by Ludo Martens
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Hitler parle а ses gйnйraux (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964), pp. 39--40.
The bestiality with which the Hitlerian troops tracked down and liquidated all the Party members, all the partisans, all the Soviet State leaders, along with their families, allows us to better understand the importance of the Great Purge of 1937--1938. In the occupied territories, unreconcilable counter-revolutionaries who had not been liquidated in 1937--1938 went to work for the Hitlerites, informing on all the Bolsheviks, their families and their friends in struggle.
As the war in the East became fiercer and fiercer, the Nazis' murderous folly against an entire people intensified. Himmler, talking to SS leaders, spoke in June 1942:
`In what was a ``war of annihilation [Vernichtungskampf],'' two ``races and peoples'' were locked in ``unconditional'' combat; on the one side ``this brute matter, this mass, these primeval men, or better these subhumans [Untermenschen], led by commissars''; on the other, ``we Germans''.'
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Mayer, op. cit. , p. 281.
An unprecedented, sanguinary terror: that was the weapon that the Nazis tried to use to force the Soviets into moral and political submission. Himmler said:
`During the battles to seize Kharkov, our reputation of striking fear and sowing terror preceded us. It is an extraordinary weapon that should always be reinforced.'
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Heinrich Himmler, Discours secrets (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 191.
And the Nazis intensified that terror.
On August 23, 1942, precisely at 18:00, one thousand airplanes began to drop incendiary bombs on Stalingrad. In that city of 600,000 people, there were many wooden buildings, gas tanks and fuel tanks for industries. Yeryomenko, who commanded the Stalingrad front, wrote:
`Stalingrad was drowned by the misty flames, surrounded by smoke and soot. The entire city was burning. Huge clouds of smoke and fire rose up above the factories. The oil reservoirs appeared to be volcanoes throwing up their lava. Hundreds of thousands of peacable inhabitants perished. One's heart got caught in one's throat in compassion for the innocent victims of the fascist victim.'
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Eremenko, pp. 153--154.
One must have a clear view of these unbearable truths to understand certain aspects of what the bourgeoisie calls `Stalinism'. During the purge, unrepentant bureaucrats, defeatists and capitulationists were affected; many were sent to Siberia. A defeatist or capitulationist Party could never have mobilized and disciplined the population to face the Nazi terror. And the Soviet people did face it in the besieged cities, in Leningrad and Moscow. And even in the Stalingrad inferno, men and women survived, never surrendered and, finally, participated in the counter-offensive!
During the German aggression, in June 1941, General Pavlov, commander of the Western Front, displayed grave incompetence and negligence. The result was the loss of Minsk, the Byelorussian capital, on June 28. Stalin recalled Pavlov and his staff to Moscow. Zhukov noted that `on a proposal of the Military Council of the Western Front', they were tried and shot.
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Zhukov, op. cit. , p. 260.
Elleinstein of course writes that `Stalin continued to terrorize his subordinates'.
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Elleinstein, op. cit. , p. 283.
But, faced with Nazi barbarism, the Soviet leadership had to show an unflinching attitude and phenomenal endurance; any irresponsible act had to be punished with the utmost severity.
Once the fascist beast began to receive mortal wounds, it tried to take up courage by bathing in blood, by practicing genocide against the Soviet people who were under its talons.
Himmler declared on December 16, 1943, in Weimar:
`When I was forced to give in a village the order to march against the Jewish partisans and commissars, I systematically gave the order to also kill the women and children of these partisans and these commissars. I would be a coward and a criminal with respect to our descendants if I allowed these hate-filled children of subhumans in the battle between human and subhuman. We always keep in mind that we are engaged in a primitive, natural and original racial battle.'
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Himmler, op. cit. , p. 205.
In another speech on April 24, 1943, in Kharkov, the head of the SS said:
`By what means will we succeed in removing from Russia the greatest number of men, dead or alive? We will succeed by killing them, by making them prisoner, by making them really work and by giving back (certain territories) to the enemy only after having completely emptied them of inhabitants. Giving men back to Russia would be a great error.'
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Ibid. , p. 187.
This reality, of the unbelievable terror that the Nazis practiced in the Soviet Union, against the first socialist country, against the Communists, is almost systematically covered up or minimized in bourgeois litterature. This silence has a clear goal. Those who do not know of the monstrous crimes committed against the Soviets are more likely to believe that Stalin was a `dictator' comparable to Hitler. The bourgeoisie covers up the real anti-Communist genocide to better publicize what it has in common with Nazism: the irrational hatred of Communism, the class hatred of socialism. And to better cover up the great genocide of the war, the bourgeoisie shines the light on another genocide, that of the Jews.
In a remarkable book, Arno J. Mayer, whose father was left-Zionist, shows that the extermination of the Jews only began once the Nazis had, for the first time, suffered heavy losses. It was in June--July 1941, against the Red Army. The bestiality against the Communists, followed by the unexpected defeats that demolished the sentiment of invincibility of the Ubermenschen (Supermen), created the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust.
`The Judeocide was forged in the fires of a stupendous war to conquer unlimited Lebensraum from Russia, to crush the Soviet regime, and to liquidate international bolshevism .... Without Operation Barbarossa there would and could have been no Jewish catastrophe, no ``Final Solution''.'
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Mayer, op. cit. , p. 234.
Once the Nazis had to face the defeats on the Russian front, they decided on a `global and final solution' of the `Jewish problem' during the Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942.
For years, the Nazis had put forward their hatred of `Judeo-Bolshevism', Bolshevism having been the worst invention of the Jews. The determined resistance of the Bolsheviks prevented the Hitlerians from finishing off their principal enemy. So the latter turned their frustations on the Jews, whom they exterminated with blind fury.
Since the Jewish big bourgeoisie had been conciliatory to the Hitlerian state, sometimes even collaborationist, most Jews handed themselves over to their executors. But the Communist Jews, who acted in an internationalist spirit, fought the Nazis and led some of the Jewish Left into resistance. The great majority of the poor Jews were gassed. But many rich Jews succeeded in escaping to the United States. After the war, they went to work for U.S. imperialism and its Middle East beachhead, Israel. They speak at length about the Jewish Holocaust, but in a pro-Israel light; at the same time, they freely voice their anti-Communism, thereby insulting the memory of those Communist Jews who really did fight the Nazis.
We conclude with a word on how Hitler prepared the Nazis to indifferently massacre 23 million Soviet citizens. To transform his men into killing machines, he had to make them believe that a Bolshevik was subhuman, an animal.
`Hitler warned his troops that the enemy forces were ``largely composed of beasts, not soldiers,'' conditioned to fight with animal-like ferocity.'
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Ibid. , p. 244.
In order to push the German troops to exterminate Communists, Hitler told them that Stalin and the other Soviet leaders were `bloodstained criminals ... [who had] killed and rooted out millions of [Russia's] leading intelligentsia in a wild thirst for blood ... [and] exercised the most cruel tyranny of all times.'
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Ibid. , p. 106.
`(T)he bloody Jew and tyrant over the people ...
killed (sometimes with inhuman tortures) or starved to death with truly fanatical savagery close to thirty million people.'
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Ibid. , p. 101.
So, for Hitler, the lie of `thirty million victims of Stalinism' served to psychologically prepare for Nazi barbarism and the genocide of Soviet Communists and partisans.
Note that Hitler first blamed Lenin for `thirty million victims'. This disgusting lie already appeared in 1926 in Mein Kampf, long before the collectivization and purge! Attacking Judeo-Bolshevism, Hitler wrote:
`(The Jew) killed or starved about thirty million people with a truly diabolic ferocity, under inhuman tortures'.
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Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), pp. 450--451.
Half a century later, Brzezinski, U.S. imperialism's official ideologue, took up these Nazi lies, word for word:
`(I)t is absolutely safe to estimate the number (of Stalin's victims) at no less than twenty million and perhaps as high as forty million'.
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Brzezinski, op. cit. , p. 27.
Stalin, his personality and his military capacities
The Hitlerian aggression drenched the Soviet Union in a bath of blood and steel that surpassed all the horrors that the world had ever previously seen. Never in humanity's history has such a terrifying test, of such unfeeling violence, been imposed on a people, its cadres and its leadership. Under such conditions, it was impossible to pretend, to rationalize or to try to save oneself with empty words and acts.
The moment of truth had come for Stalin, the supreme leader of the Party and the country. The war was to measure his moral and political strength, his will and endurance and his intellectual and organizational capacities.
At the same time, all the `truths' about Stalin, revealed in a self-interested manner, by the Hitlerians and by the more `respectable' Right, were to be tested: the war would show up without doubt Stalin the `dictator', whose `personal power' was not affected by the `slightest contradiction', the `despot' who did not listen to reason, the man of `mediocre intelligence', etc.
Half a century after the war, these slanders, put forward at the time by socialism's worst enemies, have become primary `truths' once again. With time, the international bourgeoisie succeeded in imposing on intellectual circles the monopoly of its class `truth'.
Yet the Second World War itself provided ample material to denounce this lie, which is so important to save capitalism, the system of exploitation and pillage.
Stalin, the `dictator'
We begin with the first `uncontestable truth': Stalin, alone, the dictator, imposing his personal will, requiring total submission to himself. Here is Khrushchev:
`The power accumulated in the hands of one person, Stalin, led to serious consequences during the Great Patriotic War.'
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Khrushchev, Secret Report, op. cit. , p. S36.
`Stalin acts for everybody; he does not reckon with anyone; he asks no one for advice.'
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Ibid. , p. S43.
`Stalin acted not through persuasion, explanation and patient cooperation with people, but by imposing his concepts and demanding absolute submission to his opinion. Whoever opposed this concept or tried to prove his viewpoint and the correctness of his position was doomed to removal from the leading collective and to subsequent moral and physical annihilation.'
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Ibid. , p. S13.
`The sickly suspicion created in him a general distrust .... A situation was created where one could not express one's own will.'
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Ibid. , p. S34.
Elleinstein followed in Khrushchev's footsteps. He is quite happy to denounce the `Soviet dictatorship', in which Stalin `was suspicious of all his subordinates'. `The errors of Stalin's leadership had tragic consequences in the first months of the war, but these took place primarily as a result of the Soviet dictatorship.'
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Elleinstein, op. cit. , pp. 284, 282.
Vasilevsky was originally assistant to Zhukov, the Chief of Staff. In May 1942, he became Chief of Staff. He worked at Stalin's side throughout the war.
`In elaborating a particular operational-strategic decision or in examining other important issues affecting the conduct of the war, the Commander-in-Chief called in responsible people directly in charge of the problem under review .... periodically he would summon certain members of front military councils so as to work out, review or confirm a particular decision concerning control of battle operations ....
`(T)he preliminary draft of a strategic decision of plan for its implementation was drawn up by the Commander-in-Chief in a narrow circle of people. These were usually a few members of the Politburo and the State Defence Committee .... This work would often take several days. In the course of it the Commander-in-Chief would normally confer with commanders and members of military councils of the respective fronts'.
Note that the State Committee for Defence, headed by Stalin, was responsible for the leadership of the country and all authority was concentrated in its hands. Vasilevsky continued:
`(T)he Central Committee Politburo and army leadership always relied on collective decision-making. That is why the strategic decisions taken collectively and drawn up by the Supreme Command as a rule corresponded to the situation at the fronts, while the requirements made upon people were realistic'.
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Vasilevsky, op. cit. , pp. 91--93.
Vasilevsky also thought that Stalin's style of work improved during the battle of Stalingrad, then during the great offensives against the Hitlerians.
`The big turning point for Stalin as Supreme High Commander came in September 1942 when the situation became very grave and there was a special need for flexible and skilled leadership in regard to military operations. (He was) ... obliged constantly to rely on the collective experience of his generals. Thenceforth one would often hear him say: ``Why the devil didn't you say so!''
`From then on, before he took a decision on any important war issue, Stalin would take advice and discuss it together with his deputy, the top General Staff personnel, heads of chief departments of the People's Defence Commissariat and front commanders, as well as people's commissars in charge of the defence industry.'
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Ibid. , p. 449.
During the entire war, General Shtemenko worked for the Chief of Staff, first as Chief of Operations, then as under-Chief of Staff.
`I must say that Stalin did not decide and did not like to decide for himself important questions about the war. He understood perfectly well the necessity of collective work in this complex area, he recognized those who were experts on such and such a military problem, took into account their opinion and gave each their due.'
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Chtйmenko, L'Йtat-Major gйnйral soviйtique en guerre (Moscow: Йditions du Progrиs, 1976), vol. 2, p. 319.
Zhukov described many vivid conversations and underscored the manner in which they were resolved:
`Often sharp arguments arose at the Committee sittings. Views were expressed in definite and sharp terms ....
`If no agreement was reached at the sitting, a commission would be immediately formed of representatives of the two extreme sides which had to reach an agreement and report on the proposals it would work out ....
`In all, the State Committee for Defence adopted some ten thousand resolutions on military and economic matters during the war.'
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Zhukov, op. cit. , pp. 267--268.
Khrushchev's image of Stalin, the `lone man who leans on no-one', is falsified by an event during the war, in the beginning of August 1941, which implicated Khrushchev himself and Commander Kirponos. Vasilevsky recalled the anecdote, probably thinking of the passage in Khrushchev's Secret Report that reads `At the beginning of the war we did not even have sufficient numbers of rifles'.
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Khrushchev, Secret Report, op. cit. , p. S38.
Stalin had given his approval to
Khrushchev for an offensive that would start August 5, 1941. But at the same time, Stalin told him to prepare the defence line that he (Stalin) had proposed. Stalin explained that in warfare, `you have to prepare for the bad and even the very bad as well as the good. That is the only way of avoiding blunders'.
But Khrushchev made all sorts of unreasonable demands that the headquarters could not meet. Stalin said:
