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The Human cost of Communism - 100 Million

anticommunist | 14.04.2004 12:01

A new book claims that the victims of communism last century number between 85 and 100 million.

The Human cost of Communism - 100 Million

A new book claims that the victims of communism last century number between 85 and 100 million. But, even before their 848-page "Black Book of Communism'' was published, the 11 experts split up in bitter dispute over their gruesome findings.

Reuters said: "Were Stalin's purges, Pol Pot's genocide and the millions of other deaths under the hammer and sickle central to the communist system? Were they crimes against humanity on the same par as Nazi atrocities?

"The 11 historians, many of them Maoists, Trotskyites or communists in their rebellious younger years, examined the history of the former Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and non-governing communist movements to produce their detailed estimates of victims. Reviewers hailed the ``Black Book'' as a first global study of the victims of one of the two totalitarianism's that have marked the 20th century.

It seems that some of the researchers behind the book are upset that the book makes the communists look like criminals or mass murderers "like the nazis". This is incredible. If National Socialism, Fascism, Peronism, Distributism, Social Credit, the Falange or any other group/ideology linked with 'Nationalism' killed anything like 100 million it would be on the news every night - and bear in mind this book doesn't cover events like the French Revolution that happened in the 18th century.

The book estimates communists claimed 65 million lives in China, 20 million in the former Soviet Union, two million in Cambodia and North Korea each, 1.7 million in Africa, one million in Vietnam and Eastern Europe respectively and 150,000 in Latin America.

Reuters continues: ``The facts are stubborn and they show the communist regimes committed crimes against about 100 million people''...

"Werth, whose detailed descriptions of Lenin's terror regime were rated by reviewers as some of the best parts of the book, said there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and communism" Yes, about 100 million.

anticommunist

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

Extremely old news

14.04.2004 12:44

FFS, this book was published 5 years ago!

Have sales been slipping a bit lately, as everyone notices that the USA is working hard to beat Stalin's bodycount?

How about putting some NEWS on the newswire?

David


The truth

14.04.2004 13:03


...but everone knows that capitalism kills billions of people every year, just on building sites in Surrey...

Red Ted
mail e-mail: offthepig2004@hotmail.com


Correction--the human cost of STALINISM

14.04.2004 13:31

You are simply repeating the hoary old lie promoted by right-wing/anarchist "historians" that Stalinism was the continuation of "communism".

Not true.

In order to consolidate his grip on power, Stalin first had to frame-up and assassinate virtually all of the leaders of the 1917 October Revolution. In other words before he could embark on his genocidal slaughter, Stalin first had to DESTROY Bolshevism, not continue it. And whereas in the time of Lenin, repression was directed at urban and rural capitalists (on whom for example Makhno relied), Stalin directed it towards both the capitalists AND increasingly the most class consscious workers who had defended the Revolution during the Civil War.

Read Leopold Trepper's book "The Great Game". He was not a Trotskyist, but he did pay tribute to the heroism of the Russian Trotskyists in opposing Stalin. In his memoirs, Trepper, the one-time head of the Soviet “Red Orchestra” spy network in Nazi-occupied Western Europe, said the following about the Trotskyist opposition to Stalin’s regime--a regime which Trepper had faithfully served throughout World War II despite growing misgivings that it had betrayed the principles of the October socialist revolution:

“The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did. By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra. Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed"

Quoted from the "The Great Game" by Leopold Trepper, 1977. One of the best reads ever. It is out of print now, but you can get a copy from this global second-hand book web-site which is useful for tracking down many out of print books incidentally:

 http://www.abebooks.com/

Anti-Stalinist


What really happened in Russia the truth

14.04.2004 14:42

Forty Years Since Leon Trotsky’s Assassination

Exile And Repression

Stalin conducts the struggle "on a different plane with different methods."

By Lynn Walsh

This year is the fortieth anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky.

On 20 August, 1940, Trotsky was struck a fatal blow with an ice-pick by Ramon Mercader, an agent sent to Mexico by Stalin's secret police (the GPU) to murder the exiled revolutionary—alongside Lenin, the leader of the October revolution, the founder and leader of the Red Army, and the co-founder of the Third, Communist International.

Trotsky in 1919

Trotsky's assassination was not just a malicious after-thought on the part of Stalin.

It was the culmination of a systematic and bloody terror directed against a whole generation of Bolshevik leaders, and against the young revolutionaries of a second generation prepared to defend the genuine ideas of Marxism against the bureaucratic, repressive regime developing under Stalin.

By the time the GPU reached Trotsky in 1940, they had already murdered— or driven to suicide—many members of Trotsky's family, scores of his closest friends and collaborators, and countless numbers of the leaders and supporters of the International Left Opposition.

Despite the murder of a whole generation of Bolshevik-Leninists, however, and the bureaucracy's Herculean efforts to bury the ideas and historical personality of Trotsky under a mountain of distort ions, lies, slanders, and grotesque historical fabrication, Trotsky's ideas have never had more relevance or more appeal to working-class activists than they have today, at the beginning of the 1980s, when there is unmistakably a perspective of new revolutionary developments in the advanced capitalist countries, the underdeveloped lands of the ex-colonial world, and the deformed workers' states of Russia and Eastern Europe.

This will no doubt be grudgingly conceded by even the capitalist press this August. But, predictably, an enormous amount of rubbish will be written, whether through an inability to understand the real historical role of Trotsky or a deliberate effort to obscure and confuse the political issues involved.

For instance, despite the incontrovertible evidence—some clear at the time, much more which has since come to light—some journals (e.g. the 'New Statesman', 8th December 1978), anxious, it seems, to exculpate Stalinism, have even tried to cast doubt on the GPU's responsibility for Trotsky's murder.

More fundamentally, however, the old question (raised, for instance, by Max Eastman in the 1930s) will inevitably come up. Why, if Trotsky was one of the foremost leaders of the Bolshevik party and the head of the Red Army, did he allow Stalin to concentrate power in his hands? Why did Trotsky not take power himself? The idea will no doubt be put forward again that Trotsky was "too doctrinaire", that his policies were "impractical", and that he allowed himself to be "out-manoeuvred" by Stalin. As a corollary, it will again be suggested that Stalin was more "practical" and that he was a more "astute" and "forceful" leader.

Trotsky himself completely refuted these ideas, not just in answering Max Eastman's point, but through his whole analysis of the degeneration of the soviet workers' state and his criticism of the bureaucracy's policies. From the standpoint of Marxism, it is completely false to pose the conflict that opened up after 1923 as a personal struggle for power between rival leaders.

"In view of the prolonged decline in the international revolution," wrote Trotsky in 1935, "the victory of the bureaucracy—and consequently of Stalin—was foreordained. The result which the idle observers and fools attribute to the personal forcefulness of Stalin, or at least to his exceptional cunning, stemmed from causes lying deep in the dynamics of historical forces. Stalin emerged as the half-conscious expression of the second chapter of the revolution, its 'Morning after'." ("Diary in Exile', p.38)

Neither Trotsky, nor any of the Bolshevik leaders in 1917, had imagined that the working class of Russia could build a socialist society in isolation, in an economically backward and culturally primitive country.

They were convinced that the workers had to take the power in order to carry through the largely unfinished tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; but in pressing forward to the imperative tasks of the socialist revolution, they could proceed only in collaboration with the working class of the more developed capitalist countries—because, as compared to capitalism, socialism requires a higher level of production and material culture.

The defeat of the German revolution in 1923—to which the blunders of the Stalin-Bukharin leadership contributed—reinforced the isolation of the Soviet state, and the enforced retreat of the New Economic Policy speeded up the crystallisation of a bureaucratic caste which increasingly put its own creature comforts, desire for tranquillity, and demands for privileges before the interests of the international revolution.

The ruling stratum of the bureaucracy "was rapidly discovering that Stalin was flesh of its flesh," and reflecting the interests of the bureaucracy, Stalin began a struggle against "Trotskyism"—an ideological bogey which he invented to distort and stigmatise the genuine ideas of Marxism, and of Lenin, upheld by Trotsky and the Left Opposition.

It was the bureaucracy's fear that the opposition's programme for the restoration of workers' democracy would find an echo among a new layer of young workers and give new momentum to the struggle against bureaucratic degeneration that motivated Stalin's bloody purge against the Opposition. Its ideas were "the source of the gravest apprehensions of Stalin: that savage fears ideas, since he knows their explosive power and knows his own weakness in the face of them." ('Diary in Exile', p.66)

This fear also explained Stalin's personal craving for revenge against Trotsky and his family. Stalin, remarked Trotsky, "is clever enough to realise that even today I would not change places with him [in 1935, while living in "modified prison style" in France]... hence the psychology of a man stung."

Expulsion and Exile
Answering in advance the false idea that the conflict was in some way the result of "misunderstanding" or unwillingness to compromise, Trotsky related how, while he was exiled at Alma-Ata in 1928, a "sympathetic" engineer, probably "sent surreptitiously to feel my pulse", asked him whether he didn't think some steps towards reconciliation with Stalin were possible:

"I answered him to the effect that at that moment there could be no question of reconciliation, not because I did not want it, but because Stalin could not make his peace with me. He was forced to pursue to the end the course set him by the bureaucracy. 'How will it end?' 'It will come to a sticky end.' I answered. 'Stalin cannot settle it any other way.' My visitor was visibly startled; he obviously had not expected such an answer, and soon left." ('Diary in Exile' p.39).

Beginning in 1923 Trotsky led a fight in the Russian Communist Party. In a series of articles (published as 'The New Course') he began to warn of the danger of a post-revolutionary reaction. The isolation of the revolution in a backward country was leading to the incipient growth of a bureaucracy in the Bolshevik Party and the state. Trotsky began to protest at the arbitrary behaviour of the Party bureaucracy crystallising under Stalin.

Shortly before he died in 1924, Lenin agreed with Trotsky on a block in the Party to fight bureaucracy.

When Trotsky and a group of left oppositionists began a fight for a revival of workers' democracy, the Politbureau was obliged to promise the restoration of freedom of expression and criticism in the Communist Party. But Stalin and his associates made sure that this remained a dead letter.

Within four years—on the 7th November 1927, the 10th anniversary of the October revolution— Trotsky was forced to leave the Kremlin and take refuge with oppositionist friends. A week later, Trotsky and Zinoviev, the first Chairman of the Communist International, were expelled from the Party. Next day, Trotsky's fellow oppositionist and friend, Adolph Joffe, killed himself in protest at the dictatorial action of the Stalin leadership. This was the first of Trotsky's comrades, friends, and family to be driven to death or directly murdered by Stalin's regime, which through systematic and ruthless repression of its opponents, opened up a river of blood between genuine workers' democracy and its own bureaucratic, totalitarian methods.

In Janaury 1928, Trotsky was forced into his third foreign exile. First he was deported to Alma-Ata, a small Russian town near the Chinese border, and from there he was deported to Turkey, where he took up residence on Prinkipo Island, on the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople (now Istanbul).

In an attempt to paralyse Trotsky's literary and political work, Stalin struck at his small 'apparat', which had consisted of five or six close collaborators: "Glazman, driven to suicide; Butov, dead in a GPU prison; Blumkin, shot; Sermuks and Poznansky vanished. Stalin did not see that even without a secretariat I could carry on literary work, which, in its turn, could further the creating of a new apparat. Even the cleverest bureaucrat displays an incredible short-sightedness, in certain questions!" ("Diary in Exile', p. 40) All these revolutionaries had played important roles, particularly as members of the military secretariat or on Trotsky's armed train during the civil war. But Stalin, as Trotsky remarked, "Was conducting the struggle on a different plane, and with different weapons."

If Stalin subsequently devoted such a large part of the resources of his secret police (known by its various abbreviated names: Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB), to planning and executing the assassination of Trotsky, why did Stalin allow his opponent to go into exile in the first place?

In an Open Letter to the Politbureau in January 1932, Trotsky publicly warned that Stalin would prepare an attempt on his life. "The question of terrorist reprisals against the author of this letter," he wrote, "was posed long ago: in 1924/5 at an intimate gathering Stalin weighed the pros and cons. The pros were obvious and clear. The chief consideration against was that there were too many young Trotskyists who might reply with counter-terrorist actions." (Writings 1932, p.l9)

Trotsky was informed of these discussions by Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had briefly formed a "ruling triumvirate" with Stalin, but later moved—temporarily— into opposition against Stalin.

Persecution
But "Stalin has come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to have exiled Trotsky from the Soviet Union", wrote Trotsky:

"...contrary to his expectations it turned out that ideas have a power of their own, even without an apparatus and without resources.

The Comintern is a grandiose structure, that has been left as a hollow shell, both theoretically and politically. The future of revolutionary Marxism, which is to say of Leninism as well, is inseparably bound up from now on with the international cadres of the Left Opposition. No amount of falsification can change that.

The basic works of the opposition have been, are being, or will be published in every language. Opposition cadres, as yet not very numerous but nonetheless indomitable, are to be found in every country.

Stalin understands perfectly well what a grave danger the ideological irreconcilability and persistent growth of the International Left Opposition represent to him personally, to his fake 'authority', to his Bonapartist almightiness." (Writings, 1932, pp.18-20)

In the early period of his Turkish exile, Trotsky wrote his monumental 'History of the Russian Revolution' and also his brilliant autobiography, 'My Life'. Through voluminous correspondence with oppositionists in other countries and especially through the 'Bulletin of the Opposition' (published from Autumn, 1929), Trotsky began to draw together the nucleus of an international opposition of genuine Bolsheviks. But Trotsky's prognosis that, using the GPU, Stalin would ferociously purge and attempt to destroy everything working against him, was soon borne out.

Towards the end of his Turkish exile, Trotsky suffered a cruel blow when his daughter, Zinaida, ill and demoralised, was driven to suicide in Berlin. Her husband, Platon Volkov, a young opposition militant, was arrested and disappeared forever. Trotsky's first wife, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, the woman who first introduced him to socialist ideas, was sent to a concentration camp where she died. Later Trotsky's son, Sergey, a scientist with no political interests or connections, was arrested on a trumped-up charge of 'poisoning the workers'—and Trotsky later learned that he had died in prison. Alongside his morbid fear of ideas, "the motive of personal revenge has always been a considerable factor in the repressive policies of Stalin." ('Diary in Exile', p.66)

From the start, moreover, the GPU began to penetrate Trotsky's household and the groups of the Left Opposition. Suspicion surrounded a number of people who appeared in Opposition organisations in Europe, or who came to Prinkipo to visit Trotsky or assist in his work. Jakob Frank, for example, a Lithuanian Jew worked at Prinkipo for a time but later went over to Stalinism. Another, known as Kharin (or Joseph) handed over the text of one edition of the "Bulletin of the Opposition" to the GPU, thus seriously disrupting its production. There was also the case of Mill (Paul Okun, or Obin) who also went over to the Stalinists, leaving Trotsky and his collaborators uncertain whether he was just a turncoat or a GPU plant.

Why were such people accepted as genuine collaborators? In a public comment on Mill's treachery, Trotsky pointed out that,

"The Left Opposition is placed in extremely difficult conditions from an organisational point of view. No revolutionary party in the past has worked under such persecution. In addition to repression by the capitalist police of all countries, the Opposition is exposed to the blows of the Stalinist bureaucracy which stops at nothing...it is of course the Russian section which is having the hardest time...

But to find a Russian Bolshevik-Leninist abroad, even for purely technical functions, is an extremely difficult task. This and only this explains the fact that Mill was able for a time to get into the Administrative Secretariat of the Left Opposition. There was a need for a person who knew Russian and was able to carry out secretarial duties. Mill had at one time been a member of the official Party and in this sense could claim a certain personal confidence." ('Writings 1932, p.237)

Looking back, it is clear that the lack of adequate security checks was to have tragic consequences. But resources were extremely limited, and Trotsky understood that a phobia about infiltration and an exaggerated suspicion of everyone who offered support to the work of the Opposition could be counter-productive. With his positive, optimistic view of human character, moreover, Trotsky was averse to subjecting individuals to searching enquiries and personal investigation.

One visitor to Prinkipo, however, was quite definitely a professional GPU agent. The subsequent course of this agent's treacherous career was much later to throw considerable light on the GPU's deadly manoeuvres against Trotsky and the Opposition. This was Abraham Sobolevicius, who as "Senin" was a leading member of the German Left Opposition, together with his brother, Ruvin Soblevicius, known as "Roman Well".

These brothers conspired to disrupt the activities of the German group—with considerable success. In 1933, with Hitler's seizure of power, they returned to the GPU headquarters in Moscow—but not before Trotsky had confronted "Senin" while on a brief visit to Copenhagen in 1932 and denounced the "so-called Trotskyite" as "more or less an agent of the Stalinists." "At the mildest estimate," Trotsky wrote, "we can call these people [the Sobolevicius brothers] nothing but the garbage of the revolution," and commented that there were certainly connections between such agents and the GPU in Moscow.

Purge Trials
Much later, this was confirmed by "Senin" himself: "My services for the Soviet secret police went back to 1931," he confessed (though they almost certainly began earlier).

"The job was to spy on Leon Trotsky for Joseph Stalin, who was obsessed with the idea of knowing everything his hated rival was doing and thinking even in exile... for two years, in 1931 and 1932, I spied on Trotsky and the men around him. Trotsky, suspecting nothing, invited me to his heavily guarded home at Prinkipo, Turkey. I duly reported back to the Kremlin everything Trotsky told me in confidence including his pungent remarks about Stalin."

This was revealed in the United States in 1957/8, when "Senin", now under the name of Jack Sobel, was put on trial as the key member of a Russian spy ring in America. In the course of his testimony, at his own trial, at the perjury trial of his fellow agent, Mark Zborowski, and also at Senate hearings on espionage, Jack Sobel, together with his brother, now known as Robert Sobel, confirmed in detail the murderous role of the GPU in relation to Trotsky, his family, and his supporters.

Trotsky was eager to escape the isolation of Prinkipo and find a base nearer to the centre of European events. But the capitalist democracies were far from willing to grant Trotsky the democratic right of asylum. Eventually, in 1933, Trotsky was admitted to France. The sharpening of political tension, however, and particularly the growth of the nationalist and fascist right, soon led the Daladier government to order his expulsion. Practically every European government had already refused him asylum. Trotsky lived, as he wrote, on "a planet without a visa." Expelled in 1935, Trotsky found refuge for a short time in Norway where he wrote "The Revolution Betrayed' (1936).

"Lies, falsification, forgery, and judicial perversion have assumed a scale hitherto unheard of in history..." ('Diary in Exile', p45) wrote Trotsky while still in France. But shortly after his arrival in Norway, the first big Moscow purge trial exploded in the face of the world. "Disturbing trials are now taking place in the USSR," Trotsky commented in his Diary; "Stalin's dictatorship is approaching a new frontier."

In the first monstrous show trial, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other prominent leaders of the Bolshevik Party were tried on trumped-up charges—based on false confessions extorted by brutal pressure, torture, and threats against the defendants' families. The leading defendants were sentenced to death and immediately executed. Stalin's campaign against "Trotskyism" reached a climax.

In these great purge trials, Trotsky was the chief defendant in absentia, accused of staging innumerable conspiracies with the alleged purpose of assassinating Stalin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, and other Soviet leaders, and of acting in secret collusion with Hitler and the Emperor of Japan in order to bring about the downfall of the Soviet regime and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

At the same time, Stalin exerted intense pressure on the Norweigan government to restrict Trotsky in order to prevent his replying to and refuting the vile charges hurled against him in Moscow. To avoid virtual imprisonment, Trotsky was obliged to find an alternative refuge, and he eagerly accepted an offer of asylum from the Cardenas government in Mexico. En route, Trotsky recalled his Open Letter to the Politbureau in which he had anticipated Stalin's "world-wide bureaucratic slander campaign," and predicted attempts on his life. With chilling premonition, Trotsky added: "Stalin conducts a struggle on a totally different plane. He seeks to strike not at the ideas of the opponent, but at his skull." (Writings 1936/37, p44)

The purge in Russia was not confined to a handful of old Bolsheviks or Left Oppositionists. For every leader who appeared in a show trial, hundreds or thousands were silently imprisoned, sent to certain death in Arctic prison camps, or summarily executed in prison cellars. At least eight million were arrested in the course of the purges, and five or six millions rotted, many of them to death, in the camps. It was undoubtedly the supporters of the Left Opposition, adherents of Trotsky's ideas, who bore the heaviest repression.

Writing in his recent memoirs, Leopold Trepper, a genuine revolutionary caught up in the machinery of the GPU, posed the question:

"But who did protest at the time? Who rose up to voice his outrage?" (The Great Game', 1977). He gives this answer: "The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice axe, they fought Stalinism to the death and they were the only ones who did.

By the time of the great purges, they could only shout their rebellion in the freezing wastelands where they had been dragged in order to be exterminated. In the camps, their conduct was admirable. But their voices were lost in the tundra. Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves.

Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not 'confess', for they knew that their confession would serve neither the Party nor socialism." (p56)

The purges in Russia were also linked to Stalin's direct, counterrevolutionary intervention in the revolution and the civil war which erupted in Spain in the summer of 1936. Through the agency of a bureaucratic leadership of the Spanish Communist Party controlled from Moscow, the apparatus of Soviet military advisers, and through the GPU's "Special Tasks Force," Stalin extended his terror to the anarchists, left-wing militants and especially the Trotskyists who stood in the way of his policies.

Meanwhile, Stalin's secret police also intensified his measures to destroy the centre of the International Left Opposition, based in Paris and under the direction of Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov.

Leon Sedov

In 1936 the GPU stole part of Trotsky's archives stored in Paris, a move intended to undermine Trotsky's ability to reply to the monstrous charges and faked evidence put forward in the Moscow trials. But a far heavier blow to both Trotsky personally and to the Opposition in general was the death of Leon Sedov.

Sedov had been indispensable to Trotsky in his literary work, in preparing and distributing the 'Bulletin of the Opposition', and in maintaining contacts between groups of oppositionists internationally. But Sedov also made an outstanding, independent contribution to the work of the opposition.

Early in 1937, however, he was taken ill with suspected appendicitis. On the advice of a man who had become his closest collaborator, "Etienne", Sedov entered a clinic—which subsequently turned out to be run by both "White" Russian emigres and Russians with known Stalinist leanings. Sedov appeared to recover from the surgery which was carried out; but shortly afterwards he died with extremely mysterious symptoms.

The evidence, and the opinion of at least one doctor, pointed to poisoning, and further investigation produced a strong suggestion that his illness had in the first place been produced by sophisticated, virtually undetectable poisoning.

Trotsky wrote a moving tribute to his dead son, "Leon Sedov— Son, Friend, Fighter". (Writings 1937/38, pp 166-179). He paid tribute to Sedov's role in the struggle to defend the genuine ideas of Marxism against their Stalinist perversion. But he also gave some indication of the depth of the personal blow. "He was part of both of us," Trotsky wrote, speaking for himself and for Natalia: "Our young part. By hundreds of channels our thoughts and feelings daily reach out to him in Paris. Together with our boy has died everything that still remained young within us."

Subsequently it was revealed that Leon Sedov had been betrayed by "Etienne", a GPU agent far more insidious and ruthless than the previous spies and provocateurs who had infiltrated Trotsky's circle. Etienne was later unmasked as one Mark Zborowski, who like the Sobels was exposed in the United States in the late 1950s as the key figure in the GPU's American espionage network.

By that time, Zborowski, already had a long trail of duplicity and blood behind him. In his US trial, Zborowski confessed that he had led the GPU to Trotsky's archives and had been responsible for "fingering" Rudolf Klement (Trotsky's secretary, murdered in Paris in 1938), Erwin Wolf (a supporter of Trotsky who went to Spain and was murdered in July 1937), and Ignace Reiss (a top GPU agent who renounced Stalin's terror machine and declared his support for the Fourth International, murdered in Switzerland in September 1937).

By his own admission Zborowski had been a professional GPU agent since 1931 or 1932 (though more likely since 1928). He may at one time have been a member of the Polish Communist Party (though he denied this), but he was undoubtedly a mercenary Stalinist agent. He undoubtedly had contact with Jack Sobel in Paris, and also with the agents of the GPU's "Special Tasks Force" in Spain, which was responsible for the murder in Barcelona of Erwin Wolf—and which included in its ranks the infamous Colonel Eitingon.

It was this man, under numerous pseudonyms, who was to direct the assassination attempts against Trotsky in Mexico, in conjunction with his GPU associate and lover, Caridad Mercader, and her son Ramon Mercader, the agent who eventually murdered Trotsky. Zborowski was also responsible for beginning the task of infiltrating Mercader into Trotsky's circle. Nearly two years before the assassination, he set up an elaborate scheme to enable Mercader to seduce a young American Trotskyist, Sylvia Ageloff, as a means of gaining entry to Trotsky's household.


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Show Trials And Bloody Purges
"Stalin’s dictatorship is approaching a new frontier..."
All the evidence at the time pointed to the GPU's responsibility for the murder of Trotsky, his son Leon Sedov and other leading supporters.

But later this was more than amply confirmed, not only by the detailed evidence of the Sobels, Zborowski, and others forced to testify in the United States courts and Senate hearings in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but also by the detailed evidence of a number of top GPU officers who fled from Russia and revealed the truth about the murderous activity in which they had been involved.

The first had been Ignace Reiss himself, who soon paid with his life for his denunciation of Stalin's crimes. Later Alexander Orlov, who had been director of the GPU machine in Spain during the civil war, escaped to America. He attempted to warn Trotsky of the plot against his life, though this was only partially successful because of Trotsky's understandable fear of being misled by a provocateur.

But Orlov, both in evidence to the US government and in his revealing book, 'The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes', confirmed in detail the role of Zborowski, Eitingon, and Mercader. Further corroborative evidence was brought out much later by other GPU defectors, like Krivitsky (tracked down and murdered by the GPU in 1941) and later still by Colonel Vladimir Petrov who fled to Australia and Captain Nikolai Khokhlov. Khokhlov testified that:

"Trotsky's assassination was organised by Major General Eitingon, the same general who was in Spain under the name of General Katov," and who "recruited Spaniards for diversionary activities of the Soviet intelligence."

Khokhlov added:

"And that is where he recruited a Spaniard who was brought to the Soviet union and who was briefed in detail and who was later sent to Mexico under the name of Mornard" (i.e. Mercader or 'Jacson'). (Quoted in Isaac Don Levine, The Mind of an Assassin', 1960, p.34)


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Armed Raid And Assassination
"Retribution will come to the vile murderers…"
Trotsky, Natalia Sedova, and a handful of close collaborators arrived in Mexico in January 1937.

The administration of General Lazaro Cardenas was the only government in the world that would grant Trotsky asylum in the last years of his life. In marked contrast to his reception elsewhere, Trotsky was given a flamboyant official welcome and went to live in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, in a house lent by his friend and political supporter, Diego Rivera, a well-known Mexican painter.

Trotsky's arrival, however, coincided with a second Moscow show trial, shortly followed by a third, even more grotesque trial.

"We listened to the radio," related Natalia, "opened the mail and the Moscow newspapers, and we felt that insanity, absurdity, and outrage, fraud and blood were flooding us from all sides, here in Mexico as in Norway..." ('The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky', page 212).

Once again Trotsky exposed the internal contradictions of the manufactured evidence used in these monstrous frame-ups, and in a stream of articles completely refuted all the accusations against him and his supporters. It proved possible, moreover, to organise a "counter-trial" presided over by the liberal American philosopher, John Dewey, and this commission completely exonerated Trotsky of the charges hurled against him.

Trotsky warned that the purpose of the trials was to justify a new wave of terror—which would be directed against all those who represented the slightest threat to Stalin's dictatorial leadership, whether as active opponents, potential bureaucratic rivals, pr simply embarrassing accomplices from the past. Trotsky was well aware that the death penalty pronounced against him was far from being a platonic sentence.

From the moment of his arrival, the Mexican Communist Party, whose leaders loyally followed the Moscow line, began to agitate for restrictions to be placed on Trotsky to prevent him answering the show trial allegations, and ultimately to bring about his expulsion from the country. The newspapers and journals published by the Communist Party and the Communist-controlled trade union federation (CTM) poured out a stream of slanderous allegations, to the effect that Trotsky was plotting against the Cardenas government and allegedly collaborating with fascist and reactionary elements. Trotsky was well aware that the Stalinist press was using the language of people who decide things, not by votes but by the machine gun.

In the middle of the night on 24th/25th May, came the first direct assault on Trotsky's life. A group of armed raiders forced their way into Trotsky's house, raked the bedrooms with machine-gun fire, and set off incendiaries evidently intended to destroy Trotsky's archives and cause the maximum possible damage. Trotsky and Natalia narrowly escaped death by lying on the floor beneath the bed. Their grandson, Seva, was slightly injured by a bullet.

A large bomb left by the raiders failed—fortunately—to go off. Afterwards, it was found that the raiders had been let in by Robert Sheldon Harte, one of the secretary-guards, who was apparently tricked by someone in the raiding party he knew and trusted. His body was later found buried in a lime pit. The raiders, moreover, knew the layout of the building and the security devices—they clearly had inside information. Although an accusing finger was pointed at Sheldon Harte as an accomplice, he was undoubtedly duped—as Trotsky emphatically maintained at the time—by somebody familiar to him. No one fits this inference better than Mornard, alias 'Jacson.'

All the evidence pointed to the Mexican Stalinists and, behind them, the GPU. Through a detailed analysis of the Stalinist press in the weeks before the raid, Trotsky clearly showed that they had foreknowledge of, and were preparing for, an armed attempt on his life. The Mexican police soon arrested some of the minor accomplices of the raiders, and their evidence soon incriminated leading members of the Mexican Communist Party.

For a start, the suspects had previously been involved in the International Brigades in Spain— already notorious as the recruiting ground of Stalin's agents and killers. The trail soon led to David Alfaro Siqueiros, like Diego Rivera a well-known painter, but unlike Rivera, a leading member of the Mexican Communist Party. Siqueiros had also been in Spain and had long been suspected of connections with the GPU. Despite the Stalinists' outrageous attempt to portray the attack as a "self-inflicted attack," supposedly organised by Trotsky to discredit the CP and the Cardenas government, the police eventually arrested the ring-leaders, including Siqueiros. However, as a result of pressure from the CP and the CTM, Siqueiros and the others were released in March 1941, for "lack of material and incriminating evidence"!

Siqueiros did not deny his role in the assault. In fact, he openly boasted about it. But the Communist Party leadership, clearly embarrassed—not so much by the attempt itself, but by the way it was bungled—tried to disassociate itself from the raid, blaming it onto a gang of "uncontrollable elements" and "agents provocateurs."

The Stalinist press alternated between proclaiming Siqueiros a hero, and, on the other hand, a "half-crazed madman" and "irresponsible adventurer"—and even... as being in Trotsky's pay! With shameless 'logic', the CP press asserted that the attack was an act of provocation directed against the Communist Party and against the Mexican state—and therefore Trotsky should be expelled immediately.

Thirty-eight years later, however, a leading member of the Mexican Communist Party admitted the truth. In his memoirs, 'My Testimony', published by the Mexican CP's own publishing house in 1978, Valentin Campa, a veteran member of the party, flatly contradicted the official denials of the party's involvement and gave details of the preparation for the attempt on Trotsky's life. Key extracts from Campa's memoirs, moreover, were published in the daily paper of the more influential French Communist Party ("L'Humanite', 26/27 June 1978) on the authority of the party's general-secretary, George Marchais. (see ‘Militant', October 1978.)

Campa relates how, in the autumn of 1938, he, together with Raphael Carrillo (a member of the Mexican CP’s central committee), was summoned by Herman Laborde (the party's general secretary) and informed of "an extremely confidential and delicate affair." Laborde told them he had been visited by a Comintern delegate (in reality, a GPU representative) who had informed him of the "decision to eliminate Trotsky" and had asked for their co-operation "for the task of carrying out this elimination."

After a "vigorous analysis", however, Campa says that they rejected the proposal. "We concluded... that Trotsky was finished politically, that his influence was almost zero, moreover we had said so often enough throughout the world, besides, the results of his elimination would do great disservice to the Mexican Communist Party and the revolutionary movement of Mexico and to the whole international Communist movement. We therefore concluded that to propose the elimination of Trotsky was clearly a serious mistake." For their opposition, however, Laborde and Campa were accused of "sectarian opportunism," of being "soft on Trotsky," and were driven out of the party.

The campaign to prepare the Mexican CP for the murder of Trotsky was carried through by a number of Stalinist leaders already experienced in ruthlessly carrying out the orders of their master in Moscow: Siqueiros himself, who had been active in Spain, probably a GPU agent since 1928; Vittoria Codovila, an Argentinian Stalinist who had operated in Spain under Eitingon, probably involved in the torture and murder of the POUM leader Andreas Nin; Pedro Checa, leader of the Spanish Communist Party in exile in Mexico, who actually took his pseudonym from the Soviet secret police, the Cheka; and Carlos Contreras, alias Vittorio Vidali, who had been active with the GPU's 'Special Tasks Force' in Spain under the pseudonym of 'General Carlos'. Co-ordinating their efforts was, of course the ubiquitous Colonel Eitingon.

After the failure of the attempt by Siqueiros and his group to take Trotsky's house by storm, Campa writes; "a third alternative was put into practice. Raymond Mercader who was living under the pseudonym Jacques Mornard, assassinated Trotsky on the evening of the 20th August, 1940."

Trotsky regarded his escape from the Siqueiros raid as "a reprieve". "Our joyous feeling of salvation," wrote Natalia afterwards, "was dampened by the prospect of a new visitation and the need to prepare for it." ('Father and Son'). The defences of Trotsky's house were strengthened and new precautions were taken. But unfortunately—tragically—no efforts were made to check up more thoroughly on the man who turned out to be the assassin, despite the suspicions that several members of the household had about this strange character.

Trotsky resisted some of the additional security measures suggested by his secretary-guards: for a guard to be stationed by him at all times, for instance. "It was impossible to convert one's life solely into self-defence," wrote Natalia, "...for in that case life loses all its value." Nevertheless, in view of the vital, indispensable nature of Trotsky's work – and the inevitability of an attempt on his life, there is no doubt there were serious deficiencies in the security— and that tighter measures should have been implemented.

Shortly before Sheldon Harte's abduction, for instance, Trotsky had noticed him allowing workmen strengthening the house to pass freely in and out of the courtyard. Trotsky complained that this was very careless, and added—ironically, this was only a few weeks before Harte's tragic death—"You might prove to be the first victim of your own carelessness." (Natalia Sedova, 'Father and Son.')

Mercader met Trotsky for the first time a few days after the Siqueiros raid. But the preparations for his attempt had already been in hand for a long time. Through Zborowski and other GPU agents who had infiltrated Trotsky's supporters in the United States, Mercader had been introduced in France to Sylvia Agaloff, a young American Trotskyist who subsequently went to work for Trotsky in Coyoacan. The GPU agent managed to seduce Sylvia Agaloff, and make her the unwitting accomplice of his crime.

Mercader had an "elaborate cover," which although it aroused many suspicions, unfortunately served its purpose well enough. Mercader had joined the Communist Party in Spain, and become active in its ranks in the period 1933-36 when it was already a Stalinised party. Probably through his mother, Caridad Mercader, who was already a GPU agent and associated with Eitingon, Mercader too entered the service of the GPU. After the defeat of the Spanish Republic, aided by Stalin's sabotage of the revolution in Spain, Mercader went to Moscow where he was prepared for his future role. After meeting Ageloff in Paris in 1938 he later accompanied her to Mexico in January, and gradually ingratiated himself with members of Trotsky's household.

After gaining the acceptance of Trotsky's household, Mornard arranged to meet with Trotsky personally on the pretext of discussing an article that he had written—which Trotsky considered to an embarrassing degree banal and devoid of interest. The first meeting was clearly a "dress rehearsal" for the actual assassination.

The next time he came was on the morning of 20th August. Despite the misgivings of Natalia and Trotsky's guards, Mornard was again allowed to see Trotsky alone—"three or four minutes went by," Natalia relates: "I was in the room next door. There was a terrible piercing cry... Lev Davidovich appeared, leaning against the door frame. His face was covered with blood, his blue eyes glistening without spectacles and his arms hung limply by his side..." Mornard had struck Trotsky a fatal blow in the back of the head with a cut-down ice axe concealed in his raincoat. But the blow was not immediately lethal; Trotsky "screamed very long, infinitely long," as Mercader himself put it—and Trotsky courageously grappled with his assassin, preventing further blows.

"The doctor declared that the injury was not very serious," says Natalia. " Leon Davidovich listened to, him without emotion, as one would with a conventional message of comfort. Pointing to his heart, he said to Hansen in English, ‘I feel...here...that this is the end...this time...they've succeeded'." ('Life and Death of Leon Trotsky, p. 268)

Trotsky was taken to hospital, operated on, and survived for more than a day after that, dying at the age of 62 on 21st August 1940.

Trotsky in Mexico

Mercader seems to have hoped that, after Siqueiros' lenient treatment, he too might get a light sentence. But he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment, which he served.

However, even after his identity had been firmly established by finger-prints and other evidence, he refused to admit who he was or who had ordered him to murder Trotsky.

Although the crime was almost universally attributed to Stalin and the GPU, the Stalinists brazenly denied all responsibility. There is ample evidence, however, that Mercader's mother, who escaped from Mexico with Eitingon, was presented to Stalin and decorated with a high bureaucratic honour for her son and herself. Mercader himself was honoured when he returned to Eastern Europe after his release. In spite of his silence, a chain of evidence, which can now be constructed from the elaborate testimony of Russian spies brought to trial in the United States, top GPU agents who defected to Western countries at various times, and the belated memoirs of the Stalinist leaders themselves, clearly link Mercader to Stalin's secret terror machine based in Moscow.

In the end, Stalin succeeded in murdering the man who—alongside Lenin—was indubitably the greatest revolutionary leader in history. But, as Natalia Sedova wrote afterwards: "Retribution will come to the vile murderers. Throughout his entire heroic and beautiful life, Lev Davidovich believed in the emancipated mankind of the future. During the last years of his life, his faith did not falter, but on the contrary became only more mature, more firm than ever. Future mankind, emancipated from all oppression will triumph over coercion of all sorts..." ('How It Happened', November 1940.)


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Trotsky's Vital Role
"Arming a new generation with the revolutionary method..."
Many attempts have been made to portray Trotsky as a "tragic" figure, as if his perspective for socialist revolution in the capitalist states and for political revolution in the Soviet Union was "noble"...but hopelessly idealistic. This is the view implied by Isaac Deutscher in the third volume of his Trotsky biography, 'The Prophet Outcast', in which he denigrates Trotsky's efforts to re-organise and re-arm a new international Marxist leadership, dismissing Trotsky's tenacious, painstaking work as futile. The latest biographer, Ronald Segal, entitles his book The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.'

But if there is a tragic element in Trotsky's life, it is because his whole life and work after the victorious Russian Revolution was inseparably bound up with the revolutionary struggle of the international working class—in a period first of retreat and then of catastrophic defeats.

For the very reason that Trotsky played a leading role in the October revolution, his past dictated that with the ebbing of the revolution he would be forced into exile and political isolation. But while fainthearts and sceptics abandoned Marxist perspectives and made their peace with Stalinism or capitalism—or both—Trotsky, and the small handful who remained committed to the ideas of the Opposition, struggled to re-arm a new generation of revolutionary leaders for the future resurgence of the working class movement.

In exile, Trotsky enriched the literature of Marxism with magnificent works: but he was far from accepting that his role would simply be that of historian and commentator on events. "I am reduced," wrote Trotsky in his 'Diary in Exile' (pp 53-54), "to carrying on a dialogue with the newspapers, or rather through the newspapers with facts and opinions.

"And I still think that the work in which I am engaged now, despite its extremely insufficient and fragmentary nature, is the most important work of my life—more important than 1917, more important than the period of the Civil War or any other.

"For the sake of clarity I would put it this way. Had I not been present in 1917 in Petersburg, the October Revolution would still have taken place—on the condition that Lenin was present and in command. If neither Lenin nor I had been present in Petersburg, there would have been no October Revolution: the leadership of the Bolshevik Party would have prevented it occurring—of this I have not the slightest doubt! If Lenin had not been in Petersburg, I doubt whether I could have managed to conquer the resistance of the Bolshevik leaders. The struggle with 'Trotskyism' (i.e. with the proletarian revolution) would have commenced in May 1917, and the outcome of the revolution would have been in question.

"But I repeat, granted the presence of Lenin the October Revolution would have been victorious anyway. The same could by and large be said of the Civil War, although in its first period, especially at the time of the fall of Simbirsk and Kazan, Lenin wavered and was beset by doubts. But this was undoubtedly a passing mood which he probably never even admitted to anyone but me.

"Thus I cannot speak of the 'indispensability' of my work, even about the period from 1917 to 1921. But now my work is 'indispensable' in the full sense of the word. There is no arrogance in this claim at all. The collapse of the two Internationals has posed a problem which none of the leaders of these Internationals is at all equipped to solve. The vicissitudes of my personal fate have confronted me with this problem and armed me with important experience in dealing with it.

"There is now no one except me to carry out the mission of arming a new generation with the revolutionary method over the heads of the leaders of the Second and Third International. And I am in complete agreement with Lenin (or rather Turgenev) that the worst vice is to be more than fifty-five years old! I need at least about five more years of uninterrupted work to ensure the succession."




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Books and articles with material relating to Trotsky's assassination:
Trotsky's Diary in Exile (London 1959);

Leon Trotsky: Writings 1929-40 (12 vols plus two-part supplement, New York 1969-80);

Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky: The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (London 1975);

Natalia Trotsky: How it Happened and Father and Son ('Fourth International,' May 1941 and August 1941);

Jean van Heijenoort: With Trotsky in Exile (London 1978);

Elizabeth Poretsky: Our Own People: A Memoir of Ignace Reiss (London 1969);

Isaac Don Levine; The Mind of an Assassin (London 1960);

Georges Vereeken: The GPU in the Trotskyist Movement (London 1978);

Alexander Orlov: The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (London 1954);

Walter Krivitsky: I Was Stalin's Agent (London 1941);

Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Armed (1954), The Profit Unarmed (1959), and The Profit Outcast (1963);

Ronald SegaI: The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky (London 1979).



The human face of Trotskyism


Is Stalinism the legitimate product of Bolshevism?

14.04.2004 15:40

Is Stalinism the legitimate product of Bolshevism? -

Leon Trotsky


Marxism found its highest historical expression in Bolshevism. Under the banner of Bolshevism the first victory of the proletariat was achieved and the first workers' state established.

No force can now erase these facts from history. But since the October Revolution has led to the present stage of the triumph of the bureaucracy, with its system of repression, plunder and falsification - the 'dictatorship of the lie', to use Schlamm's happy expression - many formalistic and superficial minds jump to a summary conclusion: one cannot struggle against Stalinism without renouncing Bolshevism.

Schlamm, as we already know, goes further: Bolshevism, which degenerated into Stalinism, itself grew out of Marxism; consequently one cannot fight Stalinism while remaining on the foundation of Marxism.

There are others, less consistent but more numerous, who say on the contrary: 'We must return Bolshevism to Marxism.' How? To what Marxism? Before Marxism became 'bankrupt' in the form of Bolshevism it has already broken down in the form of social democracy.

'Back to Marxism'
Does the slogan 'Back to Marxism' then mean a leap over the periods of the Second and Third Internationals... to the First International? But it too broke down in its time. Thus in the last analysis it is a question of returning to the collected works of Marx and Engels.

One can accomplish this historic leap without leaving one's study and even without taking off one's slippers. But how are we going to go from our classics (Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895) to the tasks of a new epoch, omitting several decades of theoretical and political struggles, among them Bolshevism and the October revolution?

None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other course. So the question is reduced to the simple advice to study [Marx's ] Capital. We can hardly object. But the Bolsheviks, too, studied Capital and not badly either. This did not however prevent the degeneration of the Soviet state and the staging of the Moscow trials. So what is to be done?

Is it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of Bolshevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires, considering themselves Marxists, believe?

Historical process
"We have always predicted this," they say. "Having started with the prohibition of the other socialist parties, the repression of the anarchists, and the setting up of the Bolshevik dictatorship in the soviets, the October Revolution could only end in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalin is the continuation and also the bankruptcy of Leninism."

The flaw in this reasoning begins in the tacit identification of Bolshevism, October Revolution, and Soviet Union.

The historical process of the struggle of hostile forces is replaced by the evolution of Bolshevism in a vacuum. Bolshevism, however, is only a political tendency, closely fused with the working class but not identical with it.

And aside from the working class there exist in the Soviet Union a hundred million peasants, various nationalities, and a heritage of oppression, misery, and ignorance. The state built up by the Bolsheviks reflects not only the thought and will of Bolshevism but also the cultural level of the country, the social composition of the population, the pressure of a barbaric past and no less barbaric world imperialism.

To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore social reality in the name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. One has only to call this elementary mistake by its real name to do away with every trace of it.

Bolshevism, at any rate, never identified itself either with the October Revolution or with the Soviet state that issued from it. Bolshevism considered itself as one of the factors of history, the "conscious" factor – a very important but not the decisive one. We never sinned in historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor – on the existing basis of productive forces – in the class struggle, not only on a national but on an international scale.

When the Bolsheviks made concessions to the peasant tendency to private ownership, set up strict rules for membership in the party, purged the party of alien elements, prohibited other parties, introduced the NEP, granted enterprises as concessions, or concluded diplomatic agreements with imperialist governments, they were drawing partial conclusions from the basic fact that had been theoretically clear to them from the beginning: that the conquest of power, however important it may be in itself, by no means transforms the party into a sovereign ruler of the historical process.

Having taken over the state, the party is able, certainly, to influence the development of society with a power inaccessible to it before; but in return it submits itself to a ten times greater influence from all other elements of society.

It can, by the direct attack of hostile forces, be thrown out of power. Given a more dragging tempo of development, it can degenerate internally while maintaining itself in power. It is precisely this dialectic of the historical process that is not understood by those sectarian logicians who try to find in the decay of the Stalinist bureaucracy an annihilating argument against Bolshevism.

In essence, these gentlemen say: the revolutionary party that contains in itself no guarantee against its own degeneration is bad. By such a criterion Bolshevism is naturally condemned – it has no talisman. But the criterion itself is wrong. Scientific thinking demands a concrete analysis: How and why, did the party degenerate? No one but the Bolsheviks themselves have up to the present time given such an analysis. To do this they had no need to break with Bolshevism.

On the contrary, they found in its arsenal all they needed for the clarification of its fate. They drew this conclusion: certainly Stalinism "grew out" of Bolshevism, not logically, however, but dialectically; not as a revolutionary affirmation but as a Thermidorean negation. It is by no means the same.

International outlook
The Bolsheviks, however, did not have to wait for the Moscow trials to explain the reasons for the disintegration of the governing party of the USSR. Long ago they foresaw and spoke of the theoretical possibility of this development.

Let us remember the prognosis of the Bolsheviks, not only on the eve of the October Revolution but years before. The specific alignment of forces in the national and international field can enable the proletariat to seize power first in a backward country such as Russia.

But the same alignment of forces proves beforehand that without a more or less rapid victory of the proletariat in the advanced countries the workers' government in Russia will not survive. Left to itself the Soviet regime must either fall or degenerate.

More exactly: it will first degenerate and then fall. I myself have written about this more than once, beginning in 1905. In my History of the Russian Revolution (in the appendix to the last volume: "Socialism in One Country") are collected all the statements on this question made by the Bolshevik leaders from 1917 until 1923.

They all lead to one conclusion: without a revolution in the West, Bolshevism will be liquidated either by internal counterrevolution or by external intervention, or by a combination of both. Lenin stressed again and again that the bureaucratisation of the Soviet regime was not a technical or organizational question, but the potential beginning of the degeneration of the workers' state.

At the Eleventh Party Congress in March 1922, Lenin spoke of the support offered to Soviet Russia at the time of the NEP by certain bourgeois politicians, particularly the liberal professor Ustryalov:

"'I am in favour of supporting the Soviet government,' says Ustryalov, although he was a Constitutional-Democrat, a bourgeois, and supported intervention. 'I am in favour of supporting Soviet power because it has taken the road that will lead it to the ordinary bourgeois state."'

Lenin prefers the cynical voice of the enemy to "sentimental communist lies." Soberly and harshly he warns the party of the danger:

"We must say frankly that the things Ustryalov speaks about are possible. History knows all sorts of metamorphoses. Relying on firmness of convictions, loyalty, and other splendid moral qualities is anything but a serious attitude in politics. A few people may be endowed with splendid moral qualities, but historical issues are decided by vast masses, which, if the few do not suit them, may at times treat them none too politely."

In a word, the party is not the only factor of development, and on a larger historical scale is not the decisive one.



Left Opposition
"One nation conquers another," continued Lenin at the same congress, the last in which he participated. " . . . This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations?

Here things are not so simple. If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror.

Has not something like this happened in the capital of the [Russian republic]? Have the 4,700 Communists (nearly a whole army division, and all of them the very best) come under the influence of an alien culture?"

This was said in the beginning of 1922, and not for the first time. History is not made by a few people, even "the best." And not only that: these "best" can degenerate in the spirit of an alien, that is, a bourgeois culture. Not only can the Soviet state abandon the way of socialism, but the Bolshevik Party can, under unfavourable historic conditions, lose its Bolshevism.

From the clear understanding of this danger issued the Left Opposition, definitively formed in 1923. Recording day by day the symptoms of degeneration, it tried to oppose to the growing Thermidor the conscious will of the proletarian vanguard. However, this subjective factor proved to be insufficient.

The "vast masses" which, according to Lenin, decide the outcome of the struggle, became tired of internal privations and of waiting too long for the world revolution. The mood of the masses declined. The bureaucracy won the upper hand. It cowed the revolutionary vanguard, trampled upon Marxism, prostituted the Bolshevik Party. Stalinism conquered. In the form of the Left Opposition, Bolshevism broke with the Soviet bureaucracy and its Comintern. This was the real course of development.

Stalinism conquered
To be sure, in a formal sense, Stalinism did issue from Bolshevism. Even today, the Moscow bureaucracy continues to call itself the Bolshevik Party. It is simply using the old label of Bolshevism the better to fool the masses.

So much the more pitiful are those theoreticians who take the shell for the kernel and the appearance for the reality. In the identification of Bolshevism and Stalinism, they render the best possible service to the Thermidoreans and precisely thereby play a clearly reactionary role.

In view of the elimination of all other parties from the political field the antagonistic interests and tendencies of the various strata of the population must, to a greater or lesser degree, find their expression in the governing party.

To the extent that the political centre of gravity has shifted from the proletarian vanguard to the bureaucracy, the party has changed in its social structure as well as in its ideology. Owing to the impetuous course of development, it has suffered in the last fifteen years a far more radical degeneration than did the Social Democracy in half a century.

River of blood between Bolshevism and Stalinism
The present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism. How can this be ignored?

The anarchists, for their part, try to see in Stalinism the organic product not only of Bolshevism and Marxism but of "state socialism" in general. They are willing to replace Bakunin's patriarchal "federation of free communes" by the more modern federation of free soviets.

But, as formerly, they are against centralized state power. In fact, one branch of "state" Marxism, the Social Democracy, after coming to power, became an open agent of capitalism. The other gave birth to a new privileged caste. It is obvious that the source of the evil lies in the state.

From a broad historical viewpoint, there is a grain of truth in this reasoning. The state as an apparatus of constraint is undoubtedly a source of political and moral infection. This also applies, as experience has shown, to the workers' state.

Consequently, it can be said that Stalinism is a product of a condition of society in which society was still unable to tear itself out of the straitjacket of the state. But this situation, containing nothing for the evaluation of Bolshevism or Marxism, characterizes only the general cultural level of mankind, and above all – the relation of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie.

Having agreed with the anarchists that the state, even the workers' state, is the offspring of class barbarism and that real human history will begin with the abolition of the state, we have still before us in full force the question: What ways and methods will lead, ultimately, to the abolition of the state? Recent experience proves that they are certainly not the methods of anarchism.

Anarchism
The leaders of the CNT, the only important anarchist organization in the world, became, in the critical hour, bourgeois ministers. They explained their open betrayal of the theory of anarchism by the pressure of "exceptional circumstances."

But did not the leaders of the German Social Democracy invoke, in their time, the same excuse? Naturally, civil war is not a peaceful and ordinary but an "exceptional circumstance."

Every serious revolutionary organization, however, prepares precisely for "exceptional circumstances." The experience of Spain has shown once again that the state can be "denied" in booklets published in "normal circumstances" by permission of the bourgeois state, but that the conditions of revolution leave no room for "denial" of the state; they demand, on the contrary, the conquest of the state.

We have not the slightest intention of blaming the anarchists for not having liquidated the state by a mere stroke of the pen. A revolutionary party, even after having seized power (of which the anarchist leaders were incapable in spite of the heroism of the anarchist workers) is still by no means the sovereign ruler of society.

But we do severely blame the anarchist theory, which seemed to be wholly suitable for times of peace, but which had to be dropped rapidly as soon as the "exceptional circumstances" of the . . . revolution had begun. In the old days there were certain generals – and there probably are now – who considered that the most harmful thing for an army was war. In the same class are those revolutionaries who claim that their doctrine is destroyed by revolution.

Marxists are wholly in agreement with the anarchists in regard to the final goal: the liquidation of the state. Marxists are "stateist" only to the extent that one cannot achieve the liquidation of the state simply by ignoring it.

The experience of Stalinism does not refute the teaching of Marxism but confirms it by inversion. The revolutionary doctrine which teaches the proletariat to orient itself correctly in situations and to profit actively by them, contains of course no automatic guarantee of victory.

But victory is possible only through the application of this doctrine. Moreover, the victory must not be thought of as a single event. It must be considered in the perspective of a historic epoch. The first workers' state – on a lower economic basis and surrounded by imperialism -was transformed into the gendarmerie of Stalinism.

Civil war against Bolshevism
But genuine Bolshevism launched a life-and-death struggle against that gendarmerie. To maintain itself, Stalinism is now forced to conduct a direct civil war against Bolshevism, under the name of "Trotskyism," not only in the USSR but also in Spain. The old Bolshevik Party is dead, but Bolshevism is raising its head everywhere.

To deduce Stalinism from Bolshevism or from Marxism is the same as to deduce, in a larger sense, counterrevolution from revolution. Liberal-conservative and later reformist thinking has always been characterized by this cliche.

Due to the class structure of society, revolutions have always produced counterrevolutions. Does this not indicate, asks the logician, that there is some inner flaw in the revolutionary method? However, neither the liberals nor the reformists have succeeded, as yet, in inventing a more "Economical" method.

"Dictatorship of the party"
But if it is not easy to rationalize the living historic process, it is not at all difficult to give a rational interpretation of the alternation of its waves, and thus by pure logic to deduce Stalinism from "state socialism," fascism from Marxism, reaction from revolution, in a word, the antithesis from the thesis. In this domain as in many others, anarchist thought is the prisoner of liberal rationalism. Real revolutionary thinking is not possible without dialectics.

The arguments of the rationalists assume at times, at least in their outer form, a more concrete character. They do not deduce Stalinism from Bolshevism as a whole, but from its political sins.

The Bolsheviks – according to Gorter, Pannekoek, certain German "Spartacists" and others – replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party; Stalin replaced the dictatorship of the party with the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

The Bolsheviks destroyed all parties but their own; Stalin strangled the Bolshevik Party in the interest of a Bonapartist clique. The Bolsheviks made compromises with the bourgeoisie; Stalin became its ally and support. The Bolsheviks preached the necessity of participation in the old trade unions and in the bourgeois parliament; Stalin made friends with the trade union bureaucracy and bourgeois democracy. One can make such comparisons at will. For all their apparent effectiveness, they are entirely empty.

The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard
The proletariat can take power only through its vanguard. In itself the necessity for state power arises from an insufficient cultural level of the masses and their heterogeneity.

In the revolutionary vanguard, organized in a party, is crystallized the aspiration of the masses to obtain their freedom. Without the class's confidence in the vanguard, without the class's support of the vanguard, there can be no talk of the conquest of power.

In this sense, the proletarian revolution and dictatorship are the work of the whole class, but only under the leadership of the vanguard. The soviets are only the organized form of the tie between the vanguard and the class. A revolutionary content can be given to this form only by the party.

This is proved by the positive experience of the October Revolution and by the negative experience of other countries (Germany, Austria, finally Spain). No one has either shown in practice or tried to explain articulately on paper how the proletariat can seize power without the political leadership of a party that knows what it wants.

The political subordination of the soviets by this party to its leaders, has, in itself, abolished the soviet system no more than the domination of the Conservative majority has abolished the British parliamentary system.

As far as the prohibition of the other Soviet parties is concerned, it did not flow from any "theory" of Bolshevism but was a measure of defence of the dictatorship in a backward and devastated country, surrounded by enemies.

For the Bolsheviks it was clear from the beginning that this measure, later completed by the prohibition of factions inside the governing party itself, signalled a tremendous danger. However, the root of the danger lay not in the doctrine or in the tactics but in the material weakness of the dictatorship, in the difficulties of its internal and international situation.

If the revolution had triumphed, even if only in Germany, the need to prohibit the other Soviet parties would immediately have fallen away. It is absolutely indisputable that the domination of a single party served as the juridical point of departure for the Stalinist totalitarian system.

Civil war, blockade, and famine
But the reason for this development lies neither in Bolshevism nor in the prohibition of other parties as a temporary war measure, but in the number of defeats of the proletariat in Europe and Asia.

The same applies to the struggle with anarchism. In the heroic epoch of the revolution the Bolsheviks went hand in hand with the genuinely revolutionary anarchists. Many of them were drawn into the ranks of the party. The author of these lines discussed with Lenin more than once the possibility of allotting to the anarchists certain territories where, with the consent of the local population, they would carry out their stateless experiment.

But civil war, blockade, and famine left no room for such plans. The Kronstadt insurrection? But the revolutionary government naturally could not "present" to the insurrectionary sailors the fortress which protected the capital only because the reactionary peasant-soldier rebellion was joined by a few doubtful anarchists. A concrete historical analysis of the events leaves not the slightest room for the legends, built up on ignorance and sentimentality, concerning Kronstadt, Makhno, and other episodes of the revolution.

There remains only the fact that the Bolsheviks from the beginning applied not only conviction but also compulsion, often to a most brutal degree. It is also indisputable that later the bureaucracy which grew out of the revolution monopolized the system of compulsion for its own use.

Every stage of development, even such catastrophic stages as revolution and counterrevolution, flows from the preceding stage, is rooted in it, and takes on some of its features. Liberals, including the Webbs, have always maintained that the Bolshevik dictatorship was only a new version of czarism.

They close their eyes to such "details" as the abolition of the monarchy and the nobility, the handing over of the land to the peasants, the expropriation of capital, the introduction of planned economy, atheist education, etc.

In the same way liberal-anarchist thought closes its eyes to the fact that the Bolshevist revolution, with all its repressions, meant an upheaval of social relations in the interests of the masses, whereas the Stalinist Thermidorean upheaval accompanies the transformation of Soviet society in the interests of a privileged minority. It is clear that in the identification of Stalinism with Bolshevism there is not a trace of socialist criteria.

Theory
One of the most outstanding features of Bolshevism has been its severe, exacting, even quarrelsome attitude toward questions of doctrine. The twenty-seven volumes of Lenin's works will forever remain an example of the highest theoretical conscientiousness. Without this fundamental quality, Bolshevism would never have fulfilled its historic role. In this regard, Stalinism, coarse, ignorant, and thoroughly empirical, lies at the opposite pole.

The Opposition declared more than ten years ago in its program:

"Since Lenin's death a whole set of new theories has been created, whose only purpose is to justify the backsliding of the Stalinists from the path of the international proletarian revolution."

Only a few days ago an American writer, Liston M. Oak, who has participated in the Spanish revolution, wrote:

"The Stalinists in fact are today the foremost revisionists of Marx and Lenin – Bernstein did not dare to go half as far as Stalin in revising Marx."

This is absolutely true. One must add only that Bernstein actually felt certain theoretical needs: he tried conscientiously to establish the relationship between the reformist practices of the Social Democracy and its program.

The Stalinist bureaucracy, however, not only has nothing in common with Marxism, but is in general foreign to any doctrine or system whatsoever. Its "ideology" is thoroughly permeated with police subjectivism; its practice is the empiricism of crude violence. In keeping with its essential interests the caste of usurpers is hostile to any theory: it can give an account of its social role neither to itself nor to anyone else. Stalin revises Marx and Lenin not with the theoretician's pen but with the heel of the GPU.

Morality
Complaints of the "immorality" of Bolshevism come particularly from those boastful nonentities whose cheap masks were torn away by Bolshevism. In petty-bourgeois, intellectual, democratic "socialist" literary, parliamentary, and other circles, conventional values prevail, or a conventional language to cover their lack of values.

This large and motley society for mutual protection – "live and let live" – cannot bear the touch of the Marxist lancet on its sensitive skin. The theoreticians, writers, and moralists, hesitating between different camps, thought and continue to think that the Bolsheviks maliciously exaggerate differences, are incapable of "loyal" collaboration, and by their "intrigues" disrupt the unity of the workers' movement.

Moreover, the sensitive and squeamish centrist has always thought that the Bolsheviks were "slandering" him-simply because they carried through to the end for him his half-developed thoughts: he himself was never able to. But the fact remains that only that precious quality, an uncompromising attitude toward all quibbling and evasion, can educate a revolutionary party which will not be taken unawares by "exceptional circumstances."

The moral qualities of every party flow, in the last analysis, from the historical interests that it represents. The moral qualities of Bolshevism, self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, audacity, and contempt for every kind of tinsel and falsehood – the highest qualities of human nature! – flow from revolutionary intransigence in the service of the oppressed.

The Stalinist bureaucracy imitates in this domain also the words and gestures of Bolshevism. But when "intransigence" and "inflexibility" are applied by a police apparatus in the service of a privileged minority they become a source of demoralization and gangsterism. One can feel only contempt for these gentlemen who identify the revolutionary heroism of the Bolsheviks with the bureaucratic cynicism of the Thermidoreans.

Even now, in spite of the dramatic events of the recent period, the average philistine prefers to believe that the struggle between Bolshevism ("Trotskyism") and Stalinism concerns a clash of personal ambitions, or, at best, a conflict between two "shades" of Bolshevism. The crudest expression of this opinion is given by Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist Party:

"There is little reason to believe," he writes (American Socialist Review September 1937, p. 6) "that if Trotsky had won (!) instead of Stalin, there would have been an end of intrigue, plots, and the reign of fear in Russia."

And this man considers himself ... a Marxist. One would have the same right to say: "There is little reason to believe that if instead of Pius XI, the Holy, See were occupied by Norman I, the Catholic Church would have been transformed into a bulwark of socialism."

Thomas fails to understand that it is not a question of a match between Stalin and Trotsky, but of an antagonism between the bureaucracy and the proletariat. To be sure, the governing stratum of the USSR is forced even now to adapt itself to the still not wholly liquidated heritage of revolution, while preparing at the same time through direct civil war (bloody "purge" – mass annihilation of the discontented) a change of the social regime.

But in Spain the Stalinist clique is already acting openly as a bulwark of the bourgeois order against socialism. The struggle against the Bonapartist bureaucracy is turning before our eyes into class struggle: two worlds, two programs, two moralities. If Thomas thinks that the victory of the socialist proletariat over the infamous caste of oppressors would not politically and morally regenerate the Soviet regime, he proves only that for all his reservations, shufflings, and pious sighs he is far nearer to the Stalinist bureaucracy than to the workers.

Like other exposers of Bolshevik "immorality," Thomas has simply not grown up to revolutionary morals.

Bolshevism
The "leftists" who tried to skip Bolshevism in their "return" to Marxism generally confined themselves to isolated panaceas: boycott of the old trade unions, boycott of parliament, creation of "genuine" soviets.

All this could still seem extremely profound in the first heat of the postwar days. But now, in the light of most ,recent experience, such "infantile diseases" have no longer even the interest of a curiosity. The Dutchmen Gorter and Pannekoek, the German "Spartacists," the Italian Bordigists, showed their independence from Bolshevism only by artificially inflating one of its features and opposing it to the rest.

But nothing has remained either in practice or in theory of these "left" tendencies: an indirect but important proof that Bolshevism is the only possible form of Marxism for this epoch.

The Bolshevik Party has shown in action a combination of the highest revolutionary audacity and political realism. It has established for the first time the only relation between vanguard and class that can assure victory.

It has proved by experience that the alliance between the proletariat and the oppressed masses of the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie? is possible only through the political defeat of the traditional petty-bourgeois parties. The Bolshevik Party has shown the entire world how to carry out armed insurrection and the seizure of power.

Those who counterpose the abstraction of soviets to the party dictatorship should understand that only thanks to the Bolshevik leadership were the soviets able to lift themselves out of the mud of reformism and attain the state form of the proletariat.

The Bolshevik Party achieved in the civil war the correct combination of military art and Marxist politics. Even if the Stalinist bureaucracy should succeed in destroying the economic foundations of the new society, the experience of planned economy under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party will have entered history for all time as one of the greatest teachings of mankind. This can be ignored only by bruised and offended sectarians who have turned their backs on the historical process.

But this is not all. The Bolshevik Party was able to carry on its magnificent "practical" work only because it illuminated all its steps with theory. Bolshevism did not create this theory: it was furnished by Marxism.

But Marxism is the theory of movement, not of stagnation. Only events on a tremendous historical scale could enrich the theory itself.

Bolshevism brought an invaluable contribution to Marxism in its analysis of the imperialist epoch as an epoch of wars and revolutions; of bourgeois democracy in the era of decaying capitalism; of the correlation between the general strike and the insurrection; of the role of party, soviets, and trade unions in the period of proletarian revolution; in its theory of the Soviet state, of the economy of transition, of fascism and Bonapartism in the epoch of capitalist decline; finally in its analysis of the degeneration of both the Bolshevik Party itself and of the Soviet state.

Let any other tendency be named that has added anything essential to the conclusions and generalizations of Bolshevism. Theoretically and politically Vandervelde, De Brouckere, Hilferding, Otto Bauer, Leon Blum, Zyromsky, not to mention Major Attlee and Norman Thomas, live on the dilapidated leftovers of the past.

The degeneration of the Comintern is most crudely expressed by the fact that it has dropped to the theoretical level of the Second International. All the varieties of intermediary groups (Independent Labour Party of Great Britain, POUM, and their like) adapt new haphazard fragments of Marx and Lenin to their current needs every week. They can teach the workers nothing.

Only the founders of the Fourth International, who have made the whole tradition of Marx and Lenin their own, take a serious attitude toward theory. Philistines may jeer that twenty years after the October victory the revolutionaries are again thrown back to modest propagandist preparation.

The big capitalists are, in this question as in many others, far more penetrating than the petty-bourgeois who imagine themselves "Socialists" or "Communists." It is no accident that the subject of the Fourth International does not leave the columns of the world press. The burning historical need for revolutionary leadership promises to the Fourth International an exceptionally rapid tempo of growth. The greatest guarantee of its further success lies in the fact that it has not arisen apart from the large historic road, but is an organic outgrowth of Bolshevism.

August 29, 1937.




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[Top]

Introduction
Reactionary epochs like ours not only disintegrate and weaken the working class and isolate its vanguard but also lower the general ideological level of the movement and throw political thinking back to stages long since passed through. In these conditions the task of the vanguard is, above all, not to let itself be carried along by the backward flow: it must swim against the current.

If an unfavourable relation of forces prevents it from holding political positions it has won, it must at least retain its ideological positions, because in them is expressed the dearly paid experience of the past. Fools will consider this policy 'sectarian'. Actually it is the only means of preparing for a new tremendous surge forward with the coming historical tide.

The Reaction Against Marxism and Bolshevism
Great political defeats provoke a reconsideration of values, generally occurring in two directions. On the one hand the true vanguard, enriched by the experience of defeat, defends with tooth and nail the heritage of revolutionary thought and on this basis strives to educate new cadres for the mass struggle to come.

On the other hand the routinists, centrists and dilettantes, frightened by defeat, do their best to destroy the authority of the revolutionary tradition and go backwards in their search for a 'New World'.

One could indicate a great many examples of ideological reaction, most often taking the form of prostration. All the literature if the Second and Third Internationals, as well as of their satellites of the London Bureau, consists essentially of such examples.

Not a suggestion of Marxist analysis. Not a single serious attempt to explain the causes of defeat, About the future, not one fresh word. Nothing but cliches, conformity, lies and above all solicitude for their own bureaucratic self-preservation. It is enough to smell 10 words from some Hilferding or Otto Bauer to know this rottenness.

The theoreticians of the Comintern are not even worth mentioning. The famous Dimitrov is as ignorant and commonplace as a shopkeeper over a mug of beer. The minds of these people are too lazy to renounce Marxism: they prostitute it. But it is not they that interest us now. Let us turn to the 'innovators'.

The former Austrian communist, Willi Schlamm, has devoted a small book to the Moscow trials, under the expressive title, The Dictatorship of the Lie. Schlamm is a gifted journalist, chiefly interested in current affairs.

His criticism of the Moscow frame-up, and his exposure of the psychological mechanism of the 'voluntary confessions', are excellent. However, he does not confine himself to this: he wants to create a new theory of socialism that would insure us against defeats and frame-ups in the future.

But since Schlamm is by no means a theoretician and is apparently not well acquainted with the history of the development of socialism, he returns entirely to pre-Marxist socialism, and notably to its German, that is to its most backward, sentimental and mawkish variety.

Schlamm denounces dialectics and the class struggle, not to mention the dictatorship of the proletariat. The problem of transforming society is reduced for him to the realisation of certain 'eternal' moral truths with which he would imbue mankind, even under capitalism.

Willi Schlamm's attempts to save socialism by the insertion of the moral gland is greeted with joy and pride in Kerensky's review, Novaya Rossia (an old provincial Russian review now published in Paris); as the editors justifiably conclude, Schlamm has arrived at the principles of true Russian socialism, which a long time ago opposed the holy precepts of faith, hope and charity to the austerity and harshness of the class struggle.

The 'novel' doctrine of the Russian 'Social Revolutionaries' represents, in its 'theoretical 'premises, only a return to the pre-March (1848!) Germany. However, it would be unfair to demand a more intimate knowledge of the history of ideas from Kerensky than from Schlamm.

Far more important is the fact that Kerensky, who is in solidarity with Schlamm, was, while head of the government, the instigator of persecutions against the Bolsheviks as agents of the German general staff: organised, that is, the same frame-ups against which Schlamm now mobilises his moth-eaten metaphysical absolutes.

The psychological mechanism of the ideological reaction of Schlamm and his like, is not at all complicated. For a while these people took part in a political movement that swore by the class struggle and appeared, in word if not in thought, to dialectical materialism.

In both Austria and Germany the affair ended in a catastrophe. Schlamm draws the wholesale conclusion: this is the result of dialectics and the class struggle! And since the choice of revelations is limited by historical experience and... by personal knowledge, our reformer in his search for the word falls on a bundle of old rags which he valiantly opposes not only to Bolshevism but to Marxism as well.

At first glance Schlamm's brand of ideological reaction seems too primitive (from Marx... to Kerensky!) to pause over. But actually it is very instructive: precisely in its primitiveness it represents the common denominator of all other forms of reaction, particularly of those expressed by wholesale denunciation of Bolshevism.

Verdad


hmm

14.04.2004 15:54

The difference between nazisim and communism was about a 100million? So presumably that means you think that the Nazis didn't kill anyone? Communists killed fuckloads of people, but the figure is made much bigger by humanitarian disasters, famines (not all intentional), and massive wars such as in Indochina.

The major moral difference between nazisim and communism was that communists killed opponents, were responsible for the deaths of 10s of millions in terrible conditions in slave labour camps, brutally killed people in wars, and so on.

The Nazis killed races. Their whole ideology was built on racism and hatred amongst races, glorification of war and death, and anti-semitism. They killed 6 million Jews not because they were political opponents (real or potential), or on the other side in a war, but BECAUSE they were Jews and hence designated inferior. They killed 100,000s of Roma because they were designated inferior. They killed 10s of millions of Slavs because they were designated inferior, and hence to be exterminated. If they had conquered Russia they said they would kill a third, exploit a third, and use another third for slave labour till they die (or something like that).

The Nazis also conquered Europe and led to a huge war between all the major powers of the world, across the whole world. The Cold War on the other hand was long and protracted conflicts which each side supporting a different side in Third World countries, not in Spain, France, and so on. It was about tension and cooling of tension, not mass war. The Soviets never tried to invade Britain and bomb the fuck out of us, the Nazis did. The world was also basically seperated into Nazi and anti-Nazi during WW2, during the Cold War, many were neutral, swayed from side to side, and so on. During the Cold War there were also many other conflicts that were hugely irrelevant to the Cold War itself, not the case during WW2. Many cold war conflicts, such as in Africa, would also have happened even if the soviets or US didn't get involved. Communism was not also always all one block like the Nazis, the Chienese etc split off, and many conflicts were actually between communist powers.

And contrary to the post's claims, people DO condemn communist crimes, such as Stalin's labour camps, Mao's famines, and the Khmer Rouge's genocide and so on.

Oh and btw trotskyist, Leninist tyranny DID lead to Stalinist tyranny.

har


Always fun

15.04.2004 07:43

It's always fun watching people trying to defend communism

Roger


communism was good

27.08.2005 14:30

Communism, diod not kill 100million, It killed 21 million in the USSR, and 21 million in China, then 5million at most elsewhere, meanwhile the king of the belfians killed 15million in Congo, and the kaiser killed 21million world war one, and the emperor hirohito 27million in world war two, and the far right 42 million in world war two, and the ottomans 1.5million

jim
mail e-mail: asdfghjk@yahoo.co.uk


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