First Published: Frontline, Vol. 5, No. 18, March 14, 1988.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Carol Marsh’s letter to Frontline (Feb. 15) responding to Tom Angotti’s movie review of “Repentance” (Feb. 1) stimulated lengthy letters from a number of our readers. Angotti addressed the points raised by Marsh in our last issue (Feb. 29). Below, edited for length, are the rest of the responses we have received.
Carol Marsh is correct when she says that “an all-sided materialist assessment” of the 1930s and ’40s in the USSR must “include both Stalin’s strengths and weaknesses, his accomplishments and his errors.”
Unfortunately, her straight-up defense of the 1936-38 Moscow trials does not contribute to such a balanced assessment. Instead, her perspective represents a refusal to deal with certain stubborn and painful facts about party and state practices during the Stalin period.
Of the three lines on socialist construction within the CPSU in this period – Trotsky’s, Bukharin’s and Stalin’s – I agree with Marsh that Stalin’s was the most correct. Stalin and the CPSU’s majority supported a course of rapid collectivization of agriculture as the basis for rapid industrialization. This was decisive for the survival of socialism; and could not have been achieved without large-scale use of force. In many areas there was virtual civil war in the countryside. As in the battles of 1917-21, it was inevitable that there would be mistakes, unjust executions, and abuses.
But what happened in the late 1930s went far beyond some excesses in the course of a difficult struggle. Not just a few, but many thousands of dedicated revolutionaries and patriotic citizens were killed, imprisoned, and even tortured. This was the result of a wrong line adopted by Stalin and others on how to handle differences within the party and society, treating virtually any problem or difference of opinion as the direct work of the class enemy. Unity of action was not enough – Stalin demanded unity of thought.
Consider the following: In 1934, at the 17th Congress of the CPSU, 139 people were elected as members and candidate members of the Central Committee (CC). By early 1939, 110 (about 80%) had been arrested; 98 (70%) had been shot; of the 1,966 delegates to the 17th Congress, 1,108 had been arrested by 1939.
It is absurd to claim that this many leading Communists were paid fascist agents. Nor is it credible to argue that 80% of the CC might have been disgruntled factionalists working to sabotage the party majority. The 1934 Congress was in fact held some years after the decisive defeat of Trotsky’s and Bukharin’s lines, and in the midst of major gains in socialist construction. No, something else was going on.
There is specific evidence that many of the accused were innocent. This is why the CPSU reversed many individual verdicts in the 1960s, and is reversing more today. This is not to say that there was no “fifth column” in the USSR. There was, and it was composed of both paid fascist agents and factionalist party members. But there was also an exaggerated reaction to this activity, one which fed on itself and became crystallized in a line that all problems were due to deliberate sabotage.
For example, a fairly apolitical U.S. engineer employed by the Soviet mining industry found that industrial sabotage was in fact quite common. But he found that groundless charges of wrecking were also common – so common that many Soviet engineers avoided positions of responsibility out of fear of prison or death. This “wreckermania” became expressed as a political line. For instance, at Bukharin and Rykov’s trial, the chief prosecutor Vyshinskii declared, “In our country, rich in resources of all kinds, there could not have been and cannot be a situation in which a shortage of any product should exist.” For this reason, he said, “this whole wrecking organization” set about to create shortages. On one occasion, a CC member told a party meeting that “we are now so well-equipped and have so many devoted people that there can be no breakdowns. When accidents and failures begin to take place in a factory, the first thing to do is look for an enemy.” [both emphases added].
In the late 1930s there was a complete collapse of any respect for socialist legality or party rules. Trials were generally not held, or lasted less than 10 minutes. And in the few cases where the accused were found innocent, some were shot anyway! In all but a handful of cases, CC members were arrested and shot with no one’s sanction but Stalin’s. This was in direct violation of party rules, which required discussion by the CC before any member could be removed.
Consider this: the heads of the Soviet security service between 1934 and 1953 – lagoda, Ezhov, and Beria – were all eventually shot on charges of being “enemies of the people” and direct imperialist agents. These three had gained power over the party itself, and were accountable to no one but Stalin. Clearly something was wrong with a political process which concentrates more and more power in the hands of the security service, and then three times in a row announces that the people entrusted with that power were foreign spies.
So when a CPSU study commission concludes that Bukharin was a victim of false charges, it deserves to be weighed very seriously – and not dismissed as “this week’s ’rehabilitations’.” Certainly, the conclusion should not be accepted on faith, any more than the original verdicts should be. But it is our responsibility to seriously analyze the crimes as well as the historic accomplishments of JV. Stalin. The CPSU’s re-examination of its own history is a process from which the international communist movement can learn a lot.
Tom Hillstrom,
Brooklyn, N. Y.
Carol Marsh’s letter and penetrating analysis of Stalin and his times is a significant contribution toward a fuller understanding of this still controversial subject, especially on the left. “Stalin: Man of Contradiction” by the Marxist scholar Kenneth Neil Cameron, (NC Press, Toronto, 1987), whose research is based on many original and important secondary sources, also reaches the conclusions so aptly expressed in her letter.
The author maintains that Stalin, more than any other single individual, built the first socialist society on the wreckage of imperialist war, intervention and civil war, and more than any single individual defeated German fascism and preserved socialism. Cameron provides the reader with a factual historical record and a revealing memoir of Marshal Zhukov, Stalin’s closest military advisor. The author challenges the historical accounts that focus on campaigns of viIlification, in which “millions“ were slaughtered by this monster, or a more sophisticated picture of cunning in which Stalin pushes aside “the true democratic socialists” and installs a regime of “grey regimentation.”
Cameron claims that frequently the deeper meaning of these campaigns serves to attack the Soviet Union and socialism. His purpose in writing the book is to do a “balancing up” by trying to do a serious analysis of Stalin “not only as a historical figure but as a Marxist.” Portrayals of Stalin as a monster (it should be noted that many liberals and even some on the left compare, if not equate, him with Hitler) assume a nation of “moronic robots,” a thesis which Cameron unequivocally rejects.
The author documents the serious charges against the Trotskyist Center and Bukharin Opposition, including acts which undermine socialist construction and contacts with representatives of German and Japanese imperialism.
Cameron feels that Stalin was at his best when dealing with concrete political and social problems such as the New Economic Policy or the Great Patriotic War; he believes Stalin was weakest when writing about Marxist theory. In the second of two appendices, “Dialectical Materialism: Stalin and After,” the author exposes Stalin’s failure to grasp Marx and Engels’ world outlook. Stalin centers that outlook on the political party rather than on the industrial working class. Likewise the author does a detailed analysis of Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism and shows it to be seriously flawed. “Unlike Lenin, Stalin tended to lose direction when he was not reasoning about a particular event or problem ... .It is the idealist essence of Stalin’s philosophy that accounts for some of its other non-materialist characteristics, for instance his seeing dialectics as a ’method’ first instead of examining materialism,” notes Cameron. Further Stalin mechanically derives historical materialism from dialectics rather than having roots and a history of its own. Cameron contends that much of Stalin’s analyses omits the centrality of Marx’s notion of internal contradictions in society and nature. For these reasons Stalin’s thinking often becomes metaphysical and dogmatic according to the author.
Fascinating chapters on China; Eastern Europe and the Khruschev Report will challenge many Marxists to rethink some prevailing positions. Using Khruschev’s Report to the 20th Congress, the Zhukov memoirs and Davies’ book “Mission to Moscow;” Cameron refutes Khruschev’s charges of a personality cult. Rather than a moralist horrified by transgressions against a socialist ideal we see Khruschev in a political struggle for power. Cameron contends that if Soviet society had been so shaken by the trials and purges, and so corrupted as Khruschev and others imply, “the U.S.S.R. could not have won the war.”
This book contributes to creative Marxist thought and analysis, and enriches our understanding of historical materialism as well as that of Stalin and his times. is a work that the entire left should ponder.
Dave Silver,
Jamaica, N. Y.
Carol Marsh argues that the defendants in the four Moscow show trials of 1935-1938 were guilty as charged. As “evidence,” she offers her reading of the transcripts of the confessions and the opinion of Joseph E. Davies, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Even more convincing to Marsh is the “logic” of the matter, as she indicates with her rhetorical question: “Politically, why would the Soviet Union choose to put these men on trial just at this time, 1936 to 1938, if not for the fact that the defendants were guilty of treason?”
Tom Angotti, in his response to Marsh, takes a centrist position, saying, “I do not know whether the Moscow trials were rigged and Bukharin was guilty or not. There is plausible evidence on both sides.” I find both Marsh’s and Angotti’s positions to be an embarrassing attempt to defend the indefensible. First, we must be clear with whom Marsh is actually debating. It’s not bourgeois historians, Trotskyists or Social Democrats. The line on the Moscow trials she doesn’t like (and the line Angotti is uncertain about) is the present line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
Several weeks ago the Soviet Supreme Court cleared Bukharin and several other defendants of all charges. This is only the latest in a process of overturning the verdicts of the Moscow trials that began 30 years ago. By 1968 all the defendants in the Moscow trials had been rehabilitated as Soviet citizens, and 17 had also been posthumously restored to party membership. There is a strong likelihood that Bukharin and others will also have their party memberships restored. Given a choice between relying on Marsh’s reading of the transcripts and the Soviet Supreme Court’s consideration of the matter, I have more confidence in the latter.
Although I, along with Angotti, anxiously await disclosures from the Soviet archives, the CPSU’s opinion about the fraudulent character of the Moscow trials hasn’t been in doubt for a long time. The 1964 edition of the History of the USSR, prepared by the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, stated the following: “The accusations were based on the confessions of the accused, which is in direct contradiction with the principle of the presumption of innocence .... At present it has been established beyond all doubt that most of the testimony given by the Trotskyites and the right deviationists during, the trials was unfounded. This raises doubts about the reliability of their testimony as a whole. General Procurator A. Ia. Vyshinskii conducted the trials in crude violation of procedural norms .... All the circumstances cited above impel one to draw the conclusion that legality was crudely violated at the time of the trials.”
Since Marsh seems to like hypothetical questions, I will pose one for her: Why would the CPSU and the Soviet Supreme Court choose to rehabilitate men who were guilty of treason and organizing a fascist fifth column? Either the Soviet court in 1938 was right, or the court in 1988 is right. Marsh can’t have it both ways.
In Marsh’s haste to defend the legitimacy of the Moscow trials, she spectacularly underestimates the scope of the repression during the period. The trials of former oppositionists were only the tip of the iceberg. The repressions of 1937-1939 hit tens of thousands of party and state cadres, scientists, intellectuals, ordinary workers, and leaders of foreign parties. In 1931, the Soviet military’s most important generals and thousands of lesser officers were arrested and shot. Most have since been rehabilitated. Soviet historians attribute the enormous losses suffered by the Soviet army in the first year of the war to this slaughter of the officer corps.
In Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech last October on the 70th anniversary of the revolution, he somehow overlooked the “fascist fifth column” that is so obvious to Marsh, and used much stronger language than the “violations of socialist legality” that Angotti uses to sugarcoat what happened. Instead, he said the following: “The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the wholesale repressive measures and acts of lawlessness is enormous and unforgivable .... We now know that the political accusations and repressive measures against a number of Party leaders and statesmen, against many communists and non-party people, against economic executives and military men, against scientists and cultural personalities were a result of deliberate falsification.”
Perhaps Marsh believes Gorbachev is engaging in “Stalin-bashing” and “slander.” I agree that an historical materialist assessment of Stalin and the causes of the mass repression must still be accomplished. The “cult of personality” explanation is inadequate and poses more questions than it answers. I’m sure we are all awaiting the CPSU’s promised treatise on the history of the party with great interest. However, I don’t think we have to await further documents to repudiate Marsh’s fantastic defense of Stalin’s campaign of terror against party and state cadres nor Angotti’s agnosticism.
Robert Seltzer,
Chicago, Ill.
Carol Marsh states in her letter “... there is almost nowhere one can find a balanced view of Stalin.” Nowhere is this more in evidence than in her own lengthy rehash of the orthodox mythology surrounding Joseph Stalin.
Fortunately, the Soviets are discovering and releasing more and more of the actual historical record regarding Stalin on an almost daily basis. One of the more recent and important contributions to this record was the publication in late 1987 of the long suppressed third section of the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan in the Soviet magazine Ogonek.
Mikoyan was a member of the CPSU’s Politburo from 1922 until the early 1970s. In this new section of his memoirs, Mikoyan details a more likely explanation of the massive purges and executions of thousands of Bolsheviks by Stalin in the 1934-37 period than the fantastic myth repeated by Marsh regarding the “fascist fifth column.“
Mikoyan reports that in the 1934 Party Congress Sergei Kirov, party leader from Leningrad, received the most votes cast for any delegate in the voting for the Central Committee, more than General Secretary Stalin. Mikoyan writes: “ ... A group of delegates suggested that he [Kirov] become General Secretary .... He refused .... He told Stalin and was met with hostility and a will for revenge against the whole Congress and, of course, Kirov personally.”
On December 1, 1934, Kirov was assassinated. Stalin used the assassination to justify the purges. Kamenev, Zinoviev and Bukharin were eventually arrested and executed for Kirov’s murder. However, just last week, a Soviet court reviewed Bukharin’s case and exonerated him. This would seem to reinforce Mikoyan’s version of the events.
Besides the executions of the three most prominent Bolsheviks (other than Stalin), by 1937 the majority of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected at that 1934 Congress and the majority of the delegates to that Congress were either in prison or executed. Mikoyan’s implication is clear: Stalin physically eliminated his competition and anyone with a semblance of criticism of him.
The only other explanation is that leading communists in the 1930s were extremely susceptible to fascist propaganda and in fact were in the service of Hitler!
As historical materialists we should have nothing to fear from an honest assessment of socialism’s record. Perpetuating myths will do nothing to advance our struggle.
Paul Kuehnert,
Oak Park, III.