THE PEOPLE’S WAR
The start of the Second World War caused a great deal of confusion to the left in Britain. The Communist Party made an assessment that the most dominant aspect of the war was its anti-fascist nature; on 2nd September 1939 they issued a passionately argued pamphlet in support of the war in which general Secretary, Harry Pollitt, wrote: “to stand aside from this conflict, to contribute only revolutionary-sounding phrases while the fascist beasts ride roughshod over Europe, would be a betrayal of everything our forbears have fought to achieve in the course of the long years of struggle against capitalism.”
Scores of CP members volunteered immediately for the armed services; these brave souls would later be described somewhat jokingly as the “premature anti-fascists” because within a month the CP had switched to opposition to the war; Pollitt was temporarily excluded from the leadership following correspondence from Moscow that emphasised that the war was mainly an imperialist rivalry, and instructing the CP to oppose it.
This slightly comical reversal emphasised the complexity of the real life situation, and the left outside the CP were equally divided. Stalwarts like Aneurin Bevan and Sir Stafford Cripps (both of whom had been expelled from the Labour Party) supported the war, as did the Left Book Club, and John Strachey; but six Labour MPs, and some seventy CLPs opposed the war, and by Christmas the number of Labour MPs calling for an immediate end to the conflict had climbed to 32. The Independent Labour Party, (who had three Glasgow MPs, including Jimmy Maxton) opposed the war vociferously, combining leftist rhetoric with what was essentially an ethical pacifism.
Of course the war was BOTH an anti-fascist struggle and an inter-imperialist rivalry; and the course of the war was to witness a political struggle to define which aspect dominated. In making an assessment of the political judgements of 1939 we need to avoid making the error of assuming that the actors of that time had the benefit of the knowledge of later events that we now have.
The early months of the war were extraordinarily quiet, as both London and Paris were paralysed by unwillingness to actually wage war against Hitler. They had assumed that Italy would declare war on them in support of Germany, and their plans had been for a defensive line against Germany while they waged an offensive against Mussolini. But Italy’s continued neutrality left them with no military plan, so the war was waged by default almost entirely at sea.
The timidity of Chamberlain’s government can best be illustrated by an exchange in the cabinet when Conservative MP Leo Amery suggested fire bombing the Black Forest, and Secretary for the Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, replied that the RAF could not take action against privately owned property in Germany. Chamberlain wrote to his sister in November 1939 saying that the war would be over by spring based on his assessment that the Nazi government would sue for peace once they realised how much a war would cost financially. There is no doubt that as far as Neville Chamberlain was concerned, the aim of the war was to contain Nazi Germany and prevent it dominating Europe completely, but Britain had no intention of removing, or even weakening, the Nazi regime. The almost complete lack of military initiative for several months by the British, and the complacency in this “bore war” period that Germany would sue for peace, left the British government prisoner to political events.
The conduct of the failed “tri-partite” negotiations between the USSR, France and Britain during 1939 showed that the Chamberlain government regarded the USSR as a greater threat to the British Empire than Nazi Germany, and the deliberate exclusion of the USSR from the Munich agreement in 1938 and the acquiescence by the British government in the Nazi annexation of part of Czechoslovakia meant that Moscow was sure that the Western democracies would do nothing to prevent a fascist attack on the USSR. In particular, the Chamberlain government refused to agree that an alignment of Finland or the Baltic states with Nazi Germany would pose a serious threat to the defence of Leningrad. All of the actions of the Soviet government in this period must be judged by their expectation of an imminent and murderous attack by Germany, which explains the non-aggression pact signed by the USSR with Nazi Germany once the tripartite talks with Britain and France for a robust anti-Nazi military alliance had failed
Nazi Germany had invaded Poland on 1st September, and within two days the Polish air force was destroyed, and all organised resistance by the Polish armed forces was over within two weeks. The British and French sent not a single soldier nor a single plane to help the Poles. Not until September 17th did the Soviet Red Army enter Poland, preventing the Germans advancing further East and thus providing a better defensive line for the USSR.
The former Liberal leader, David Lloyd George was scathing in 1939 of the stupidity of Britain going to war with Nazi Germany without first securing a military alliance with the USSR; and indeed the political rhetoric from the Chamberlain government in 1939 was more anti-Soviet than it was anti-Nazi.
Finland began to lay naval mines in the Gulf of Finland during October 1939, which is the sea corridor from the Baltic to the port of Leningrad. The long term consequence of this was that the Soviet Baltic Sea fleet was locked in throughout the war, making the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia effectively domestic German waters, where submarines and naval ships could be trained without risks and whereby Germany could import iron ore and nickel from Sweden without interruption.
The USSR’s invasion on Finland in November 1939 may have been politically impossible to justify (though Labour MP, D N Pritt, made valiant efforts to do so, which led to his expulsion from the party), and the pretext for war was certainly a cynically manipulated border incident of Soviet contrivance. However, the geo-political importance of the Karelian Isthmus for the defence of Leningrad was indisputable.
(Ironically, the undoing of the Chamberlain government was their own violation of Norwegian neutrality, when the Royal Navy started to mine Norway’s territorial waters on 8th April 1940, which was then used a pretext by the Nazis for their invasion of Denmark and Norway.; and the Soviet invasion of Finland was no more nor less cynical than the Anglo-American invasions of neutral Vichy French territory in North Africa, Syria and Madagascar, or the British invasion of Iceland in May 1940, and the subsequent occupation of the country by the USA.)
However, in 1939 Chamberlain’s government acted far more decisively in defence of Finland than they had for Poland. Scandalously, they sent scores of RAF fighter planes (mainly Gloster Gladiators, and Hawker Harts) as a gift to the Finnish government that would be sorely missed when the Battle of Britain began; these British planes were repainted on arrival with the blue swastikas of the Finnish air force (An RAF Gladiator gifted to the fascists by Chamberlain is pictured left); and the British government organised volunteers to go and fight, around 300 British soldiers sent by Chamberlain actually found themselves in Finland serving alongside German troops fighting the Red Army. By February 1940, the British and French had decided to commit a full 100000 troops to Finland to fight against the USSR.
There was no method in this tomfoolery. Labour MP Hugh Dalton was the loudest critic of what he described as “Midwinter madness”, and the government’s anti-Soviet priorities were also opposed by the Liberal Party. Having started a war against Nazi Germany, to then recklessly risk any prospect of the USSR becoming a future ally, and even being prepared to wage war against the USSR and Germany at the same time was the most crass stupidity.
The refusal by neutral Norway to provide passage for their troops prevented the British and French planned war against the USSR from developing further, but the fact that the Western allies were prepared to jeopardise their own national defence in order to effectively aid the German encirclement of Leningrad during 1939 and 1940 does show that Stalin and Molotov’s assessment of the intentions of the Western democracies was not too far from the mark. Interestingly, public opinion in Britain (measured by a voluntary organisation called Mass Observation) remained firmly pro-Soviet throughout this period, with five times more people preferring an alliance with the USSR than opposing it.
The assessment that the war was merely an anti-imperialist rivalry was therefore reinforced by the actual conduct of the war by the Chamberlain government in the early months. Nevertheless, there was a widespread view that the war was not one for the Empire, but was one against fascism, and conducting war against the Nazi government always contained within it the possibility of the war taking on a progressive and liberatory aspect. The outbreak of war had seen no scenes of jingoism, and the memory of the pointless slaughter of the Great War was still fresh, but there was also a feeling that the war was just..
The anti-war political movement gained some success in endorsement from some trade unions, like the National Union of Clerks (later Apex, now part of the GMB), and the prominent science fiction writer, Olaf Stapleton; but the Southwark Central by-election in February 1940 saw a Stop the War candidate get less than 1500 votes, despite having 3000 canvassers out on election day, and having distributed 130000 copies of 22 different leaflets, and their candidate being a well known and liked local Labour councillor.
What changed everything was the defeat of France, and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the beaches of Dunkirk. Churchill’s new government had included the Labour Party, and showed new sense of anti-fascist purpose, but the experience of the defeated army returning home changed the mood. They had left their tanks and artillery, their lorries and horses in France, most of them had not even fired a shot in anger. Yet they had a tale to tell of how the French General Staff had preferred to surrender than fight, not because they were cowards but because they prefered Nazi victory to the continuance of the left wing Popular Front government in Paris. There was a widespread distrust of the sympathies of the British establishment, summed up brilliantly in the 1942 film about pro-fascist traitors “Went the Day Well”
The war in Britain became focussed upon national defence, and there was a growing awareness of “fifth-columnists” (pro-fascist traitors). By June 1940 there were one and a half million volunteers in the LDV (Home Guard). Contrary to the later Dad’s Army mythology the LDV started without officers or NCOs, which led to a debate whether they would be regarded as “irregular troops” under the Geneva Convention – the Germans resolved the question by announcing that they considered the LDV to be “murder gangs” who would be shot as terrorists if captured. Tom Wintringham, who had commanded International Brigade forces in Spain became a major celebrity in 1940 as he toured the country lecturing on how to fight fascism, and three spanish mineworkers who ran training courses on how to sabotage tanks became the idols of the LDV.
Even before the Nazi invasion of the USSR, and the switch of the official communist parties changing their position to support, the war in Britain had pursued its own logic towards becoming an anti-fascist struggle. Naturally there was a tension between this aim and the defence of the Empire, but in order to win the war, the Army and RAF (but not the Royal Navy) understood the need to win the troops to the idea that they were fighting for democracy. Every unit had a political education officer appointed, and each week there was a political lecture and a debate, particularly in the Army these posts were often filled by communists. As mass organisations, the armed forces became partially democratised and the conduct of the war (for example prioritising a second front in Europe) became shaped by democratic and mass-popular campaigns on the Home Front, such as the stunning by-election victories by the left wing Common Wealth party.
Ultimately, the war led to the military defeat of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The alternative would have been barbarism.
Sources:
The People’s War, Angus Calder, Penguin, 1971
Days of the Good Soldiers, Richard Kisch, Journeyman, 1985
Codswallop
Comment by Frank — 1 September, 2009 @ 12:53 pm
Seems pretty well reasoned, actually. Not much here I take a dislike to. Thanks, Andy.
Comment by Mikey — 1 September, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
An excellent piece Andy and topical with the anniversary of the war. Galloway will be showcasing this anniversary on his shows on Talksport this weekend - you should contribute. It’s a useful rejoinder too, to the OSCE absurdity (endorsing Baltic state propaganda)blaming the Nazis and the USSR equally for the war. President Medvedyev’s firm answer in the week is a measure of Russia’s new found confidence in asserting it’s historical role in the momentous events of the period, and above all the central truth - that without the Red Army this blog would be written in German.
Comment by Molotov — 1 September, 2009 @ 3:06 pm
No mention of the role played by the Bolshevik Leninists of the day in this piece Andy. Would you like to make a comment?
Comment by neprimerimye — 1 September, 2009 @ 3:31 pm
On person I knew who was in the orbit of the CP, and enlisted early on for the war, was Charlie Goodman - one of around 150 Eastenders who already had a taste of action against the fascists as a volunteer with the International Brigade in 1937.
Like other former IBs when he enlisted he was given a very menial role in the army, and treated as a “premature anti-fascist”. He told me once that the first bit of action he saw in World War 2 was when he punched his officer in the mouth for making an antisemitic remark. How you understood the war in 1939 from Britain depended on whose eyes you were seeing it through. Like Charlie, many young Jews in Britain who enlisted were aware of what a fascist victory might mean as they had been following news of the treatment of Jews in the late 1930s in Poland, Rumania and other places under semi-fascist regimes.
Does anyone know more about the attitude of the ILP to WW2? I know that leading ILPer Fenner Brockway stood down as chair of War Resisters International to support the fight against Franco in Spain, and I believe that he maintained this position in relation to the fight against Hitlerism in 1939.
Comment by David Rosenberg — 1 September, 2009 @ 3:38 pm
The ILP had a rather complex formal position which was that there should be a socialist government that would offer peace to the world, but was prepared to fight in defence of Britain and the USSR. In practice it there was a big divide within the ILP between this “defencist” position and the hard core pacifists
The ILP was outside the electoral pact concluded between Tory, Liberal and labour parties, and therefore stood in by-elections throughout the war, in 1941 it typicaly gained between 20% and 30% of the vote, suggesting that it was receiving the Labour vote, rather than it being a specifially anti-war vote.
As the war progressed, the ILP became politically eclipsed by the pro-war, left-wing Common Wealth party, who won a few by-elections on the basis of campaigning for an immediate implementation of Beveridge and a second front.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 3:52 pm
Most wars that I know of involve people. I’ve posted a much more nuanced and sophisticated analysis from Ernest Mandel who identifies five conflicts. It has the merit of giving a fuller understanding of what actually happened in different parts of the globe.
1 - An inter-imperialist war, a war between the Nazi, Italian, and Japanese imperialists on the one hand, and the Anglo-American-French imperialists on the other hand.
2- A just war of self-defence by the people of China, an oppressed semi-colonial country, against Japanese imperialism.
3 -A just war of national defence of the Soviet Union, a workers state, against an imperialist power.
4 - A just war of national liberation of the oppressed colonial peoples of Africa and Asia (in Latin America there was no such war), launched by the masses against British and French imperialism
5 - A war of liberation by the oppressed workers, peasants, and urban petty bourgeoisie against the German Nazi imperialists and their stooges.
http://liammacuaid.wordpress.com/2009/09/01/world-war-two/
Comment by Liam — 1 September, 2009 @ 4:21 pm
Down with the war!
http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1939/09/down.htm
Comment by Anonymous — 1 September, 2009 @ 4:34 pm
Liam,
Actually, most wars involve states and governments; and how governments can be influenced by people is how politics actually works.
There is some merit in mandel’s argument, although I would say it is very abstract - but for perhaps understandable reasons mandel doesn’t have much to say about the war from the point of view of the workers’ movement in Britain. If you operate at the level of abstraction that mandel does then it is easy to appear “nuanced and sophisticated”, because you are not seeking to relate to any real world events in the practical way that politics really operates.
if we accept that mandel is largely right in his main thesis characterising WW2 as five wars , then the task for the left in Britain became how to influence the conduct of the war in order to minimise the degree to which the government’s priorities could be support of war #1; and how to ensure the prioritisation of support for wars #3 and #5.
It is of course impossible to seperate the conduct of the war by the British state from their aid for the wars of liberation you describe as war #5. And this also includes the degree to which the left intervened, for example Britosh soldiers in cairo campaigning against the Greek army in North Africa being prevented from returning to Greece, and providing convoys of food and practical solidarity when the Greek Army was contained.
the interesting thing of course is that if we accept that mandel is correct that the struggle of French, Belgian and other working people against the nazis was progressive, depite France and Belgium being occupied imperial powers, then it is of course possible that the anti-facsist struggle of british workers threatened with nazi occupatioon, but not yet occupied was also progressive.
the argument for a second front was the cutting edge position for the British left, because it meant a democratic campaign on the Home Front and in the armed forces to prioritise the anti-nazi war as opposed to the anti-Japanese war; and was direct military aid for the Red Army and the liberation movements with Europe. It was also necessary for the left to operate in a complex political context, subverting the traditional power structures in the armed forces, and using the opportunity to democratise society as a war aim.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
Nazi Germany had invaded Poland on 1st September, and within two days the Polish air force was destroyed, and all organised resistance by the Polish armed forces was over within two weeks. The British and French sent not a single soldier nor a single plane to help the Poles. Not until September 17th did the Soviet Red Army enter Poland, preventing the Germans advancing further East and thus providing a better defensive line for the USSR.
Come on, Andy. That was all part of the deal between Hitler and Stalin. See Article II of the Secret Protocol:
“In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish State, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.”
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/timeline/pact.htm
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:06 pm
#11
so???
The USSR responded to Nazi agression by annexing Eastern Poland after the Polish armed forces had already been defeated , the fact that there had been a prior notification to the Germans of their intention to do so in the event of a German attack on Poland alters nothing. Significantly the USSR did not aid the German invasion, but were just defending their state security, in the same way that Britain did in invading Iceland in may 1940; or Britain’s unprovoked attack on the French mediterainian fleet in North Afcia.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
Nick (12), I was responding to what Andy said:
“Not until September 17th did the Soviet Red Army enter Poland, preventing the Germans advancing further East and thus providing a better defensive line for the USSR.”
Another possible interpretation is that the Soviet Union stood aside and let Hitler grab most of Poland, and then used the agreement to grab a slice for itself.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:21 pm
#14
“the Soviet Union stood aside and let Hitler grab most of Poland”
There was no military nor political allliance between the USSR and Poland, and so there was no reason for Warsaw to expect the USSR to coome to its aid once it was attacked. The USSR needed time to build its defences against the expected Nazi invasion.
During the Tri-partite talks, the USSR had sought to gain a robust military alliance with Britain and France to counter Nazi expansionism, but this was blocked mainly by Neville Chamberlain.
the more relevent question is why did Britain and France stand aside and let Hitler grab most of Poland, given that they had actually entered into mutual defence pacts with the warsaw government.
Are you saying that it would have been better for the Poles too have allowed the Nazis to occupy all of Poland, this was not the judgement of Polish Jews who fled into the Soviet occupied area.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:26 pm
Great Article Andy.
Gene,
Another possible interpretation is that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were as bad as each other-that is what generally gets preached in schools today.
On the surface the Nazi-Soviet pact seems to be ludicrous, even treacherous. However, in light of the actions of Britain and France, it seems to make more sense.
Look at the inaction of Britain and France at the Fall of democracy in Spain, and later at Munich, where Britain decided to let Germany have czechslovakia, without any condemnation, even agreeing with Nazi arguments of reuniting Germans…etc Alongside Andy’s point of the aircraft sent to Finland. It does display that British policy was generally to be anti-soviet above all else.
The Nazi-Soviet pact was a natural reaction to the very real threat of Nazi sympathisers in the bourgeois democracies teaming up with Germany to attack Russia, like they had done only a few years before after WW2.
I think the Soviet Union’s colossal effort, taking the brunt of the Wehrmacht’s forces during the war,facing the majority of a genocidal, anti-slavic army more than forgives the Nazi-Soviet pact-of which was enacted due to reasons of self-preservation.
Comment by YCLer — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
#’like they had done after WW1′-SORRY
Comment by YCLer — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:42 pm
I thought the territory annexed by the USSR in 1939 was actually territory taken by Poland from the USSR when the two counties fought in 1921, and that the population in its majority was Belorusian or Ukranian and not Polish(correct me if I’m wrong) and so there is not for that reason an equivalence between the actions of Hitler and Stalin.
As far as Trotskyists were concerned, their activities and political line varied both from country to country and within countries. In France many were involved in doing dangerous anti- war propaganda work with German soldiers. I know that Ted Grant served in the 8th Army and was involved in the Soldier’s Parlaiment in Cairo. I’m not sure about Mandel, but I know his close comrade, the brilliant and talented Amram Leon, secretary of the the Belgian section of the Fourth International had as a bad a war as possible, being arrested by the Gestapo and murdered in Auschwitz.
One point with regard to the Home Guard worthy of mention is the role played by Tom Wintringham (who I understand was a senior officer in the British contingent of the International Brigades and resigned from the CP following the Hitler-Molotov pact) and other Brigadistas at Osterley Park training school.
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
Its actually worth reading Molotov’s defence of the Hitler Stalin pact. It makes grim reading, and the cynicism and illusions (both combined) I think make it harder to sustain the kind of revisionist argument about it going round.
http://www.archive.org/details/TheMeaningOfTheSoviet-germanNon-aggressionPact
I did hear of Molotov saying of Poland “a blow from the west and a blow from the east and the bastard child of versailles collapses”. In addition there are the stories of handing German Communists in exile in Moscow over to the Gestapo: on Hitler’s birthday. I think its more then plausible that Stalin believed that the future lay with a world partitioned between the Soviets and the Axis.
This was far from the opinion of most Communists outside the Soviet Union though, and not what they believed the Soviet Union stood for.
Comment by johng — 1 September, 2009 @ 5:52 pm
#20
It is hard to see what you find so objectionable in that speech John, given that it is a speech by a professional diplomat discussing the public not the provate position of the Soviet government; after all the USSR was a state, and one that had to organise its defence and self preservation.
however Molotov makes the interesting point that the tri-partite talks failed specifically over the refusal of the Polich government, encouraged by Britain, to accapt military assistance from the USSR in the event of an invasion by nazi germany.
This raises the question of how Gene at #15 can criticise the USSR for “standing by”, when it was the express wish of the Poles that the USSR should not intervene on their behalf. Once the Polish army was defeated I assume that gene thinks it would be better for the nazis to have secured all of Poland, rather than only the Western part.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:01 pm
“these British planes were repainted on arrival with the blue swastikas of the Finnish air force. (An RAF Gladiator gifted to the fascists by Chamberlain is pictured left)”
Andy, I don’t think the Finnish government of 1939 can be called “the fascists”. Wikipedia states that they were broadly conservatives and certainly anti-Russian (as any Finnish nationalist of that period could certainly be expected to be), but had put down their nascent fascist movement in 1932. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C3%B6sti_Kallio
Although there is certainly a shock factor in seeing a British plane with a swastika on it, Wikipedia reckons that the blue swastika of the Finnish air force dates to 1918 before A. Hitler & the Nazis were ever thought of, and was simply an ancient “good luck” symbol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Air_Force
Surprisingly the training arm of the Finnish Air Force still appears to be using the blue swastika in its badge, and today’s Finns certainly cannot be called fascists or nazis.
Comment by Strategist — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:07 pm
#16,
So essentially you’re criticizing France and the UK for failing to come to Poland’s defense against the Nazis while excusing the USSR for carving up Poland with the Nazis. Signed agreements or no, that’s hard to swallow.
Are you saying that it would have been better for the Poles too have allowed the Nazis to occupy all of Poland, this was not the judgement of Polish Jews who fled into the Soviet occupied area.
The Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet occupied area may have experienced some short-term relief. Of course most of them were exterminated after the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941– an invasion made possible in large part by the massive amounts of raw materials which the Soviet Union provided to Germany after September 1, 1939.
And though the 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland doesn’t get much attention, it was resisted (however futilely) by what was left of the Polish army, which suffered thousands of casualties as a result.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
And let’s not even talk about German Communists living in the USSR whom Stalin sent back to Germany after the invasion.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:19 pm
#22
The Finnish government were not only anti-Russian, they were also pro-Nazi. And to describe a government that spent 45% of its entire state budget on the military as just “conservative” seems a bit of an understatement, especially when that country had a total population of just over 3.6 million at the time, but had half a million troops in active service. the Finnish government also executed the pacifist Arndt Pekurinen because of his opposition to the 1941 agression against the USSR.
the Finnish government encouraged Finns to join the Waffen SS; they allowed the German Air force to use air bases around helsinki in the invasion of the USSR, and they allowed 80000 German ground troops to use Finnish soil as a base of operations to invade the USSR. The undertook secret negotiations with the Nazi regime to coordinate the Finnish agression against the USSR, and they lied to the British saying that they had not been doing so. during the war the British government regarded the Finns as a fully paid up member of the Axis alliance.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
#23
“So essentially you’re criticizing France and the UK for failing to come to Poland’s defense against the Nazis while excusing the USSR for carving up Poland with the Nazis. Signed agreements or no, that’s hard to swallow.”
Gene, you are being silly here.
Britain and France had a mutual military agreement with Poland, but actually offered Poland no aid when it was attacked.
The USSR had offered the Polish government military protection as part of the military alliance it was seeking with France and Britain, but Poland had vetoed any alliance with the USSR. The actions of the USSR were for their own state defence, and were of no different character from the various Anglo-American invasions of neutral territory for strategic reasons during the war,
It was no secret that the Germans were likely to invade Poland, and the notification by Moscow to the Berlin government that they would themselves occupy Eastern Poland if the Nazis attacked Poland was primarily a defence measure for the USSR, but was also recovering Russian territory lost to Poland in the Polish/Bolshevik war, and was objectively a good thing in preventing the spread of Nazi rule.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:37 pm
#24
“And let’s not even talk about German Communists living in the USSR whom Stalin sent back to Germany after the invasion.”
That has no basis in fact whatsoever, does it Gene? Are all your political judgements based up making up the “facts”?
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:41 pm
When th USSR “liberated” Eastern Poland from the Poles (incidentally,Lvov was never part of the Russian Empire)you might of thought that they’d have the Polish Communist Party running the new paradise.
Could someone explain then why they all spent the war in Soviet concentration camps.
Incidentally,one of the Polish Communists who survived the gulag was one Mr Jaruzelski,later General and Polish coup leader in 1981.
Which just shows the strength of ideas in the face of personel betrayal.
Comment by djinbrighton — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:44 pm
Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Harts were really out of date by the battle of Britain. Finland was not quite a fascist state - Soviet agression certainly pushed it into Hitler’s orbit.
Comment by Green Socialist — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:54 pm
#25 “They were not only anti-Russian, they were also pro-Nazi”.
I’m not able to make statements about the Finnish government of 1939 from personal knowledge or reading, but you’re making claims that the Finnish government of 1939 was fascist, and then defending that on the basis of stuff it did in 1941 when it had been in a desperate all-out David -v- Goliath war for national survival for two years.
My guess is that the Finnish govt in 1939 was not pro-Nazi but was determined not to be snuffed out by Stalin like Estonia etc were, and in those circumstances inevitably had to judge Hitler as their best shot to have any kind of chance against the full might of Stalin, who wished them nothing but harm.
Comment by Strategist — 1 September, 2009 @ 6:57 pm
Andy:
There’s been a lot of talk about the “Katyn massacre” in the last few days: 20,000 Polish officers killed by the Soviets. You obviously know way more about this history than I do–what’s your take on that event?
Comment by James — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:19 pm
Well done Andy, in supporting the Soviet-Nazi pact. Now how about justifying the Katyn Massacre?
how much murder and repression are you willing to stomach in your descent into Stalinophilia?
Comment by darren redstar — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:24 pm
#27,
“And let’s not even talk about German Communists living in the USSR whom Stalin sent back to Germany after the invasion.”
That has no basis in fact whatsoever, does it Gene? Are all your political judgements based up making up the “facts”?
Are you familiar with Margarete Buber-Neumann?
http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/margarete-buber-neumann/
There were hundreds more like her, many of them Jews.
I don’t make this stuff up, Andy.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:45 pm
This story from the BBC sums up the modern-day attitude to WW2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8232559.stm
The lead story about the marking of the 70th anniversary of WWII in Poland is reported under the title:’Poland angry at Soviet war role’
No mention of the 5.5 million Poles who were killed by Nazis.As the success of the BNP is showing, anti-Nazism is so yesterday. Forget what the Nazis did, lets concentrate on attacking a country that hasn’t existed for 20 years.
Although to be fair, the report concerns the type of politians, that are so dedicated to democracy, that have attempted to ban the hammer and sickle logo in the EU.
Comment by YCLer — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:47 pm
#29
“Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Harts were really out of date by the battle of Britain”
Well gladiators were still in production up until 1939, and the Hart ocntinued in active service until 1943.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
Andy says
““And let’s not even talk about German Communists living in the USSR whom Stalin sent back to Germany after the invasion.”
That has no basis in fact whatsoever, does it Gene? Are all your political judgements based up making up the “facts”?”
what happened to franz koritschoner Andy? how did he die?
Comment by darren redstar — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
#30
“My guess is that the Finnish govt in 1939 was not pro-Nazi but was determined not to be snuffed out by Stalin like Estonia etc were, and in those circumstances inevitably had to judge Hitler as their best shot to have any kind of chance against the full might of Stalin, who wished them nothing but harm.”
But actually the war aims of the USSR in the 1939 invasion of Finland was just to take over East Karelia for the express purpose of defence of Leningrad and did not seek to “snuff out” Finland, and when the Germans stopped supporting the Finns in 1944, the USSR promptly signed a peace treaty with Finland guaranteeing its independence. The geo-political reasons for the intervention in Finland were the same as the motivatiosn that led Britain to invade Iceland, or sink the French fleet in Oban and mer al kebir. Were French collaborators who joined the SS justified by Britains attack on neutral Vichy? Why is there a duble standardr that the USSR is expected not to have defended itself.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 7:57 pm
#35
“There were hundreds more like her, many of them Jews.”
Ahh, I see where we are at cross purposes. These were dissidents within the USSR, not active members of the communist party. Buber-Neumann was already in internal exile at the time she was sent to Germany.
There is no doubt about it that Stalin’s Russia was a brutal place where life was cheap, and I can only assume that they thought these people were worthless and expendable weighed against the interests of state security.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:08 pm
andy have you no shame?
Comment by darren redstar — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:11 pm
Outbreak of the Second World War: Who were the ‘guilty men’?
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18883
Stalin’s unholy alliance with Hitler
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18884
Comment by solidarity — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:17 pm
Armchair points out in post #19 some aspects of the war carried out by the Bolshevik Leninists, something Andy has still to comment upon, but he is in error with regard to Ted Grant. Grant did not serve in the military for medical reasons. However numerous British Trotskyists were deeply involved in the Soldiers Parliaments and in actively aiding the various resistance movements against fascism in a number of countries. Details can be found in a number of issues of Revolutionary History journal.
Unlike the Stalinists however the Fourth Internationalists did not subsume the class war into the more general struggle against fascism and sought to turn the anti-fascist war into a direct struggle for workers power along the lines of the Bolshevik fight against the Russian states support of WW1. For that reason Trotskyists were in fact jailed in both this country and the USA during WW2. Mistakes were, of course, made by a movement that was marginalised by Stalinism and Social Democracy and thereby denied roots within the workers movement, of both an ultrs-leftist and a social patriotic type but in general only the partisans of the Fourth remained in the workers camp.
In terms of strategy however it can be argued that the program outlined by LDT in 1938 was no longer operable after the failure of the Quit India campaign in 1942 and the turn of the war against the Axis powers. I note that it was at this point that the views of individuals such as Orwell and Wintringham, at the onset of war not far off those of the FI, came ever closer to those of the open social patriots in the camp of Social Democracy. After the warsuch people were drawn into the orbit of Social Democracy and in britain Labourism. Andy Newmans capitulation to Stalinism represents a similar lack of confiance in the revolutionary capacity of the working people.
Comment by neprimerimye — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:18 pm
neprimerimye,
Your depiction of World War Two represents an all-too familiar sect-dwelling, mindset that displays your complete and utter detachment from how working people see World War Two.
Yeah forget defeating Nazi Germany, lets put our resources into the ‘class war’.
And you trots wonder why people thought you were fascist agents.
Comment by YCLer — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:33 pm
will somebody please answer my question at *28
By the way,has anyone here ever read KS Karol’s “Solik -life in the Soviet Union 1939-1946?
Comment by djinbrighton — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
Stalin’s unholy alliance with Hitler
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=18884
They got the year wrong.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:50 pm
Otherwise it’s a pretty good article.
Comment by Gene — 1 September, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
#37 The Hawker Hart& Gloster Gladiator were both biplanes Andy!
The Hart began service in 1930… The Galdiator did well with the Navy and in the defence of Malta, but was useless againt top German aircraft like the 109.
Finland was an anti communist rightish regime, However Finland’s victory over the USSR saved itself from Eastern Bloc repression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Civil_War
Comment by Green Socialist — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:10 pm
neprimerimye- Trotsyism was all over the place during the Second World War and after.
Interestingly, Trotsky himself stated that France had become an opressed nation after the fall of France, the implication being that resistance to the Germans was not in breach of prolrtarian intenationalism on the grounds of France being an imperialist country. Those of his followers who took this to its logical conclusion had a better position as a result than those official communists in Nazi occupied Europe who failed to begin resistance until after the invasion of the USSR (many of them to their credit did not wait). Ironically Trotsky was murdered as an alleged agent of fascism while the British and French were being accused by the Daily Worker of provoking the Germans.
They had a better position still than those of their erstwhile comrades who continued to argue a defeatist position even after June 1941.
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:20 pm
btw on the subject of Finland, while the wartime regime was clearly in alliance with Nazi Germany, in fairness to them, I understand that unlike most of the other satelite regimes, they actively opposed attempts to extend the Jewish holocaust to their territory.
I msy be wrong, can anyone comment?
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
It is sobering that so many contributors are ignorant of events that led up to the war. The rise of Hitler assisted by the billionaires and bankers,panic stricken that Germany may turn Communist. The entire attitude towards Germany by British foreign policy and to a lesser extent French was coloured by anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism. Hitler was the bulwark against Bolshevism. His actions were appeased and in many cases encouraged by the British and French. When Italy invaded Ethiopia, Britian refused a naval blockade of Italy and closing the Suez canal to Italian warships because this might “risk a war” (Eden) and Chamberlain added there could be no question of letting Mussolini be overthrown in consequence of a military defeat since this would mean “chaos in Italy” in other words revolution.
Britain’s appeasement of fascism reached new heights in Spain. Although the mass of working people in Britain and France supported the Spanish Republic against Franco’s fascist legions Britain threatened France that “if war with Germany and Italy broke out through the French government allowing the Spanish republic to import arms it would not ..honour its obligations to France” (A Rothstein, The Munich conspiracy) Only the USSR supplied material aid to the Spanish republic their ships running a gauntlet of German submarines.
The anti-republic stance of Britain was exposed in a diary of a Downing street official who wrote. “Stanley Baldwin the Tory PM told Eden.. “on no account, French or other must he bring us in to fight on the side of the Russians”.
When Japan invaded the mainland of China in 1937 Britains policy was to sit on its hands and do nothing except refuse to put an embargo of exports including arms to the Japanese. It also concluded an agreement with the japanes giving diplomatic recognition to their seizure of Chinese customs!
Only the Soviet Union sent arms and equipment to aid China as well as a loan of $100 million.
British policy was to appease Hitler right up to the carve up of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain and his cohorts Runciman, Halifax and Sir Horace Wilson, who said “His majesty’s government will do anything, meet any terms, to satisfy the Germans”. “Only the bolsheviks will benefit from and Anglo-German War” and added Britain would not object to domination of south eastern Europe. “All we ask is that you do not shut us out of trading there; leave us only 20 per cent.”
These are just a few of the dirty dealings and two faced policies of the British Tory government and Labour right.
The second world war had everything to do with British foreign policy of appeasement and anti_Sovietism.
Do not accuse the Soviet union for being partly to blame for World War 2, look at Britain’s appeasers for encouraging Hitler througout the thirties. They sowed the seeds and Europe paid the price.
Comment by Alfie — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:24 pm
#49 I obviously meant trotsKyism- can’t we have a spell check on this blog?
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:26 pm
#48
Yes the Gladiator and Hart were both bi-planes, but the Gladiator in particular was avaluable aircraft, and the Hart, flown by Swedish pilots in the Finnish war in 1939 and 1940 handled very well as a dive bomber, these were useful aircraft.
Your other argument “However Finland’s victory over the USSR saved itself from Eastern Bloc repression” makes no sense, because Finland actualy lost both the Winter war of 1939 to 1940 and the continuity war of 1941 to 1944 to the USSR.
The USSR acheived its war aim of the Winter War which was to occupy East Karelia to strengthen the defences of Leningrad, and then Finland and the USSR negotiated peace.
In 1941 Finland launched an aggressive war against the USSR, two days after the nazi invasion, and reopened the conflict, but when the Germans withdrew from Estonia in 1944 they faced the prospect of massive defeat by the Red Army, and negotiated peace. the USSR won the war but had no interest in occupying Finland.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:30 pm
#50
“[Finland] actively opposed attempts to extend the Jewish holocaust to their territory. ”
This is true, but I believe it is also true of the admiral Horthy regime in Hungary (before the Arrow Cross took power), and it is even true of Mussolini’s Italy, where Jews were not repressed until the King sued for peace with the allies, and the Germans occupied norther Italy and sponsored Mussolini’s appalling Salo republic
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:34 pm
#51 You are clearly correct. The USSR was motivated by a desire to avoid war, which would clearly undo all the economic progress that was being achieved at the time, albeit by a brutal dictatorship. You are also correct about Soviet aid to the Spanish Republic.
I would add the rider in relation to China that, prior to the German treaty with Japan that the Chinese Nationalists were receiving large ammounts of aid, particularly military, from Nazi Germany.
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:35 pm
Incidently, as I understand it the majority view of trotskyists in the anglophone world was to support the Military Ppolicy of James p cannon: http://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1940/mpop.htm
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
Incidently, someone mentioned the Katyn massacres - which were inexusbale barbarity, and the Russian government now confirms that despite years of covers up and lies, these were the action of the NKVD on the orders of Beria and Stalin.
There can be no justification.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 9:51 pm
#39 “The geo-political reasons for the intervention in Finland were the same as the motivation that led Britain to invade Iceland, or sink the French fleet in Oban and mer al kebir. Were French collaborators who joined the SS justified by Britains attack on neutral Vichy? Why is there a duble standardr that the USSR is expected not to have defended itself.”
I’m not disputing that there is a direct analogy between Stalin wanting to secure Eastern Karelia and Britain invading Iceland, or that Stalin had his reasons. All I was originally arguing is that you said Britain sent fighter planes “to the fascists” and I said that the Finnish government of 1939 cannot and should not be described as “fascist”.
It would be the double standard you argue against to ask the Finns not to defend themselves in 1939. The Finns would have been completely entitled not to believe any promises from Stalin that they only wanted Eastern Karelia, or about anything. Presumably the Finns would be getting as good intelligence as anybody about the psychotic bloodbath of 1938 in USSR and would have known precisely what they were dealing with in Stalin, Beria et al.
[NB Oran, Algeria, not Oban, Scotland…]
Comment by Strategist — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:03 pm
…or maybe the Caledonian McBrayne fleet had in fact gone over to the Vichy French. In which case, quite right to sink the lot.
Comment by Strategist — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:06 pm
The great thing about this discussion is that a lot of damaging and destructive bullshit can be buried.
As I said on a previous post, the Trotskyist Jock Haston stood in the wartime Neath by-election when the CP slogan was, “a vote for Haston is a vote for fascism”. Now the main political decendendents of the two movements are united in trying to construct a working-class alternative to New Labour.
At the same time, Andy Newman is quite able both to defend the Soviet role in the anti-fascist struggle while recognising the barbarous nature of events such as the Katyn massacre.
Maybe a lesson we could learn is that it would be better not to have to wait so long to bury the bullshit.
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
Obsolete aircraft had a limited role in places like East Africa and as training aircraft but were simply a quick way to kill fine aircrewmen if used in serious fighting against a well-equipped enemy - the Defiant and the Battle in Europe and the Buffalo in Malaya being simple examples.
On another subject: Dear Old Uncle Joe ordered Polish officers [and others] killed in cold blood; an officer captured by the Huns in 1939 had a BETTER chance of survival that his brother or cousin in Red Army hands.
Concerning 27 and 35, the facts are 100% TRUE.
Joe sent anti-Nazi refugees back to the Gestapo.
Fact.
Comment by binky — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:28 pm
It is extraordinary that Andy Newman and Nick Wright are still parroting the absurd claims about Stalin seizing eastern Poland in order to “gain time”, since the ever-wise Supreme Leader knew full well that a Nazi attack on the USSR was imminent.
In fact, Stalin kews nothing of the sort and was completely unprepared for the 1941 onslaught. He clearly believed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was for the long term, and not a mere tactical manoeuvre. So stubborn was Stalin in this belief that he refused to accept what his own intelligence services were telling him about the Nazi build-up in 1941.
No time at all was gained - when the Nazis attacked, the Soviet front collapsed, and hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were killed or captured in the first few weeks of the war.
Furthermore, Stalin had earlier decapitated the Soviet armed forces, with the executions of Tukhachevsky and other senior military figures. This helps explain the poor performance of the Red Army in the Winter War against Finland, and in the initial phases of Operation Barbarossa.
Andy and Nick are also silent about the fate of the Polish Communist Party. Most of the leadership of the Party had taken refuge in Moscow - which meant that they were easy targets for Stalin and were murdered during the purges. Then in 1938, the Comintern obediently dissolved the Polish Party, on the absurd grounds that it had become “a hotbed of Trotskyists”.
Obviously the extermination of Polish communism by Stalin was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact, and should alert comrades Newman and Wright as to the true nature of that document.
Take off the blinkers!
Comment by paul fauvet — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:44 pm
I note that Nick Wright now explains the Katyn Massacre as an attempt to “decapitate the Polish officer class”.
Perhaps he would give his opinions on the decapitation of the Polish working class, which Stalin achieved a few years earlier, and about which comrades of Nick’s persuasion have always kept very quiet.
Comment by paul fauvet — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:47 pm
Let’s face it, a huge section of the genuine left felt they had for decades to pretend to themselves that Stalin wasn’t so bad, even after Krushchev made it clear that he was.
And you don’t have to be deaf to the sigh of relief that is still palpable to this day of people in this country as they learned of the heroic resistance at the gates of Mosocow in December 1941, and the victory at Stalingrad in January 1943, to recognise the truly apalling nature of that regime.
And sorry Alfie, while I’m at it, yes I agree that the USSR was not involved in starting the war, but the reality is that, had the Comintern not encouraged the German CP to pursue its disastrous ultra-left line in the late 20’s/early 30’s, they could have helped prevent Hitler from coming to power.
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 10:56 pm
#58
“All I was originally arguing is that you said Britain sent fighter planes “to the fascists” and I said that the Finnish government of 1939 cannot and should not be described as “fascist”. ”
What i specifically wrote was: “An RAF Gladiator gifted to the fascists by Chamberlain is pictured left”
Finland was an ally of nazi Germany, and was regarded by the British government as a member of the Axis powers. British aircraft supplied to the Finnish air force were used to support the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, and as such I think it is completely accurate to describe them as being gifted to the facsists, through Chamberlain’s extremely poor judgement.
the view I am putting forward was the one adopted by noted anti-communists at the time such as Hugh Dalton and david lloyd george
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:07 pm
#63
“It is extraordinary that Andy Newman and Nick Wright are still parroting the absurd claims about Stalin seizing eastern Poland in order to “gain time”, since the ever-wise Supreme Leader knew full well that a Nazi attack on the USSR was imminent.”
In fact, from January 1939 to June 22nd 1941, the Red Army received 82000 new artillery pieces and morters, 7000 more tanks, and 18000 new combat aircraft.
the third five year plan under Voznesenskii started in 1938 was extremely successful in bringing on line new American capital plant and factories, and the imbalances between raw material supplies and industrial requirements had been brought into equilibrium by summer of 1940, providing the industrial capacity for the mammoth military production during the war years. By 1941 Soviet armaments production was more efficient, better tooled and had higher throughput than their German competitors, what is more, a lot of it had been moved east of the Urals.
In 1939, much of the industrial capacity for war production was still not on line, and there were serious skilled labour shortages and fuel shortages - the extra time gained by the Molotov pact really did provide the foundation for the future sucess of the Red Army.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:18 pm
How amazing that the figure 20,000 Polish officers were “shot” by the Soviets is being bandied about by the BBC. Goebbels only mentioned 10,000! The BBC out Goebbels, Goebbels!
The claims that the Soviets killed these officers is one of the enduring slanders that persists to this day and served to cover up the appalling atrocities carried out by the Nazi butchers. Goebbels himself let the cat of the bag when he wrote in his diaries “Unfortunately, German ammunition has been found in the graves at Katyn … It is essential that this incident remains a top secret. If it were to come to the knowledge of the enemy the whole Katyn affair would have to be dropped. ”
In 1971 during another debate abouth the incident in “The Times” A former German Soldier wrote a letter saying,
“As a German soldier, at that time convinced of the righteousness of our cause, I have taken part in many battles and actions during the Russian campaign. I have not been to Katyn nor to the forest nearby. But I well remember the hullabaloo when the news broke in 1943 about the discovery of the ghastly mass grave near Katyn, which area was then threatened by the Red Army.
“Josef Goebbels, as the historic records show, has fooled many people. After all, that was his job and few would dispute his almost complete mastery of it. What is surprising indeed, however, is that it still shows evidence in the pages of The Times thirty odd years later. Writing from experience I do not think that at that late time of the war Goebbels managed to fool many German soldiers in Russia on the Katyn issue … German soldiers knew about the shot in the back of the head all right … we German soldiers knew that the Polish officers were despatched by none other than our own. ”
But let not the truth get in the way of a good lie. A lie that distracts from other culprits such as the reactionary Dictatorship of Polish Colonels who signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis in 1934. Who stabbed Czechoslovakia in the back in 1938 and invaded with ten divisions at the same time as the Nazis occupying a slice of that country. (The Hungarians did the same) The Colonels who amongst them had invaded the young Soviet union in 1920 seizing a 150 miles of Russian terrirtory along the Curzon line. The same Colonels who assured Hitler that they would not allow the Red Army to come to the assistance of Czechoslovakia and who refused Soviet army help in repulsing Hitler.
The officer class of Poland ruled with an iron fist were anti-semetic, nationalistic and violently anti-communist. But for them Poland’s people may have assisted the Czechs and along with the Red Army stopped Hitler for some time.
Comment by Alfie — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:21 pm
#68
Alfie
I am sorry, but the Kremlin now admits that the Katyn massacre was carried out by the NKVD, and the results of the 1944 inquiry which put the blame at the hands of the nazis is totally discredited.
There is no mileage in defending the indefencible, and sadly the true horror of Stalin’s rule really is part of our socialist heritage.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
To ask the same question I asked previously, but in a different way:
1) in which modern states is the Polish territory occupied by the USSR in 1939 now located?
2) is anyone raising this as a problem?
Oh yes, and between which states was Chechoslovakia partioned after the German invasion in 1938 (a clue, one of them began with the letter “P”).
Comment by Armchair — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:26 pm
#58
“It would be the double standard you argue against to ask the Finns not to defend themselves in 1939. The Finns would have been completely entitled not to believe any promises from Stalin that they only wanted Eastern Karelia, or about anything. ”
Well no, the difference is that The USSR was seeking to secure the very existance of its nation and people from the Nazis, who were openly committed to the enslavement and of the Slavic peoples, and the eradication of the Jews, gypsies and others they regarded as inferior types; whereas Finland had no reasonable worry that their national survival was at stake. Indeed, even had the Finns concerns about the USSR’s war aims in 1939, such concerns would have been satisfied by the conclusion of a peace in 1940; and they were themselves the agressors of the Continuity war in 1941, when they coordinated their invasion of the USSR with the Nazis.
Comment by Andy Newman — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:37 pm
Not sure if the Buber-Neumann question was resolved above. The point, Andy, is not Buber-Neumann herself. From memory, I think she said that one of the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was that German Communists in Russia (most of them refugees from Nazis) were handed over to Germany, including, I think her then husband, Neumann. They weren’t dissidents. They were loyal Communists.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:51 pm
History is a battleground! Unfortunately much of what is being summised in this debate relies on opinions and slants from various political standpoints. But certain facts remain and can never be questioned. The Soviet Union took the brunt of the German/Rumanian/Hungarian/Italian and fascist Ukranian legions. The Soviet people resisted to a man (and woman) Many paid the price with terrible retribution. The entire population of one village, mostly women and children were forced marched naked to the top of a quarry and made to jump to their deaths by the Nazis. Young partisans some only aged 12 were hanged in their villages as a warning and left to hang for weeks. Villages were torched with their victims still inside their houses. Hundreds of thousands more were shot or sent to the gas chambers. Cities and industries were levelled to the ground. Fields of wheat and corn were torched, farms destoyed. We can never imagine the fear nor the hatred towards the fascist occupiers. We can never imagine the pain the suffering that took place across Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Those people who seek to defame, to question every action or decision taken in the heat of war from a long time after the event need to rethink their attitudes. How do we know what it was like? What decisions might they have had to take knowing it might mean the life and death of many people, or a defeat of victory? The reality was then, mistakes were common.
It’s too easy to criticise Stalin from afar but nevetheless despite his many errors he undoubtedly helped secure Soviet victory. I remember as a child my Father and Uncle’s all who fought during the war praising the Soviet Union and Stalin, even the Tories amongst them. They fought, they new.
Comment by Alfie — 1 September, 2009 @ 11:52 pm
#72
I am pretty sure that her husband had already been shot in the USSR.
I am not sure that this issue adds much of substance. Stalin’s regime was brutal and it is not a suprise that they regarded people as expendible for state security.
But certainly there was a significant number of German communists, like Walter Ulbricht, who spent those years in the USSR, and were sent to Germany. The leadership of the KPD that first took power in Eastern germany were almost entirely exiles who had been living in the USSR, though later joined by some like Horst Sindermann who had survived the concentration camps.
So the story of Stalin handing all the German communists to Hitler is misleading, and the reason it is brought up is because of the revisionist tide to somehow equate the USSR with nazi Germany.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:01 am
So when Stalin handed German leftists over to the Nazis it was OK because they were only dissidents! Can Andy sink much lower into his Stalinist sewer? To disguise this infamy with weasel words about how Stalin ‘regarded people as expendible for state security’ is frankly nauseating.
Comment by Stephen Marks — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:14 am
I just googled this and got a ‘book’ reference to Gregor Dallas ‘1945′. He claims that Stalin liquidated most of the GermanKPD in the Comintern (60-ish out of 70-ish) (sorry can’t remember the exact figures and it won’t cut and paste), and he sent back 500 rank and filers.
I’m not sure that the reason why this is brought up is for the reason you state. Some people struggle to find the ‘core values’ of the Soviet set-up. It’s all very well to come up with various formulae about ‘workers’ state’ or ‘degenerated workers’ state’ or ’state capitalist’ but what baffles most people (let’s be honest) is that apart from securing the state boundaries of the Soviet Union, it’s hard to see what ‘Stalinism’ was actually for. What was its purpose? The story of the German Communists illuminates this perfectly. If Stalin was a Communist like them, he would have fought tooth and nail to hang on to them, no matter what he had signed. So if he wasn’t a Communist, what was he? And what were his ‘colonels’ and ‘lieutenants’ and thousands of apparatchiks? What were they sustaining other than themselves? What bewildered most Communists outside of the Soviet Union was the decade after the end of the war. In 1945 Stalin was their hero - for having saved the Communist Soviet union and, saving Western liberal democracies too…er..well with a good old whack of help from the USA…mutter mutter. But then even with the whole of Eastern Europe and an alliance with ‘Communist’ China, they didn’t proceed to socialism/Communism. Why not? Because they weren’t socialist or Communist. It was a self-serving tyranny of a particularly grotesque dehumanising kind. That’s why Communists (like my parents) left in droves and, in their case, stayed being communists and/or marxists.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:22 am
#71 “Finland had no reasonable worry that their national survival was at stake.”
I entirely disagree. In the previous two years 1937-8 the Stalin regime had sentenced 680,000 people to death, and transported hundreds of thousands more to gulags etc, including entire nationalities or minority peoples Stalin didn’t like.
Though this unbelievable crime against humanity was not fully known at the time, the Finns given their proximity to Russia probably had a better idea of what was going on than most. Who in their right mind would have handed over a section of their own population to live under that regime?
Let’s accept for the sake of argument that you are right and Stalin really had no malign plans for Finland. But who could have safely predicted that in 1939? Anybody taking Stalin at his word would have been out of his mind.
I have tried to keep this personal question out of this discussion, but Andy, you do surely accept that Stalin was one of the worst monsters in the history of the human race?
Comment by Strategist — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:31 am
Alfie- it is entirely possible to recognise the sacrifice made by the Soviet people while refusing to cover for Stalin and his regime. As for Katyn it is absurd to quote as authority a German soldier who wasnt even there against the Kremlin’s archives.
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:34 am
My father explained to me that the reason why he went on believing in the Soviet Union for as long as he did (he left the CP in 1957) was in part because it was ingrained in him to disbelieve whatever was said about the SU in the west. So, if the ‘bourgeois press’ said that Stalin had wiped out this or that group, that had to be lies in order to scare workers off from becoming Communists and fighting the system. That reflex, he said, worked right up to Hungary and was hard to let go of even after that. He said to me in the 1980s and 1990s that it was still tough to accept that what had been said in newspapers like the Observer had in fact been more often than not true. When they talked about mass murder, tyranny, arbitrary rule, a self-justifying despotism etc etc…they were right! They hadn’t been making it up.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:59 am
Andy your not seriously trying to claim that the Katyn massacres were not carried out by the Russians? Surely?
Its also just not true that the reason why people know about Communists being handed over to the Gestapo is because of a recent tide of revisionism.
Its because of the new left, trotskyists and others who refused to forget. The idea that now is the time to return to these absurdities when most of the existing communist party’s even rejected them is surely not a good idea.
There is a problem Andy, with being more catholic then the pope. And socialists of course have not a bean in the current fight between Russian capitalists and european capitalists about this history. We have our own history.
Comment by johng — 2 September, 2009 @ 1:25 am
#80 “Andy your not seriously trying to claim that the Katyn massacres were not carried out by the Russians? Surely?”
No Johng, that was Alfie at #68. Andy at #69 put him straight on that.
Comment by Strategist — 2 September, 2009 @ 1:31 am
Yes Stalin was personally a monster, and he presided over a brutal regime. Is his monsterous personality a useful criteria to judge his regime? Beria was personally a far more appalling monster than Stalin, but Beria’s brief rule of the USSR saw profound liberalisation and peaceful overtures to the west.
Stalinism was not only a product of Stalin’s personality, any more than Stalin’s personality was a product of the social system he presided over.
Stalinism was the product of tragic and brutish circumstances, and it is necessary to understand the economic and agricultural collapse of the late 1920s, the very real and valid fear of invasion by the Soviet leadership, the widespread famines of 1926 and 1927, the international isolation and trade boycotts from Britain and France that were the context of Stalin coming to power. the desire for economic growth was not irrational as a bulwark agaist further famine, nor was rearmement irattional as a defence against the terror of invasion, but these goals took on a brutal, terrfying and self-consuming logic of their own. Equally the train of events set in motion by Lenin, with the abandonment of the rule of law, the terror and the arbitrary despotism of the war communism years did perhaps inexoribly lead to the type of government that Stalin introduced.
IN the late 1920s there seem to have been three possible historical alternatives, one of the butchers, Stalin or Trotsky, or a more conciliatory course under Chicherin, Tomsky and the other politburo moderates. The only one which actually happened was Stalin coming to power, so we cannot truely judge the alternatives.
What can be said of the Stalin years is that the Soviet Union survived, that the economy grew sufficiently to break out of the cycle of desperation and to provide the foundation for a more stable and harmonious society, and that they survived the nazi onslaught. What is also true is that Stalin’s government remained surprisingly broadly popular with tens of millions of working people in the USSR, notwithstanding the Great Terror, partly because of the economic dynamism, the scope for promotion, social mobility and perhaps bizaerely having been in a gulag was not an impediment to future social advance. Indeed for all the grim brutality, many experienced the 1930s as a marked improvment on the 1920s, and credited Stalin with improving their lives.
But for all that, the terror of the Stalin years was a by-product of the societal aim of greater economic growth, cultural development and state security. It was also terror in a culturally backward and poverty striken country seeking to force economic and social advance. The ideology promoted was still of human equality and dignity, despite the sordid reality.
In contrast, the racial terror of nazi governrment was the fundamental objective of the regime, and the most economic and culturally advanced society in Europe was transformed into a mass murder machine. the ideology was hatred, dehumanising of the victims and glorification of militarism for its own sake.
So I make no apology whatsoever for drawing a distinction that the Hitler regime was thoroughly and consciously unmitigatedly evil; whereas the Stalin regime was a tragic product of circumstances, and hopes gone wrong. In the war between the two, the USSR were the perhaps unlikely saviors of humanity, and the nazi regime were the nightmare that would draw the human race into the most sordid disgrace.
The Finnish government made a choice to ally themselves with nazi germany. They made that choice after the Nuremburg laws had deprived the Jews of their equal rights, after Kristallnacht and after the true brutal and expansionist nature of the nazi barabarism had been fully exposed. There are few moral absolutes in politics, but in my view it could never be justified to ally with Hitler.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 September, 2009 @ 1:36 am
“By February 1940, the British and French had decided to commit a full 100000 troops to Finland to fight against the USSR. There was no method in this tomfoolery.” “The refusal by neutral Norway to provide passage for their troops prevented the British and French planned war against the USSR from developing further, but the fact that the Western allies were prepared to jeopardise their own national defence in order to effectively aid the German encirclement of Leningrad during 1939 and 1940 does show that Stalin and Molotov’s assessment of the intentions of the Western democracies was not too far from the mark.”
Been reading up a bit on this. Another take on “the method in this tomfoolery” was that support for the Finns was really a feint and British & French intentions were really to use those troops to seize the Swedish iron ore mines and the Norwegian port of Narvik from which the iron was shipped on which the German steel & so armaments industry relied. The Norwegians and Swedes suspected this and refused permission because they didn’t want Britain, France & Germany fighting it out on their soil.
I can’t say whether this is really true and I certainly can’t say it wasn’t tomfoolery as a policy but it is a different and more plausible explanation than the British & French being keener on fighting USSR than the Germany they were already at war with. I can easily believe the British & French thinking that a stratagem like this might contain the war to a (to them) relatively obscure theatre and avoid an all-out invasion of France and repeat of 1914-18 bloodbath.
Comment by Strategist — 2 September, 2009 @ 1:52 am
Andy my post at #83 is not a response to yours at #82, they have crossed.
To me your post a #82 reveals you as the thoughtful and humane person that we all know you are, but I think your essential personal kindness makes you too kind & understanding to Stalin, who doesn’t deserve it. And for me you remain too prone to doublethink, which you really need to stop:
“for all that, the terror of the Stalin years was a by-product of the societal aim of greater economic growth, cultural development and state security. It was also terror in a culturally backward and poverty striken country seeking to force economic and social advance. The ideology promoted was still of human equality and dignity, despite the sordid reality.”
Come on, by 1937-8 that’s not true. The ends never justified those means. The stated ends were pure lies by that point. The objective by then was absolute power and glory to the dictator-emperor for its own sake, like any other megalomaniac before or since.
“the Stalin regime was a tragic product of circumstances, and hopes gone wrong”
This is really an insult to the dead. For me your eloquent words of denunciation of the Nazi regime are far more applicable to Stalin by 1938:
“a society… transformed into a mass murder machine… the ideology was hatred, dehumanising of the victims and glorification of militarism for its own sake…thoroughly and consciously unmitigatedly evil”.
Comment by Strategist — 2 September, 2009 @ 2:11 am
Armchair at 70: The terrorities the Soviets invaded in 1939 are indeed part of the Ukraine and Belarus today. The reason for this is that in 1945 the Soviet Union unilaterally decided to move the borders of Poland to the West, and deported the Polish population (those that had survived mass deportations to the Gulag from 1939-1941 and death at the hand of the Nazis and Ukranian nationalists) in these terrorities to Poland. At the same time Poland was given territory that had been part of Germany at the beginning of the war. This is not a major point of discussion today because post 1989 Poland has accepted the fait accomplai of successful ethnic cleansing in 1945-1947 — nobody wants to open that particular can of worms again. That doesn’t mean that Poland didn’t have legitimate historical, ethnic and diplomatic claims to these territories, which I presume is what you you wanted to snidely apply.
As to you next point, you are talking about the Polish occupation of Teschen, which was a small territory with a population of about 200,000 (including a plurality of ethnic Poles according to some sources) which the new nations of Czechslovakia and Poland had bitterly contested in the Versailles period — with Poland feeling it had been cheated. When Hitler moved on the Sudentedland, Poland took the opportunity to independently grab Teschen. This was a disastrous error by the Poles from a diplomatic perspective and morally shameful, but it was done opportunistically without coordination with the Nazis, which is I presume also what you wanted to imply. The Polish leadership at the time also made it quite clear in internal discussions that they would never have contemplated going to war with the Czechs over the issue.
More generally, the fundamental problem with the “buying time for the struggle against fascism” issue is that while it could be argued this justified a non-agression pact with the Nazis, it didn’t justify overunning the Baltic States or Eastern Poland and incorporating them into the Soviet Union. It CERTAINLY cannot justify Katyn and the deportation of thousands of ethnic Poles to the Gulag. As to the “strategic depth” argument, there is a great deal of evidence that Stalin thought he had achieved a medium term peace with Hitler, but even if you accept that this was a major motivation for invading a sovereign state alongside the Nazis, its miserably failed in practice — the new territories were not ideal for defense and moving the line west meant abandoning the old, effective border fortification. Most historians I have read on operation Barbarossa believe the Soviet move into Poland was a contributing factor to the debacle of 1941.
The fact that there are still people like Alfie denying the scope and perpetrators of Katyn on, of all days, Spetember 1 is deeply saddening.
Comment by girondistnyc — 2 September, 2009 @ 2:14 am
My old mate Duncan Hallas kicked some serious Nazi butt in WW2,and had the bullet holes to prove it! I wish you would not keep calling uncle Jo Stalins regime soviet Andy,it had been a long time since any workers councils had existed there.Maybe reconstituted Russian empire might be more accurate.
Comment by ScotinLondon — 2 September, 2009 @ 5:11 am
No much as been said about the role of the USA in all of this,
Comment by steelcityred — 2 September, 2009 @ 5:20 am
Girondystnic- If there was involuntary deportation of Poles from those territories this is to be deplored, but surely the reason they were part of Poland in 1939 was that they had been seized by military force in 1921. And the reason why they weren’t…
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 7:31 am
…part of Poland before then was that the majority population were not Poles. (Correct me if I’m wrong). Your point re the land dispute between Poland and Chechoslovakia could be made re much of Europe with the demise of empires and birth of new
states
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 7:56 am
The comments in post #44 represent an illiterate and quite jawdroppingly stupid response to my previous post here. ‘YCLer’ is clearly illiterate as he appears to be suggesting that the Bolshevik Leninists were uninterested in defeating Nazism and yet considerable mention had already been made as to the activities of the partisans of the Fourth in the armed forces and the various resistance movements. Reference too had been made to a journal that details in greater detail those activities but comrade ignoramus seemingly cannot read such comments.
The question then is asked by ‘YCLer’ as to why “people” thought that Trotskyists were facist agents. The answer to this moronic question is simple in that the members of the misnamed CPGB and YCL spread such lies in order to preach class peace. Heck the CPGB went so far as to campaign in Cradiff for a Tory candidate in preference to the ILP.
Comment by mike — 2 September, 2009 @ 8:58 am
Mike- your abusive tone blunts your message.
“Class-peace” was preached by the CP in the sense that it was believed that the British war-effort was inextricably linked to the fight against fascism and the defence of the USSR.
Trotskyists did not hold to that and were therefore involved in supporting strikes, such as by the Kent miners and at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Nottingham, for which they were denounced by the CP and the government for being fascists.
A minority of Trotskyists wheld the view that they were not bothered about the war effort (the same position the CP had until June 41, but the majorty held that there was no contradiction between pursuing the class struggle and maintaining the struggle against fascism.
Soldiers in the 8th Army sent back the message that the right to strike was one of the rights they were fighting for.
In the light of history, it is clearly understandable both that some on the left would have taken the position that everthing had to be held in abeyance while the war was won, while others felt that the class struggle should not be put on hold.
The positon of the Trotskyists, right or wrong, no more made them fascists than was Ghandi in India.
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:22 am
Nick Wright- yes our duty is to understand, but if we take the view that a moral standpoint is imaterial, does that mean that our understanding will not stop us from condoning or even perpetuating atrocities yourself now and in the future?
A lot of Irish people want to do more than “understand” Cromwell btw.
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:27 am
Stop wriggling, Nick. You know perfectly well that we discuss Stalin in a different way than we discuss Cromwell or Aztec emperors because Stalin casts such a huge shadow over the left.
All those who describe themselves as socialists or communists have to face the problem of what Stalinism has done to our movement. The crimes of Stalin remain potent propaganda for our enemies - and propaganda which is all the more effective because most of it happens to be true.
As for Andy’s continuing belief that the Nazi-Soviet pact “bought time”, here are a few awkward facts that ought to destroy that myth:
1. So confident was Stalin that Hitler would not attack that trade between the USSR and Germany continued right up to the day Barbarossa was launched. Soviet forces on the border were not even on alert, and intelligence reports that the Nazis were planning an invasion were dismissed as British propraganda.
2. The Luftwaffe destroyed around 4,000 Soviet planes in the first three days of the war, most of them on the ground. Not much sign of readiness there.
3. Up to December 1941, the German armies had captured two and a half million Soviet troops. Only the Soviet Union’s huge resources of manpower saved it from this catastrophe.
4. In the purges, Stalin had about 30,000 Red Army officers executed. They included two thirds of the corps and division commanders. This was not the behaviour of someone who believed that war was imminent.
Comment by paul fauvet — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:27 am
The reluctance of the Polish (anti-democratic and expansionist) state to allow Stalin to defend the country is understandable given what we know about the massascres of Polish officers in the Eastern parts subsequently occupied, and the fate of the Baltic states defensively occupied.
The Nazi-Soviet pact is also understandable given the refusal of the British Conservatives (and the timidity of the French Popular Front Govt) to build an anti-Nazi front with the Soviets. That the Bristish Conservatives were more hostile to Soviet Russia than Hitler and Mussolini is well documented.
What is clear is that when we look at the leaderships of these countries, it is difficult to find the ‘good guys’. Lucky Marxists don’t have to - if conservative revisionists want to say ‘Poland good - Stalin bad’ we don’t have to say ‘Stalin good - Poland bad’ - what we can say is that the planned economy of of the USSR was the key factor in defeating Nazi Germnay and that the anti-fascism of the British working class was key to stopping Halifax and co doing a Petain and appeasing the Nazis yet further after the fall of France. We can also honestly compare the timidity and failure to sacrifice of the elites (despite notable exceptions) to the heroism of workers and peasants across Europe in defeating the Nazi regimes.
Comment by Jota — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:39 am
Paul
There is no contradiction between beleiving that war with Germany was inevitable and needed to be prepared for, and simultaneoulsy being caught napping when it actually occured. The whole point of a planned suprise attack is that you make it a surprise.
There were indeed large numbers of Soviet soldiers captured, and many tousands of them even volunteered to serve in the German “Ost” battalions on the Western Front. There are a number of things of interest here. One is that morale in the Red Army took a serious blow on the initial invasion, and troops on the immediate front line were overwhelmed. But the surrendering stopped for two reasoins, one is that Red Army morale recovered dramaticaly once it was clear that at Moscow and leningrad they were holding their ground; the other is that while some non-political ordinary soldiers may have had initial illusions that life might be better under the Germans, the actual conduct of the German army was so apallingly brutal that it consolidated a deep loyalty to the USSR, and to Russia.
With regard to the purge of the 30000 officers, this occured in 1937 and 1938, removing the layer of officers who predated Stalin’s modernisation of the Red Army. There was considerable debate in the Red Army about the effect of this on their relatively poor performance in the Winter War in Finland 1939/1940, and while assessments bu foreign commentators were that this was due to the officer corps purge, the Red Army’s own assessment was that it was due to problems with the command structure, in particular too much decentralisation of tactical decision making. These deficiences were rectified with the restoration of a general staff, and the removal of political commissars.
You should also be cautious of recycling what was German propaganda, accepted by the Western democracies at the time, that the Red Army was crude, ill equipped and relied upon strength of numbers. In 1941 the Red Army was less battle hardened than the germans, and suffered initial reversals largely due to inertia and poor morale, but they were already well equipped. But 1943 the Red Army had more and better equipment, better tactical technique and were more motivated than the Wehrmacht. What is more, although the Soviet economy was only roughly half the size of the German economy, they were producing more armaments by 1943 than the combined Axis powers.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:49 am
Incidently, as an aside, i went to the same school as Lord halifax.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:50 am
#68
That’s a bit of a chararacature of the Polish army- amongst the dead of Katyn there were plenty of Jewish officers.
Comment by Green Socialist — 2 September, 2009 @ 10:51 am
#96 I think that the Red Army’s new leadership not blaming the Bolshevik-era Officer purge as responsible for the Red Army’s poor performance in the Winter War vs Finland may have been done to self-presevation, Andy.
The deep operations doctrine - promoting close air support and mechanisation - developed by Tukhachevsky would have avoided the linear defence promoted by Stalin’s placemen - Stalin’s decision to move troops right to the front enabled the mass encirclements that a Red Army led by Tukhavevsky would have avoided. Stalin efectively staged a counter revolution in military thinking for his domestic political ends.
What may have been possible is revealed by the performance of the Red Army in the Far East in the mid-30s - scoring significant victories over the Japanese through mobile defense and combined arms operations.
Comment by Jota — 2 September, 2009 @ 11:06 am
#97 `Incidently, as an aside, i went to the same school as Lord halifax.’
I bet he calls it `The People’s War’ too.
Comment by David Ellis — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:15 pm
#100
Hardly
Halifax was very much in the Chamberlain mode. The King preferred him to Churchill as prime minister after the fall of Chamberlain, but Halifax said he couldn’t be prime minister as he sat in the Lords.
That he could have thought such a parliamentary convention could be allowed to stand in the way of what needed to be done to win a total war showed his pettifogging, conservative mindset; and he was cerainly a supporter of the Colonel Blimps and chinless wonders rather than the democratising aspect of a people’s war.
Comment by Andy Newman — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:20 pm
I was of course referring to his attitude during and after the war as opposed to before but I like what you say about the democratising aspect of `a people’s war’ and of course the Leninist slogan in any inter-imperialist war is to turn the imperialist war into a civil war which would be the most democratic slogan of all with the workers and the people deciding who and how to fight as opposed to a tiny cabal of imperialist/capitalists and their lackeys sharing out billions of colonial subjects and acres of land amongst themselves by a show of force.
Certainly it was right to defend the Soviet Union against imperialist invasion whilst always pointing out the disasterous impact of Stalinist distortion and policy on the ability of the world proletariat to conduct a successful war against imperialism to its conclusion.
Comment by David Ellis — 2 September, 2009 @ 12:31 pm
David Ellis- I think Halifax would have been more likely to have refered to it as a “Brother’s War”.
Comment by Armchair — 2 September, 2009 @ 2:04 pm
More on Tom Wintringham here:-
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jwinteringham.htm
It deals with his influence on the formation of Home Guard and the Common Wealth Party. He was expelled from the CPGB after refusing to leave his wife Kitty for reasons explained in the article.
Comment by prianikoff — 2 September, 2009 @ 2:10 pm
#96
There is no contradiction between beleiving that war with Germany was inevitable and needed to be prepared for, and simultaneoulsy being caught napping when it actually occured. The whole point of a planned suprise attack is that you make it a surprise.
- Don’t forget Andy,
Stalin was also caught with his pants down because he didn’t believe Hitler would open up a Second Front whilst he still had unfinished buisness in the West with an unbeaten Britian.
Indeed, although some of the Wermacht top brass were itching to get at the Soviets, many weren’t and, I believe, many of Hitler’s top henchmen in the Nazi Party couldn’t believe the decision of their boss to attack East whilst the West remained unresolved.
Another reason for the Red Army’s poor performance against Operation Barbarossa was Stalin himself. As you say Andy, once the political commissars were withdrawn from military operational decisions the Soviet military began to perform. Same with Stalin, who gradually withdrew himself from decision making - unlike Hitler who became more and more involved.
Comment by joe90kane — 2 September, 2009 @ 4:27 pm
ps
great thread!
pps
Stalin handed communists over to the Nazis as a gesture of friendship under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact -
- that makes a change from him stuffing vast numbers of communists into his gulags.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise give STalin’s record
ie handing Republican Spain over to the fascist Nationalists etc.
Since when did Stalin ever give a shit about communism and communists, anywhere at anytime?
Comment by joe90kane — 2 September, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
no 106 “ie handing Republican Spain over to the fascist Nationalists etc.”
What are you on about? The Soviet Union was virtually the only country that aided republican Spain with armanents.
Comment by Matthew Stiles — 2 September, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
Armchair wrote in post #92 ““Class-peace” was preached by the CP in the sense that it was believed that the British war-effort was inextricably linked to the fight against fascism and the defence of the USSR.”
Which is true but the exact same can be said of the majority tendency within the Trotskyist movement. The point being that the CPGB did not just preach ‘class peace’ but enforced it in the workplaces and went so far in the electoral arena that they called for a vote for the Tories. The B-Ls on the other hand tried their damndest to turn the war against fascism into a war against capitalism in general while recognising that the armed conflict with the Axis had to be given military support. Which is why the likes of Duncan Hallas went into the Army fought the Nazis and agitated for workers power.
Comment by neprimerimye — 2 September, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
#107
What are you on about? The Soviet Union was virtually the only country that aided republican Spain with armanents.
- Stalin didn’t ‘aid’ Republican Spain.
He took it over from the inside and deliberately destroyed it’s ability to fight the fascists.
Stalin wasn’t interested in encouraging potential rivals or in cultivating other centres of power not under his control, either at home or abroad.
Next you’ll be telling me Stalin was interested in strengthening international communism.
Comment by joe90kane — 2 September, 2009 @ 7:29 pm
Stalin again?!
Comment by One more message — 2 September, 2009 @ 11:02 pm
“I remember as a child my Father and Uncle’s all who fought during the war praising the Soviet Union and Stalin, even the Tories amongst them.”
Hmm. Precisely.
Comment by Tim Vanhoof — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:10 am
Joe90kane- Stalin’s line on Spain may or may not have been disastrous and contributing to the defeat of the Republican side, but the idea that he deliberately helped engineer the fascist victory is ludicrous.
Comment by Armchair — 3 September, 2009 @ 1:00 am
Re Andy ~96 ?
‘What is more, although the Soviet economy was only roughly half the size of the German economy, they were producing more armaments by 1943 than the combined Axis powers.’
What is your source for this- I have western data suggesting Soviet industrial capacity being ~20% of output of great powers combines in 1939, larger than Britian, Germany at ~9-12 %, and about half of the US figure of 38 %.
Are you counting the economic output of all german occupied teritories ?
Comment by kieran — 3 September, 2009 @ 7:47 am
Its pretty fun reading Andy Newman’s crude re-cyclings of Stalinist propaganda.
“With regard to the purge of the 30000 officers, this occured in 1937 and 1938, removing the layer of officers who predated Stalin’s modernisation of the Red Army.”
The idea that assassinating your entire high command, including all your best, most experienced officers, makes no difference to your fighting potential is risable. The modernisation of the Red Army was initiated and overseen by Tuchachevsky, the Commander in Chief that Stalin killed. Stalin didn’t modernise the Red Army, he sought to un-modernise it, objecting to Tuchachevsky’s plans for mobile defence in depth. Not that that was the reason why Stalin killed him, Stalin was always terrified of the army as a rival source of power and feared a potential coup.
Stalin certainly should not have been caught by surprise, agents in the Tokyo embassy and the Red Orchestra in Franche/Belgium gave him the actual date of the attack and the troop deployments of Operation Barbarossa. The Red Orchestra had an agent acting as a stenographer in Hitler’s personal war cabinet.
He ignored it because of his dumb faith in the Nazi dictator. Birds of a feather flock together.
Whether Stalin actually wanted a fascist victory in Spain is moot. He certainly didn’t object to a fascist victory in Spain and did everything in his power to assist it. Avoiding socialism was his key priority.
Comment by bill j — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:15 am
This is no guarantee of historical accuracy, but my mother, (who at the time was a resolute Communist and believer in the Soviet Union, would tell us ‘the story’ of the outbreak of war and what happened)would always stop at the point where she talked about what Stalin did in the time between the Pact and the German invasion. She then would say, ‘he got rid of all his generals. He must have been ga-ga.’ All this tells us is that CP-ers at the time (and since) thought that Stalin had done something incompetent and wrong. Her understanding of it was that he did this post-Pact, pre-invasion.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:30 am
I think Andy has done as much as possible with this thread to acquaint Joe90 and Bill J with the biggest life and death realities of the 20th century. But he appears to have failed.
We end up with Duncan Hallas being presented as the revolutionary hero of the great war against fascism, and Stalin as someone who did everything in his power to assist fascism in Spain and oppose socialism there as everywhere else.
My father was a trade unionist in the printing industry, solid working class, left of centre but not a Communist. His elder brother was a Labour Party ETU union official who turned out in the 1930s to smash up a Mosley meeting when the fascists came to our city.
They both knew why they went off to fight in World War Two - the overriding necessity to defeat fascism. They brought me up on the politics, but nothing about their extensive involvement in the fighting (Royal Marine Commandos). They also understood the enormous and vital role of the Soviet Red Army (another Stalin-led defeat!).
The idea that an utterly irrelevant Trotskyist like Hallas should be held up as a kind of revolutionary or anti-fascist icon would have made them laugh - or spit - in their beer.
They would have seen the lofty, self-righteous denunciations of Stalin and Soviet policy in their real context.
The kind of sectarian drivel, driven by anti-Communism, from BillJ and Joe90 above would not have won an audience among most working class people who knew which side they were on, and why, in the 1930s and 1940s.
Working class anti-fascists in that period were not as stupid as know-all, posturing, Soviet-hating ultra-leftists today obviously think they were.
Comment by Party hack — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:36 am
#109 Good grief.
“Working class anti-fascists in that period were not as stupid as know-all, posturing, Soviet-hating ultra-leftists today obviously think they were.”
But surely the point is that they had no clue of the actually reality of what had been going on in 1937-38 in USSR, and if they had, they would have been utterly disgusted and utterly opposed to it.
The point that has been made again and again was that it wasn’t the genius and all-wise omnipotence of the supreme leader that we have to thank for the achievements and amazing sacrifice of the Soviet war effort, in many ways these achievements were despite having an evil paranoid bastard sitting on the throne.
People defending Stalin the individual in 2009 knowing what we do now about him is sick beyond belief. Your Dad and your Uncle would spit in their beer and then tip it on your head.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:26 am
#106
“What is your source for this- I have western data suggesting Soviet industrial capacity being ~20% of output of great powers combines in 1939, larger than Britian, Germany at ~9-12 %, and about half of the US figure of 38 %. ”
My Source is Walter Dunn’s “The Soviet economy and the Red Army 1930 to 1945″, a book by an American academic more inerested in the military than in politics. I was quoting from memory, but he was refering to iron and steel capaicity not over all GDP.
Comment by Anonymous — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:30 am
111 - oh that was me.
Comment by andy newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:31 am
Joe90kane
I’ve been reading Paul Preston on the Spanish Civil War just recently and his main point about Stalin was that Stalin was concerned that if Spain went fascist then France would be much less likely to join in any war against Germany, should Germany attack the Soviet Union.
Comment by Matthew Stiles — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:37 am
Re 111
‘My Source is Walter Dunn’s “The Soviet economy and the Red Army 1930 to 1945″, a book by an American academic more interested in the military than in politics. I was quoting from memory, but he was referring to iron and steel capacity not over all GDP.’
Fair enough. Certainly you have a point about the Soviets gearing up for war, as from 1936 the USSR cuts investment sharply and increases military production instead.
But you can also see the effect of Stalin’s industrialization in the years before. In 1929 Russia accounted for 4.3 % of world manufacturing output, by 1936-8, 18.5 %. In contrast Germany actually shrank from 11.6 % to 10.7 %. The biggest loser of the interwar period was France, which in 1913 accounted for 7%, falling to 6.6 and 4.5 % in 1926-9 and 36-8 respectively.
These are all stats from: League of Nations, Industrialization and foreign trade, (Geneva, 1945)
The Russian military actually seems to have massively underperformed, given the manpower, industrial capacity and design/equipment it had access to. For example, the KV-1 Heavy tank was infinitely superior to anything the Germans produced prior to the Panther. It appears that they were preparing for war in a very general, but not specific sense. Certainly they were caught completely by surprise in Poland.
Comment by kieran — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
#113 Stalin was only interested in geo-political matters and even if we were to concede that he was right to concern himself solely with the interests of the Soviet state he was utterly useless at even that paralysed as he was by the crippling paranoid fear of factions that inflicts the bureaucrat. The international proletarian revolution has long slipped from his list of priorities. He was, in fact, an implacable enemy of it realising as he did that the resurgence of the world revolution would soon sweep his little self-interested bureaucracy into the dustbin of history. The satelite Stalinist parties conducted all their business in line with the interests of the Stalinist state not the international working class or even the working classes of their countries of origin after all, Uncle Joe was paying.
Comment by David Ellis — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
Hitler had more justification in calling his war a `Volksgrieg’ or people’s war. With the political voice of the German proletariat definitively silenced by the Nazi regime of open violence and the utterly craven misleadership of the Stalinists the German people were howling for blood and war. They could not wait to grab some of that `living space’ currently squatted by `savages’, `degenerate races’ and Bolsheviks like the Wild West had been by the yanks and Africa and Asia by Britain. In Britain, there was no real appetite for war as there could be only one result - the end of empire and an acceleration towards US domination. The proletariat would of course have to be armed and trained. Never a good idea for the ruling class and the Royal Family and the goverment had made planse to evacuate Britain and run the empire from Canada like the portuguese royal family had done when they fled to Brazil years before. However, a coalition of social chauvinist Labour reformits, liberals and stalinists managed to persuade the British proletariat that it would be a good thing to fight German fascism and Japanese militarism in the name of British imperialism behind a Tory leader in Egypt, Burma and other outposts of the empire.
The failures of the working class leaderships of the 30s assured capitalism of another 70-80 years with all the misery that has bought to billions of people not to mention the climate destruction and now we are being asked to relive all that as if it was fanbloodytastic.
Comment by David Ellis — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
Yup, thanks to David Ellis for confirming one of my earlier points. Those dull proles in the 1930s and 1940s, sacrificing the revolution in order to follow the liberals and Stalinists and defeat Nazism. Hopeless, eh? What are we going to do with them? The sooner they get some middle class, sectarian, ultra-leftist, impossibilist leadership, the better!
Comment by Party hack — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:43 pm
Party Hack: you are well named my friend. It seems that for you there is no need to struggle for leadership against the chauvinist mis-leaders, the proletariat don’t need arming they are ready to go. But then we must ask why is the world still dominated by imperialism, why did the soviet union collapse so meekly, why doesn’t anybody buy the Morning Star anymore? Or are you saying that the world is already a socialist paradise? I’m not sure what you are trying to say but that is probably because you are not sure yourself.
Re: the war. Wasn’t it against Germany and Japan not Nazism? And hadn’t it been prepared long previously by the treaty of Versailles that concluded round one of the inter-imperialist blood-fest?
Comment by David Ellis — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:56 pm
“He [Stalin] certainly didn’t object to a fascist victory in Spain and did everything in his power to assist it.”
Trots say the darndest things, don’t they?
Comment by our lad george — 3 September, 2009 @ 12:59 pm
#118: Ruling class propaganda may have played up an ‘anti-German’ character to the war, and this no doubt reinforced backward ideas within the working class (about whom I have no romantic illusions, contrary to David Ellis’s arrogantly superior suggestion). But many working class people understood its anti-fascist character, just like almost all Comunists, socialists and many liberals did. Oh, how they needed a David Ellis to give them the correct line! i.e. have a social revolution at home, ask Mr Hitler if he could wait while we (no doubt with minimal self-inflicted damage) swiftly despatched our own ruling class, and then - full of the revolutionary fervour that has come from, er, somewhere, proper leadership, wherever - we could taken on the Nazis. By rousing the German working class, obviously. Except, I forgot, we can’t have a revolution in one country alone. So, er, we would have to have appealed to the German working class at the same time as we are not yet fighting Hitler but instead launching our own pre-doomed revolution, er …
That’s the gibbering schoolboy approach to revolutionary politics which, somehow, I don’t think the proles - hopelessly misled by liberals and Stalinists - would ever have adopted.
The war to defeat German fascism and Japanese autocracy helped make possible the Welfare State here, social reforms across Europe, the liberation of China, Korea, Vietnam etc., support for national liberation movements around the world (by those inward-looking anti-revolutionary Stalinists!) and so on. All trivial matters for Comrade Ellis, of course, who has his eyes fixed firmly on the future perfect state of socialist grace, while sneering about the real struggles and real gains (’workers paradises’) that the rest of us have to make do with.
Comment by Party hack — 3 September, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
#110
But I don’t think anyone is arguing that Stalin personally was particulatly wise nor omnipotent. The USSR underwent a period of forced industrialisation in the context of both desperate domestic poverty, and international pressure and isolation. It was brutal and repressive; it was also perhaps suprisingly reasonably popular, as many people experenced an improvement of their living standards and particularly of social mobility.
For sure, the clique around Beria and Stalin were interested in their own prestige and position; but the driving dynamic of the society was forced industrialisation under the impetus of real external threat, and the party collectively was the only social force cappable of driving that through.
The irony here is that the Trotsykist critics don’t really represent an alternative trajectory in terms of the internal policitical economy of the USSR, they just think that Stalin should have adopted a more reckless international policy. After all, based upon his actual record in government Trotsky was more ruthless, more vainglorious, and less able to work collaborativiely with different strands of opinion than Stalin; and the industrial and agricultural policies adopted by Stalin were essentially Trotsky’s, which is why leading Trotskists like Preobrazhnsky joined Stalin.
Now we can speculate on whether the moderates like Chicherin might have avoided the excesses, or whether Bukharin’s economic policy options might have avoided the terror, but we can never know.
What we do know is that any government trying to hold together society in the context of famine, social and economic collapse and to ward off complete anarchy is going to be repressive, and even once the immediate danger is passed the repressive habits will remain. The actually available historical choice was not between Stalin and prosperous Western style democracy, the choices were all of how a beleagured and deperately poor country could survive, ward off catastrophic military invasion, and dig its way out of famine and economic collapse.
Incidently, the bengal famine killed some 5 million people during the war, is anyone suggesting that the British Empire was also as bad as Hitler?
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 1:22 pm
Sorry, forgot to add Cuba to the list of all the hopeless or trivial developments made all the more possible by the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism.
Not forgetting either the terrible example and inspiration that the Cuban revolution (or should that be state capitalist counter-revolution?) has given to the peoples of Latin America. They’re all doomed as well, obviously, under such Stalinist influence, deprived of the correct leadership that only British Trotskyism appears capable of giving to the rest of the world.
Comment by Party hack — 3 September, 2009 @ 1:51 pm
Incidently, the bengal famine killed some 5 million people during the war, is anyone suggesting that the British Empire was also as bad as Hitler?
No, because unlike Stalin did in Ukraine, the British didn’t deliberately engineer the Bengal famine.
Comment by Gene — 3 September, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
#123 - ‘No, because unlike Stalin did in Ukraine, the British didn’t deliberately engineer the Bengal famine’
This is disputatious. The British were intent on depriving resources to an anticipated Japanese invasion of India. This led to a scorched policy in conjunction with the stockpiling of food for British troops.
Both certainly contributed to the famine of 1943.
Moreover, I’m sure the victims of the Bengal Famine would take little comfort in the extent to which it was engineered by the British. It was a British colony, and as we all know the British Empire was no benevolent society.
Comment by John Wight — 3 September, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
#121 Andy you argue well as ever, but as ever too there is just something a little unsettling in there, a touch of doublethink, a feeling of somehow airbrushing away the crimes against humanity.
Maybe that’s unfair, I entirely accept that you are not a Stalin apologist or supporter, but there are such people out there, and on here, and that’s just such a bizarre, vile and repellent stance to take in 2009.
Your comments on Trotsky are interesting and new to me. I don’t oppose Stalin and Stalinism from a Trotskyist viewpoint. Both Stalinists and Trotskyists can call me a wishy washy liberal if they want.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 2:41 pm
I hit post before adding the last thing I was going to say:
#121 You say “It was brutal and repressive; it was also perhaps suprisingly reasonably popular, as many people experenced an improvement of their living standards and particularly of social mobility.”
You could just as easily say that about Nazi Germany, but it doesn’t make any kind of justification for Nazism.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 2:47 pm
I find it very revealing that at the end of it, Trots find themselves downplaying the evil actions of Nazism and the british empire in order to attack their main enemy, that being the world’s first worker state.
Yes Stalin did many terrible things, but why ignore the terrible things that the British empire or Nazi Germany did?
This weird logic, taken to its full extent results in the bizzare, sectarian politics of tiny sects like the weekly worker group, who do all they can to attack others on the left, while generally ignoring attacks on the right, our real enemy.
But then i suppose that you trots would consider offical Communists as your main enemy.
Comment by YCLer — 3 September, 2009 @ 2:49 pm
#127 “Yes Stalin did many terrible things, but why ignore the terrible things that the British empire or Nazi Germany did?”
That’s a totally false, morally & intellectually bankrupt statement. You’re not helping your case.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 2:55 pm
What so it is justified to argue that when there was a famine in the British empire it wasn’t the British Empire’s fault, but then when it happened in Stalin’s Russia, well it had to be Stalin’s fault.
You are the one who is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
Comment by YCLer — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
#129 “it is justified to argue that when there was a famine in the British empire it wasn’t the British Empire’s fault, but then when it happened in Stalin’s Russia, well it had to be Stalin’s fault”
Who’s arguing that? Stalin engineered a terror famine and millions died. That’s a horrible crime. What has anything anybody else did or didn’t do got to do with it?
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
If you paid a little more attention Strategist, rather than just wading in with your accusations that I am not your moral and intellectual equivalent (which is a great way of acting if you want to isolate ordinary people from left politics-WELL DONE!)
I was refering to 123# “Incidently, the bengal famine killed some 5 million people during the war, is anyone suggesting that the British Empire was also as bad as Hitler?
No, because unlike Stalin did in Ukraine, the British didn’t deliberately engineer the Bengal famine.”
Comment by YCLer — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:24 pm
The point i was making was, if we want to understand why Stalin did the terrible things he did, we have to contextualise it. We need to look at the isolated position of the Soviet Union, the invasion by the rest of the world and the siege-mentality that grew out of that.
We cannot understand Stalin by making apologies for the worst aspects of the British Empire, (like #123) or by ignoring the crimes of Nazi Germany(like the article from the BBC covering Polish war commemorations)
That was my point. Im sure you are very much morally and intelectually cleverer and better than me, but that is not a way of acting that will win over ordinary people to socialism
Comment by YCLer — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
We cannot understand Stalin by making apologies for the worst aspects of the British Empire, (like #123) or by ignoring the crimes of Nazi Germany(like the article from the BBC covering Polish war commemorations)
#123 was me, and I wasn’t making apologies for the British role in the Bengal famine– it’s clear that their priorities, neglect and incompetence contributed to it. But there is a moral difference between that and deliberately engineering a famine as punishment for resisting agricultural collectivization. If you can’t grasp that, there’s not much to discuss.
Comment by Gene — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:45 pm
Hey Gene, you’re being accused of being a Trot. Now there’s something you could take back to HP with you.
If there is evidence that the British helped create the Bengal famine, (I don’t know either way) then there really is no difference as to whether it’s for collective punishment (a la Stalin) or for some kind of strategic reason. They would then be both created by rulers who ‘know better’ than the victims. In both cases the victims would have been sacrificed for a ‘greater good’ which in both cases would be nothing more or less than the continued rule of that particular regime (Stalin and British Empire, respectively). However, if the Bengal famine really can be shown to have been something that was in now way connived at (eg through deliberate neglect, as minuted in documents at Kew etc) then my argument above falls. Of course.
YCler, if you imagine that Trots downplay the role of the British Empire, you’ve been assembling your arguments about Trots without reference to anything they write. Good fun, but a crap way to argue.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 3 September, 2009 @ 3:54 pm
Hey Gene, you’re being accused of being a Trot. Now there’s something you could take back to HP with you.
I’ll add it to the long list of insults I’ve accumulated during my years as a blogger.
Comment by Gene — 3 September, 2009 @ 4:04 pm
#116 - historians studying the experiences of ordinary people in the Nazi period tend to find convincing evidence that Germans were worried by the prospect of war - far from keen for it. While defeatist sentiments were rarely openly voiced to the later stages of the war, particularly after Stalingrad, due to fear of repression - most Germans, particularly the urban working class in big cities were unconvinced by the bulk of Nazi propaganda.
Comment by Jota — 3 September, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
#131 YCLer, my intention was to criticise the bankruptcy of your argument, not of you or your personality or intelligence.
But I have very serious problems with “The point i was making was, if we want to understand why Stalin did the terrible things he did, we have to contextualise it. We need to look at the isolated position of the Soviet Union, the invasion by the rest of the world and the siege-mentality that grew out of that.”
Because where I think you are leading with that - you don’t actually say it, so I may be wrong - is that when we contextualise it and understand it, then we can excuse it, forgive it, even support it. This I utterly reject, and so should everyone. I hope you agree.
There’s a line of argument that goes:
1. Without Stalin and Stalinism the USSR would have ceased to exist by 1939.
2. Without Stalin Germany would have beaten Russia in any war and Nazism would have taken over the world
3. Without Stalin, Cuba wouldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t have the lovely permaculture gardens we see in Cuba today, as shown in today’s Morning Star.
4. Therefore, at some level, although distasteful, the Great Terror etc was a price worth paying.
Well there’s lots of might have beens in history, but I don’t accept 1, 2 or 3, and even if they were true, they don’t justify (4). The key one (2), that without Stalin, USSR wouldn’t have been able to beat Hitler for us, is the one that has been argued against here by knowledgeable historians here. In fact, without Stalin, the Red Army would have been more effective and would probably have won sooner.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 5:17 pm
The rapid drift towards open Stalinism of this blog is perfectly compatible with the posts embracing the English Democrats and the Royal Air Force. May I suggest a name change to National Unity?
Comment by Tim Vanhoof — 3 September, 2009 @ 5:29 pm
“fter all, based upon his actual record in government Trotsky was more ruthless, more vainglorious, and less able to work collaborativiely with different strands of opinion than Stalin; and the industrial and agricultural policies adopted by Stalin were essentially Trotsky’s, which is why leading Trotskists like Preobrazhnsky joined Stalin.”
Stalin’s tolerance and ability to work with other strands of opinion demonstrated of course by his taste for killing their proponents.
Comment by bill j — 3 September, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
“In fact, without Stalin, the Red Army would have been more effective and would probably have won sooner.”
No, the question is how the USSR could have dug itself out of the desperate state of near collapse it was in 1928, following the famines of 1926 and 1927, the industrial collpase following the trade boycotts from Britain and France, and so called “Scissors crisis”, causing dislocation between the urban and rural economies. Furthermore there was almost open war between the different factions of the CPSU, amnd disastrous demoralisation following events in Britain and China.
In 1928 the USSR couldn’t have defended itself from the Dagenham Girl Pipers, let alone Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
Added to which the culture of ruthlessness and disgragard to legality that had grown up, exemplified by the execution of 100 Czarist prisoners in 1926 in reprisal for the assasination of a Soviet diplomat in Poland; and if you want to get a flavour read Trotsky’s writings on the war communism period promising to wage war against the countryside and settle the question of grain procurement from the peasantry by force of bayonets.
The actually existing options open to the government were all circumscribed by the context they found themselves in; and Stalin and the brutality of the period were a product of material circumstances.
Now personally, i think there may well have been better options in the policies of Tomsky and Chicherin, who would have made a greater accomodation with capitalism and this may have avoided the excesses of the Stalin era, but we can never know.
And we also cannot know whether a much more gradual pace of industrialisation might not have left the USSR vuknerable to invasion.
The rapid industrialisation which Stalin did acheive, almost certainly couldn’t have been done without a high level of political repression. And it was this rapid industrialisation that was the precondition for the military defence.
If you think there were alternatives, then they have to be ones that were actually open to the Soviet government in the circumstances they found themselves in.
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 5:41 pm
#138
“posts embracing the English Democrats”
Point to one post ever that has been supportin]ve of the Englsh Democrats.
you are simply lying aren’t you.
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 5:43 pm
“In fact, without Stalin, the Red Army would have been more effective and would probably have won sooner.”
“No”
So murdering your entire high command two years before the invasion is a good idea?
So abandonding defence in depth and reverting to the stagnant military tactics of WWI was a good idea?
So collectivising the peasantry at an unsustainable rate, leading to a famine with approximately 5 million deaths was a good idea?
So ignoring intelligence warnings of the date of the invasion and the German military deployment were a good idea?
Stalin was just great and really contributed to the defence of the USSR and building a happy society. Andy Newman’s good idea?
Comment by bill j — 3 September, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
There comes a point in the evolution of a tyranny where both contemporaneously and in the process of looking back, where we should be able to say that the survival of that state as a state (ie Andy’s argument about ‘defence’) is not something worth supporting/celebrating/wishing for etc. Just because Stalin made the Soviet Union able to defend itself, shouldn’t necessarily be a source of celebration or retrospective support. When we talk about Nazi Germany, of course we’re quite clear that Hitler’s programme for ‘development’ for Germans isn’t something we support even though the standard of living for Aryan Germans went up. So, why should we offer restrospective support for Stalin’s ’success’ in industrialising the Soviet Union or (in spite of all his efforts to do the opposite) of creating armed forces that could defend itself? And before anyone jumps down my throat and claims I’m saying Stalinism = Nazism, I’m not. I’m saying Stalinism = tyranny and the question about support is re that particular tyranny. Or indeed any other tyranny. I think it’s emerging as a question in Iran, isn’t it? This site was divided on whether to support those who demonstrated against the regime. Presumably a similar divide operates restrospectively re Stalin. However, the enormity of Stalin’s crimes against the people are way beyond those of Iran.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 3 September, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
#143
Quite right Michael.
It’s a bizarre argument that in order to achieve social progress, a little tyranny never hurt anyone, even its victims.
Apparantly, without Stalin’s tyranny there would have been no civilised progress in the Soviet Union - which begs the question what is meant by ‘civilisation’, especially one which needs tyranny in order to survive and flourish?
It’s a bit like claiming the natives need a bit of western colonialism and imperialism in order to receive the benefits of modern civilisation - or that Germany’s autobahn’s depended on Operation Barbarossa or the Holocaust (both quintessentially Nazi).
ps
#105
Joe90kane- Stalin’s line on Spain may or may not have been disastrous and contributing to the defeat of the Republican side, but the idea that he deliberately helped engineer the fascist victory is ludicrous.
Comment by Armchair
- Thanks armchair.
No, I’m not suggesting Stalin deliberately pre-planned and then put into action a fascist victory.
As in post-WWII Greece or post-WWII Italy or post-WWII Yugoslavia, Stalin wasn’t interested in foreign communist regimes outside of his control.
Comment by joe90 kane — 3 September, 2009 @ 7:39 pm
The British Left is renowned for having been successfully inculcated with the ideas and prejudices of its own ruling class to an extent unaparalleled except in the United States.
Consequently, reductive statements such as Stalinism = Tyranny and comparisons between the Soviet Union in the 1930s and Iran in 2009 are more suited to the pages of the Guardian’s CIF than a socialist discussion list.
Are we talking about Stalinism (and by the way, I’ve yet to read or hear a credible Marxist analysis of what Stalinism is), or are we talking about the Soviet Union in its entire history?
If the former, then any analysis worthy of the name must begin with the formation of the Bolsheviks in 1903 by Lenin and his adherents, based on their commitment to an elite formation of professional revolutionaries. It must encompass the so-called ‘expropriations’, sanctioned by Lenin, the acts of sabotage against leading industrialists throughout the latter part of that decade, both of which were activities in which Stalin came to prominence.
It then must look at the decision to withdraw from the Constituent Assembly, the abandonment of the soviets and any notion of workers’ democracy, the invasion Poland, the banning of factions, War Communism, Kronstadt, the reintroduction of the death penalty, and so on.
If, as I do, you believe that under the extreme conditions in which the nascent socialist state found itself at the period in question the aforementioned measures were necessary, then we understand the statement made by Trotksy that, ‘Lenin created the apparatus. The apparatus created Stalin’.
How would the Nazis and fascism have been defeated without the Soviet five year plans? Perhaps people could have marched with placards in capitals throughout Europe and chanted ‘Nazis out!’ and ‘Welfare Not Warfare!’
If, on the other hand, our condemnation is of the Soviet Union in its entirety, then we have to explain how those national liberation movements throughout the developing world, funded, armed, trained, and supported by the SU, would have fared otherwise. We have to explain how the North Vietnamese would have been able to defeat the might of US imperialism. We have to explain how the Cuban Revolution would have survived. We have to explain how millions upon millions, both within and without the SU, would have won the welfare state, had an education, enjoyed decent healthcare, developed their economies, had access to art, sport, music, books, and so on.
For those who prefer an historical analysis which factors in all of the empirical data available, and which understands the fundamental role of material conditions and struggle in the development of human societies, reductive and simplistic formulations such as Stalinism = Tyranny are nowhere near good enough.
Comment by John Wight — 3 September, 2009 @ 7:55 pm
John, no amount of analysis can wish away the dead millions. There is no solace available for that slaughter in any of the justifications you offer. There are so many ifs and what-ifs in the questions you ask that it’s impossible to have a discussion about them. The old chestnut about defeating Nazism is an absolute imponderable as we don’t know what kind of regime or people would have been living in Greater Russia had the Russian Revolution not happened etc etc. It’s just as possible to run a scenario in which a different regime wouldn’t have been invaded etc etc etc
(Sure you can take the piss out of my shorthand way of talking about it. Of course I wasn’t saying Iran = Stalinism. At least aim straight, huh?)
Comment by Michael Rosen — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:11 pm
In post #140 Andy wrote “The rapid industrialisation which Stalin did acheive, almost certainly couldn’t have been done without a high level of political repression. And it was this rapid industrialisation that was the precondition for the military defence.”
I beg to differ. Prior to his beheading of the Bolshevik Party Stalin had opposed the program of industrialisation proposed by the Communist Opposition led by Leon Trotsky. It can be argued that had that less breakneck program been implemented that it would have laid better foundations for continued growth of the industrial sector as less wastage would have been siffered as it would have relied on the cooperation of the working people and not their forced participation.
Moreover, as has been pointed out a number of times in this debate, less repression of the class and its representatives in both the party and the military would have prevented the severe losses suffered by Russia in the first stages of the war. In plain terms their war material would have been better preserved and utilised. As it was the policies of Stalin meant that much of that material was simply thrown away and many many lives lost for no positive purpose. The Russian maases won the war but Stalin undermined them at every turn.
Comment by neprimerimye — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:12 pm
Strategist (#130): “Stalin engineered a terror famine and millions died.”
Gene (#133): “[Stalin] deliberately engineering a famine as punishment for resisting agricultural collectivization.”
Evidence please.
Comment by Noah — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:34 pm
I certainly appreciate your arguments John Wight.
I wish history was black and white then judgements about it would be much easier. I’m not suggesting you are simplifying anything John however.
Just for instance -
- There is a counterfactual argument that, without a Bolshevik Russia in the first place, there would have been no Nazi regime and therefore no Operation Barbarossa etc etc
There is another histprical counter-factual argument along the lines that -
- without the existence of its only ever military rival, the Soviet Union, the US would have been deprived of a very convenient pretext for the vast government subsidies and welfare handouts to its domestic corporate military-indutrial complex (or military-petroleum duplex as I like to call it).
How international history might have panned out without the existence of the Soviet Union as a bogey-man to scare the American public out of its taxes (commonly called ‘The Cold War’) which was spent by their government on useless military crap, is anyone’s guess.
Of course, now that the US domestic military-petroleum duplex has deprived of a suitable enemey of sufficient size to justify massive public subsidies coming its way, it has been angling around for another one to take its place for quite a while. It seems to have settled in recent years for the spectre of ‘islamic extremist fundamentalism’, which is coming to take us all away in our sleep if we’re not careful.
Comment by joe90 kane — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:44 pm
Look, you can’t have your cake and eat it. My beef is with those who support the October revolution in its heroic phase, but are opposed to the way it turned out. Iroinically, many of those most vociferous about Stalin are the same ones who would like to inflict a rerun of the Russian revolution on us.
I have a lot of respect for those social democrats, among them some marxists, who argue that the whole experiment of the Russian (October) revolution was proven a mistake by events. We cannot rerun the film of history and find out what would have happened differently - but equally we canot assume that the outcome would necessarily have been better. A fascist government under Kornilov and terrible repression was a probable alternative, facing many of the same problems of economic and social collapse that the Bolsheviks had to contend with, and Kornilov would still have faced a rural jacquerie.
But once power was taken by the Bolsheviks a chain of events was set in motion. Again you might argue that the Bolsheviks could have taken power and still had a less cavalier attitude towards democracy, constitutionality and the rule of law. But the pace of events accelerated out of their control by the continued war with Germany, growing over into civil war (the revolt of the Czechs, etc), economic disruption and famine.
the process of war communism, during which Trotsky showed his naked brutality; and the later New economic Policy and lenin levy transformed the nature of the country and the party.
faced with the actual choices that faced the devastated, isolated and desperate Soviet state in the late 1920s; and given the moral and intellectual exhaustion, and the tenedency towards high-handed disregard for democratic process and preparedness to resort to violence that all three factions on the politburo showed, then the outcome was never going to be pretty.
It is worth pointing out that the boundaries between the different factions were also very fluid, and the policies often interchangeable. The support at various times by the Trotsky faction for Stalin against the moderates proves this.
In such a situation of massive economic and social collapse, democracy and toleration of dissent by sectional interests are highly unlikely outcomes; and it is in this context that the Stalin regime consolidated itself.
So, many of the thngs that were most terrible about the Stalin government genuinely were the product of circumstances beyond the government’s control - a process of events that were set in motion.
So that is not to say that Stalin was not a monster, nor that mistakes and even crimes were not committed; Khruschev acknowledged as much.
But had it not been Stalin it would have been someone else, because the material conditions did not allow much scope for different options.
Comment by Andy newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:51 pm
Andy Newman: If you think there were alternatives, then they have to be ones that were actually open to the Soviet government in the circumstances they found themselves in.
—
Actually, Lenin (I know you don’t have much use for him) thought that unless proletarian revolutions succeeded in the industrialized countries, the USSR was doomed. This would have been true with practically any economic policy. But in order for such revolutions to succeed, it would be necessary for Stalin’s class-collaborationist policies to be replaced with a class struggle program. That being said, the Comintern should have never been in the business of micro-managing revolutions from afar. But even the bad mistakes of the early Comintern were preferable to the suicidal policies of Stalin.
Comment by Louis Proyect — 3 September, 2009 @ 8:52 pm
And let’s not forget that, although there were huge numbers of victims of the Soviet regime under Stalin, they’re a drop in the ocean compared to the suffering and exploitation of humanity under capitalism, which continues to the present, as if I need to tell anyone that
It’s quite instructive to compare the crimes of the Soviets and Stalin - with 500 years of western corporate capitalism exploiting the Global South, and see which ones get the most discussion and airtime.
Honestly, if I hear BBC Radio 3 presenters go on about the oppression of Shostakovich under Stalin one more time!
How many such composers as Shostakovich were produced under the western regimes in the Global South during the same period?
Comment by joe90 kane — 3 September, 2009 @ 9:11 pm
Louis #151
Well revolutions abroad cannot be conjured from no-where.
The USSR was already isolated by the time Stalin came to power; and it was necessary to seperate out the internationalist links of the CPSU as a political party with communist parties abroad from the requirements for a diplomatic policy and necessary state obligations of the USSR towards other states that they needed to do business with. the failure to understand this distinction was what led the Trotskyist Rakovsky (as ambassador in Paris) to precipitate the rupture in trade relations with France, which was a terrible blow to the USSR.
Imagining that the United opposition had come to power in 1928, where would these other revolutions have come from? The problem was not class collaborationism but the foolhadiness of the class against class third period, an adaptation by Stalin towards the international policy of Trotsky’s ally Zinoviev.
Now you are very confident that Stalin’s policies were “suicidal”, but which polices were those?
the disastrous policy in China of subordination to the KMT was originated by the Trotskist Karl Radek, and implemented in China itself by the Trotskist Henk Sneevliet. The policy in Britain of caling for all power to the TUC general council was originated by Trotsky’s ally in the United opposition, Zinoviev.
The very unsuicidal policy of the Popular Front was successful in both Britain and France in isolating and defeating fascism, until France fell to foreign invasion. for sure, the fascists won in Spain, but without the Soviet military aid, madrid would have fallen, and the war would have been over.
It is all very well saying that socialism could only survive if there was a world revolution, I wonder whether Castro and Chavez agree.
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 9:20 pm
#152
“Honestly, if I hear BBC Radio 3 presenters go on about the oppression of Shostakovich under Stalin one more time!”
Quite so.
What about the persecution of Paul Robeson in the USA..
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 9:23 pm
“By February 1940, the British and French had decided to commit a full 100000 troops to Finland to fight against the USSR.”
Incidently, on a biographical note, my father’s unit was actually on route to Finland, and he was very far from being a volunteer to do so! So this wasn’t just paper talk, british troops were really on the way to Narvik.
He got as far as Preston, when his whole unit was disembarked from the train, and they were billeted on the good people of that town for some weeks before the Army decided what to do with them next - he was next sent to Iniskillin; before being shipped out East
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 9:38 pm
#148 Noah. Oh fuck off, for God’s sake. OK, let’s say the Ukrainian famine was an unfortunate accident. Now defend the Great Purge (680,000 executed, says Wikipedia). Presumably they were all guilty of thought crime and their fate well merited.
#140 Andy. It’s difficult for me to take you on, on the facts, I don’t have your knowledge. My gut instinct on the potential weak points in your argument as follows:
In 1928 the Wehrmacht couldn’t have taken on the Dagenham Girl pipers either, let alone invade Russia. So 1928 and 1941 is apples & pears.
Neprimerimye picks up your claim that strong repression was a necessary condition of rapid industrialisation. Obviously we can’t know. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Ultimately Russia is a country very rich in human and natural resources capable of industrialising rapidly.
Your key question “If you think there were alternatives, then they have to be ones that were actually open to the Soviet government in the circumstances they found themselves in”, you answer yourself by talking about the options offered by Tomsky and Chicherin. You say we can never know, but you yourself acknowledge that they were alternatives, possibilities.
Finally. #143, #145, #146. At the level of the intellect, it’s great fun to have a ringside seat to see two serious heavyweights slug it out. At the level of the gut - and this means no disrespect to John - I’m just glad it’s Michael’s stories I’m reading to my kids at night.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 9:58 pm
#155 “Incidently, on a biographical note, my father’s unit was actually on route to Finland”.
Fascinating! Picking up on a question you haven’t answered yet, do you (did he?!) think he really was off to fight the Russians, or do you/did he think that in fact he was off to occupy the Swedish iron ore mines Hitler’s steel & armaments industry was dependent on?
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:03 pm
Michael #146
I hear what you’re saying, but surely we can agree that history is never as black and white when being made as it is in hindsight.
We can only ever forge a concrete analysis on what took place, not on what might have been. The fact is that in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, whether we like it or not, socialism/communism is represented and embodied by and in the history of the former Soviet Union.
Now, as socialists living in the wake of this history, and encumbered by it, we can either choose to attempt to understand what took place and why, with regard to its development, undoubted deficiencies, etc., or else reject it out of hand.
The problem arises, and here I speak as someone who’s been at fault in this regard myself, when we use our different standpoints over this issue as a stick to beat one another with.
If we can agree to disagree and then move on to the far more important task of focusing on the points where we are able to achieve consensus, then we move some way to starting the long process of creating a viable, coherent and united socialist alternative in the here and now that stands a chance of creating its own history.
Comment by John Wight — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:05 pm
“It is worth pointing out that the boundaries between the different factions were also very fluid, and the policies often interchangeable. The support at various times by the Trotsky faction for Stalin against the moderates proves this.”
Inasmuch as after Stalin had terror directed against them then various Trotskyists capitulated, then I suppose so. Andy Newman is pretty funny. He supports the counter revolution in Russia, crushing of internal party democracy, slaughter of the opposition, etc.etc.etc. all in the name of progress, moderation and modernisation.
And the idea that Trotsky was responsible for Stalin’s policy in China is pretty sick. Radek was certainly a member of various oppositions, anyone who fell out with Stalin was, but he was no Trotskyist, even before he capitulated in 1929 (or in Andy Newman speak changed factions.)
Comment by bill j — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
Strategist #156
‘I’m just glad it’s Michael’s stories I’m reading to my kids at night.’
Classic. You’ve obviously read mine.
Comment by John Wight — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:13 pm
#157
After you mentioned this, I looked into it further and it seems there was a discussion in the cabinet that sending troops to Finland would have the incidental benefit of occupying narvik and the Norwegian part of the northern railroad, and thus disrupting iron ore supplies to Germany until the baltic thawed again.
This would still therefroe have required a war againt Russia, even if only one ocntained within Finland’s borders.
But if you look at the political context of the time, there was extremely strong language from Chamberlain and Halifax against the Soviet Union in parliament and in the press; which is why senior figures like Dalton and Lloyd George condemned the British government for its anti-Soviet aapproach to this question - and both Dalton and Lloyd George were vehemently anti-communist.
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:21 pm
#161 Cheers for this. Meanwhile, normally I’d commiserate with anybody getting stuck in Preston, but these things are relative. I’m glad your Dad made it through to 1945.
Comment by Strategist — 3 September, 2009 @ 10:31 pm
Now you are very confident that Stalin’s policies were “suicidal”, but which polices were those?
the disastrous policy in China of subordination to the KMT was originated by the Trotskist Karl Radek, and implemented in China itself by the Trotskist Henk Sneevliet. The policy in Britain of caling for all power to the TUC general council was originated by Trotsky’s ally in the United opposition, Zinoviev.
The very unsuicidal policy of the Popular Front was successful in both Britain and France in isolating and defeating fascism, until France fell to foreign invasion. for sure, the fascists won in Spain, but without the Soviet military aid, madrid would have fallen, and the war would have been over
—
There really is no point in responding to Stalinist apologetics such as these. Frankly I am shocked by how retrograde Andy’s thinking is. Much worse than the Uighur-bashing but sort of expected, I am sad to say.
Comment by Louis Proyect — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:21 pm
John, I’m all for unities of the now on the basis of common ground. I’ve even written about as much in SW. No worries about that. However, this thread is looking at the record of what hangs over us, as you say. As you can see, my position is that the Soviet Union can’t be a starting point for where we’re trying to get to. The conditions were different, the regime(s) that arose out of those circumstances can’t be used as blueprints or signposts. What’s more we owe something to those who suffered. That’s to say, if we’re talking about a socialism that is about treasuring life (and this should distinguish from capitalists who fling workers into production and war as expendable ‘hands’ and ‘appendages of the machine’) then we have to treasure the lives of whatever tyranny (I’ll stick with the word) has been inflicted on humanity. It really doesn’t matter what the Soviet leadership called their regime, what bits of rhetoric they used from the socialist, marxist and communist movements, we do now know of the extent of the miseries and disasters that were visited on people. By the way, I’ve read myself sideways and up and down with Tony Cliff, Mike Kidron, Ernest Mandel, Monty Johnstone and a French guy called Bettelheim (was it?) on the nature of the Soviet State. IN all their different ways, they shed light on ways in which the economy worked or didn’t work. However, all regimes are also about the nature of lives lived of all its peoples. In a sense, none of those analyses addressed that (to be fair it wasn’t in their terms of reference!), but this issue of lives lived is crucial for socialists. WE have to include it in. One of the reasons why the Left finds it difficult to make headway (I would argue) is that more often than is desirable we appear to be talking about something that doesn’t have to do with lives lived. I’m fully away of why we do this. It’s because we’re trying to get to the core ways in which our lives are screwed by the system. There are, we assert, underlying processes of exploitation and oppression that we think we can explain. So we do. Me included. However, no matter how true such analyses are (and this also applies to how we describe and view history) we have to find ways to talk about lives lived - as well, and as part of the analyses. Too often i see in apologetics re the Soviet Union, the analyses (eg without the SU we wouldn’t have defeated the Third Reich) that same kind of abstract talk. It’s a theoretical construct that is so hypothetical it has no meaning outside of itself. It’s like pub talk, where people start up conversations about what if x hadn’t been elected or some such. No matter what the starting line the Russian people were on in 1917, they didn’t deserve Stalinism. It wasn’t why they won a revolution. It wasn’t what they wanted. That should be our starting point.
Comment by Michael Rosen — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:27 pm
#159
“Andy Newman is pretty funny. He supports the counter revolution in Russia, crushing of internal party democracy, slaughter of the opposition, etc.etc.etc. all in the name of progress, moderation and modernisation.”
Bill, you are a ridiculous figure, no-where have I argued in support of any of those positions.
What i am saying is that the political options were circumscribed by the material conditions.
I honestly think that a government built around Rykov, Tomsky, Bukharin and Chicherin might have represented a relatively humane and viable alternative. Certainly these moderates opposed the first show trial - which was the Donbass affair in 1928 that led to 5 engineers being executed, and did enormous damage to the USSR’s international trade, including break off of the Soviet-German trade talks. Trotsky himslef considered blocking with these four in late 1928 from exile in Alma Ata, but no-one else in the left opposition supported him on this - as the majority of the left preferred Stalin, fooled by the promise of forced industrialisation.
But once the other historical options were closed off, then Stalin did form the government, and the combinatioon of the harsh material circumstances, and the the tendency of the Stalin faction to prefer violence as a way of solving things. led to the events that we all know.
You have to remember the degree to which the country was falling apart whan Stalin came to power. 1928 saw food rationing introduced, unemployment benefit was only payable for two years, and tens of thousands of the urban poor had been out of work since 1926 and thereofre were faced with literal starvation, in addition the cities were swelling with poor coming in from the countryside, and restrictions on benefit left thousands with no income excet criminality. the working day had nominally been reduced to seven hours in 1927, but most factories required mandatory unpaid overtine taking it to 12 hours. Expecations of social collapse were so rife that everyone was talking about it being another 1919, and hoarding was pushing up prices further. There was a rural strike against sellign grain, and cattle were being deliberately slaughtered in the countryside by rich peasants rather than letting them be expropriated.
The factories were full of old equipment, and it was not unususal for skill shortages to require one worker to cover three machines - with a corresponding accident rate. the diseases of poverty like tuberculosis and cholera were rife in the cities, many working class areas had rampant criminality and drunkenness, gambling and related murders were endemic. Add to which the enormous growth of anti-semitism, to the degree that the greeting “Bud zdorov, bei zhidov” became the most common greeting instead of hello in the Ukraine (keep healthy, beat a jew)
If the government had fallen, then i do not think that the alternative would have been better than Stalin, it would have been warlordism and facsism.
Comment by Andy Newman — 3 September, 2009 @ 11:46 pm
Bill J.: . Andy Newman is pretty funny. He supports the counter revolution in Russia, crushing of internal party democracy, slaughter of the opposition, etc.etc.etc. all in the name of progress, moderation and modernisation.
—
What I get a chuckle out of is Andy’s blandness. He really has mastered the art of saying outrageous things in the tone of a BBC news reader.
Comment by Louis Proyect — 4 September, 2009 @ 12:03 am
Does’nt it rather back up the old state cap adage about stalinism being the twin of reformism. reformists with tanks.
Comment by johng — 4 September, 2009 @ 12:26 am
# 167: I don’t think something Tony Cliff once said in a pub in Islington really counts as an adage.
Comment by Neil — 4 September, 2009 @ 1:09 am
#164
“No matter what the starting line the Russian people were on in 1917, they didn’t deserve Stalinism. It wasn’t why they won a revolution. It wasn’t what they wanted. That should be our starting point.”
Michael.
For sure. Neither did they want civil war, war communism, the famines and shortages of the 1920s.
the point about trying to root any criticism of Stalin in the conceretely existing material conditions and the limited choices really open to the peopple who actually lived this history is to strip away the conceit that responsibility for the terrible things that went wrong can simply be limited to Stalin.
Stalin was a butcher, choices made by him and his clique were often self-serving; and with the benefit of hindsight we can also see that many of those choices were completely wrong. Very damageingly, the Stalin clique also perfected the art of a sort of political double book-keeping, whereby they devised polices based upon optimistic assumptions that they knew to be wrong. At the end of September 1928, Bukharin launched a ferocious attack in Pravda on the use of fictitious economic indicators by Gosplan and the VSNKh planning authorities (using the convention that he was criticising “Trotskist , his substantive points were all aimed against Stalin).
But they all had a hand in getting where they were by 1928. Trotsky and Lenin as well as Stalin had supported the usurpation of sovereignty away from the Soviets and to the party as early as 1918, when the party restored the death penalty in direct defiance of the petrograd soviet and the all russia congres of soviets.
The left opposition had supported the execution of the 100 Czarist prisoners in 1927, as well as the Stalinists, a disastrous and terrible act of terrorism totally outside the rule of law.
Trotsky in particular had used the most violent and intemperate language in his hostility to the rich peasants - whipping up a hysteria against the kulaks in the Red army during the civil war; and had used mass terror in the countryside to seize grain at gunpoint during war communism.
The Platform of the Left Opposition published in 1927 was woefully impractical, relying as it did upon a massive forced “administrative loan” of grain to be seized from the kulaks that in fact did not exist, and a reduction of the working day for industrial workers that would have led to a further fall in industrial goods to trade with the countryside, which would have exagerated the problem of grain hoarding and inflation - problems that within their own paradigm of rapid industrialisation could only have been solved by brute force like Stalin actually did use.
the left opposition called for an extension of international trade on the basis of encouraging specialisation in high tech industry, and leveraging off the control of the currency exchange to gain additional foreisgn currency (a bit like modern Chinese SEZs!!!) but the real viability of this this was completely undermined by their cavalier approach to diplomacy with othe countries (rakovsky was feted by the left opposition, for the idiocy that cost the USSR its trade with france)
The trouble with Trotskyism is that it is really just saying “a big boy did it and ran away”. In practice, in the 1920s in the actually existing material conditions of the USSR the policies of the left opposition provided no viable alternative whatsoever.
this isn’t a stale argument from a long time ago, becasue the modern day trotskyists are Stalin’s true heirs. they are the ones who want another Russia type revolution, that model their party’s on the Bolsheviks, and who are scathing about the importnace of the rule of law.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 1:50 am
Trotsky in particular had used the most violent and intemperate language in his hostility to the rich peasants - whipping up a hysteria against the kulaks in the Red army during the civil war; and had used mass terror in the countryside to seize grain at gunpoint during war communism.
—
What profound ignorance. This addled bird’s eye version of Soviet history will not stand up under scholarly scrutiny. It packs together contradictory assertions with sheer disregard for the historical record. My only question is whether Andy just makes this crap up on his own or does he crib it from a trunk full of tracts in the CP’s attic.
Isn’t Andy aware that they have this thing called the Marxism Internet Archives where the collected works of Trotsky can be searched? Just go there (http://www.marxists.org/admin/search/index.htm) and enter Trotsky and “kulak” and you won’t find anything vaguely resembling his fevered outpourings. Here is the sort of thing you will find from the period of the civil war:
“The Ukraine has lagged behind Great Russia in political development. The revolution in the Ukraine was interrupted by the German invasion. The subsequent succession of regimes introduced frightful political confusion in both town and country, and held up the central process of the Soviet revolution, namely, the unification of the working people against the exploiters, the poor against the rich, the poor peasants against the kulaks.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/military/ch69.htm
If Andy considers this sort of thing “hysteria”, then he is beyond hope.
Comment by Louis Proyect — 4 September, 2009 @ 2:19 am
Its a dubious political method to attribute to opponents ones own analytical weaknesses. Trotsky for all that he got wrong had a whole theory about the rise of Stalinism being rooted in material circumstances. It was the tradition stemming from the Krushev speech and what was to become the official line, that turned Stalin into the spot on the socialist sun. I don’t really understand why these grotesque characatures of Trotsky’s position are being put foward all over again. The Moscow trials were a long time ago. Generally speaking its not a happy memory.
Comment by johng — 4 September, 2009 @ 2:50 am
“this isn’t a stale argument from a long time ago, becasue the modern day trotskyists are Stalin’s true heirs. they are the ones who want another Russia type revolution, that model their party’s on the Bolsheviks, and who are scathing about the importnace of the rule of law”
A sentiment which would no doubt find an echo on the right of the labour movement and indeed, in the wierd and wonderful world of blogdom, on Harry’s Place. Its a very odd thing to run a site which appears at moments to come out with unreconstructed Stalinism (but without Stalinist states) and then invoke the horrors of Stalinism to denounce…Trotskyists (using warmed over stalinist arguments to do so). Trouble is that axiom from a pub in Islington makes a lot of sense to me. For where are the forces to confront the hard left going to come from?
Not I think from most in Respect who see themselves as part of the left. Probably not from an old crew of Marxism Today people who have little social or political weight.
The answer seems to me quite obvious. The traditional right of the Labour movement. Do they require Andy’s services though?
Comment by johng — 4 September, 2009 @ 3:03 am
“The answer seems to me quite obvious. The traditional right of the Labour movement. Do they require Andy’s services though?”
He does seem out of step in a period where much of the left outside of Labour are attempting to work together at last.
What is curious is his accusation that the Left Opposition were Stalinists in disguise. If that were the case then why did Trotsky not align himself with Stalin? If the LO were supposedly intent on seizing power and creating a bureaucratic dictatorship then that assumes that Stalin was too.
It’s easy with hindsight to look back and attribute some cunning foresight on the part of both the LO and the Stalinists. The development of Stalinism wasn’t a carefully thought out plot but an erratic and uneven response to the material conditions in which the Bolshevik leadership found themselves. Stalin moved to the right in response to this crisis by consolidating the power of the bureaucracy under his control. Trotsky’s response was to oppose this and fight for a different political and economic solution.
If the LO had taken control then the economic and political strategy in Russia would have been different. The political strategy of the international Communist parties would also have been different. The possibility of revolution spreading and Russia receiving international support might have increased. The Civil War and the failure of the German Revolution had a severe impact on the stability of the revolution and the Bolsheviks. It was during this crisis that the seeds of Stalinism grew and not out of some fundamental flaw in revolutionary socialism.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:35 am
This is an interesting discussion and I’d say that I broadly agree with the main thrust of Andy’s arguments here.
1) The Soviet Union, unlike Britain and France, was under no obligation to come to the aid of Poland. The Soviet Union had tirelessly sought to build an international anti-fascist alliance but had been rebuffed time and again, leaving it with no alternative other than to act in accordance with its own perceived interests.
2) The Polish government had, from 1934, itself been a party to a mutual pact with nazi Germany and had also been party to the 1938 dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
Andy points out these and other relevant historical facts and honestly addresses the crimes committed by Stalin in power, but still he is unfairly accused of “Stalinism” by the Trotsky cultists.
It is odd that the Trotsky cultists talk of what “could” have happened “if” Trotsky’s faction had “come to power.”
Comrades, Trotsky WAS in power, he ran the Red Army as Commisar for War. He proposed the militarisation of labour and led the military suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.
When in a position of power, he was every bit as ruthless as Stalin was to become.
And he lost power largely because the party feared he could become a Napoleon-style military dictator.
It seems incredible now, given the monstrous crimes that Stalin was to commit and given the “Jesus Christ” figure that Trotsky has now become to many, but Stalin was largely seen at the time, by the party membership, as the more tolerant, unassuming, unifying and stabilising individual.
In my view, a key turning point came not in the late 1920s, but at the end of 1934 with the murder of Sergei Kirov. Had he lived, it is likely that he would have taken over the leadership and the Soviet Union would have avoided the horrors of the purges.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:24 am
Ray:
‘What is curious is his accusation that the Left Opposition were Stalinists in disguise. If that were the case then why did Trotsky not align himself with Stalin?’
You need to go back and re-read the history. Most of the main actors within the Left Opposition did align themselves with Stalin when he embarked on his left course in 1928. Some even managed to convince themselves that in Stalin’s campaign to purge the kulak lay the fulfilment of the theory of Permanent Revolution.
Trotsky did not. Nor was he prepared to relinquish his attachment to his faith in the international working class to carry the revolution forward. The struggle between two contending schools of thought - Permanent Revolution and Socialism In One Country - was no mere scholastic exercise. It was a life and death struggle for the future course of the Soviet Union and the course of its development surrounded by Captialist states committed to its destruction.
Trotsky lost that struggle. His faith in the international working class, his romantic and reckless idealistic view of the working class, was his undoing.
As Andy has pointed out, most of the people on this thread who take the simplistic view of Stalin-evil/Trotsky-good hardly even pay lipservice to the backward, famine-stricken, convulsed state which the SU was in after the Civil War, which came after the First World War and two revolutions.
Men make history but not in circumstances of their choosing. Between the undoubted noble and pure intentions of the early Bolsheviks, intentions and plans drawn up in salons and meeting rooms while in exile in Europe, came events that rendered their plans redundant. They had to respond to events and crises as they occured, and chief among their priorities was survival of the regime. Out of this need came War Communism, the banning of party factions, an end to workers’ democracy, Kronstadt, the reintroduction of the death penalty, and the emergence of a one-party state.
Both Lenin and Trotsky are accorded ‘get out of jail cards’ as a result of their departure from the stage or real events. Lenin died just as the policies which he authored began to take shape in the form of the degenerated workers’ state which the SU had become, and Trotsky was driven out and thus saved the opprobrium reserved for Stalin as the man with his hands on the tiller.
The notion that just one man could achieve the overwhelming and unquestioned power to force industrialise a nation of 200 millions people, could unleash the purges, could be responsible for all that took place within the Soviet Union, and over a period of 30 years, this is fanciful at best.
The inconvenient truth is that Stalin enjoyed broad support. Apart from the nomenklentura, members of the bureaucracy, managers, and party functionaries, the purges and the terror hardly touched the vast majority of the population.
As for Ray’s hypothetical point about the international communist parties having a different strategy under the LO, this is just silly. The Comintern was made up of a rag-bag of sects that hardly had any purchase among the working class within their respective countries. Even Trotsky realised this. By the late 1920s his power came from what he symbolised, unflinching commitment to revolution and revolutionary self sacrifice, and not from his influence over the working class in its day to day struggle.
Lenin’s genius was strategic. The adoption of the slogan ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ in 1917 perfectly synthesised the needs of each of the people at the right time, drawing together the troops, the peasantry and the working class in common cause. Stalin’s pronouncement in 1924 of ‘Socialism In One Country’ did the same, while Trotsky’s exhortation to further revolutionary struggle failed to take into account the utterly exhausted state of the country and the working class after years of social and economic convulsion.
Stalin was brutal in his methods. Nobody is arguing he wasn’t. The contention comes over whether or not, given the material conditions out of which the SU emerged, the revolution could have survived without such brutal methods. And if not whether the gains enjoyed by the working class thereafter, both within and without the SU, were worth the heavy price paid for them.
Comment by John Wight — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:43 am
“The inconvenient truth is that Stalin enjoyed broad support. Apart from the nomenklentura, members of the bureaucracy, managers, and party functionaries, the purges and the terror hardly touched the vast majority of the population.”
Total rubbish. E H Carr gives and excellent summary of how the Stalinists used the periods of “open discussion” periodically allowed in the 1920s to identify “trouble makers” and sack, deport or kill them. In a society where all jobs came from the state, these options pretty much all amounted to death.
Or if you want an account written by a Right Oppositionist try “I dreamt revolution” by William Reswick.
Trotsky’s failing in the 1920s was simple, he was not prepared to split the Bolshevik Party, so he continually made terrible tactical concessions to the Stalinists, meaning that by the time he came to be expelled the prospects for building a mass opposition were much worse than they would have been in the early 1920s. But making tactical mistakes is not the same thing as slaughtering everyone who disagrees with you.
Good job Andy Newman hasn’t got a gun. Lol.
Comment by bill j — 4 September, 2009 @ 8:23 am
John I think you need to re-read your history. Your claim that Russian foreign policy had little influence on international Communist parties is untrue. The influence of Stalin’s foreign policy on the German Communist Party had dire consequences for the working class in Germany and facilitated the rise of the Nazis.
The difference between Stalinism and what went before it was that democratic centralism still existed under Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Stalin destroyed democratic centralism in the party and consolidated a ruling bureaucracy under his control. Trotsky offered an alternative to this. And even if his political and economic solution could not have saved the revolution it would have at least spared millions the horrific suffering of Stalinism.
The situation the Bolsheviks found themselves in did not need to lead to Stalin and the Great Purges. There is no excuse that can legitimise the mass slaughter of all the original leading Bolsheviks (apart from Stalin) and millions of others in the name of a so-called workers state that was really state capitalist. It would have been better for the Russian working class to have reinstated bourgeoisie democracy than suffer the horrors of Stalinism. Not to mention the dire consequences Stalinism has had on the left internationally.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 8:38 am
Ray, democratic centralism in a party is one thing, but to suggest that democratic centralism is sufficiently participatory when running the affairs of a nation of 200 million is ludicrous.
Lenin and Trotksy ushered in the advent of rule by decree. The concentration and centralisation of power was made imperative by a regime whose first priority was its own survival.
Shylapnikov, Kollentai and the rest of the Workers Opposition did not stand in opposition to Lenin for nothing. By 1921 the country was being ruled by the dictates of a Central Committee, with the role of the unions subordinated to that of a transmission belt delivering and explaining the decisions of the CC to the workers instead of vice versa.
Also, to make suppositions of the type that under Trotsky there would have been a Utopia is just silly and nothing but wishful thinking.
Bourgeois democracy was not an option after February either. Kornilov and the reaction he represented was the alternative. As history has shown time and again, White Terror has always been greater than its Red counterpart. Just consider the millions who died as a result of the Nazis.
More importantly, to suggest that bourgeois democracy constitutes some benign halfway house between fuedalism and socialism is simply ahistorical. Consider the suffering, misery and deprivation of tens of millions who had the misfortune to live under the jackboot of empire and colonialism, administered and run by exactly the kind of liberal democracies you cite.
The gaps in your analysis reflect cognitive dissonance.
Comment by John Wight — 4 September, 2009 @ 9:05 am
“The Soviet Union had tirelessly sought to build an international anti-fascist alliance but had been rebuffed time and again, leaving it with no alternative other than to act in accordance with its own perceived interests.”
Karl you neglect to mention the detrimental effect that Stalins use of the Comintern as a pawn in his foreign policy plans had on building an international anti-fascist alliance.
Trotsky wasn’t “in power” as you claim. He played a leading role in a democratically centralist organisation that Stalin systematically destroyed. Internal party democracy was eradicated during this period by Stalin long before the purges. This is exactly the opposite of Trotsky’s approach of supporting internal democracy by trying to win the Bolsheviks to his political strategy without resorting to intimidation like Stalin did. There was an alternative to Stalin and those who believe in the inevitibility of Stalinism or claim that it preserved a workers state are essentially legitimising his undemocratic and ruthless behaviour.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 9:09 am
“Ray, democratic centralism in a party is one thing, but to suggest that democratic centralism is sufficiently participatory when running the affairs of a nations of 200 million is ludicrous.”
If this was the case then why did it continue in the Bolshevik Party and why Lenin support it? In direct contrast Stalin dismantled it and used intimidation within the party to achieve this. The only dissonance appears to be between the way Lenin and the Bolsheviks organised and the way Stalin did. If Lenin and the Bolsheviks could continue democratic centralism while running the affairs of a nation of 200 million then what made Stalin dismantle it? The only logical reason is that he wanted to destroy internal party democracy and any dissent.
No one has claimed that Trotsky would have created a “utopia”. If anything the LO/UO might have staved off an inevitable collapse of socialism in Russia long enough for revolution to spread.
When I said that bourgeois democracy would have been preferable to Stalinism I am not claiming that this would have been possible but any form of democracy would have been preferable to the undemocratic and murderous regime of Stalinism.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 9:28 am
#170: Louis Proyect says:
Louis should try it then: Trotsky from 1918. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch07.htm
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 10:13 am
#173
Ray:
“Stalin moved to the right in response to this crisis by consolidating the power of the bureaucracy under his control. Trotsky’s response was to oppose this and fight for a different political and economic solution.”
But Stalin didn’t move to the right did he, he moved to the left in 1928 and 1929, both on the issue of industrialisation, and over the internationall question, with the adoption of “class on class” in the Comintern. The consolidation of Stalin’s power was the 1928 campaign against the right in the party.
It was the right in the party who were the mainstay of opposition to Stalin, but who saw trotsky as an even bigger danger.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 10:21 am
A.N “..this isn’t a stale argument from a long time ago, becasue the modern day trotskyists are Stalin’s true heirs. they are the ones who want another Russia type revolution, that model their party’s on the Bolsheviks, and who are scathing about the importnace of the rule of law.”
I’ve stayed out of this for the same reason that I don’t normally eat Pringles.
But this is getting ludicrous. Andy Newman is starting to sound like Neil Kinnock!
His arguments are very similar to those used by the Webbs during the 1930’s.
i.e. Comparing “actually existing socialism” with capitalism and proclaiming it superior.
This is combined with a completely “objectivist” attitude to Stalinism as being a “historical necessity”.
In practice, it means supporting Stalinism against the the left wing of the Bolshevik party, with the aim of bolstering Social Democracy.
Which was Gorbachev’s main role.
It all fits in with the broadly Eurocommunist perspective of strategic diplomatic alliances between capitalism and socialism.
Whether through a cross-class “Peoples Front”, or a system of international alliances.
Nowadays China is being held up as the main example, due to its economic sucess and accomodation with international capitalism.
The Wartime Peoples Front is idealised because during this period many former CP militants achieved respectability, rose amongst the ranks and lived relatively prosperous lives in the post-war period.
This layer is generally the material base for such politics. But as a description of the actual processes occurring at the time it’s false.
Nor does it analyse the class contradictions brewing as a result of the current crisis of capitalism.
Because Stalinism represented the “second wave of Menshevism” it gained support not only from reformist socialists, but many Russian Nationalists and technocrats like Ustryalov.
They supported Stalin after he crushed the left, promoted Russian national interests or because they were in favour of bureaucratic nationalisation.
Today, many of the most vociferous apologists for Stalin in Russia are right wing nationalists like Alexander Dugin, who has influenced Putin.
Under Stalin the term “Trotskyist” became synonymous with “wrecker” and ludicrous fabrications were concocted on this basis.
Contrary to the tired old nonsense being repeated here, Trotsky did not see Stalin *the individual* as the main problem, but Stalin, the representative of a conservative bureaucratic stratum.
Rather than putting the USSR is a stronger position at the outset World War 2, the policies of the bureaucracy had made its position far weaker than it needed to be.
The belated Popular Front policy of the 1930’s had failed to halt the advance of Fascism.
By 1937, Stalin was deeply unpopular in the USSR and there was widespread opposition to his policies.
Had this opposition coalesced, he would probably have been overthrown and put on trial.
Hence, he instigated a new wave of repression in 1937
As part of this repression, the military leadership was purged, with disastrous results in 1941.
Stalin was forced into a pact with Germany which made the USSR dependent on Hitler’s intentions.
Anyone who argues that it was a clever strategy to allow industry to be developed across the Urals is a fool.
The military defences of the Western Ukraine were dismantled unecessarily after the 1939 Pact.
All the evidence was that the Soviet leadership saw it as providing mid-term security and were suprised in 1941.
Western Poland was handed over to the Nazis and Stalin failed to prosecute the war in Finland because Hitler wanted control over Scandinavia.
When the Nazis invaded, the Red Army was completely unprepared and routed on a wide-front with millions of casualties and prisoners.
Defending the role bureaucracy by freeze-framing the analysis to what happenend in 1945 while ignoring its subsequent trajectory is completely dishonest.
In the long term, the bureaucracy defended its own interests, not socialism.
Socialism became an obstacle to these interests and was dispensible.
Comment by prianikoff — 4 September, 2009 @ 10:22 am
#120 `Oh, how they needed a David Ellis to give them the correct line! i.e. have a social revolution at home, ask Mr Hitler if he could wait while we (no doubt with minimal self-inflicted damage) swiftly despatched our own ruling class, and then - full of the revolutionary fervour that has come from, er, somewhere, proper leadership, wherever - we could taken on the Nazis. By rousing the German working class, obviously. Except, I forgot, we can’t have a revolution in one country alone. So, er, we would have to have appealed to the German working class at the same time as we are not yet fighting Hitler but instead launching our own pre-doomed revolution, er …
That’s the gibbering schoolboy approach to revolutionary politics which, somehow, I don’t think the proles - hopelessly misled by liberals and Stalinists - would ever have adopted.
The war to defeat German fascism and Japanese autocracy helped make possible the Welfare State here, social reforms across Europe, the liberation of China, Korea, Vietnam etc., support for national liberation movements around the world (by those inward-looking anti-revolutionary Stalinists!) and so on. All trivial matters for Comrade Ellis, of course, who has his eyes fixed firmly on the future perfect state of socialist grace, while sneering about the real struggles and real gains (’workers paradises’) that the rest of us have to make do with.’
Above is the feted rationalisation for class collaboration developed by all party hacks. But it is not me that you mock Hack. It is Bolshevism. You piss on the struggle for leadership and for a correct line on the grounds of pragmatism otherwise knows in political terms as opportunism. I can see capitalist welfarism is the limit of your ambitions and always will be until that is taken away and then it will be the benificence of our wonderful workhouses.
Keep hacking away useful idiot.
Comment by David Ellis — 4 September, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
Ray (179) says: “Karl you neglect to mention the detrimental effect that Stalins use of the Comintern as a pawn in his foreign policy plans had on building an international anti-fascist alliance.”
Guilty as charged Ray, I didn’t mention that because that wasn’t the point I was making. The point is that, judged against the historical evidence, the Soviet Union’s international policy, anti-fascist strategy and its repeated diplomatic initiatives during the lead-up to WWII appear reasonable, sensible, consistent and principled, unlike those of the other nations involved. Whether or not, or to what extent, the Comintern was used “as a pawn” does not change this. The Soviet government’s use, or misuse, of the Comintern is a separate question entirely Ray.
“Trotsky wasn’t “in power” as you claim. He played a leading role in a democratically centralist organisation that Stalin systematically destroyed.”
Ray, Trotsky ran the army - I’d call that a position of power. When Trotsky was in a position of power, he proposed the militarisation of labour and led the military suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. Trotsky also supported the suppression of opposition parties and the ban on factions within the ruling party.
“Internal party democracy was eradicated during this period by Stalin long before the purges.”
Opposition parties were suppressed during the civil war and internal factions were banned soon after. Internal party democracy was gradually eradicated further yes, but Kirov and others in the leadership were still able to bloc against Stalin - on the question of the treatment of dissident figures in particular - up until the 1934 Kirov murder, the act which sparked the purges.
“This is exactly the opposite of Trotsky’s approach of supporting internal democracy by trying to win the Bolsheviks to his political strategy without resorting to intimidation like Stalin did.”
That’s bollocks Ray. I think the army leaders shot on Trotsky’s orders felt intimidated, as did the Kronstadt sailors and others killed by Trotsky or on his orders. He discovered internal party democracy after he was removed from power.
“There was an alternative to Stalin and those who believe in the inevitibility of Stalinism or claim that it preserved a workers state are essentially legitimising his undemocratic and ruthless behaviour.”
There is no general theory of “Stalinism” Ray. Just as Stalin created a “theory” of “Trotskyism” in order to have a “devil” figure, so you and your fellow Trotsky cultists have created “Stalinism” for the same reason. When people say “Stalinism” they mean “something I don’t like.” It’s a meaningless term used by lazy people who can’t be bothered to explain what they really mean.
No-one here is defending Stalin or denying his crimes. Don’t forget Ray, it was communists who suffered most at his hands and it was the Soviet Communist Party, 50 years ago, that honestly addressed these crimes and roundly condemned them.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 4 September, 2009 @ 2:32 pm
Andy Newman takes exception to this from Leon Trotsky, one must assume:
“Yes, you, Moscow proletarians, on behalf of the masses who have elected you, will set out into the countryside, under the banner of the Soviet power, on crusade against the kulaks. You will say, when you get there, that you are, on the one hand, for the closest fraternal alliance with the starving peasants, with whom you will share the grain that you take from the kulak and, on the other hand, you are for merciless and destructive war against the kulaks, who want to starve out Soviet Russia of the workers and peasants.”
I guess he thought it would have been better for the rich peasants to hoard grain than allow starving peasants to eat.
How pathetic.
Comment by Louis Proyect — 4 September, 2009 @ 2:48 pm
It really surprises me that no-one has picked up on Andy’s line that the Trots are the new Stalinists and that THEREFORE they must be fought. All the rest is just stale old distortions drawn from the Stalin school of falsification. But don’t those who do regard themselves as Communists understand what Andy is saying here? He would have opposed the Bolshevik revolution. Of course he uses the traditional Stalinist arguments about Trotskyists but he is doing this in the name of combatting stalinism (or so he says).
Comment by johng — 4 September, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
#174 ‘Comrades, Trotsky WAS in power, he … led the military suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.
When in a position of power, he was every bit as ruthless as Stalin was to become.’
errr except he didn’t. Only in the general sense that he was in the Soviet Government and had collective responsibility for the actions of the Red army could you say that Trotsky led the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. Trotsky was in Moscow when that took place. The whole affair was not his responsibility and for one reason or another he took no part in the negotiations with the rebels or the subsequent suppression.
Comment by DuncaB — 4 September, 2009 @ 3:47 pm
#186
Louis: ” guess he thought it would have been better for the rich peasants to hoard grain than allow starving peasants to eat.”
no in extreme circumstance,s, extraordinary meaures needed to be taken.
But in 1927, after the harvest had failed in certain areas, there was also also a famine, and even though Rykov and Milyukin reported that there was no grain hoarding, and grain collection was going well in those areas where the harvest had not failed,, the left opposition still raised the slogan for seizing grain. Indeed in 1928 the government did revert again to extraordinary seizures of grain, but there was not enough grain there to be seized because there was no hoarding. Many fiunctionaries were over zealous and coonfiscated the very grain out of poor peasants larders, and Bukharin reported that several of the people in charge of the grain procurement needed to be shot for repression of the peasantry. teh reprrssion of the peasantry was what provoked the sluaghter of cattle.
The grain seizures were not even a short term solution., let alone a long term one.
The legacy of the extraordinary measures taken against the rich peasants in the civil war period informed tha attitudes of many CPSU members in the 1920s and 1930s, and the hysterical demonisation of the Kulaks started with Trotsky, as in the speech I have quoted. Indeed the threat by the Kulaks became an extra-histroical article of faith for many CPSU members, especially on the left of the party.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 4:56 pm
Come off it Duncan, I don’t think I meant that he personally led the troops across the ice, but as Commissar for War - i.e. not just “a member of the government” but the person in charge of the army - do you really think he wasn’t involved in any of the decision making?
(And to be fair, he never attempted to wash his hands of the issue in the way that you’re trying to do, he always vigorously defended the action.)
But this is a bit of a side-show really, my main point is that all the avilable evidence points to his being every bit as ruthless as Stalin when he was in a position of power.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:00 pm
Remember Trotsky wrote “Terrorism and Communism” publisshed in English bu the CPUSA under the title “In defence of terrorism”, which is the most chilling justification for state terror ever written.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:03 pm
“Remember Trotsky wrote “Terrorism and Communism” publisshed in English bu the CPUSA under the title “In defence of terrorism”, which is the most chilling justification for state terror ever written.”
Much worse than Stalin’s bullet to the back of the head. No great writer he.
Comment by bill j — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:08 pm
#187
JOhnG:
John, history isn;t a football match where we cheer on out favouorite side. Surely we can all agree that the eventual outcome of the October revolution didn’t meet the hopes of its participants. What I actually wrote earlier was:
The nature of true tragedy is that there may not have been better options; but your position is to cheer on the bit you approve of and then wash your hands of the actual historical outcome of those events.
With regard to your arguments that I am recycling Stalinist propagands. Hardly, I am highly critical of Stalin, I am just equally critical of Trotsky based upon looking at the historical record, rather than relying upon Trotsky’s own self-justifying assessment.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:15 pm
#192
Bill.
Did Trotsky not support the execution of the 100 Czarist prisoners in 1927?
Did he not have thousands of people executed in the Red Army?
Did he not support the military repressioon of the Krondstadt rebellion, snd did he not support the supression of the Workers opposition in the CPSU.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:18 pm
“But this is a bit of a side-show really, my main point is that all the avilable evidence points to his being every bit as ruthless as Stalin when he was in a position of power.”
I think you are missing the point. The Bolshevik Party operated on democratic centralist principles. Decisions were made by an elected leadership not one individual. Stalin did away with this fundamental principle and usurped the leadership. If you want to accuse anyone for Kronstadt then you have to accuse all the Bolshevik leadership not just Trotsky. The Bolsheviks were correct to suppress the rebellion as it threatened the revolution. Comparing the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion with Stalin’s crimes is really not going to win you the argument that Trotsky was equivalent to Stalin.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Andy Newman
Did Stalin not execute 100000s of political oppositionists in the USSR?
Did Stalin not create a famine that killed 5,000,000 peasants?
Did Stalin not assasinate 1000s of political oppositionists across the world?
Did Stalin not have 10,000s of Red Army soldiers and officers?
Did Stalin not suppress the working class in the USSR crushing any dissent or opposing point of view?
Did Stalin not create and enforce a regime of total terror and corruption?
Did Stalin not suppression the Workers Opposition, Democratic Centralists, Left Opposition, United Opposition, Right Opposition, Menshevik Opposition, SR Opposition, Military Opposition?
All of course forgiven - he did one thing that Andy Newman wholeheartedly supports - he murdered Trotsky.
Love is blind after all.
Comment by bill j — 4 September, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
Bill
Are you not too bright?
I have time and time made it clear that i am not now, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be an admirer of stalin.
Time and time again in this very thread I have argued that he was a brutal monster.
You blindness seems to be that you think that anyone who opposes trotskyism must be a Stalinst.
Comment by Andy newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 6:00 pm
There’s no real comparison between what happened in 1917-21 and the wholesale purges of the 1930’s, either in terms of the scale of repression undertaken, or its political aim.
Even Nikita Krushchev could see that Stalin’s repression was almost exclusively directed against the left. In his memoirs, at the end of the 1960’s, he wrote:-
“After destroying the outstanding core of people who had been tempered in the tsarist underground under Lenin’s leadership, there followed the wanton extermination of leading party, soviet, state, academic and military cadres as well as millions of rank-and-file people whose way of life and whose thoughts Stalin didn’t like…in order to preclude the possibility of any people or groups who wanted to return the party to Lenin’s inner-party democracy and to direct the nation toward a democratic social structure.”
Comment by prianikoff — 4 September, 2009 @ 6:27 pm
Andy, they’ve got a religious faith in this idea of Trotsky as Christ and Stalin as the devil.
It’s a 360 degree mirror image of Stalin’s obsessive and irrational mentality and I’m afraid there’s just no reasoning with them over this.
We can keep on trying to talk logic and pointing to historical facts and they’ll keep responding with their biblical quotes.
It’s sad, but that’s where we are. Otherwise, they’re all decent socialist activists, they’ve just got this “old-time religion” thing going on.
Comment by Karl Stewart — 4 September, 2009 @ 6:30 pm
“Andy, they’ve got a religious faith in this idea of Trotsky as Christ and Stalin as the devil.”
Karl, this is not the case. I have not read anyone here claiming that Trotsky was a saint or that he was infallible. In fact quite the reverse.
This is not a debate about the behaviour of two individuals. It is a discussion about the best course of action for the Bolsheviks to take in order to preserve the revolution during this incredibly difficult period. The choice was to either preserve democracy in the party or destroy it and impose a dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalin chose the later and, in hindsight, it was Trotskys mistake that he did not organise a more effective opposition to Stalin.
Trotskys political strategy in no way compares to that of Stalins. Neither do the reason for and the level of suppression that was used by Lenin and Trotsky compare to that of Stalin.
Comment by Ray — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:11 pm
Strategist #156:
“Noah. Oh fuck off, for God’s sake. OK, let’s say the Ukrainian famine was an unfortunate accident. Now defend the Great Purge (680,000 executed, says Wikipedia).”
Dear Strategist, let me remind you of the assertion which you made at #130: “Stalin engineered a terror famine and millions died. That’s a horrible crime.”
I politely requested you to post some evidence for this. Clearly you not only can produce no evidence, but lack even a basic knowledge of the subject.
So why did you make that allegation; one which, it turns out, you can only ‘defend’ by swearing and evading the issue by trying to change the subject?
Please explain.
BTW, if you had taken the trouble to ascertain the facts before making your assertion, you might have come across some of the conclusions drawn from recent academic research on the 1931-33 famine in the USSR. Here’s a very brief summary:
“Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet government had relied increasingly on state requisitioning of grain from the countryside to feed the urban population, and this policy over the years left the peasantry with no reserves. As early as 1927 a grain procurement crisis had already developed, but it was the natural factors of insufficient rainfall in Spring of 1930, 1931, and 1932 and too much rain during midsummer in these years that contributed to the smaller harvest, based on weather data now available. There is also archival evidence of natural phenomena like wheat rust and ergotism that infected the grain supplies.”
http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=3838
To which I would add that collectivisation in the USSR was a chaotic and bitterly fought process on all sides. Prof Geoffrey Hosking in his ‘A History of the Soviet Union’ states:
“Many peasants slaughtered their cattle, rather than hand it over [to the collective]. Kolkhozniki (collective farmers) going out to the fields were sometimes set upon by their non-collectivized neighbours with pichforks, and had their tools and clothes stripped from them. Total chaos reigned…”
* * * *
As for your demand that I should “defend the Great Purge” - why should I, any more than I would reply to a similarly illogical loaded question, eg, “When did you stop beating your wife”?
If you’re searching for a straw man, go look elsewhwere.
Comment by Noah — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
How this debate has degenerated into a quagmire of who said what and who did what is depressing. I have to say this has mainly been due to the followers of Trotsky (right or wrong!). Whose mostly blinkered opinions are not worth a grain of sand. It is a pity that what might have been a very worthwhile and reasoned debate about the causes of the second world war has been hijacked by these authorities on history. This to vent their spleen against the USSR, Stalin and all shades in between.
Maxim Gorky summed up such types wonderfully in an essay called “The Wiseacres”.
“The wiseacre has probably read at least sixteen thousand books on diverse subjects, and this semimechanical labour of appropriating the thoughts of others has developed in him a terribly exaggerated opinion of the power and scope of his own intellect. Of course, I would not deny a sack the right to be proud of the amount of grain stuffed into it. But one often observes that the broader the knowledge of the wiseacre, the wider and more convulsive is the amplitude of his fluctuations”.
Comment by Alfie — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:52 pm
Alfie
you are completely correct, and I am going to close the comments.
Comment by Andy Newman — 4 September, 2009 @ 7:58 pm