socialist, anti-Stalin, and loyal to their masters.

Another source of information is the books by political defectors. These, again, are unreliable and well-known for lies. In addition, both defector and émigré tales are usually told in an anecdotal way, from a very limited viewpoint, with heavy reliance upon third-hand rumor and gossip. Most or all author-defectors were bureaucrats of some kind, and reflect the self-serving attitudes of such petty-bourgeois drones, viciously anti-working class and anxious to build little careers for themselves.

However, modern bourgeois scholars are not left solely with this dubious material, which [faded] fare for their anti-communist [faded] voluminous writings of Leon Trotsky and [faded] material published during Khrushchev’s time as chief revisionist of the USSR [faded] to chew on.

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