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Review of PBS Series: Stalin (May - June 1990)

PBS Anti-Stalinism Is Based On NazisLies

 The following article is the first of four articles which review Stalin,the PBS television series, and the accompanying book Stalin: A Timefor Judgment , by Jonathan Lewis and Phillip Whitehead (New York:Pantheon, 1990). The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has produced a three- partseries on the life of Joseph Stalin, part 1 of which was broadcast onMonday, May 28. This series coincides with an unprecedented attack on the entireconcept of communism, unleashed by the overt return to capitalism

in Eastern Europe and sponsored by Gorbachov. This policy of "perestroika" is nothing but a hug attack upon the working class.Under the name of economic "reform" wages are being drasticallycut, and prices of all necessities -- food, shelter, transportation --drastically raised. Fascist nationalism has been unleashed to getworkers fighting amongst themselves. Like racism, nationalistrivalries dim class consciousness, encouraging workers to ally withbosses of "their own" ethnic or linguistic group and fight otherworkers. The political "reforms" -- capitalist-style elections, multi- partysystems, and the accession to power of openly capitalist and fascist

parties -- are necessary in order to prevent rebellion against thisattack. Workers are more likely to accept these drastic cuts if thebosses that oversee them have more credibility. As Lenin, for one,noted long ago, capitalist democracy serves this purpose. These attacks on the working class -- that is, this attempt to raise thelevel of exploitation of the working class, get them to provide asource of cheap labor in order to profit a few capitalists -- cannotsucceed without an all-out assault on the ideas of communism,internationalism, working-class dictatorship and class consciousness.For it was during the period of working-class power that subsidies forfood, clothing and housing, free medical care, day care, guaranteed jobs, and other pro-worker benefits were put into effect. this periodand the benefits which survive from it are associated with JosephStalin. Therefore, the Soviet and East European bosses, who are nowremoving the last vestiges of the benefits won by the communistmovement, must justify their acts by saying that the period of Stalinwas horrible.As this review shows, Part One of the series fails to conform even tothe facts accepted by pro-capitalist, bourgeois scholars concerningthe Russian Revolution and the left of Stalin. (Naturally, we could notexpect the series to have a pro-working class, communist outlook.)

 The lies and distortions in it are very crude, and can be effective onlybecause most people are not aware of the facts.

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As you read these reviews, ask yourself: Does someone lie if the truthis on his side? Obviously the real facts, even as established bycapitalist research, do not paint a bad enough picture to justify areturn to exploitation and all its horror and misery.

Mass Murders

Part One opens with Stalin's portrait superimposed upon drawings of skeletons and skulls, and then upon mass graves. A Sovietarcheologist describes the murders as though he witnessed them.However, there has been no independent study of these mass gravesnear Minsk, in a part of Byelorusssia (one of the USSR's republics,now the independent state of Belarus) which was the scene of literallymillions of murders by the Nazis in 1941-44. In other words: there isno evidence that these killings were not Nazi killings.

 The book mentions the very similar mass graves uncovered by theNazis in 1943 in Vinnitsa, in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, which werecertainly either mainly or totally of Nazi victims. The only source forthis conclusion -- that the victims were killed by the Soviets -- is aNazi propaganda report, which is contradicted by post-war evidence.A German soldier swore to both American and Soviet interrogators in1945 that these were graves of Nazi victims whom he saw the Naziskill; but this well-known source is never even mentioned. The factthat the Soviets have recently "admitted" these were victims of Stalin's time suggests that they may be doing the same with theseother mass graves.

 The point here is not that there were not many killings during the`30s -- there were -- but that these anti- Communist Soviet andWestern writers attribute these mass murders to Stalin without theevidence they would unquestionably demand if, say, somebody werealleging they were done by Americans.

Stalin's `School Friend'

 The main form of distortion in the film and book is the dishonest useof evidence. For example, the narrator tells us a "school friend" saidof young Stalin: "To gain victory and be feared was triumph for him";"he was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will."Later, we are told that Stalin told a `friend" at the funeral of his firstwife in 1909 that "this creature softened my heart of stone." With herdied my last warm feelings for people." This "friend" was JosephIremashvili, who later became a Nazi and published his book in Berlinin 1932. Once again, a Nazi source is used without admitting it.

Stalin a Police Informer"

 The narrator tells us that Stalin may have informed on his comrades

to the Tsarist secret police at times, whereupon a Soviet author,

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Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, appears and tells us Stalin really didinform. This is famous nonsense. Bourgeois historians have established thatAntonov-Ovseyenko's book is full of falsifications and exaggerations.1 Second, the film at this point is following Robert C. Tucker's 1973

biography of Stalin. 2 According to Tucker, the only allegations thatStalin ever informed on them were made by anti-CommunistMensheviks in exile in the `20s. Thought Tucker wants to believethem, he admits he can prove nothing, and goes on to show that alater book alleging Stalin's role as an informer was a complete fake(Tucker, pp. 108-114). The point here is that the film goes out of its way to make viewersaware of this allegation, despite the fact that its authors know thereis no evidence for it whatsoever. The accompanying book dismissesthe whole "informer" matter as rumors in a single sentence.

The Bolshevik Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly

 This is termed an attack on democracy. We are not told that theBolsheviks had been elected to a majority of the Soviets in Petrogradand other cities by October 1917, and had the second largestdelegation to the Assembly; that the Socialist-Revolutionaries, theparty with the majority in the Assembly, had split, with the largestsection voting to support the Bolsheviks; or that, since the vote, theBolsheviks had seized state power and had given the land to thepeasants and had promised peace -- the major peasant demands.

E. H. Carr, the eminent British bourgeois historian of the RussianRevolution, makes it clear that the Assembly did not in fact expressthe will of the population and that, if any one group did, it was theBolsheviks. 3 The larger point here, though, is the equation of elections, held undercapitalist domination of the mass media, the schools, churches, andgovernment, with "democracy." In fact, at best such elections arethe attributes of capitalist dictatorship. No act, however arrived at,can be considered "democratic" unless it suits the interest of themass of the population. The Bolshevik victory, working-class power,an end to the bosses' rule, to the murderous war, and giving the landto the peasants and the factories to the working class, was the mostdemocratic act imaginable!

Stalin in Tsaritsyn

 This is not even mentioned in the accompanying book, but is takenfrom Tucker, who interprets it as evidence of Stalin's envy of Trotsky.In fact, Stalin's actions in dismissing the Tsarist Generals in whom Trotsky had confidence, and replacing them with communistcommanders like Voroshilov and Frunze, saved the day, and was the

principle behind the military feud with Trotsky, here as elsewhere farto the right of Stalin. 4

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Stalin in Georgia and Lenin's Testament 

 These stories follow the Soviet revisionist line of glorifying anythingLenin ever said. The Georgia affair had to do with Stalin's andOrdzhonikidze's hostility to Georgian nationalists, and Lenin's desire

to placate them. Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were both of them of Georgian nationality themselves, and had spent years organizingworkers in Georgia, largely against nationalists such as these. Thiswas a principled disagreement in which Lenin, in desiring to placatethe nationalists, was wrong. We are not told that, in his Testament ,Lenin attacked, not merely Stalin, but Trotsky, Bukharin, and virtuallyeveryone in the Soviet leadership. 5

Stalin Stacks the Party?

 The final major falsehood concerns the way in which Stalin becamethe main leader in the Party after Lenin's death. Here the seriesadopts the line made famous by Trotsky: that Stalin had used hisposition as General Secretary to "stack" the Party in his favor:"By controlling appointments within the Party, Stalin graduallyacquired greater real power than his rivals. A country-wide network of Party members owing allegiance only to Stalin lay at the end of thetelephone."Nadyezhda Yoffe, daughter of one of Trotsky's most loyal allies, andEsteban Volkov, Trotsky's own grandson, are quoted on this point, aswell as Lewin.

 This elitist position treats workers as idiots. Lewin says openly thatStalin's victory depended upon his control of the uneducated workersin the Party "because he has below a mass of people who don'tunderstand what it's all about, listen to what they were told." It isworthy of any capitalist, and exposes Trotsky, as well as Lewin andthe producers of the film. But Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (later a Nazicollaborator, but a Stalin supporter in the `20s) and a worker, Yelizaveta Tyomkina, are quoted as saying that they thought Stalinthe best of the leaders. Even Stephen Cohen's very anti-Stalin bookadmits that Stalin won the allegiance of party activists and his victorycannot be attributed to his "stacking" the Party. 6 Cohen isinterviewed and attacks Stalin several times in the film, but is notquoted here.Part One ends at the beginning of the collectivization movement,caused by the utter failure of capitalist methods (in the form of theNew Economic Policy, NEP) to provide a decent standard of living forthe workers plus the funds to industrialize.

Notes

1. See Leo van Rossum, "A. Antonov- Ovseyenko's Book on Stalin: Is It

Reliable? A Note," Soviet Studies, July 1984, pp. 445-7. Back. 

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2. Stalin as Revolutionary 1879- 1929. This work is a "psychohistory,"full of unsubstantiated psychological guesswork, a completely invalidhistorical procedure even by bourgeois capitalist standards -- exceptwhen applied to Stalin, apparently! It is so poorly regarded by otherscholars that the second volume took twenty years to appear. See

the review of this shoddy work in PL Magazine, Vol . 10, No. 4 (July,1976), pp. 58-73, "The Name and the Game of the Anti- Stalinists."Back.3. E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I, Chapter 5. A White Russianémigré noted a year later that "The Constituent Assembly wasblamed more than the Bolsheviks who dispersed it." Car concludesthat "it was one more demonstration of the lack of any solid basis, orany broad popular support, in Russia for the institutions andprinciples of bourgeois democracy." (p. 130) Back. 4. For a thorough discussion see John Erickson, The Soviet HighCommand. New York: St Martin's Press, 1961. Back.5. Under the influence of his final illness, cut off from all activity,Lenin wrote and did things he had never done before. The essays hewrote at this time advocate the promotion of capitalist relations. AsPyatakov, a Politburo member, said later, the party leadershipregarded all this as uncharacteristic of Lenin. They even considerednot printing his final essays at all! Back.6. Steven F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York,1973), pp. 325-28. This book is also critically reviewed in the PLMagazine review published in 1976; see the citation in note 2 above.Back.

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