Not long ago I read "The Unknown Stalin" by Roy Medvedev and his brother.  Remember Roy?  He is the bourgeois agent who wrote one of the 3 most infamous anti-Stalin tirades of the Cold War era entitled "Let History Judge" which is found in every bourgeois public library and is a veritable cesspool of accusations and slanders of Stalin’s leadership.  Well, it appears that as a result of developments in the fSU since 1991 and hard confrontations with reality Roy has had a near epiphany resembling that which Paul experienced on the road to Damascus.  Apparently a degree of realism is slowly superseding ideology because we find in that work comments such as the following which don’t fit the Medvedev mold to say the least.  Keep in mind ladies and gentlemen that these words are coming from one of the most prominent of all anti-Stalin haters.  That which follows is not what I expected to find therein and Roy would be wise not to revert to his former personna.  Maybe his future works will continue in this vein, who knows, but for now let’s relish his enlightenment.
 

         If Stalin's personal archive had not been destroyed, selected items certainly would have surfaced and been used to support the moves to rehabilitate Stalin in 1965.
     Medvedev, Roy & Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 101
 

         Lenin's life and activity can be studied comprehensively, but in the case of Stalin the situation is unfortunately quite different.  No comparable archive exists, nor will it ever be possible to re-create one in the future, since a significant portion of Stalin's papers were deliberately destroyed by his political heirs, including a large number of documents and a considerable part of his personal archive.  [I WONDER WHY THE KHRUSHCHOVITES AND OTHERS WOULD DO THAT]
     p. 65
 

         Stalin's own contributions to the whole discussion [of keeping the nationalities together] have never been made public and still remain inaccessible in a secret Stalin fond in the Presidential Archive.  Particularly after 1991 there has apparently been a reluctance to reveal how well Stalin understood the potential danger of disintegration, given certain
constitutional preconditions.  He was less optimistic than others about the spread of revolution in the West, believing on the contrary that there was a need to make preparations in order to be in a position to repel aggression.
     p. 267
 

         In the first months of 1935,...Stalin tried to restore something of the liberal atmosphere of mid-1934.
     p. 284
 

         Historians have long been aware of the disagreement between Lenin and Stalin over the first constitution of the USSR, but the dispute needs to be freshly examined because recent events have made it possible for us to assess the details more objectively.  Most previous accounts of this conflict have questioned Stalin's skepticism about the durability
of a "union" based on the "solidarity of the workers" (i.e. Party discipline), and various authors have argued that his insistence on the need for tough central power to hold the entire structure together was wrong.  Today, a decade after the surprisingly rapid collapse of the Soviet Union, it can be argued that Lenin was the one who was politically shortsighted when he proposed a less restrictive first constitution for the Soviet Union.
     p. 263
 

         Analyzing the events of the pre-war period today, it does seem clear that the strictly centralized economy, which played such a crucial role in the rapid industrialization of the country, would never have been possible if Lenin's model for the Union had been adopted.  Lenin even went so far as to oppose a centrally directed general transport system.  And if instead of the USSR with its "autonomous" and "Union" republics (the latter distinguished by a formal right to secede), an extended Russian Federation had been established as originally envisaged by Stalin, this certainly would have led to an even more rapid economic, political, and ethnic integration of the country.  Along with an accelerated process of Russification, there could have been the genuine birth of a "Soviet people" that paid much less heed to ethnicity, rather like the experience of the United States.
     p. 268
 

         In the course of 70 years the process of ethnic integration was strongest in the central regions of the USSR, above all in Moscow and Leningrad.  There was also a considerable degree of integration in Kiev, Minsk, Tbilisi, Baku, Tashkent, and Kharkov.  If the USSR had continued to exist for another 40-50 years, "the Soviets" would have become as much a reality as "the Americans."
     p. 269
 

         According to Sudoplatov, who at that time headed one of the departments of the MGB, Stalin was extremely critical of the "Doctors' plot" case as prepared by Ryumin, regarding it as primitive and unconvincing.  Ryumin was removed on Stalin's orders and transferred to reserve duty on 14 November 1952.
     p. 32
 

         Stalin always had cash, piled up and packets in his desk drawers and cupboards.  He never had any need for cash nor did he think it necessary to put it in a safe.  Stalin received a salary for each of his 10 official positions (Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo, deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and of the Russian Republic, deputy of the Moscow Soviet, member of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet, Supreme Commander in Chief, member of the Central Committee, and, until 1947, Minister of Defense).  In the Soviet Union at that time, it was normal practice for salaries to be paid in cash twice a month.  As the envelopes with bank notes regularly arrived, he would put them away in his desk or cupboard  without even bothering to open them.  Occasionally he gave large sums to his daughter Svetlana or to other relatives who sometimes visited the dacha, and he also sent money to the widow of his eldest son Yakov, who had died as a prisoner of war; she lived with her daughter, Stalin's first grandchild, who had been born in 1938.  There were also stories of gifts being sent to childhood friends in Georgia.
     p. 91
 

         But some former prisoners began to write memoirs or works of fiction about the camps and the repressions.  The first were Solzhenitsyn in Ryazan, Shalamov in Moscow and Yevgeny Ginsburg in Lvov.
     p. 118
 

         According to the historian Antonov-Ovseenko, author of, Stalin and his Time, Stalin was coarse and cynical about his mother and gave orders for her to be constantly watched, assigning that task to two trusted female communists.  Although he refers to the testimony of several Georgian Bolsheviks and their relatives, this is nevertheless a perfect
example of pure invention.
     p. 310
 

         REMEMBER HOW MANY TIMES WE WERE TOLD STALIN WAS TRYING TO GET RID OF HIS POLITICAL OPPONENTS.  THE FOLLOWING 3 EXCERPTS SHOWS HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD BUKHARIN AS LATE AS DEC. 1936 AND THIS IS AFTER THE REVELATIONS OF THE ZINOVIEV/KAMENEV TRIAL.
 

         At the end of November 1936 a group of strangers arrived at his door from the housekeeping department of the Kremlin.  Bukharin was sure that they had come to do a search, which in those months would not have been unusual, even in a Kremlin apartment.  But in fact it was worse; they had brought Bukharin an order to vacate the Kremlin.  He got extremely upset and was at a total loss to know what to do.  He immediately started thinking about his enormous collection of books and personal papers.  How could he transport them and where?  At that moment the internal Kremlin telephone suddenly rang.  It was Stalin.  "So, how are things with you, Nikolai?" as though everything were perfectly normal.  Bukharin did not know how to reply, and after a pause said that he was being served an eviction notice.  Without asking anything further, Stalin exclaimed in a loud voice, "Tell them all to go to the devil."  Hearing that, the uninvited guests beat a hasty retreat.
     p. 290
 

         ...On 4 December 1936 Stalin convened a plenum of the Central Committee in the Kremlin, prohibiting any mention of it in the press....  The plenum approved the final text of the USSR Constitution and heard a report from Yezhov on the activities of the "anti-Soviet Trotskyist and Right organizations."  Yezhov, joined by several other speakers, demanded that Bukharin and Rykov be expelled from the Party and their case handed over to the NKVD.  Bukharin tried to defend himself, categorically denying all the accusations that had been made against him.  Stalin spoke cautiously, but said that although it was impossible simply to believe Bukharin, there had to be more substantial evidence.  Arrangements were
made for a confrontation to take place on 7 Dec 1936 during an interval between sessions of the plenum.  On one side there were Pyatakov, Radek, Kulikov, Sosnovsky, and several other prisoners, all of whom had implicated Bukharin.  On the other side there was Bukharin, who was given the opportunity to refute their accusations.  Questions were asked by Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Andreev, Ordzhonikidze, and Zhdanov.  At the evening session of the plenum Stalin reported that he had not found the statements of all the accusers to be convincing.  Therefore he proposed that they "consider the question of Rykov and Bukharin to be unfinished and postpone a decision until the next plenum."
     p. 290
 

         According to Larina [Bukharin’s wife], whom I often met in the 1970s, she and her husband went together to Red Square on 7 Nov. 1936 for the celebration of the 19th anniversary of the October Revolution....  A young Red Army soldier saluted and said: "Comrade Bukharin, Comrade Stalin asked me to inform you that you are not in the right place and he requests that you come up to the platform."...
     p. 289
 

         It was Khrushchov in his February 1956 "secret speech" at the 20th Party Congress who first told the story of Stalin's sudden depression during the first days of the war, claiming that he had relinquished the leadership of the country....
         Khrushchov himself was in Kiev at the beginning of the war and could have had little first-hand knowledge of what was actually taking place in the Kremlin....
         This story--that Stalin gave up the leadership during the first days of the war--has been repeated by quite a few reputable authors, citing Khrushchov as their source.  The power crisis in the Kremlin during the first week of the war also became the subject of several works of fiction.  Biographies of Stalin published in the West have repeated the table, often with additional embellishment.  In the well-illustrated biography of Stalin by Jonathan Lewis and Philip Whitehead, published in Britain and United States in 1990 and used as the basis for a television series, they describe events of 22 June 1941 has established fact without making any reference to Khrushchov or Beria:
         "Stalin himself was prostrate.  For a week he rarely emerged from his villa at Kuntsevo.  His name disappeared from newspapers.  For 10 days the Soviet Union was leaderless....  On 1 July Stalin pulled himself together."
         Alan Bullock, in his dual biography of Hitler and Stalin published in 1991, also asserts as fact the allegation that Stalin "suffered some kind of breakdown" and that there are "no orders or other documents signed by Stalin from 23 to 30 June."  Bullock also repeats the story that members of the Politburo discussed the possibility of arresting Stalin.  Even though the whole episode is a complete fabrication, it nevertheless has appeared in encyclopedias and even in such an authoritative work as the, Oxford Encyclopedia of the Second World War published in 1995.  But one has only to read the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov, where Stalin's activities, orders, and directives during the first days of the war are well documented, in order to become convinced that the story is false....
         At the beginning of the 1990s the visitors' book from Stalin's Kremlin office covering the years 1924-53 was discovered in the Politburo archive.  These records were kept by Stalin's junior secretaries in Stalin's office.  These rather dry documents are of enormous interest to students of Soviet history, and were published in, chronological order with commentaries and explanatory notes by the journal Istorichesky Arkhiv during the years 1994-97....
         The visitors' book makes it clear that on 22 June, the day that the war began, the first to appear in Stalin's office at 5:45 a.m. were Molotov, Beria, Timoshenko, Mekhlis, and Zhukov.  About two hours later the gathering was joined by Malenkov, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, and Vyshinsky.  In the course of the day a large number of senior military, state and Party figures came and went.  Meetings went on without interruption for 11 hours.  It is known that more than 20 different decrees and orders were issued that day, including the text of the appeal to the Soviet people, drafted collectively and read out on the radio by Molotov.  Stalin, who had not slept the night before, left earlier in the evening to have a short rest at the Kuntsevo dacha, only 15 minutes' drive from the Kremlin.  But he was unable to sleep and returned to the Kremlin at 3 a.m. on 23 June in order to consult with military leaders and members of the Politburo.  Meetings continued in the afternoon.  Voroshilov, Merkulov, Beria, and General Vatutin (deputizing for Zhukov who had flown to the southern front) finally left Stalin's office at 1:45 a.m. on 24 June....
         Activity during the next days was just as strenuous.  On 26th June Stalin worked in the Kremlin from midday to midnight and received 28 visitors, mainly military leaders and members of the government.  The largest number of meetings took place on Friday 27 June with 30 people coming into the office. The following day, 28 June, was similar, with the final meetings coming to an end after midnight.  Stalin did not go to his Kremlin office on the Sunday; however, the assertion by two biographers, Radzinsky and Volkogonov, that this was the day Stalin fled and shut himself up in the dacha hardly corresponds to what actually happened.  Both authors have rather unreliably based their conclusions on the
fact that there are no entries in the Kremlin office visitors' book for 29 and 30 June.  But according to Marshal Zhukov, "on the 29th Stalin came to the Stavka at the Commissariat for Defense twice and on both occasions was scathing about the strategic situation that was unfolding in the west."  On 30 June Stalin convoked a meeting of the Politburo at the dacha at which it was decided to set up the State Defense Committee (GKO)....
         Thus Stalin did not abandon the leadership of the country during the first days of the war, although he did push aside a large number of his Party colleagues, convinced that collective Party leadership would only have been a hindrance in wartime conditions....
         If one looks at all Stalin's actions and the military decisions that were taken during the first days of the war, with hindsight it is perfectly possible to come to the conclusion that given the intensity and the power of the blow inflicted on the USSR by the German army and its allies, whose forces taken together amounted to almost 200 divisions, the tactical decision to keep the main forces of the Soviet army 200-300 kilometers from the border was absolutely correct.  It was this that made it possible to carry out local counterattacks and on 26th June, on Stalin's orders, to create a new reserve front using the 5th Army.  Soon after that a new third defense line was established.  The German army continued to advance but only at the price of very heavy losses.
    p. 241-245
 

         ...Stalin was a thinking, calculating, hard-working man possessed of an iron will and a considerable intellect; undoubtedly he was a patriot, concerned to uphold historic Russian statehood.
     p. 8
 

         Nevertheless it must be admitted that Stalin's contribution to the linguistics debate had on the whole a positive affect.
     p. 218
 

         After Stalin, increasingly incompetent figures came to power in the Soviet Union, sometimes entirely by chance.  Although the economic and military strength of the USSR continued to grow, it was largely inertia that preserved political unity, based on the strength of the early foundations.  Not a single ruler of the USSR after Stalin's death contributed anything of substance to these foundations.  [RIGHT ON ROY.  I NEVER THOUGHT I WOULD SAY THAT TO MEDVEDEV]
     p. 8
 

         THE CRYPTO-FASCIST BUSHITES WHO WARP SCIENCE ACCORDING TO POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY SHOULD FOLLOW STALIN’S WISE COURSE OUTLINED NEXT.

         In 1991-93 two researchers from the Institute of History and the Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology, Yesakov and Rossiyanov, found the original document in the archives and published an analysis of what Stalin had written.  It should be noted that Stalin did a good job as an editor, improving Lysenko's text, modifying the stridency and softening the anti-Western tone, and he also removed the false dichotomy between Soviet and Western science....  Stalin removed the word "Soviet" from the title of the report [which was On the Situation in Soviet Biological Science]; in his view, "On the Situation in the Biological Sciences" was a more correct formulation of the subject in question.  All 49 pages had been examined meticulously.  He struck out the second section of the report, "The False Basis of Bourgeois Biology," and where Lysenko had claimed that "any science is based on class," Stalin wrote: "ha, ha, ha...and mathematics?  and Darwin?"....
         Throughout the text, Stalin crossed out the term "bourgeois."  For example, "bourgeois world view" became "idealist world view"; "bourgeois genetics" became "reactionary genetics."
         ...Stalin's changes and additions to the text signaled a decisive departure from the doctrine that had dominated all the debates during the 1920s and 1930s--that science was based on class.  He clearly had been influenced by the enormous advances in nuclear physics in the United States and Britain as well as the subsequent creation of the atomic
bomb.  By the end of the war Stalin had come to realize that progress in science and technology was less a matter of ideology than a question of substantial material support for scientists.
     p. 195
 

         SQUARING THESE COMMENTS WITH WHAT MEDVEDEV SAID ABOUT STALIN IN THE 1960’S IS A REAL CHALLENGE IN LIGHT OF THE FACT THAT MANY ARE DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED TO PRIOR ALLEGATIONS.  HOPEFULLY MEDVEDEV WILL CONTINUE HIS EVOLUTION TOWARD A FAR MORE REALISTIC DESCRIPTION OF THE SOVIET ERA AND PRODUCE EVEN MORE ACCURATE INFORMATION.  ONLY TIME WILL TELL.

8/10/06