7. The image of Stalin, between history and mythology

The various historiographical sources of the current image of Stalin

if this book isn't about how Babylon imperialists are hiding the truth that STALIN. WAS ACTUALLY, A BLACK MAN! ill be disappointed

Many thanks to @Igualitarista for working on translations of Domenico Losurdo's Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. Read here from the chapter "The Great Patriotic War and the Inventions of Khrushchev": https://t.co/B1AUJJOJEl

— Donny Diggins (@DonnyDiggins) January 19, 2018

All indications lead us to believe that events are headed toward a conflict between the popular forces, encouraged by cultural stimulation, and the bureaucratic oligarchy. This crisis doesn’t allow for a peaceful solution; the country is clearly headed toward a revolution.

A decisive civil war appears on the horizon and, “in the atmosphere of civil war, the assassination of some oppressors is no longer a matter of individual terrorism”; in any case, “the Fourth International supports a struggle to the death against Stalinism”, destined to eliminate “a faction already condemned by history”.

As you can see, the attack against Kirov evokes the spectre of civil war among the forces that had toppled the old regime. In reality, this spectre follows the history of Soviet Russia like a shadow from the moment of its establishment. To sabotage the peace of Brest-Litovsk, interpreted by Bukharin as a capitalution to German imperialism and a betrayal of proletarian internationalism, he harbors for a moment the idea of a type of coup d’etat that would see removed from power, at least for some time, the man who was until that moment the undisputed leader of the Bolsheviks (supra, pp. 54 and 55). If it was already out in the open while Lenin was still alive, despite his enormous prestige as a leader, the spectre of the division of the leading Bolshevik group and of civil war within that same revolutionary bloc took complete form in the following years. It’s what unequivocally appears in the important testimony from within the anti-Stalinist opposition and from the deserters of the communist movement, in whom the old faith had transformed into unrelenting hate. Let’s see how Boris Souvarine describes the situation created in the CPSU around ten years after the October Revolution:

The opposition considers forming its own organization as a clandestine party within the one party, with its miniature hierarchy, its Politburo, its central committee, its regional and local agents, its groups on the ground, its participation quotas, its memos, and its code for correspondence.

The expectations was of not only a political clash, but a military one as well. Immediately after the end of the second world war, the memoirs of Ruth Fischer are published in the United States, at the time a leading figure within the German communist movement and member of the presidium of the Comintern from 1922 to 1924. In this memoir she explains the way in which, in her time, she participated in the “resistance” organization in the USSR against the “totalitarian regime” that was installed in Moscow. This is in 1926. After having broken with Stalin the year before, Zinoviev and Kamenev drew close to Trotsky: they organize the “bloc” to win power. They then develop a clandestine network that reaches “as far as “Vladivostok” and the far East: messengers distribute exclusive party and state documents, transmit coded messages, personal armed guards provide security to secret meetings. “The leaders of the bloc made preparations for definitive steps”; based on the assumption that the clash with Stalin only could be resolved with “violence”, they met in a forest in the outskirts of Moscow with the aim of analyzing in depth “the military aspect of their program,” starting with the “role of those army units” willing to support the “coup d’etat.” Fischer continues:

It was a question that was mostly technical, which should be discussed among the two military leaders, Trotsky and Lasevi . Since as vice-commissar of the red army he was still in a favorable legal position, Lasevi was tasked with planning the military action against Stalin

.

The street demonstrations the following year, to mark the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, should be read in that context: from Moscow and Leningrad they extended to “other industrial centers” so as to “force the hierarchy of the party to give in”.

In Europe during those years, it wasn’t a mystery to anyone the severity of the political battle that went on in Soviet Russia: “The history of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky is the history of the attempt by Trotsky to take power , it is the history of a failed coup d’etat”. The brilliant organizer of the Red Army, still enjoying “immense popularity”, certainly didn’t accept defeat: “His violent polemic and cynical and foolhardy pride made him a type of red Bonaparte backed by the army, the popular masses, and by the rebellious spirit of the young communists against the old Leninist guard and the high clergy of the party”. Yes, “the high tide of sedition advances upon the Kremlin”.
The author, Curzio Malaparte, who was in Moscow and had interviewed figures at the highest level, gives a reading of the tensions of 1927 which is confirmed by Ruth Fischer, that’s to say, by an authorized representative of the anti-Stalinist opposition:

On the eve of the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the imprisonment of Trotsky would provoke an unpleasant reaction . The occasion chosen by Trotsky to seize state-power couldn’t be better. Like the good tactician he is, he stayed in the shadows. To not appear as a tyrant, Stalin wouldn’t dare arrest him. When he would dare to, it would be too late, thought Trotsky. By the time the lights would go off on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin would no longer be in power.

As is already known, these plans fail and Trotsky, expelled from the party, sees himself obligated to transfer first to Alma Ata and later to Turkey. There “the Soviet consulate authorities” pay him $1,500 for ‘royalties’ as an author. Although it is a “ridiculous quantity”, as affirmed by a supporter, historian, and biographer of Trotsky, the gesture could be read as attempt to not sharpen the contradiction any further.

Conspiracy, infiltration of the state apparatus, and “aesopian language”

The exiled revolutionary didn’t renounce his plans. But how would he seek to carry them? Malaparte writes:

The acts of sabotage on the railways, power stations, telephone and telegraph lines increase every day. Everywhere Trotsky’s agents worm their way in. Screwing with the gears of the state’s technical organization, they provoke once in a while the partial paralyzation of sensitive agencies. They are the skirmishes that proceed the insurrection.

Is this a matter of mere illusions or the echo of regime’s propaganda? The book cited here, after being published, circulated widely in Europe and the thesis within it did not appear to raise ironic smiles or scandalized laughter. Just like with “terrorism”, so we must not lose sight of the particular history of Russia when it comes to “sabotage”. In 1908, both the petroleum executives and Stalin repeatedly condemned, with obviously different motives, the certain tendencies within the working class to achieve their demands by resorting to “economic terrorism”. Despite stressing that the ultimate cause of this phenomena was capitalist exploitation, the Bolshevik leader had welcomed “the latest resolution by the strikers from the Mirzoiev , directed against the fires and ‘economic’ assassinations’”, and against “the old terroristic” and “anarchist tendencies”. By the start of the 1930s, had this tradition totally disappeared, or did it continue to manifest in new forms? In any case, we saw the white guards take advantage of it. What of the left opposition?

The “insurrectionary” plans that Malaparte mention reveal an important confirmation, at the least. The biographer of Trotsky describes here the attitude his hero continued to maintain while in exile: “The instructions are simple: the opposition must take on a solid military training, with seriousness and party consciousness and, once expelled from it, in the proletarian and soviet organizations in general, referring always to the International”. Here he turns against Soviet power the tradition of conspiracy which greatly contributed to its establishment. In What is to be Done? Lenin especially emphasizes that: We, the revolutionaries, “have to give maximum attention to propaganda and agitation among the soldiers and officers, and the creation of ‘military organizations’ belonging to our party”.

Taking note of that lesson, the opposition organizes a clandestine network that gives particular attention to the military apparatus. Its tormented process of formation made the task of infiltration easier. What happened at the time the Cheka was created, the first political police in Soviet Russia, is significant. On July 6th, 1918, an attack takes the life of the German ambassador: the perpetrator was Iakow G. Blumkin, a socialist revolutionary who sought to protest the Brest-Litovsk treaty and reopen the debate on it. When the chief of the Cheka, Félix E. Dherzhinsky, went to the German embassy in Moscow to offer the apologies of the Soviet government, he is informed the authors of the attack appeared with the credentials of the Cheka. To discover the truth, he proceeds to the headquarters of that institution where he is yet arrested by “Cheka dissidents”, themselves either members or close to the party of Revolutionary Socialists. Later freed by the Red Guard, Dzerjinski then purges the political police and has the execution of those responsible for the conspiracy and the mutiny. In conclusion, the first victims of the “purge” are members of the Cheka, although they formed part of the opposition.

The perpetrator of the attack managed to flee, but doesn’t yet exit the scene: “Trotsky publicly recognized, toward the end of 1929, having received Blumkin as a guest, while still an agent of the intelligence services of the Red Army.” Lev Sedov, son and colleague of Trotsky, sought to make it appear as something casual, however a document archived in Stanford “shows that the contact between Trotsky and Blumkin didn’t come about by coincidence, but from an organized connection within the USSR”; in this content “the secret agent evidently had an important role”. It would be this connection that would lead Stalin “to order the execution of Blumkin”.

As you can see, the opposition “agents infiltrated everything”. Even “in the GPU” a “small nucleus of Trotsky’s loyalists” remain hidden for a time. According to a contemporary American historian, it’s possible that Genrij G. Yagoda played a role as a double agent, the man led the first phase of the “Great Terror, before seeing himself eliminated. According to the accounts of militant anti-Stalinists it’s known that “some documents were printed in the typography of the GPU”; looking closely, there’s “permanent tension in the terrorist apparatus of Russia”.

The infiltration is made easier by the cautious opening of the regime. Upon calling for struggle against the “bureaucratic dictatorship”, Trotsky points out that “the new constitution offers at the same time a semilegal trench from which to fight it”. It is best fought with camouflage, disguising the intention of seeking to undermine and topple state power. On this point the leader of the opposition leaves no room for doubt: “the subversive work demands some conspirative precautions”; it’s necessary “to observe in the struggle the rules of the conspiracy”. And yet more:

The life and death struggle can’t be conceived without the cunning of war, in other words: without lies and deceptions. Could the German workers possibly avoid deceiving Hitler’s police? Would Soviet Bolsheviks be unethical in deceiving the GPU?

Again the conspiratorial tradition of the Bolsheviks is turned against the regime that emerged from the revolution. In 1920 Lenin had called for the revolutionaries’ attention to “the obligation of combining illegal forms of struggle with legal forms, with the obligatory participation in the most reactionary parliament and a certain number of other institutions under reactionary laws”. And that’s not all: revolutionaries should know how to “face all sacrifices and -in case of necessity- resort as well to all tricks, illegal methods, and to silence and to hide the truth with the object of infiltrating the unions and remaining in them, and realizing there, at whatever cost, the work of a communist”. It’s exactly how the opposition conducts itself in relation to the political and social organizations of the hated “Thermidorian” regime.

The conspirators go by a precise rule of conduct:

Carry out self criticism, recognize your “errors” and that they are generally corrected. Those called “two faced men” by the stalinist press, or even the “left-right fraction”, from this moment on seek contacts which would allow the broadening of the resistance front to Stalin’s policies. Meet up with other groups on this path...

It’s understandable then the obsession over “duplicity”, the obsession for which Khrushchev condemned Stalin. Meanwhile, the abandonment of the NEP culminates in the rupture with Bukharin. Due to the position assumed by the latter it’s interesting to read the testimony of Humbert-Droz, leader of the Comintern who was expelled from the Swiss communist party in 1942 over his differences with Stalin. On a trip to the 1st Conferences of the Revolutionary Labor Unions of Latin America, in the spring of 1929 he meets with Bukharin and has a meeting with him, which he recalls with these words: “He got me up-to-date on the contacts his group made with the Zinoviev-Kamenev faction to coordinate the struggle against Stalin’s power”, that he anticipated the struggle including “individual terrorism”, whose central objective “was eliminating Stalin” and, to be clear, “eliminate him physically”. Three years later it is another representative of the “right”, Martemkan N. Riutin, who draws up and circulates a document that passes from hand to hand and which classifies Stalin as a “provocateur” who they must rid themselves of, resorting even to tyrannicide. When Bukharin reveals his plans, Humbert-Droz objects that “the introduction of individual terrorism in the political struggles born out of the Russian Revolution would run the risk of turning against those that used it”, but Bukharin isn’t persuaded. On the other hand, it would be difficult for the objection just seen to persuade a man who we now know -as he himself revealed confidentially in 1936- harbored a profound “hatred” in relation to Stalin, in fact, the “absolute” hatred that is reserved for a “demon”. While he expressed himself like this in private, Bukharin was incharge of Izvestia, the newspaper of the Soviet government. Are we dealing with an obvious incoherence? Not from the point of view of the Bolshevik leader, who continued to combine legal and illegal work, with the aim of toppling a regime that he considered detestable and who valued another lesson from Lenin. In reference to Tsarist Russia, we can read in What is to be Done? that:

In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forces its way into the censored literature and, though expounded in aesopian language, is understood by all the “interested”.

This is exactly how Bukharin uses the Soviet government’s newspaper. The condemnation of the “all-seeing total state”, founded on “blind discipline”, “jesuit obedience”, and on “the glorification of ‘leader’” pretends to alone make reference to Hitler’s Germany, but in fact points to the USSR as well. The “aesopian language” recommended by Lenin becomes immediately transparent when the denunciation refers to “cruel and uncultured provincialism”. It’s clearly the portrait of Stalin painted by the opposition. We saw Trotsky refer to him as a “small provincial man” (supra, pp. 20 and 39-40), and in discussions behind closed doors it is Bukharin himself that expresses his disdain for the leader that has succeeded Lenin, despite not knowing any foreign languages.

Continuing on the effectiveness displayed in Tsarist Russia by the revolutionary message expressed in “aesopian language”, What is to be Done? proceeds as follows:

Quite a considerable time elapsed (by our Russian standards) before the government realized what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. Meanwhile, Marxists books were published one after another, Marxist journals and newspapers were founded, nearly everyone became a Marxist, Marxists were flattered, Marxists were courted, and the book publishers rejoiced at the extraordinary, ready sale of Marxist Literature.

Bukharin and the opposition hoped that a similar phenomena would create a climate favorable to the overthrow of Stalin. But Stalin also read What is to be Done? And knew well the rules of Bolshevik conspiracy. In conclusion, we witness a prolonged civil war. The clandestine network organizes itself, or seeks to reorganize itself despite successive rounds of repression that become increasingly unforgiving. According to the words of an active militant in the struggle against Stalin: “Despite being stomped on and annihilated, the opposition survived and grew; in the army, in the administration, in the party, in the cities, in the rural areas, every terrorist wave brought forth a resistance movement”. The leading Bolshevik group now appears divided in a conflict that doesn’t exclude coups and that, at least in the expectations and hopes of Stalin’s enemies, from one moment to another could become open and generalized, involving the entire country. While the opposition turns to the lesson of Lenin and to the conspiratorial tradition of Bolshevism to weave their plans in the shadow, this double game provokes the indignation of Soviet power, which identifies in false friends the most dangerous and insidious enemy: the tragedy heads toward its conclusion.

Infiltration, disinformation, and calls to insurrection

The “rules of the conspiracy” theorized by Trotsky, do they only imply the concealment of one’s own political identity, or could they include the recourse to false denouncements, in order to spread confusion and chaos in the enemy camp and to make more difficult the identification of the clandestine network struggling to topple Stalin’s regime? In other words, do the “rules of the conspiracy” include just the rigorous protection of private information or do they also allow the use of disinformation? It’s not just American journalist Anne Louise Strong, sympathetic to the government, who raises such suspicions. In the Secret Report itself it speaks of false charges and “provocations” realized by “authentic Trotskyists”, thus carrying out their “revenge”, but also “careerists without a conscience” willing to clear the way using the most contemptible means. Noteworthy is an episode that takes place when the assassination of Kirov is announced. Most reactions -according to Andrew Smith, who worked at that moment in the Kuznecov Elektrozavod factory- are of shock and concern in relation to the future; but there’s also those who express regret that it wasn’t Stalin who was shot. Later an assembly is held, during which the workers are encouraged to denounce enemies or possible enemies of Soviet power.

Smith recalls his surprise at how, during the debate, the dissident group with which he was in contact proved to be the most active in attacking the opposition and deviationists and seeking the most severe measures against them.

Indicative as well is an episode that occurs outside the USSR, but could help in understanding what occurs inside that country. When general Alexandr M. Orlov, a former high-level collaborator with the NKVD (and in 1938 sheltering in the United States), is accused by the journalist Louis Fischer of having participated in the liquidation of anti-Stalinist communists during the Spanish civil war, he responds with the false revelation that it was his accuser, in fact, who was a spy at the service of Moscow.

In the Soviet Union of the 1930s we have seen the opposition infiltrating the repressive apparatus at the highest levels: it would be very strange if, after having achieved this objective, it limited itself to obeying the orders of Stalin. Disinformation carries the double advantage of obstructing the machinery of repression and redirecting it against an especially hated enemy -it’s an integral part of war: and this is what it’s about, at least judging by Trotsky’s argument in July of 1933, in which he considers “already underway” the counter-revolutionary civil war carried out by the “Stalinist bureaucracy” and which culminated in the “infamous annihilation of the Leninist-Bolsheviks”. Thus it’s necessary to be aware of the new situation. “The slogan for the reform of the CPSU” doesn’t make sense anymore. A frontal struggle is imposed: the party and the International led by Stalin, now on their last leg, “can only bring misfortunate and nothing but misfortune” to the “world proletariat”; on the opposing side, the authentic revolutionaries certainly can’t be inspired, in their action, by “petit bourgeois pacifists”. There’s no doubt: “Only with violence can the bureaucracy be forced to return power to the hands of proletarian vanguard”. Hitler’s rise to power for Trotsky doesn’t mean that unity is necessary, with the aim of confronting the enormous danger which looms, starting from Germany; it means that they can’t stop half-way in the struggle against a power, Stalinism, which had led to the defeat of the German and international proletariat.

As you can see, it is the very leader of the opposition who speaks of “civil war” within the party that he in part led during the October Revolution and in the first years of Soviet Russia. We are in the presence of a topic which constituted the starting thread of the investigation by a Russian historian who is a sure and self-declared Trotskyist, author of a monumental and multi-volume work, dedicated precisely to the detailed reconstruction of this civil war. He speaks, regarding Soviet Russia, of a “preventative civil war” carried out by Stalin against those who were organized to topple him. Even outside the USSR, this civil war takes shape and at times intensifies within the front that fought against Franco; in fact, referencing Spain from 1936-1939, he speaks not of one but “two civil wars”. With great intellectual honesty and taking advantage of new, rich material documents available thanks to the opening of Russian archives, the author cited here reaches the conclusion: “The Moscow trials weren’t a crime without motive nor in cold blood, but more accurately the reaction from Stalin during an acute political struggle”.

Polemicizing against Aleksandr Solzenitsyn, who paints the victims of the purges as a bunch of “rabbits”, the Russian Trotskyist historian cites a pamphlet which in the 1930s called for the Kremlin to be cleared of “the fascist dictator and his clique”. He them comments: “including from the perspective of Russian legislation in force today, this pamphlet would be judged as a call for the violent overthrow of the government (the ruling elite to be more precise)”.

In conclusion, far from being an “irrational and senseless outbreak of violence”, the bloody terror carried out by Stalin is in reality the only way he could defeat the “resistance of the true communist forces”. “The party of the executed”, is how he defined those targeted, “in an analogy to the expression used to identity the French communist party, the principal force of anti-fascist resistance and privileged target of Hitler’s terror”. Thus, Stalin is compared to Hitler; highlighting the fact that the communist and French partisans didn’t limit themselves to a passive or nonviolent resistance while opposing the latter.

Civil war and international maneuvers

It’s not surprise that once in a while this or that superpower had sought to take advantage of the latent civil war in Soviet Russia. Who solicits or hopes to provoke foreign intervention is, sometimes, the defeated faction, which believes it has no other hope for success. Such a dynamic unfolds starting from the first months of Soviet Russia. Let’s return to the attack of July 6th of 1918. It is an integral part of a very ambitious project. On one end, the Left Revolutionary Socialists promote “counter-revolutionary uprisings in a number of centers against the Soviet government” or “an insurrection in Moscow which hoped to topple the communist government” on the other end, they propose as well to “assassinate various German representatives” with the aim of provoking a military reaction from Germany and the subsequent resumption of the war. It would be confronted with a levée en masse by the Russian people, which would inflict a simultaneous defeat to the traitorous government and the enemy invader. The perpetrator of the attack against the German ambassador is a sincere revolutionary: well before entering into contact with Trotskyist circles, he intends to emulate the Jacobins, protagonists of the most radical phase of the French Revolution and of the heroic mass resistance against the invasion by the counter-revolutionary powers. However, In the eyes of Soviet authority Blumkin could very well be a provocator: the success of his plan would have resulted in a new advance by the armies of Wilhelm II and, perhaps, the toppling of the power born out of the October Revolution.

The interaction between internal politics and international politics appears in all historical changes. Hitler’s rise to power, with the annihilation or decimation of the German section of the Communist International, represents a hard blow to the Soviet Union: what consequences would it have for internal political stability? On March 30th, 1933, Trotsky blames the ruling bureaucracy in the USSR for the defeat of the communists in Germany, and writes that “the liquidation of Stalin’s regime” is “absolutely inevitable and isn’t far off”. In the summer of the same year, Deladier’s government in France allows Trotsky to visit: only a few months since the previous rejection by Herriot, and doubts arise about the reasons for this change. Ruth Fischer thinks that the French government did so on account of the “weakness of Stalin’s position”, the “reorganization of the opposition against him”, and the approaching return of Trotsky to Moscow with leading responsibilities at the highest level.

A new and dramatic turn of events arises with the outbreak of the Second World War. In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union is still outside the gigantic conflict, and it even remains committed to the non-aggression pact with Germany. It is an intolerable situation for the countries already facing Hitler’s aggression; taking the Finno-Russian conflict as a pretext, they consider a plan to bombard the petroleum centers in Baku. It’s not just a matter of striking the line of energy supplies to the Third Reich: “the Franco-British military plans sought to break the military alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany through attacks against the oil industries in the Caucasus region and bringing a post-Stalinist regime to their side against Germany”.

Let’s return for a moment to the attack against German ambassador Mirbach. The perpetrator certainly had in mind triggering a German attack, but not because he hope for their victory: on the contrary, he hoped the assault would awaken Russia, leading it to a decisive response. Later we see Blumkin participating in the conspiracy led by Trotsky. And the latter, for his part, in clarifying his position, compares himself in 1927 to French prime minister Clemenceau who, during the First World War, assumed leadership of the country after denouncing the lack of military effectiveness by his predecessors, and therefore proposing himself as the only statist capable of leading France to victory against Germany. Of the many number of possible interpretations and reinterpretations for this analogy, only one thing was made clear: not even the invasion of the Soviet Union would have put an end to the attempts by the opposition to seize power. Even more disturbing is the already cited comparison of Stalin to Nicholas II: during the First World War, read and denounced as an imperialist war, the Bolsheviks had put forth the slogan of revolutionary defeatism and had identified the Tsarist autocracy as the internal enemy and principal enemy, that which they first sought to combat and defeat.

In the years to follow, Trotsky goes way beyond evoking the spirit of Clemenceau: on April 22nd, 1939, he declares his support for “the liberation of so-called Soviet Ukraine from the Stalinist yoke”. Once independent, it would later be unified with western Ukraine upon being separated from Poland, and with Carpathian Ukraine, annexed earlier by Hungary. Let’s reflect about the moment in which this position is taken. The Third Reich had just carried out the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, and rumors grow which indicate that the Soviet Union (and especially Ukraine) is the next objective for Germany. In these circumstances, in July of 1939, it is even Kerensky who takes a stand against Trotsky’s surprising project which, according to the Menshevik leader, only favors Hitler’s plans. “It’s the same opinion from Kremlin”, was the quick response from Trotsky who, on the other hand, in an article from April 22nd had written that with Ukraine’s independence “the Bonapartist clique will reap what they have sown”; it’s good for the “current Bonapartist caste to be undermined, shaken, destroyed and swept away”; only this way is the road paved for a real “defense of the Soviet Republic” and its “socialist future”. Soon after the invasion of Poland begins, Trotsky goes even further. In forseeing the final ruin of the Third Reich, he adds: “However, before going to hell, Hitler could inflict such a defeat on the Soviet Union that it could cost the head of the oligarchy in the Kremlin”. That prediction (or that desire) of the liquidation (as well physical) of the “Bonapartist clique” or “caste” carried out by a revolution from below or even by a military invasion couldn’t not be seen in the eyes of Stalin as confirmation of the suspicions about the convergence, at least objective convergence, between the Nazi leadership and the Trotskyist opposition; both had the interest in provoking the collapse of the internal front in the USSR, even if the first saw in that the collapse the precondition for the slavic nation’s enslavement and the second saw in it the outbreak of a new revolution.

Also, it’s not a particularly vile suspicion: acting like the new Lenin, Trotsky aspired to use to his advantage the dialectic that had led to the defeat of the Russian army, the toppling of the Tsarist autocracy and the victory of the October Revolution. Once again, the past history of Bolshevism is turned against Soviet power. Kerensky, who in 1917 had denounced the treason by the Bolsheviks, now warns of the treason by those who define themselves as “Bolshevik-Leninists”. From Stalin’s point of view, there’s been a radical change with respect to the First World War: now it’s a matter of confronting a political party or faction which, at least with respect to the first phase of the conflict, hopes for the collapse of the country and the military victory of a Germany not yet depleted from three years of war, as was the case with Wilhelm II, but at the height of its power and explicitly dedicated to building its colonial empire in the East. Given this context, it’s certainly not surprising that the accusation of treason is raised. Let’s return to the article by Trotsky from April 22nd, 1939. In it there’s but a single affirmation which could have received Stalin’s agreement: “The impending war will create a favorable atmosphere for all sorts of adventurers, miracle-hunters and seekers of the golden fleece”.

While the flames of the Second World War burn ever higher, destined as well to reach the Soviet Union according to the same prediction from Trotsky, he continues making declarations and statements that are anything but reassuring. Let’s see a few: “Soviet patriotism can’t be separated from the irreconcilable struggle against the Stalinist clique” (June 8th, 1940); “The Fourth International has recognized for sometime now the need to topple the bureaucracy through a revolutionary uprising by the workers” (September 25th, 1939); “Stalin and the oligarchy led by him represent the principal danger to the Soviet Union” (April 13th, 1940). It is quite understandable that the “bureaucracy” or the “oligarchy”, branded as the “principal enemy”, harbor the conviction that the opposition, if not at the direct service of the enemy, is in any case ready from the start to follow-up its actions.
Any government would have found organizations of this orientation to be a threat to national security. Only to fuel the concerns and suspicions of Stalin is the prediction from Trotsky (September 25th 1939), of an “imminent revolution in the Soviet Union”: only “a few years or perhaps months away from the inglorious collapse” of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Where does such certainty come from? Is it a prediction formulated only taking into account the internal developments within the country?
It’s even more complicated upon analyzing the interplay between internal political conflict in Russia and international tensions; the suspicions and accusations are in fact encouraged by the existence of a fifth column and by disinformation operations carried out by the secret services of Nazi Germany. In April of 1939 Goebbels writes in his diary: “Our clandestine radio station in Eastern Prussia which broadcasts into Russia has caused an uproar. It operates in Trotsky’s name and causes trouble for Stalin”. Immediately after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the leader of the Third Reich’s propaganda services is even more pleased: “now we are using three clandestine radio stations in Russia: the first is Trotskyist, the second separatist, the third Russian-nationalist, all are critical of the Stalinist regime”. It’s an instrument the aggressors give great importance to: “We work with all methods, especially the three clandestine radio stations in Russia”; these “are a model of cunning and finesse”. On the role of “Trotskyist” propaganda, the diary entry from July 14th is especially significant, which references the treaty between the Soviet Union and Great Britain and the joint statement by the two countries, it proceeds as follows: “This is an excellent occasion to show the compatibility between capitalism and Bolshevism . The statement will find scarce acceptance among Leninist circles in Russia” (having in mind that Trotskyists like to define themselves as “Bolshevik-Leninists”, in contrast to the “Stalinists”, considered traitors to Leninism.

Naturally, the intention by Stalin and his collaborators to collectively condemn the opposition as a den of enemy agents appears grotesque today, but it’s important not to lose sight of the historical context broadly presented here. It’s especially necessary to have in mind that similar suspicions and accusations were raised against the Stalinist leadership. After having labelled Stalin as a “fascist dictator”, the pamphlets which the Trotskyist network circulated in the Soviet Union added: “The leaders of the Politburo are either mentally ill or mercenaries of fascism”. Even official documents of the opposition insinuated that Stalin could be the protagonist of a “gigantic and conscious provocation”. On both sides, instead of committing to an exhaustive analysis of the objective contradictions, and how political conflicts interrelate with them, they prefer to quickly resort to the category of treason and, in its extreme form, the traitor becomes a conscious and valuable agent for the enemy. Trotsky doesn’t tire in denouncing the “plot of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the working class”, and the plot is even more despicable because the “Stalinist bureaucracy” is nothing more than “imperialism’s transmission device”.3] It’s not necessary to say that Trotsky is on the receiving end as well: he laments at seeing himself described as an “agent of a foreign power”, but in turn labels Stalin as an “agent provocateur at Hitler’s service”.

On both sides the most infamous accusations are exchanged; on close examination, the most incredible are those coming from the opposition. The conflicted and tormented mood of its leader was carefully analyzed by a Russian historian not suspected of having Stalinist sympathies:
Trotsky didn’t want the defeat of the Soviet Union, but the overthrow of Stalin. In his predictions about the imminent war the insecurity can be noted: the exile knew that only a defeat for his country could put an end to Stalin’s power . He desired war, because in that war he saw the only possibility of toppling Stalin. But Stalin didn’t want to admit this even to himself.

1 Trotsky (1988), p. 986 (=Trotsky, 1968, pp. 263-64).
2 Trotsky (1967), pp. 75-76.
3 Souvarine (2003), pp. 547-48.
4 Fischer (1991), vol. 2, pp. 217-22.
5 Fischer (1991), vol. 2, pp. 256-57.
6 Malaparte (1973), pp. 105, 109-110 and 113.
7 Broué (1991), p. 632.
8 Ibidem
9 Malaparte (1963), p. 124.
10 Stalin (1971-1973), vol. 2, pp. 101-06 and in particular p. 103 (= Stalin 1952,1956, vol. 2, pp. 126,144, and in particular p. 128).
11 Broué (1991), p. 516.
12 Mayer (2000), pp. 271-72.
13 Broué (1991), p. 616.
14 Malaparte (1973), p. 124
15 Thurston (1996), p. 34
16 Fischer (1991), vol. 2, p. 250
17 Trotsky (1988), p. 986 (=Trotsky, 1968, p. 263).
18 Trotsky (1967), pp. 67, 69 and 63.
19 Lenin (1955-1970), vol. 31, pp. 26 and 44.
20 Broué (1991), p. 680.
21 Khrushchev (1958), pp. 134-35.
22 Humbert-Droz (1974), pp. 263,64.
23 Graziosi (2007), p. 336; cf. also Tucker (1990), p. 211 and Mayer (2000), p. 647.
24 Humbert-Droz (1974), pp. 263-64.
25 Cohen (1975), p. 285; Tucker (1974), pp. 424-25.
26 Lenin (1955-1970), vol. 5, p. 362.
27 Cohen (1975), pp. 356-60.
28 Wolkogonow (1989),. 295.
29 Fischer (1991), vol. 2, p. 326
30 Strong (2004), cap. V.
31 Khrushchev (1958), pp. 136-37 and 139-40.
32 Flores (1990), pp. 215-16.
33 Trotsky (1997-2001), vol. 3, pp. 421-25.
34 Trotsky (1988), p. 490; italics in the original text
35 Rogowin (1998), pp. 91 and 404.
36 Rogowin (1998), p. 100.
37 Rogowin (1999), pp. 288-89.
38 Rogowin (1999), p. 11-12.
39 Carr (1964), p. 876; Daniels (1970), p. 145 speaks of “insurrection”; cf. also Mayer (2000), p. 271.
40 Broué (1991), p. 707.
41 Broué (1991), pp. 715-16.
42 Hillgruber (1991), p. 191.
43 Trotsky (1988), p. 117 and note 85 from the editor.
44 Trotsky (1988), p. 1179
45 Trotsky (1988), pp. 1253-54 and 1179.
46 Trotsky (1988), pp. 1258-59.
47 Trotsky (1988), p. 1163.
48 Trotsky (1988), pp. 1341, 1273 and 1328.
49 Trotsky (1988), pp. 1273, 1286.
50 Goebbels (1996), p. 123.
51 Goebbels (1992), pp. 1614 and 1619-20.
52 Goebbels (1992), p. 1635.
53 Trotsky (1967), pp. 64 and 44.
54 Trotsky (1988), pp. 1334 and 1339.
55 Wolkogonow (1989) pp. 514-15.

Edited by xipe (Jan. 22, 2018 02:14:40)

In three decades, the face of the Soviet Union was completely transformed. The essence of the historical actions of Stalinism is this: it found a Russia that worked the land with wooden plows, and left it the owner of a nuclear arsenal. It raised Russia to the level of the second-most powerful industrial nation in the world, and it was not just a matter of mere material progress and organization. No one could have obtained a similar result without a cultural revolution in which an entire country was sent to school to give it a broad education.

In short, although it was conditioned and partly distorted by the Asiatic and despotic heritage of tsarist Russia, “the socialist ideal had an innate, compact integrity” in Stalin’s USSR.

In this historical account, there was no longer room for the fierce accusations directed by Trotsky to the late leader at the time. What sense did it make to condemn Stalin as a traitor to the ideal of world revolution and the advocate of socialism in one country at a time when a new social order was spreading across Europe and Asia and revolution was breaking free from its “national shell”?5 Though ridiculed by Trotsky as a “minor provincial transported, like a joke of history, to the plane of major world events”6, Stalin, in the opinion of a famous philosopher (Alexandre Kojève), had emerged in 1950 as the incarnation of the Hegelian world spirit, and therefore called to unify and lead humanity, using forceful methods and combining wisdom and tyranny in his practice7.

Outside of communist circles, that is, outside of the pro-communist left, and in spite of the outbreak of the Cold War and the persistence of a hot war in Korea, obituaries for Stalin in the West were generally “respectful” or “balanced”. At that moment, he “was still seen as a relatively benign dictator, as a statesman even, and in popular consciousness an affectionate memory lingered of ‘Uncle Joe’, the great war leader who had led his people to victory over Hitler and helped save Europe from Nazi barbarism”8. The ideas, impressions, and emotions of the years of the Great Alliance against the Third Reich and its allies had not diminished, to the extent that, as Deutscher recalled in 1948, “foreign statesmen and generals were impressed by Stalin’s extraordinary grasp of the technical details of his gigantic war machine”9.

The “impressed” even included those who had supported military intervention against the land of the October Revolution, namely, Winston Churchill, who on multiple occasions said of Stalin: “I like that man”10. During the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the English statesman had greeted his Soviet counterpart as “Stalin the Great”, worthy successor to Peter the Great; he was the savior of his country, and had prepared it to defeat the invaders11. Averell Harriman, US ambassador to Moscow from 1943 to 1946, had also been fascinated by certain aspects of Stalin, always describing the Soviet leader’s military skill quite positively: “I found him better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, in some ways the most effective of the war leaders”12 . In 1944, Alcide De Gasperi emphatically celebrated “the immense, historic, and secular merit of the armies organized by the genius of Joseph Stalin.” The eminent Italian politician’s accolades extended beyond the military plane as well:

When I saw that Hitler and Mussolini persecuted people for their race, and invented this terrible anti-Jewish legislation we know, and at the same time saw how the Russians, composed of 160 different ethnicities, sought to fuse them together, overcoming the differences between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort towards the unification of human society, let me say: this is Christian, this is eminently universalist in the sense of Catholicism13.

The high standing that Stalin enjoyed and continued to enjoy was no less intense or less widespread among the great intellectuals. Harold J. Laski, a renowned exponent of the British Labor Party, in an autumn 1945 conversation with Norberto Bobbio, declared himself an “admirer of the Soviet Union” and of its leader, describing him as someone “very wise” (très sage)14. That same year, Hannah Arendt had written that the country led by Stalin had distinguished itself by “its entirely new and successful approach to nationality conflicts, its new form of organizing different peoples on the basis on national equality”; it was a kind of model, it was “what every political and national movement should give its utmost attention to”15.

In turn, writing shortly before and after the end of World War II, Benedetto Croce had credited Stalin for promoting freedom internationally, for contributing to the fight against Nazi fascism, including in his own country. Indeed, he saw in the leader of the USSR “a gifted man of political genius” who played a historical role that was, on the whole, positive: relative to pre-revolutionary Russia, “Sovietism was a progress of freedom”, just as “in relation to the feudal regime” the absolute monarchy was “a progress of freedom which generated further and greater progresses.” The doubts that the liberal philosopher had were focused on the future of the Soviet Union, but these very doubts, by contrast, only emphasized Stalin’s greatness even more: he had taken the place of Lenin, so that one genius had followed another, but what successors would “Providence” have in store for the USSR?16

As the crisis of the Great Alliance began, those who started to equate Stalin’s Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany were harshly reproved by Thomas Mann. What had characterized the Third Reich was the “racial megalomania” of the self-styled “master race” which had launched a “diabolical policy of depopulation,” and prior to that, of eradicating culture in the territories it conquered. Thus, Hitler had adhered to Nietzsche’s maxim: “if one wants slaves, then one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.” The orientation of “Russian socialism” was in direct contradiction; by massively spreading education and culture, it proved it did not want “slaves” but rather “thinking men” and therefore, despite everything, had been directed “toward freedom.” Equating the two regimes was therefore unacceptable. Moreover, those who argued that way could well be suspected of complicity with the fascism they claimed to condemn:

To place Russian communism and Nazi fascism on the same moral plane, insofar as both are totalitarian, is at best a superficiality. At worst it is fascism. Those who insist on this equation may consider themselves to be democrats, but in truth and at the bottom of their hearts they are fascists, and only fight fascism in an obvious and hypocritical way, while saving all their hatred for communism17.

Following the outbreak of the Cold War, Arendt carried out precisely what Mann had denounced by publishing her book on totalitarianism in 1951. And yet, at almost the same time, Kojève was pointing to Stalin as the instigator of a decidedly progressive historical turn of global dimensions. In the West itself, the new truth—the new ideological motif of the equanimous struggle against the various manifestations of totalitarianism—was still having difficulty taking hold.

In 1948, Laski had in some ways reaffirmed the viewpoint he had expressed three years earlier: in defining the USSR, he borrowed a phrase used by another top-level representative of the British Labor Party, Beatrice Webb, who as early as 1931, and into World War II and until her death, had spoken of the Soviet country in terms of a “new civilization.” Laski agreed: with the formidable impetus that it gave to promoting social classes that had for so long been exploited and oppressed, and introducing new relations in the factory and the workplace that were no longer based on the sovereign power of the owners of the means of production, the country led by Stalin had emerged as the “pioneer of a new civilization.” Of course, the two of them were quick to point out that the “new civilization” that was emerging was still being weighed by the burden of “barbaric Russia”. This found its expression in despotic forms, but in forming a correct judgment of the Soviet Union, Laski emphasized in particular, it was necessary not to lose sight of one essential fact: “Its leaders came to power in a country accustomed only to bloody tyranny” and were forced to govern in a situation characterized by a “state of siege” that was more or less permanent and by a “potential or actual war”. Moreover, in situations of acute crisis, England and the United States, too, had limited the traditional freedoms more or less drastically18.

In reference to Laski’s admiration for Stalin and the country he led, Bobbio would much later write: “immediately after Hitler’s defeat, to which the Soviets had made a decisive contribution at the battle of Stalingrad, did not make any particular impression.” In fact, the British Labor intellectual’s tribute to the USSR and its leader had gone well beyond just military terms. And yet, was it that much different from the position of the Turinese philosopher at that time? In 1954, the latter published an essay that praised the Soviet Union (and the socialist states) for having “initiated a new phase of civil progress in politically backward countries, introducing traditional democratic institutions: institutions of formal democracy, as in universal suffrage and eligibility to seek office, and institutions of real democracy, as in the collectivization of the means of production”. What was needed, then, was to add “a drop of oil to the machinery of the revolution already achieved”19. As we can see, the judgment expressed then was anything but negative about the country that was still mourning the death of Stalin.

In 1954, the legacy of liberal socialism was still pulsing within Bobbio’s thought. Despite strongly emphasizing the inalienable value of freedom and democracy, in the years of the war in Spain, Cario Rosselli had negatively contrasted the liberal countries (“England is officially with Franco, and starves Bilbao to death”) with a Soviet Union committed to helping the Spanish Republic, which was under assault by Nazi fascism20*. He was not only talking about international politics either. Faced with a world characterized by “the stage of fascism, imperialist wars, and capitalist decadence”, Carlo Rosselli gave the example of a country that, though still far from a mature democratic socialism, had in any case left capitalism behind and represented “a source of valuable experience” for anyone committed to building a better society: “Today, with the enormous Russian experience [...] we have a huge amount of positive material. We all know what socialist revolution means, what socialist organization of production means”21.

In conclusion, for an entire historical period, in circles that went well beyond the communist movement, the country that Stalin led, and Stalin himself, enjoyed interest, sympathy, esteem, and perhaps even admiration. Of course, we must reckon with the severe disappointment provoked by the pact with Nazi Germany, but Stalingrad had already been working to delete it. It is for this reason that in 1953, and in subsequent years, celebration of the late leader united the socialist camp, seemed to strengthen, at times, the communist movement despite its earlier defeats, and ended up resonating in certain ways in the liberal West itself, which had already thrown itself into a Cold War waged uncompromisingly by both parties. It is no coincidence that in the Fulton speech with which he officially began the Cold War, Churchill declared: “I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”22. Undoubtedly, as the Cold War increased in intensity, the tones of voice would become harsher. Yet still, in 1952, a great English historian who had worked in the service of the Foreign Office, Arnold Toynbee, allowed himself to compare the Soviet leader to “a man of genius: Peter the Great”; indeed, “the test of the battlefield has justified Stalin’s tyrannical push for technological Westernization, just as it had for Peter the Great.” And it would continue to be justified even beyond the Third Reich’s defeat: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russia would again face “the need to accelerate the race to catch up with Western technology” that was again “advancing explosively”23.

Towards a global comparative

Another historical event marked a radical turn in the history of Stalin’s image even more than the Cold War did. Churchill’s speech of March 5, 1946 played a less important role than another speech, given ten years later, on February 25, 1956, by Nikita Khrushchev on the occasion of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

For more than three decades this Report, which painted a portrait of an insanely bloodthirsty dictator, conceited and profoundly mediocre—or even ridiculous—in the intellectual sphere, has been satisfactory to almost everyone. It allowed the new leadership group that ruled the USSR to present itself as the sole repository of revolutionary legitimacy in the country, in the socialist camp, and in the international communist movement, which saw Moscow as its nerve center. With their old convinctions confirmed, and with new arguments for waging the Cold War at their disposal, the West also had reason to be satisfied (or enthusiastic). In the United States, Sovietology displayed a tendency to develop around the CIA and other military and intelligence agencies, subject to the elimination of elements suspected of sympathizing with the land of the October Revolution24. The discipline underwent a process of militarization, which was key to the development of the Cold War. In 1949, the president of the American Historical Association declared: “One cannot afford to be unorthodox”, and the “plurality of aims and values” could no longer be permitted. It was necessary to accept “a large measure of regimentation”, since “total war, whether it be hot or cold, enlists everyone and calls upon everyone to assume his part. The historian is no freer from this obligation than the physicist”25. In 1956, not only did the strength of these slogans not dissipate, but thereafter, a more or less militarized Sovietology could enjoy comfort and support from the very heart of the communist world.

Granted, the Khruschev Report pointed an accusatory finger at a single individual rather than at communism as such, but in those years it was opportune, from the point of view of Washington and its allies, to not spread their targets too wide, and instead focus their fire on the country of Stalin. With the signing of the “Balkan pact” of 1953 with Turkey and Greece, Yugoslavia became a sort of external member of NATO, and some twenty years later China, too, would form a de facto alliance against the Soviet Union. The superpower had to be isolated, and it would be pressured to carry out a more and more radical “de-Stalinization” until it was deprived of all identity and self-esteem, and was forced to resign itself to surrender and to final dissolution.

Finally, due to the “revelations” from Moscow, the great intellectuals could quietly forget the interest, sympathy, and even admiration with which they had viewed Stalin’s USSR. Apart from them, the intellectuals who took Trotsky as their point of reference also found comfort in these “revelations”. For the enemies of the Soviet Union, Trotsky had long been the embodiment of the ignominy of communism, the privileged exemplar of the “exterminator”, or for that matter, the “exterminator Jew” (see below, pp. 268). As late as 1933, when Trotsky had been exiled for some years, Spengler continued to see him as the representative “Bolshevist mass-murderer” (bolschewistischer Massenmörder)26. With the turn made at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the museum of horrors was reserved solely for Stalin and his closest collaborators. Above all, and exerting its influence well beyond the Trotskyists, the Khrushchev Report served as comfort for certain Marxist left circles who felt freed from the painful task of reconsidering the theory of the masters and the history of its effects. It is true that, rather than withering away, the state was quite oversized in the countries that communists ruled; far from dissolving, national identity assumed an increasingly important role in the conflicts that led to the final dismemberment and burial of the socialist camp; there was no sign of the abolition of money or the market, which tended to expand alongside economic development. Yes, all of this was indisputable, but the problem... was with Stalin and “Stalinism”! And so there was no reason to question the hopes or certainties that had accompanied the Bolshevik Revolution and that had referenced Marx.

Despite their opposition to each other, these political-ideological spheres elaborated an image of Stalin that begins with colossal, arbitrary abstractions. For the left, the history of Bolshevism was virtually eliminated, and the history of Marxism even more so, from the history of the person who, for longer than anyone else, held power in the country that emerged from the revolution that had been planned and carried out according to the ideas of Marx and Engels. In turn, the anti-communists brashly skipped over both the history of tsarist Russia and the history of the Second Thirty Years’ War, which made up the context for the contradictory and tragic development of Soviet Russia and its three decades under Stalin. And so each of the different political and ideological spheres took the impulse of Khrushchev’s speech to cultivate their own mythology, whether it was the purity of the West, or the purity of Marxism and Bolshevism. Stalinism was the terrible term of comparison that allowed each of its opponents, by contrast, to bask in their infinite moral and intellectual superiority.

Though they were based on strikingly different abstractions, these interpretations nevertheless ended up producing a kind of methodological convergence. By investigating the terror without paying much attention to the objective situation, it was reduced to the initiative of a single personality or of a restricted class of leaders, determined to reassert their absolute power by any means necessary. Beginning from this assumption, if it could be compared to some other great political figure, this could only be Hitler; therefore, in order to understand Stalin’s USSR, the only comparison it was possible to make was with Nazi Germany. This is a motif that has been appealed to since the late 1930s by Trotsky, who repeatedly returned to the category of “totalitarian dictatorship” and within this genus distinguishes the “Stalinist” species on the one hand and the “Fascist” (and especially the Hitlerian) on the other27, with a contextualization that would later become the common sense of the Cold War and the dominant ideology today.

Is this mode of argument convincing, or would it be better to turn to a global comparison, without losing sight of either Russian history as a whole or of all the countries involved in the Second Thirty Years’ War? Admittedly, this mode of argument begins with a comparison of countries and leaders with very different characteristics, but should this diversity be explained exclusively through ideologies, or does the objective situation, i.e., the geopolitical positioning and historical background of each of the countries involved in the Second Thirty Years’ War, also play an important role? When we speak about Stalin, our thinking leads us immediately to the personalization of power, the concentration camps, the deportation of entire ethnic groups. However, were these phenomena and practices only found in Nazi Germany and the USSR, or did they also manifest in other countries, in different ways according to the greater or lesser intensity of the state of emergency and its longer or shorter duration, including in those countries with a more consolidated liberal tradition? Of course, one should not lose sight of the role of ideologies, but can the ideology to which Stalin claimed to be heir really be equated with the one that inspired Hitler, or would an unbiased comparison end up producing unexpected results? Against the theoreticians of “purity”, it should be pointed out that a political movement or regime cannot be judged based on the excellence of the ideals it claims to be inspired by: in evaluating those ideals we cannot go higher than the Wirkungsgeschichte, the “history of effects” produced by them. But should such an approach be applied globally, or only to the movements that were inspired by Lenin or Marx?

These questions will seem superfluous or even misleading to those who ignore the problem of the changing image of Stalin based on the belief that Khrushchev finally brought the hidden truth to light. However, it would demonstrate a complete disregard of methodology for a historian to consider 1956 the year of the definitive and final revelation, blatantly avoiding the conflicts and interests that spurred the campaign of de-Stalinization and its various aspects, and that had motivated the Sovietology of the Cold War even before then. The radical contrast between the different images of Stalin should drive the historian not only to not take one as absolute, but rather to call all of them into question.

1

How to cast a god into hell: the Khrushchev Report

A “huge, grim, whimsical, morbid, human monster”

If we now analyze On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences, read by Khrushchev at a closed meeting of the Congress of the CPSU and remembered afterwards as the Secret Speech, one detail immediately catches our attention: this is a speech of censure that advocates liquidating Stalin in every respect. Responsible for many heinous crimes, he was a despicable individual both morally and intellectually. Besides being ruthless, the dictator was also ridiculous: he knew the countryside and the agricultural situation “only from films”, films that, after all, “beautified” reality beyond the point of recognition28. Rather than political logic or Realpolitik, the bloody repression he unleashed was dictated by personal whim and a pathological libido dominandi. From this—observed Deutscher with satisfaction in June 1956, shaken by Khrushchev’s “revelations” and so forgetting his own respectful and sometimes admiring portrait of Stalin from three years before—emerged the portrait of a “huge, grim, whimsical, morbid, human monster”29. The ruthless despot was so unscrupulous that he was suspected of plotting the murder of Kirov, the man who was, or seemed to be, his best friend, so that his opponents, actual or potential, real or imaginary, could be accused of this crime and be eliminated one after another30. The ruthless repression had not only fed upon individuals and political groups. No, it brought about “mass deportations of entire populations”, arbitrarily accused of collusion with the enemy and convicted en masse. Had Stalin at least helped to save his country and the world from the horror of the Third Reich? On the contrary, insisted Khruschev, the Great Patriotic War was won despite the madness of the dictator: the troops of the Third Reich managed to penetrate so deep into Soviet territory, sowing much death and destruction, and were defeated only because of their own shortsightedness, stubbornness, and blind trust in Hitler.

Because of Stalin, the Soviet Union had come to the tragic meeting unprepared and helpless: “we started to modernize our military equipment only on the eve of the war [...]. At the outbreak of the war we did not even have sufficient numbers of rifles to arm the mobilized manpower.” As if all this were not enough, “after our severe initial disasters and defeats at the front”, the person responsible abandoned himself to gloom and even apathy. Overcome by the feeling of defeat (“Lenin left us a great legacy and we’ve lost it forever”), unable to react, Stalin “for a long time actually did not direct military operations and ceased to do anything whatsoever”31. Sure, after some time, he finally yielded to the insistence of the other members of the Politburo and returned to his post. If only he had not! The one who led the Soviet Union and its military as a dictator, when faced with mortal danger, had been so incompetent that he did not “ the basics of conducting battle operations”. The Secret Speech is adamant about this point: “We should note that Stalin planned operations on a globe. Yes, comrades, he used to take a globe and trace the front line on it”32. Despite everything, the war ended favorably, and yet the dictator’s bloodythirsty paranoia worsened further. At this point we can consider the portrait that emerged from the Secret Speech of, as Deutscher observed, the “morbid, human monster”, complete.

Only three years had passed since the demonstrations of grief caused by Stalin’s death, and his popularity was still so strong and persistent that, at least in the USSR, Khrushchev’s campaign initially met “a good deal of resistance”:

On 5 March 1956 students in Tbilisi went out into the streets to lay flowers at the monument to Stalin on the third anniversary of his death. Their gesture in honor of Stalin turned into a protest against the decisions of the Twentieth Party Congress. The demonstrations and meetings continued for five days, and on the evening of 9 March tanks were brought into the city to restore order.33

Perhaps this accounts for the characteristics of the text we are examining. A bitter political struggle was being waged in the USSR and the socialist camp, and the caricatural portrait of Stalin served perfectly to delegitimize the “Stalinists” who might cast a shadow on the new leader. The “cult of personality,” which had prevailed until then, did not allow for nuanced judgments: a god must be cast into hell. A decade earlier, during another political battle that had different characteristics but was no less intense, Trotsky had also sketched a portrait of Stalin not only aimed at condemning him politically and morally, but also with the intention of ridiculing him on a personal level: he was a “minor provincial,” an individual characterized from the beginning by an irremediable mediocrity and dullness, who often made an extremely bad impression in the political as well as in the military and ideological spheres, and was never rid of his “peasant coarseness.” Of course, in 1913 he had published an essay of undeniable theoretical value (Marxism and the National Question), but its real author was Lenin, while the person who signed the text was one of the “usurpers” of the great revolutionary’s “intellectual rights”.

There are many points of convergence between these two portraits. Khrushchev hinted that the real instigator of the murder of Kirov was Stalin, and the latter had been accused (or at least suspected) by Trotsky of having accelerated, with “Mongol ferocity,” the death of Lenin34. The Secret Speech criticizes Stalin’s cowardly evasion of his responsibilities at the beginning of Nazi aggression, but on September 2, 1939, even before Operation Barbarossa, Trotsky had written that “the new aristocracy” in power was characterized “by its incapacity to conduct a war”; the “ruling caste” in the Soviet Union was destined to adopt the attitude “of all doomed regimes: ‘after us the deluge’”35.

To what extent do these two widely converging portraits stand up to the historical record? We should start by analyzing the Secret Speech, which, delivered officially to a Congress of the CPSU and to the top leaders of the ruling party, was quickly asserted as the revelation of a long-hidden but indisputable truth.

The Great Patriotic War and the “inventions” of Khrushchev

Stalin had gained enormous prestige worldwide following Stalingrad and the defeat of the seemingly-invincible Third Reich. It is no accident that Khrushchev lingers on this point. The new leader described in catastrophic terms the lack of military preparedness of the Soviet Union, whose army, in some cases, lacked even the most basic weapons. This is the complete opposite of the picture that emerges from an investigation that appears to have come from Bundeswehr* circles and, at any rate, relies extensibly on its military archives. It describes the “multiple superiority of the Red Army in tanks, aircraft, and artillery”; furthermore, “the industrial capacity of the USSR had increased to an extent where it was able to equip the Soviet armed forces ‘with a truly inconceivable amount of armaments’”. This grew at an increasingly intense rhythm as Operation Barbarossa approached. One statistic is especially revealing: in 1940 the Soviet Union had manufactured 358 tanks, considerably more than other armies had available, but in the first half of the following year it manufactured 1,50336. In turn, the documents from the Russian archives show that, at least in the two years immediately prior to the Third Reich’s invasion, Stalin was literally obsessed with the problem of “quantitative increase” and “qualitative improvement of all military apparatus.” Some data are revealing in themselves: the defense budget was 5.4% of state spending during the first five-year plan, and was up to 43.4% in 1941. “In September 1939, under orders from Stalin, the Politburo took the decision to build nine new aircraft manufacturing factories before 1941”, and at the time of the Nazi invasion “the industry had produced 2,700 aircraft and 4,300 modern tanks”37. There are many things that can be said about these data, but not that the USSR came to the tragic meeting of the war unprepared.

As a matter of fact, ten years have passed since an American historian dealt a blow to the myth of the Soviet leader’s moral collapse and evasion of responsibility upon the start of the Nazi invasion: “However shaken he was, Stalin had eleven hours of meetings with party, state, and military leaders on the day of the attack, and he received visitors almost continuously for the next several days”38. We now have access to the register of visitors to Stalin’s office in the Kremlin, discovered in the early 1990s: it appears that, in the hours immediately after the military aggression, the Soviet leader was immersed in an endless succession of meetings and initiatives to organize the resistance. These days and nights were characterized by “activity” that was “strenuous”, but orderly. In any case, “the whole episode [narrated by Khrushchev] is a complete fabrication”; this “story is false”39. In fact, from the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Stalin not only made the most difficult decisions, giving orders for the transfer of the population and industrial facilities away from the front, but “retained minute control over everything, from the size and shape of bayonets to the Pravda headlines and who wrote the articles”40. There is no evidence of panic or hysteria. Dimitrov’s corresponding journal entry reads: “At 7:00 a.m. I was urgently summoned to the Kremlin. Germany has attacked the USSR. The war has begun [...]. Striking calmness, resoluteness, confidence of Stalin and all the others.” Even more surprising is the clarity of ideas. It was not just about planning “measures for mobilization.” It was also necessary to define the political situation. Indeed, “only the Communists can defeat the fascists” and end the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Third Reich, but we must not lose sight of the real nature of the conflict: “The [Communist] parties in the localities are mounting a movement in defense of the USSR. The issue of socialist revolution is not to be raised. The Sov[iet] people are waging a patriotic war against fascist Germany. It is a matter of routing fascism, which has enslaved a number of peoples and is bent on enslaving still more”41.

The political strategy that preceded the Great Patriotic War is clearly seen. A few months earlier, Stalin had stressed that against the expansionism applied by the Third Reich “for the subjugation, the submission of other peoples”, they were responding with justified wars of resistance and national liberation (see below, p. 214). Incidentally, before Hitler’s aggression, the Communist International had already made a reply to those who scholastically opposed patriotism against internationalism, as shown in Dimitrov’s diary entry of May 12, 1941, that

We will have to develop the idea of combining a healthy, properly understood nationalism with proletarian internationalism. Proletarian internationalism should be grounded in such a nationalism in the individual countries [...]. Between nationalism properly understood and proletarian internationalism there can be no contradictions. Rootless cosmopolitanism that denies national feelings and the notion of a homeland has nothing in common with proletarian internationalism.42

Far from being an improvised and desperate reaction to the situation at the start of Operation Barbarossa, the strategy of the Great Patriotic War marked a general theoretical orientation that had been maturing for some time: internationalism and the international cause of the emancipation of the people specifically indicated wars of national liberation, which were necessary given Hitler’s aim of resuming and radicalizing the colonial tradition, of subjugating and enslaving the supposed slavish races of Eastern Europe firstly. These were issues that Stalin would take up again in speeches and statements during the war: they constituted “major milestones in the declaration of Soviet military strategy and political aims”43. They also had international significance: regarding Stalin’s speech broadcast on July 3, 1941, Goebbels observed with annoyance that it “drew enormous admiration in England and the USA”44.

A series of disinformation campaigns and Operation Barbarossa

Even in the narrow field of military affairs, the Secret Speech has lost all credibility. According to Khrushchev, Stalin rushed into disaster, ignoring the “warnings” that came to him from all sides about the impending invasion. What can we say about this accusation? Meanwhile, information from friendly countries could be misleading as well: for example, on June 17, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt alerted Stalin to an impending Japanese attack, which ended up not happening45. The fact is that, in the early days of the Nazi invasion, the Soviet Union was forced to contend with major campaigns of distraction and disinformation. The Third Reich was intensely dedicated to making it seem that the troop buildup in the east served only as a distraction from an imminent invasion across the English Channel, which seemed quite plausible after the conquest of the island of Crete. “All state and military apparatuses are mobilized”, noted Goebbels with satisfaction in his diary (May 31, 1941), to stage the “first great wave of camouflage” for Operation Barbarossa. Thus, “14 divisions have been transported westward”46; additionally, all troops on the Western Front were put on high alert47. About two weeks later, the Berlin edition of the “Völkischer Beobachter” published an article identifying the occupation of Crete as a model for the planned reckoning with England; within a few hours, the original was seized in order to give the impression that a secret of great importance had been treacherously revealed. Three days later (June 14) Goebbels wrote in his diary: “The English radios are already declaring our deployment against Russia a bluff, behind which we seek to hide our preparations for the invasion [of England]”48. To this disinformation campaign Germany added another: rumors were circulated that the military deployment in the east was intended to pressure the Soviet Union, by means of an ultimatum if necessary, to have Stalin accept a redefinition of the terms of the German-Soviet pact and to agree to export more grain, oil, and coal, all needed by a Third Reich engaged in a war with no end in sight. It wanted to make it seem that the crisis could be resolved with new negotiations and additional concessions from Moscow49. This was the conclusion reached by the army intelligence services and military commanders of Great Britain, who had advised the war cabinet on May 22 that “Hitler has not finally decided whether to obtain his wishes [the USSR] by persuasion or force of arms”50. On June 14, Goebbels noted in his diary with satisfaction: “They still generally believe that it is a bluff, or an attempt at blackmail”51.

We should also not underestimate the disinformation campaign staged on the opposite side, which had begun two years earlier: in November 1939, the French press published a nonexistent speech (supposedly delivered to the Politburo on August 19 of that year) in which Stalin exposed a plan to weaken Europe, promoting a fratricidal war within int, in order to then Sovietize it. There is no doubt that it was a forgery intended to break the German-Soviet non-aggression pact and direct the expansionist fury of the Third Reich eastward52. According to a widespread historiographical legend, on the eve of the Nazi attack, the government in London warned Stalin repeatedly and unselfishly, but, like a good dictator, Stalin had only faith in his Berlin counterpart. In reality, while London communicated to Moscow information concerning Operation Barbarossa on the one hand, on the other Great Britain was spreading rumors about an imminent attack by the Soviet Union against Germany or the territories it occupied53. The British were clearly and understandably interested in hastening conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union or making it inevitable.

This came into play following Rudolf Hess's mysterious flight to England, clearly motivated by the hope of rebuilding the unity of the West in the fight against Bolshevism, and so giving concreteness to the program set out in Mein Kampf of the alliance and solidarity of the Germanic peoples in their civilizing mission. Soviet agents abroad informed the Kremlin that the Nazi regime’s second-in-command had undertaken the initiative with the acquiescence of the Führer54. Conversely, important figures within the Third Reich strongly defended the theory that Hess had been encouraged by Hitler. In any case, the Führer felt the need to immediately send Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Rome in order to clear Mussolini’s suspicions that Germany was preparing an exclusive peace accord with Great Britain55. Obviously, Moscow was even more worried by this maneuver, especially because of the British government’s attitude of only fueling the rumor: it did not take the opportunity to “made maximum propaganda capital out of Heß’s capture – something Hitler and Goebbels both expected and feared”; moreover, the interrogation of Hess -reported Ambassador Ivan Maysky to Stalin from London- is committed to a policy promoting appeasement. While leaving the door open to an Anglo-Soviet rapprochement, His Majesty’s secret services were committed to feeding the existing rumors of an imminent peace to be signed between London and Berlin; all with the aim of increasing the pressure on the Soviet Union (which may have sought to avoid the dreaded alliance between Britain and the Third Reich with a preemptive attack by the Red Army against the Wehrmacht) and strengthening the bargaining power of England in any case56.

The Kremlin’s caution and distrust is easily understood: the danger of a repeat of Munich, on a wider and more tragic scale, was very present. Perhaps it can be speculated that the second disinformation campaign staged by the Third Reich played an important role. Based at least on the transcript preserved in the archives of the Soviet Communist Party, despite taking for granted entry of the USSR in the conflict in the short term, Stalin emphasized in his speech on May 5, 1941 to graduates of the Military Academy that Germany had historically achieved victory when it had focused on one front, while it had suffered defeat when it was forced to fight east and west simultaneously57. Of course, Stalin could have underestimated the seriousness with which Hitler valued the opportunity to attack the USSR. On the other hand, he knew that a hasty total mobilization would have provided the Third Reich with the casus belli on a silver platter, as had happened in World War I. There is in any case a definite question: despite moving circumspectly in a remarkably complicated situation, the Soviet leader proceeded with “acceleration of his preparations for war.” Indeed, “between May and June 800,000 reservists were called to service, with 28 divisions moving into the western territories of the Soviet Union in mid-May”, while steadily continuing the work of fortifying borders and camouflaging the most sensitive military targets. “On the night of 21–22 June this vast force was put on alert and warned to expect a surprise attack by the Germans”58.

To discredit Stalin, Khrushchev stresses the spectacular initial victories of the invading army, but ignores the forecasts made in the West at the time. After the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and the entry of the Wehrmacht into Prague, Lord Halifax continued to reject the idea of ​​a rapprochement of England and the USSR, arguing that there was no sense in allying with a country whose armed forces were “insignificant”. At or just before the time Operation Barbarossa began, the British secret services calculated that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated with eight to ten weeks”; while advisors to the US Secretary of State (Henry L. Stimson) had predicted on June 23 that everything would be over in a period of between one and three months59. Moreover, a current illustrious military historian observes, the devastating penetration of the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory was easily explained with a little geography:

The 1,800 mile breadth of that front, and the scarcity of natural obstacles, offered the attacker immense scope for infiltration and manoeuvre. Despite the great size of the Red army, the ratio of force to space was so low that the German mechanized forces could easily find openings for indirect advance onto their opponent’s rear. At the same time the widely spaced cities where road and railways converged provided the attacker with alternative objectives that he could exploit to confuse the defending armies as to his direction, and impale them on the ‘horns of a dilemma’ in trying to meet his thrusts60.

The quick unraveling of the blitzkrieg

One should not be blinded by appearances: carefully observed, the Third Reich’s attempt to replicate in the east the triumph of the Blitzkrieg in the west began to show problems in the first weeks of the gigantic shock61 . The diaries of Joseph Goebbels are revealing here. On the eve of the attack highlights the unstoppable would result in the end the German attack, “certainly the most powerful that history has ever known”; no one could argue with the “most powerful display in world history”62. And then: “We have before a triumphal march unprecedented [...]. I consider the military strength of the Russians very low, possibly even lower than the Führer does. If there was ever an action with an assured outcome, it is this”<63. Hitler was in fact no less certain; some months prior, in front of a Bulgarian diplomat, he had referred to the Soviet army as “no more than a joke”64.

Nevertheless, in reality the invaders were met with unpleasant surprises from the beginning: “On June 25, during the first assault on Moscow, anti-air defense proved so effective that from then on the Luftwaffe was forced to limit itself to reduced-range night attacks” 65. Within ten days of war, the formerly self-assured began to fall into crisis. On July 2 Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Overall, the fight is very hard and stubbornly. In no way can we speak of a rout. The red regime has mobilized its people”66. Events followed that caused the mood of the Nazi leaders to change radically, as it can be seen in Goebbels’s diary.

July 24:

We cannot doubt the fact that the Bolshevik regime, which has existed for almost a quarter century, has left deep scars on the peoples of the Soviet Union [...]. We should therefore clearly emphasize the hardness of the battle being waged in the east to the German people. The nation should be told that this operation is very difficult, but we can overcome it and get through67.

August 1:

The headquarters of the Führer [...] is also openly admitting that it has erred a little in the assessment of Soviet military strength. The Bolsheviks are displaying more resistance than we had assumed; in particular, they have more material means at their disposal than we believed68.

August 19:

Privately, the Führer is very irritated with himself for having been deceived so much about the potential of the Bolsheviks by reports from [German agents in] the Soviet Union. In particular, his underestimation of the enemy’s armored infantry and air force has created many problems. He has suffered a lot. This is a serious crisis [...]. The campaigns we had carried out until now were almost walks [...]. The Führer had no reason to be concered about the west [...]. With our rigor and objectivity Germans have always underestimated the enemy, with the exception in this case of the Bolsheviks69.

September 16:

We calculated the potential of the Bolsheviks in a completely erroneous way70.

Researchers of military strategy highlight the unforeseen difficulties in which to enter the Soviet Union is immersed machinery powerful, experienced and surrounded by war myth of invincibility as was the German71 . It is “particularly significant for the success of the Eastern War Battle of Smolensk, in the second half of July 1941 (hitherto overshadowed by other events in investigations)”72 . The observation of an illustrious German historian, quoting these eloquent journal entries by General Fedor von Bock, 20 and 26 July respectively:

The enemy wants to retake Smolensk at any price and is constantly mobilizing new troops over there. The hypothesis expressed by some that the enemy acts without a strategy is not based on any fact [...]. It is confirmed that the Russians have carried out for me a new and compact deployment of forces around the front. In many places they try to go on the attack. Surprising for an adversary who has suffered similar blows; they must have an incredible amount of material, in fact our troops still lament the potent effect of enemy artillery.

Even more restless and in fact decidedly pessimistic is Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, leader of counterespionage, who, speaking to General von Bock on July 17, says: “I feel very hopeless”73.

Not only did the Soviet army not flee in disarray during the first days and weeks of the attack, indeed opposing it with a “fierce resistance”, it proved to be well managed, as revealed otherwise “Stalin’s decision to halt the German advance only at the right time and at the right point for himself.” The results of this careful military leadership are also revealed at the diplomatic level: “impressed by the tenacious combat given in the Smolensk area”, Japan, who had observers present, decided to reject the proposal of the Third Reich to join the war against the Soviet Union74. Analysis of the German historian, fiercely anticommunist, is fully confirmed by Russian investigators who supported the Khrushchev Report and stood out as champions of the fight against “Stalinism”: “The [German] blitzkrieg plans had already been wrecked by the middle of July”75. In this context, the homage Churchill and FD Roosevelt gave on the August 14, 1941 to the “splendid defense” of the Soviet army does not seem like a mere formality76 . Outside of diplomatic and government circles, in Britain, we are informed by a diary entry by Beatrice Webb, ordinary citizens, even conservative ones, show a “lively interest in the surprising courage, initiative and magnificent equipment of the Red armed Forces – the one and only sovereign state that has been able to stand up to the almost mythical might of Hitler’s Germany”77. In Germany itself, three weeks after the start of Operation Barbarossa, voices that radically questioned the triumphalist version of the regime began to be heard. This is shown in the diary of an eminent German intellectual of Jewish origin: apparently, in the east “we were suffering tremendous losses, had underestimated the Russians’ power of resistance [...] in terms of troops and also of armaments they were inexhaustible”78.

Long considered an expression of political-military ignorance or even blind trust of the Third Reich, the extremely cautious behavior of Stalin in the weeks preceding the outbreak of hostilities now appears in a completely different light: “The relatively open concentration of Wehrmacht forces along the Soviet border, the violations of Soviet airspace and numerous other provocations had only a single purpose: to draw the main forces of the Red Army as close to the border as possible. Hitler wanted to win the war in one gigantic battle.” Even the most valiant generals were drawn to the trap, and anticipating the arrival of the enemy, urged a massive deployment of troops to the border. “Stalin categorically rejected this demand, insisting on the need to maintain large-scale reserves at a considerable distance from any conceivable front line.” Later, aware of the strategic plans of the plotters of Operation Barbarossa, Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov recognized the success of the line followed by Stalin: “Hitler’s command was counting on us bringing our main forces up to the border with the intention of surrounding and destroying them”79.

In fact, in the months preceding the invasion of the USSR, the Führer says, arguing with his generals: “Problem of Russian space. The infinite range of space requires the concentration at decisive points”80. Later, with Operation Barbarossa already begun, in a conversation he later clarified his opinion: “In world history there have been so far only three battles of annihilation: Cannes, Sedan and Tannenberg. We can be proud of the fact that two of them have been victoriously fought by German armies. ” However, for Germany the third and greatest decisive battle of annihilation and subjugation, as desired by Hitler, became increasingly complicated, and a week later he was forced to admit that Operation Barbarossa had seriously underestimated the enemy, “the Russian military preparation must be considered fantastic”81. This is, of course, the attitude of a card player trying to justify the failure of his predictions. And yet, the British expert in military strategy quoted above does not come to very different conclusions: the reason for the defeat of the French resided “not in quantity or quality of equipment, but in their theory”; moreover, deploying the army too far ahead has disastrous effects, “he had largely cast away his strategic flexibility”; Poland had also made a similar mistake, favored by “buttressed by national pride and military over-confidence.” None of this was the case with the Soviet Union.82

More important than each of the battles is their combined image: “The Stalinist system was able to mobilize the vast majority of the population and virtually all of its resources”; in particular the “capacity of the Soviets” was “extraordinary”, in a situation as difficult as the first months of the war, “the time to evacuate and then convert a considerable number of industries to military production”. Indeed, “two days after the German invasion, the Evacuation Committee managed to shift 1,500 large factories east, after performing titanic operations of logistical complexity”83 . On the other hand, this relocation process had already begun in the weeks or months preceding the Nazi aggression (see below, p. 319), further confirming the fantastic character of the accusation launched by Khrushchev.

There is more. The Soviet leadership had intuited somehow the development of war looming on the horizon, and from that moment drove the country’s industrialization: a radical departure from the previous situation, had identified “made Asian Russia a focal point” remote and sheltered from possible aggressors84 . Indeed, Stalin had insisted on it strongly, repeatedly.

January 31, 1931: the task of “creating new, technically well-equipped industries in the Urals, in Siberia, in Kazakhstan” was imposed. A few years later, the Report presented on 26 January 1934 at the 17th Congress of the CPSU had proudly pointed out the powerful industrial development that had taken place “in Central Asia, in Kazakhstan, in Buryat-Mongolia, in Tataria, in Bashkiria, in the Urals, in Eastern and Western Siberia, in the Far East, etc.”85 The implications of all this did not escape Trotsky, who a few years later, while analyzing the dangers of war and the preparedness of the Soviet Union and stressing the results achieved by the “planned economy” in the “military” field, had noted: “the industrialization of the outlying regions, especially Siberia, has given a wholly new value to the steppe and forest spaces”86 . Only now was the value of space realized, making the blitzkrieg used by the German general staff more complicated than ever.

It is precisely in the field of industrial equipment built in anticipation of war that the Third Reich was forced to confront the bitter surprises, as shown by two entries by Hitler.

November 29, 1941: “How can such a primitive people manage such technical achievements in such a short time?”87

August 26, 1942: “With regard to Russia, it is incontestable that Stalin has raised living standards. The Russian people were not being starved [at the time of the start of Operation Barbarossa]. Overall, we must recognize that: workshops of the scale of the Hermann Goering Werke have been built where two years ago there were only unknown villages. We are discovering railway lines that are not on the maps”88.

At this point it is convenient to give the floor to three experts, notably different from each other (one Russian and the other two Western). The first, who once headed the Soviet Institute of Military History, and shared the militant anti-Stalinism of the Gorbachev years, seems moved by the intention to resume and radicalize the indictment of the Khrushchev Report. And yet, by the very results of his research, he is forced to make a rather more nuanced judgment: without being a specialist, much less the genius described in official propaganda, in the years preceding the outbreak of the war, Stalin dealt extensively with the problems of defense, the defense industry and the war economy as a whole. Yes, in the strictly military level, only through trial and error, even severe, and “thanks to the hard praxis of everyday military life” he “gradually learns the basic principles of strategy”89. In other fields, however, his thinking appears “more developed than many Soviet military leaders.” Thanks also to his experience in the management of political power, Stalin never lost sight of the central role of the war economy and contributed to the resilience of the USSR with the transfer of the industrial war machine to the interior: “it is almost impossible to underestimate the importance of this endeavor”90. In the end, the Soviet leader paid great attention to the political and moral dimension of war. In this area “he had ideas totally out of the ordinary,” as evidenced by the “courageous and far-sighted” decision, taken despite the skepticism of his colleagues, to hold the military parade commemorating the anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 1941, in a Moscow besieged and harassed by the Nazi enemy. In short, we can say that with respect to the military careerists and the circle of his collaborators, “Stalin testifies to a more universal thought”91. And this thought—it can be added—did not overlook even the smallest aspects of life and morale of the soldiers: informed that they had run out of cigarettes, thanks to his ability to dispatch “a Herculean workload”, “he made time during the battle of Stalingrad to telephone Akaki Mgeladze, Party boss of Abkhazia, where the tobacco was grown: ‘Our soldiers have nothing to smoke! Tobacco’s absolutely necessary at the front!’ ”92

On the positive assessment of Stalin as a military leader the two Western authors go even further. If Khrushchev insists on the sweeping initial successes of the Wehrmacht, the first of the two mentioned experts describes the same evidence with a very different language: no wonder that “the greatest invasion in military history” has achieved initial successes: the reply of the Red Army after the devastating blows of the German invasion in June 1941 was “the greatest feat of arms the world had ever seen”93. The second researcher, a professor at an American military academy, understanding the conflict in terms of its long duration, the attention paid to both the rear and the front, the economic and political dimension, as well as the actual military war, talks about Stalin as a “great strategist”, in fact, “the first true strategist of the twentieth century”94. This assessment broadly coincides with the other Western researcher cited above, whose basic thesis, summarized in the flaps of his book, sees in Stalin the “greatest military leader of the twentieth century.” Obviously you can discuss or clarify these valuations so flattering; but it is clear that, at least as regards the issue of the war, the scene drawn by Khrushchev has lost all credibility.

Especially that time of the final exam, the USSR shows quite well prepared from another essential point of view. Let us turn back to Goebbels, who, explaining the unforeseen difficulties of Operation Barbarossa, besides the military potential of the enemy, also refers to another factor:

For our confidants and our spies it was almost impossible to penetrate inside the Soviet Union. They could not acquire a precise vision. The Bolsheviks have worked directly to deceive us. Of a number of weapons they possessed, especially heavy weapons, we were unable to learn anything clearly. Exactly the opposite occurred in France, where we knew practically everything and could not have been surprised at all.95

The lack of “common sense” and “mass deportations of entire peoples”

Having authored in 1913 a book that established him as a theoretician of the national question, and People’s Commissar for Nationalities immediately after the October Revolution, through which he developed his work, Stalin had earned the recognition of personalities as different as Arendt and De Gasperi. Reflection on the national question had finally resulted in an essay on language aimed at demonstrating that, far from dissolving after the overthrow of a certain social class, the language of a nation has a remarkable stability, as well as enjoying the stability of the nation that uses it. This essay also helped to consolidate Stalin’s fame as a theoretician of the national question. As late as 1965, despite doing so from a position of harsh condemnation, Louis Althusser credited Stalin with having opposed the “madness” which claimed “making strenuous efforts to prove language a superstructure”: thanks to these “simple pages”, concludes the French philosopher, “we could see that there were limits to the use of the class criterion”96 . The desacralization/liquidation in which Khruschev participated in 1956 could not help but pay attention to, to ridicule, the theorist and politician who had devoted special attention to the national question. In condemning “the mass deportations of entire nations,” the Secret Speech declares:

>No Marxist-Leninist, no man of common sense can grasp how it is possible to make whole nations responsible for inimical activity, including women, children, old people, Communists and Komsomols [members of the Young Communist League], to use mass repression against them, and to expose them to misery and suffering for the hostile acts of individual persons or groups of persons97.

Out of the question are collective punishment, deportation imposed on poor populations suspected patriotic loyalty. Regretably, far from referring to the madness of a single individual, this practice profoundly characterized the Second Thirty Years’ War, beginning with Tsarist Russia, which despite being an ally of the liberal West, during the First World War called “a wave of deportations” of “unknown proportions in Europe”, which affected about one million people (mostly of Jewish or German origin)98 . Of smaller proportion but of equal significance was the measures taken during the Second World War against Japanese Americans, who were deported and imprisoned in concentration camps (see below, pp. 177-178).

Besides attempting to eliminate a potential fifth column, expulsion and deportation of entire peoples can be carried out according to the reconstruction or redefinition of political geography. During the first half of the twentieth century, this practice intensified on a global level, from the Middle East, where the Jews who had escaped the “final solution” forced to flee to the Arabs and Palestinians, to Asia, where the division of the crown jewel of the British Empire into India and Pakistan resulted in the “largest forced migration, globally, of the century”99 . Remaining on the Asian continent, it is worth taking a look at what happens in a region administered by a personality or name of a personality (the 14th Dalai Lama), who is later destined to win the Nobel Peace Prize and become synonymous with nonviolence: “In July 1949 all the Han residents [of different generations] in Lhasa had been expelled from Tibet” in order to “counter the possibility of ‘fifth column’ activity” as well as make the demographic composition more homogeneous.100

This is a practice carried out not only in the most varied geographical and political-cultural areas, but also in those years theoretically backed by great personalities. In 1938 David Ben Gurion, the future father of the nation of Israel, declared: “I support compulsory transfer [of the Palestinian Arabs]. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”101. In fact, he would adhere to this very program ten years later.

But here it is necessary to focus attention particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where a silent tragedy occured, despite being of the largest of the twentieth century. In total, about sixteen and a half million Germans were forced to leave their homes, and two and a half million did not survive the massive ethnic cleansing, or counter-cleansing.102 In this case it is possible to make a direct comparison between Stalin on the one hand, and western statisticians and pro-Westerners on the other. What attitude did the latter assume in such circumstances? As always, we begin analysis starting from a historiography that can not be suspected of being lenient toward the Soviet Union:

It was the British government that since 1942 promoted a transfer of populations from East Germany and the Sudeten territories [...]. Undersecretary of State Sargent went further than anyone by asking for an investigation to determine “whether Britain should not encourage the move to Siberia of Germans from East Prussia and Upper Silesia.”103

Speaking at the House of Commons on December 15, 1944, on the proposal for the “transference of several millions” of Germans, Churchill made clear his view this way:

For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.104

FD Roosevelt would adhere shortly thereafter, in June 1943, to deportation plans; “Stalin gave way almost immediately to pressure from Beneš for the expulsion from Czechoslovakia of the Germans in the Sudeten territories’105 . An American historian believes he can now conclude that

In the end, there was virtually no difference between noncommunist and communist politicians on the issue of the expulsions of Germans in postwar Czechoslovakia or Poland. When it came to the issue of the forced deportation of the Germans, Benes and Gottwald, Mikolajczyk and Bierut, Stalin and Churchill all danced to the same tune.106

This conclusion alone would suffice to refute the implicit black-and-white contrast in the Khrushchev Report. In fact, at least as regards the Germans of Eastern Europe, the person who took the initiative regarding the “mass deportations of entire nations” was not Stalin; the responsibility are not shared equally. Eventually the American historian cited above would recognize the same. In Czechoslovakia, Jan Masaryk expressed the conviction that “the German posseses no soul, and the words that he understands best are the salvos of a machine gun.” This is not an isolated attitude: “Even the Czech Catholic Church got into the act. Monsignor Bohumil Stasek, the canon of Vysehrad, declared: “Once in a thousand years the time has come to settle the accounts with the Germans, who are evil and to whom the commandment to love thy neighbor therefore does not apply”107. In these circumstances, a German witness recalls: “Often we had to appeal to the Russians to help us against the Czechs, which they often did, when it wasn’t a matter of hunting down women”108. But there’s more. Let us again call on the American historian: “At the former Nazi camp at Theresienstadt (Teresin), the interned Germans worried openly about what would happen to them if the local Russian commandant did not protect them against the Czechs.” A Soviet secret report delivered to the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow reported the pleas addressed to Soviet troops to remain, “‘If the Red Army leaves, we are finished!’ We now see the manifestations of hatred for the Germans. They [the Czechs] don’t kill them, but torment them like livestock. The Czechs look at them like cattle.” In fact, continues the historian who I quote, “the horrible treatment at the hands of the Czechs led to despair and hopelessness. According to Czech statistics, in 1946 alone 5,558 Germans committed suicide”109. A similar thing happened in Poland. In conclusion:

The Germans considered Soviet military personnel much more humane and responsible than the native Czechs or Poles. Russians occasionally fed hungry German children, while the Czechs let them starve. Soviet troops would occasionally give the weary Germans a ride on their vehicles during their long treks out of the country, while Czechs looked on with contempt or indifference110.

The American historian speaks of “Czechs” or “Poles” in general, but not entirely correctly, as seen in the same story:

The Czechoslovak communists—and other communists as well—found themselves in a difficult position when it came to the question of expelling the Germans. During the war, the communists’ position, articulated by Georgi Dimitrov in Moscow, was that those Germans responsible for the war and its crimes should be tried and sentenced, while the German workers and peasants should be re-educated111.

“In fact, in Czechoslovakia it was the Communists who put an end to the persecution of the few remaining ethnic minorities after they seized power in February 1948”112.

Contrary to what Khrushchev insinuated, compared with the bourgeois leaders of Western and Central-Eastern Europe, at least in this case Stalin and the Communist movement led by him proved to be less devoid of “common sense”.

That was no accident. If towards the end of the war FD Roosevelt claimed to be “more thirsty for German blood than ever” because of the atrocities committed by them, and even comes to cherish for some time the idea of “castration” of such a wicked people, Stalin acts very differently, and just as Operation Barbarossa was unleashed, said that the Soviet resistance can count on the support of “all the finest men and women of Germany” and “the German people which is enslaved by the Hitlerite misrulers”113. Especially solemn is the stance of February 1942:

it would be ludicrous to identify Hitler’s clique with the German people, with the German state. The experience of history indicates that Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain. The strength of the Red Army lies, finally, in the fact that it does not and cannot feel racial hatred for other peoples, including the German people; that it has been trained in the spirit of equality of all peoples and races, in the spirit of respect for the rights of other peoples114.

Even an anti-Communist as uncompromising as Ernst Nolte is forced to acknowledge that the attitude of the Soviet Union towards the German people does not show the racist tones otherwise displayed by the Western powers115 . To conclude on this topic: although unequally distributed, the lack of “common sense” was quite widespread among political leaders of the twentieth century.

So far I have dealt with the deportations caused by the war and the war period, i.e. by the rebuilding and redistribution of political geography. At least until the 1940s, the United States continued carrying out deportations in urban centers, which wanted to be, as posters in entrances warned, for whites only . Apart from African Americans, Mexicans were also affected, reclassified as non-whites based on a census of 1930, resulting in “thousands of Mexican workers and their families, including many Mexican Americans” being deported to Mexico. Measures of expulsion and deportation by towns that want to be “whites only” or “Caucasians only” did not even exempt the Jews.116

The Secret Speech portrays Stalin as a tyrant so devoid of sense of reality that, by taking collective measures against certain ethnic groups, would not hesitate to punish the innocent or his own party comrades. It calls to mind the case of German exiles (mostly enemies of Hitler) who, just after the war with Germany, were held en masse in French concentration camps (see below, p. 177). But it is useless to look for an effort at comparative analysis in Khrushchev’s speech.

His intention was to reverse two issues that until then had been disseminated not only by official propaganda, but also by public opinion and the international media: the great leader who contributed decisively to the destruction of the Third Reich was transformed into a clumsy dilettante who could barely read a world map; the leading theoretician of the national question is revealed precisely as someone lacking any “common sense”. Acknowledgments rendered to Stalin before then are all attributable to a cult of personality that was now dealt with forever.

The cult of personality in Russia; from Kerensky to Stalin

The denunciation of the cult of personality is the main argument of Khrushchev. In his Speech, however, there is a seemingly vital question that is missing: Does the cult of personality have to do with the vanity and narcissism of an individual politician, or is it a more general phenomenon rooted in a certain objectively determined context? It may be interesting to read the comments made by Bukharin while US preparations for intervention in World War I were being finalized:

Since the state machine is more prepared for military tasks, it transforms itself into a military organization, under which there is a dictator. This dictator is President Wilson. It has granted him exceptional powers. It has an almost absolute power. And it tries to install in the people slavish feelings towards the “great president”, as in ancient Byzantium, where the monarch was deified117.

In situations of acute crisis the personalization of power tends to intertwine with the transfiguration of the leader who holds it. When he arrived in France in December 1918, the victorious American president was hailed as the Messiah, and his Fourteen Points were compared with the Sermon on the Mount118.

It is especially sobering to consider the political processes that occured in the United States from the Great Depression to World War II. Elected on the promise of remedying a rather worrying social and economic situation, FD Roosevelt held the post for four consecutive terms (although dying early in the fourth): a unique case in the history of his country. Beyond the long duration of this presidency, the predictions and expectations surrounding it were also extraordinary. Prominent figures spoke of a “national dictator” and invited the new president to demonstrate all his energy: “It becomes a tyrant, a despot, a real monarch. In the World War we took our Constitution, wrapped it up and laid it on the shelf and left it there until it was over.” The permanence of the state of emergency calls for not getting caught up in excessive legalistic scruples. The new leader of the nation is called to be and is already defined as “a providential person”, or, in the words of Cardinal O’Connell: “a God-sent man.” Ordinary people spoke and wrote about FD Roosevelt in even more emphatic terms, looking at him “almost as they look to God” and hoping to one day place him “in the halls of immortals beside Jesus”119 . Invited to behave like a dictator and man of Providence, the new president makes a broad use of his executive power since the first day or hours of its mandate. In his inaugural message he calls for “broad executive power [...] as great as the power that would be given me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe” 120. With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, even before Pearl Harbor, FDR begins on his own initiative to drag the country into war alongside England; then an executive order issued sovereignly imposes imprisonment in concentration camps of all American citizens of Japanese origin, including women and children. It is a presidency that, if on one hand enjoys great popular devotion, on the other hand rings alarm bells for the “totalitarian” threat: this occurs at the time of the Great Depression (when pronouncing the charge is specifically former President Hoover121) And especially in the months preceding the intervention in the Second World War (in which time Senator Burton K. Wheeler accuses Roosevelt of exercising a “dictatorial power” and promoting a “totalitarian form of government”)122 . At least from the point of view of the opponents of the President, totalitarianism and the cult of personality had crossed the Atlantic.

Of course, the phenomenon we are investigating here (the personalization of power and the cult of personality associated with it) is manifested only in embryonic form in the American Republic, protected by the ocean from any attempted invasion, and carrying a political tradition quite different from that of Russia. It is on this country that we should focus attention. Let’s see what happens between February and October 1917, before the Bolsheviks take power. Driven by his personal vanity, but also by the desire to stabilize the situation, we find Kerensky beginning “to model himself on Napoleon”: inspecting the troops, he “even wore his right arm in a sling”; on the other hand “A bust of the French Emperor stood on his desk at the Ministry of War.” The results of this staging occur early: poems that pay tribute to Kerensky as a new Napoleon flourished123 . On the eve of the summer offensive, which decisively changed the fate of the Russian army, the cult of Kerensky (restricted in certain circles) reaches its paroxysm:

Everywhere he was hailed as a hero. Soldiers carried him shoulder-high, pelted him with flowers and threw themselves at his feet. An English nurse watched in amazement as they ‘kissed him, his uniform, his car, and the ground on which he walked. Many of them were on their knees praying; others were weeping.’124

As can be seen, it does not make much sense to explain, as did Khrushchev, the exalted form that reaches at a certain point the cult of personality seen in the USSR, through the narcissism of Stalin. Actually, when Kaganovich proposes replacing the expression of Marxism-Leninism by that of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, the leader who is intended as homage replies: “How can you compare a dick to a watchtower?”125. At least compared to Kerensky, Stalin seems perhaps more modest. Confirms the attitude that assumes the conclusion of a war won in reality, not in imagination, as was the case of the Menshevik leader who loved strike Napoleonic poses. Immediately after the victory parade, a group of marshals contacted Molotov and Malenkov: proposed solemnizing the victory achieved during the Great Patriotic War, granting the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union” to Stalin, who however declined the offer126. The Soviet leader also shuns the rhetorical exaggeration on the occasion of the Potsdam Conference: “both Churchill and Truman took time to drive around the ruins of Berlin. Stalin displayed no such interest. He arrived quietly by train, even ordering Zhukov to cancel any plans he might have had to welcome him with a military band and a guard of honour”127 . Four years later, on the eve of his seventieth birthday, a conversation took place in the Kremlin that is worth quoting:

[Stalin] called Malenkov and warns: “Do not get the idea to honor me with a ‘star’ again.”

“But Comrade Stalin, a birthday like this! The people would not understand.”

“Do not make reference to the people. I do not want to argue. No personal initiative! Understood?” “Of course, Comrade Stalin, but the Politburo members say...”

Stalin interrupted Malenkov and declared the matter closed.

Naturally, it can be said that in the circumstances referred to here the political calculus plays a more or less important role (and it would be very strange if it did not); it is a fact, however, that personal vanity does not take the reins. And it played little role in vital decisions of a political or military nature: during World War II Stalin invited its partners to speak bluntly, discussed animatedly, and even fought with Molotov, who in turn, despite taking good care not to question the hierarchy, continued to defend his own opinion. Judging by the testimony of Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, the supreme leader “even liked people who had their own point of view and weren’t afraid to stand up for it”128.

In seeking to condemn Stalin as solely responsible for all the catastrophes that occurred in the USSR, far from liquidating the cult of personality, Khrushchev merely transformed it into a negative cult. How clear is the image of in principio erat Stalin! Also in addressing the most tragic chapter in the history of the Soviet Union (the terror and bloody purges, which spread on a large scale without exception for even the communist party), the Secret Speech has no doubts: it is a horror that is to blamed exclusively on a individual thirsty for power and possessed by a bloody paranoia.

1. Medvedev (1977), p. 705; Zubkova (2003), commentary below photos 19-20.
2. Thurston (1996), pp. xiii-xiv.
3. Fejtö (1971), p. 31.
4. Nirenstein (1997).
5. Deutscher (1972a), pp. 167-9.
6. Trotsky (1962), p. 447.
7. Kojève (1954).
8. Roberts (2006), p. 3.
9. Deutscher (1969), p. 522
10. Roberts (2006), p. 273.
11. In Fontaine (2005), p. 66; referring to a book by Averell Harriman and Elie Abel.
12. In Thomas (1988), p. 78.
13. De Gasperi (1956), pp. 15-6.
14. Bobbio (1997), p. 89
15. Arendt (1986b), p. 99.
16. Croce (1993), vol. 2, pp. 33-4 and 178.
17. Mann (1986a), pp. 271 and 278-9; Mann (1986b), pp. 311-2.
18. Webb (1982-85), vol. 4, pp. 242 and 490 (journal entries of 15 March 1931 and 6 December 1942); Laski (1948), pp. 39-42 and passim.
19. Bobbio (1997), p. 89; Bobbio (1977), pp. 164 and 280.
20. Rosselli (1988), pp. 358, 362 and 367.
* See Yuri Ribalkin, Stalin y España (ed. Marcial Pons 2007), Ángel Viñas, La soledad de la República: El abandono de las democracias y el viraje hacia la Unión Soviética (ed. Crítica 2006), El escudo de la República: el oro de España, la apuesta soviética y los hechos de mayo de 1937 (ed. Crítica 2007), El honor de la República: entre el acoso fascista, la hostilidad británica y la política de Stalin (ed. Crítica 2008), Javier Iglesias Peláez, Stalin en España. La gran excusa (ed. Raíces, 2008). [Translator’s note]
21. Ibid., pp. 301, 304-6 and 381.
22. Churchill (1974), p. 7290.
23. Toynbee (1992), pp. 18-20.
24. Gleason (1995), p. 121.
25. Cohen (1986), p. 13.
26. Spengler (1933), p. 86, note 1.
27. Trotsky (1988), p. 1285
28. Kruschov (1958), pp. 223-4.
29. Deutscher (1972b), p. 20.
30. Kruschov (1958), pp. 121-2.
31. Ibid., pp. 164-5 and 172.
32. Ibid., pp. 176 and 178.
33. Zubkova (2003), p. 223.
34. Trotsky (1962), pp. 170, 175-6 and 446-7.
35. Trotsky (1988), pp. 1259 and 1262-3.
* Armed forces of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1955 [Translator’s note]
36. Hoffmann (1995), pp. 59 and 21.
37. Wolkogonow (1989), pp. 500-4
38. Knight (1997), p. 132.
39. Medvedev, Medvedev (2006), pp. 269-70.
40. Montefiore (2007), p. 416.
41. Dimitrov (2002), pp. 320-1.
42. Ibid., p. 314.
43. Roberts (2006), p. 7.
44. Goebbels (1992), p. 1620 (journal entry of 5 July 1941).
45. In Butler (2005), pp. 71-2.
46. Goebbels (1992), p. 1590.
47. Wolkow (2003), p. 111.
48. Goebbels (1992), pp. 1594-5 and 1597.
49. Besymenski (2003), pp. 422-5.
50. Costello (1991), pp. 438-9.
51. Goebbels (1992), p. 1599.
52. Roberts (2006), p. 35.
53. Wolkow (2003), p. 110.
54. Costello (1991), pp. 436-7.
55. Kershaw (2001), pp. 581 and 576-7.
56. Ibid., pp. 585-7; Ferro (2008), p. 115 (with respect to Maysky).
57. Besymenski (2003), pp. 380-6 (and especially p. 384).
58. Roberts (2006), pp. 66-9.
59. Ferro (2008), p. 64; Beneš (1954), p. 151; Gardner (1993), pp. 92-3.
60. Liddel Hart (2007), pp. 414-5.
61. Ibid., pp. 417-8.
62. Goebbels (1992), pp. 1601 and 1609.
63. Ibid., pp. 1601-2.
64. Fest (1973), p. 878.
65. Ferro (2008), p. 189.
66. Goebbels (1992), p. 1619.
67. Ibid., pp. 1639-40.
68. Ibid., p. 1645.
69. Ibid., pp. 1656-8.
70. Ibid., pp. 1665-6.
71. Liddel Hart (2007), pp. 417-8.
72. Hillgruber (1991), p. 354.
73. Citado en Hillgruber (1991), pp. 358-60.
74. Ibid., pp. 372 and 369.
75. Medvedev, Medvedev (2006), p. 252
76. In Butler (2005), p. 41.
77. Webb (1982-85), vol. 4, p. 472 (journal entry of 8 August 1941).
78. Klemperer (1996), vol. 1, p. 647 (journal entry of 13 July 1941).
79. Medvedev, Medvedev (2006), pp. 259-60.
80. Hitler (1965), p. 1682 (statement of 30 March 1941).
81. Hitler (1989), p. 70 (conversation of 10 September 1941) and Hitler (1980), p. 61 (conversation of 17-18 September 1941).
82. Liddel Hart (2007), pp. 404, 400 and 392.
83. Werth (2007a), pp. 352 and 359-60.
84. Tucker (1990), pp. 97-8.
85. Stalin (1971-73), vol. 13, pp. 67 and 274.
86. Trotsky (1988), p. 930 (= Trotsky, 1968, p. 207).
87. From a conversation with Fritz Todt, quoted in Irving (2001), p. 550.
88. Hitler (1980), p. 366 (conversation of 26 August 1942).
89. Wolkogonow (1989), pp. 501 and 570.
90. Ibid., pp. 501, 641 and 570-2.
91. Ibid., pp. 597, 644 and 641.
92. Montefiore (2007), p. 503.
93. Roberts (2006), pp. 81 and 4.
94. Schneider (1994), pp. 278-9 and 232.
95. Goebbels (1992), p. 1656 (journal entry of 19 August 1941).
96. Althusser (1967), p. 6.
97. Kruschov (1958), p. 187.
98. Graziosi (2007), pp. 70-1.
99. Torri (2000), p. 617.
100. Grunfeld (1996), p. 107.
101. In Pappe (2008), p. 3.
102. MacDonogh (2007), p. 1.
103. Hillgruber (1991), p. 439.
104. Churchill (1974), p. 7069.
105. Hillgruber (1991), p. 439.
106. Naimark (2002), p. 134.
107. Ibid., p. 136.
108. Ibid., pp. 137-8.
109. Ibid., p. 139.
110. Ibid., p. 138.
111. Ibid., p. 133.
112. Deák (2002), p. 48.
113. Stalin (1971-73), vol. 14, pp. 238 and 241.
114. Ibid., pp. 266-7.
115. Cfr. Losurdo (1996), ch. iv, § 2 (for Nolte) and ch. iv, § 5 (for F. D. Roosevelt and the “castration” of the Germans).
116. Loewen (2006), pp. 42 and 125-7.
117. Bujarin (1984), p. 73.
118. In Hoopes, Brinkley (1997), p. 2.
119. Schlesinger jr. (1959-65), vol. 2, pp. 3-15.
120. Nevins, Commager (1960), p. 455.
121. Johnson (1991), p. 256.
122. In Hofstadter (1982), vol. 3, pp. 392-3.
123. Figes (2000), pp. 499-500.
124. Ibid., pp. 503-4.
125. In Marcucci (1997), pp. 156-7.
126. Wolkogonow (1989), p. 707.
127. Roberts (2006), p. 272.
128. Wolkogonow (1989), p. 707 (for the conversation between Stalin and Malenkov); Montefiore (2007), pp. 498-9.

Edited by wuyong (Jan. 24, 2018 19:23:40)