Another view of Stalin

by Ludo Martens

  `The aftermath was the ``Ukraine famine'' of 1932--33 .... Lurid accounts, mostly fictional, appeared in the Nazi press in Germany and in the Hearst press in the United States, often illustrated with photographs that turned out to have been taken along the Volga in 1921 .... The ``famine'' was not, in its later stages, a result of food shortage, despite the sharp reduction of seed grain and harvests flowing from special requisitions in the spring of 1932 which were apparently occasioned by fear of war in Japan. Most of the victims were kulaks who had refused to sow their fields or had destroyed their crops.'

  .

  Tottle, op. cit. , pp. 93--94.

  It is interesting to note that this eyewitness account was confirmed by a 1934 article by Isaac Mazepa, leader of the Ukrainian Nationalist movement, former Premier under Petliura in 1918. He boasted that in Ukraine, the right had succeeded in 1930--1932 in widely sabotaging the agricultural works.

  `At first there were disturbances in the kolkhosi [collective farms] or else the Communist officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustation of the Bolsheviks' plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest .... The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that Soviet Ukraine had to face since the famine of 1921--1922. The autumn and spring sowing campaigns both failed. Whole tracts were left unsown, in addition when the crop was being gathered ... in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50 per cent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing.'

  .

  Ibid. , p. 94.

  The second cause of the famine was the drought that hit certain areas of Ukraine in 1930, 1931 and 1932. For Professor James E. Mace, who defends the Ukrainian far-right line at Harvard, it is a fable created by the Soviet rйgime. However, in his A History of Ukraine, Mikhail Hrushevsky, described by the Nationalists themselves as `Ukraine's leading historian', writing of the year 1932, claimed that `Again a year of drought coincided with chaotic agricultural conditions'.

  .

  Ibid. , p. 91.

  Professor Nicholas Riasnovsky, who taught at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, wrote that the years 1931 and 1932 saw drought conditions. Professor Michael Florinsky, who struggled against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, noted: `Severe droughts in 1930 and 1931, especially in the Ukraine, aggravated the plight of farming and created near famine conditions'.

  .

  Ibid. , p. 92.

  The third cause of the famine was a typhoid epidemic that ravaged Ukraine and North Caucausus. Dr. Hans Blumenfeld, internationally respected city planner and recipient of the Order of Canada, worked as an architect in Makayevka, Ukraine during the famine. He wrote:

  `There is no doubt that the famine claimed many victims. I have no basis on which to estimate their number .... Probably most deaths in 1933 were due to epidemics of typhus, typhoid fever, and dysentery. Waterborne diseases were frequent in Makeyevka; I narrowly survived an attack of typhus fever.'

  .

  Ibid. , p. 96.

  Horsley Grant, the man who made the absurd estimate of 15 million dead under the famine --- 60 per cent of an ethnic Ukrainian population of 25 million in 1932 --- noted at the same time that `the peak of the typhus epidemic coincided with the famine .... it is not possible to separate which of the two causes was more important in causing casualties.'

  .

  Ibid. , p. 97.

  The fourth cause of the famine was the inevitable disorder provoked by the reorganization of agriculture and the equally profound upheaval in economic and social relations: lack of experience, improvization and confusion in orders, lack of preparation and leftist radicalism among some of the poorer peasants and some of the civil servants.

  The numbers of one to two million dead for the famine are clearly important. These human losses are largely due to the ferocious opposition of the exploiting classes to the reorganization and modernization of agriculture on a socialist basis. But the bourgeoisie would make Stalin and socialism responsible for these deaths. The figure of one to two million should also be compared to the nine million dead caused by the 1921--1922 famine, essentially provoked by the military intervention of eight imperialist powers and by the support that they gave to reactionary armed groups.

  The famine did not last beyond the period prior to the 1933 harvest. Extraordinary measures were taken by the Soviet government to guarantee the success of the harvest that year. In the spring, thirty-five million poods of seeds, food and fodder were sent to Ukraine. The organization and management of kolkhozy was improved and several thousand supplementary tractors, combines and trucks were delivered.

  Hans Blumenfeld presented, in his autobiography, a rйsumй of what he experienced during the famine in Ukraine:

  `[The famine was caused by] a conjunction of a number of factors. First, the hot dry summer of 1932, which I had experienced in northern Vyatka, had resulted in crop failure in the semiarid regions of the south. Second, the struggle for collectivization had disrupted agriculture. Collectivization was not an orderly process following bureaucratic rules. It consisted of actions by the poor peasants, encouraged by the Party. The poor peasants were eager to expropriate the ``kulaks,'' but less eager to organize a cooperative economy. By 1930 the Party had already sent out cadres to stem and correct excesses .... After having exercised restraint in 1930, the Party put on a drive again in 1932. As a result, in that year the kulak economy ceased to produce, and the new collective economy did not yet produce fully. First claim on the inadequate product went to urban industry and to the armed forces; as the future of the entire nation, including the peasants, depended on them, it could hardly be otherwise ....

  `In 1933 rainfall was adequate. The Party sent its best cadres to help organize work in the kolkhozes. They succeeded; after the harvest of 1933 the situation improved radically and with amazing speed. I had the feeling that we had been pulling a heavy cart uphill, uncertain if we would succeed; but in the fall of 1933 we had gone over the top and from then on we could move forward at an accelerating pace.'

  .

  Ibid.

  Hans Blumenfeld underscored that the famine also struck the Russian regions of Lower Volga and North Caucasus.

  `This disproves the ``fact'' of anti-Ukrainian genocide parallel to Hitler's anti-semitic holocaust. To anyone familiar with the Soviet Union's desperate manpower shortage in those years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource is absurd ....'

  .

  Ibid. , p. 100.

  Ukraine under Nazi occupation

  The Japanese armies occupied Manchuria in 1931 and took up position along the Soviet border. Hitler came to power in 1933.

  The programs of industrial and agricultural reorganization undertaken by the Soviet Union in 1928--1933 came just in time. Only their success, at a cost of total mobilization of all forces, allowed the victorious resistance to the Nazis.

  One of history's ironies is that the Nazis started to believe their own lies about the Ukrainian genocide and about the fragility of the Soviet system.

  Historian Heinz Hohne wrote:

  `Two sobering years of bloody war in Russia provided cruel proof of the falsity of the tale about sub-humans. As early as August 1942 in its ``Reports from the Reich'' the SD (Sicherheits Dienst) noted that the feeling was growing among the German people that we have been victims of delusion. The main and startling impression is of the vast mass of Soviet weapons, their technical quality, and the gigantic Soviet effort of industrialization --- all in sharp contrast to the previous picture of the Soviet Union. ``People are asking themselves how Bolshevism has managed to produce all this.'' '

  .

  Ibid. , p. 99.

  The U.S. professor William Mandel wrote in 1985:

  `In the largest eastern portion of the Ukraine, which had been Soviet for twenty years loyalty was overwhelming and active. There were half a million organized Soviet guerilla
s ... and 4,500,000 ethnic Ukrainians fought in the Soviet army. Clearly that army would have been fundamentally weakened if there had been basic disaffections among so large a component.'

  .

  Ibid. , p. 101.

  Historian Roman Szporluk admits that the `zones of operation' of `organized Ukrainian Nationalism ... was limited to the former Polish territories', i.e. to Galicia. Under Polish occupation, the fascist Ukrainian movement had a base until 1939.

  .

  Ibid.

  The Ukrainian holocaust lie was invented by the Hitlerites as part of their preparation of the conquest of Ukranian territories. But as soon as they set foot on Ukrainian soil, the Nazi `liberators' met ferocious resistance. Alexei Fyodorov led a group of partisans that eliminated 25,000 Nazis during the war. His book The Underground Committee Carries On admirably shows the attitude of the Ukrainian people to the Nazis. Its reading is highly recommended as an antidote to those who talk about the `Stalinist Ukrainian genocide'.

  .

  Alexei Fyodorov, The Underground Committee Carries On (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

  The struggle against bureaucracy

  Trotsky invented the infamous term `Stalinist bureaucracy'. While Lenin was still living, late in 1923, he was already maneuvering to seize power within the Party:

  `[B]ureaucratization threatens to ... provoke a more or less opportunistic degeneration of the Old Guard'.

  .

  Trotsky, The New Course, p. 72.

  In his opposition platform, written in July 1926, his foremost attack was against `unbridled bureaucratism'.

  .

  Trotsky, The New Course, p. 85.

  And once the Second World War had begun, Trotsky spent his time provoking the Soviet people in `acting against the Stalinist bureaucracy as it did previously against the Tsarist bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie.'

  .

  Trotsky, Lettres aux travailleurs d'URSS (May 1940). La lutte antibureaucratique en URSS II: La rйvolution nйcessaire 1933--1940 (Paris: Union gйnйrale d'йditions, 1975), pp. 301--302.

  Trotsky always used the word `bureaucracy' to denigrate socialism.

  Given this context, it might come as some surprise that throughout the thirties, the Party leaders, principally Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov, devoted a lot of energy to the struggle against the bureaucratic elements within the Party and State apparatus.

  How did the struggle against bureaucratization and bureaucracy define itself in the thirties?

  Anti-Communists against `bureaucracy'

  First we should make sure that we agree about the meaning of terms.

  As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power, the Right used the word `bureaucracy' to describe and denigrate the revolutionary rйgime itself. For the Right, any socialist and revolutionary enterprise was detestable, and automatically received the defamatory label of `bureaucratic'. Right from October 26, 1917, the Mensheviks declared their irreconcilable hostility with the `bureaucratic' Bolshevik rйgime, the result of a `coup d'йtat', a rйgime that could not be socialist because most of the country was peasant, a rйgime characterized by `state capitalism' and by the `dictatorship against the peasants'. This propaganda clearly intended the reversal of the dictatorship of the proletariat imposed under the Bolshevik rйgime.

  But, in 1922, faced with the destruction of the productive forces in the countryside and trying to preserve the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks were forced to back off, to make concessions to the individual peasants, to allow them the freedom to buy and sell. The Bolsheviks wanted to create in the countryside a kind of `state capitalism', i.e. the development of a small capitalism constrained and controlled by the (Socialist) State. At the same time, the Bolsheviks declared war on bureaucracy: they combatted the unchanged habits of the old bureaucratic apparatus and the tendency of new Soviet civil servants to adapt to it.

  The Mensheviks sought then to return to the political scene by stating: `You, the Bolsheviks, you are now against bureaucracy and you admit to building state capitalism. This is what we said, what we have always said. We were correct.' Here is Lenin's answer:

  `[T]he sermons ... the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature --- ``The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say again.'' But we say in reply: ``Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.'' '

  .

  Lenin, Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P.(B.). Works. vol. 33, p. 283.

  As can be seen above, Lenin vehemently dealt with counter-revolutionaries attacking the so-called `bureaucracy' to overthrow the socialist rйgime.

  Bolsheviks against bureaucratization

  Lenin and the Bolsheviks always led a revolutionary struggle against the bureaucratic deviations that, in a backward country, inevitably occurred within the apparatus of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They estimated that the dictatorship was also menaced `from inside' by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state apparatus.

  The Bolsheviks had to `retake' part of the old Tsarist state apparatus, which had only been partially transformed in the socialist sense.

  Futhermore, the Party and government apparatus in the countryside posed great problems, throughout the country. Between 1928 and 1931, the Party accepted 1,400,000 new members. Among this mass, many were in fact political illiterates. They had revolutionary sentiments, but no real Communist knowledge. Kulaks, old Tsarist officers and other reactionaries easily succeeded in infiltrating the Party. All those who had a certain capacity for organization were automatically accepted into the Party, as there were so few cadres. Between 1928 and 1938, the weight of the Party in the countryside remained weak, and its members were heavily influenced by the upper strata that intellectually and economically dominated the rural world. These factors all lead to problems of bureaucratic degeneration.

  The first generation of revolutionary peasants had experienced the Civil War, when they were fighting the reactionary forces. The War Communism spirit, giving and receiving orders, maintained itself and gave birth to a bureaucratic style of work that was little based on patient political work.

  For all these reasons, the struggle against the bureaucracy was always considered by Lenin and Stalin as a struggle for the purity of the Bolshevik line, against the influences of the old society, the old social classes and oppressive structures.

  Under Lenin as under Stalin, the Party sought to concentrate the best revolutionaries, the most far-seeing, active, firm and organically tied to the masses, within the Central Committee and the leading organs. The leadership of the Party always sought to mobilize the masses to implement the tasks of socialist construction. It was at the intermediate levels, most notably in the Republic apparatuses, that bureaucratic elements, careerists and opportunists could most easily set up and hide. Throughout the period in which Stalin was the leader of the Party, Stalin called for the leadership and the base to mobilize to hound out the bureaucrats from above and from below. Here is a 1928 directive, typical of Stalin's view.

  `Bureaucracy is one of the worst enemies of our progress. It exists in all our organizations .... The trouble is that it is not a matter of the old bureaucrats. It is a matter of the new bureaucrats, bureaucrats who sympathize with the Soviet Government and finally, communist bureaucrats. The communist bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member.'

  .

  Stalin, Speech delivered at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. Selected Works, p. 286.

  After having presented several grave cases, Stalin continued:


  `What is the explanation of these shameful instances of corruption and moral deterioration in certain of our Party organizations? The fact that Party monopoly was carried to absurd lengths, that the voice of the rank and file was stifled, that inner-Party democracy was abolished and bureaucracy became rife .... I think that there is not and cannot be any other way of combating this evil than by organizing control from below by the Party masses, by implanting inner-Party democracy. What objection can there be to rousing the fury of the mass of the Party membership against these corrupt elements and giving it the opportunity to send these elements packing?'