STALIN WAS ABRUPT BUT FAIR
 
 
In your opinion, did Stalin have negative features?
            He was by character an abrupt person, but at the same time fair.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 214
 
            Stalin and his system were apparently genuinely popular; he was an excellent father figure for tens of millions of his subjects, strict but fair and wise.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 14
 
 
STALIN WILL EVENTUALLY BE REHABILITATED AND HONORED BY THE SOVIET PEOPLE
 
            In time Stalin will be rehabilitated in history.  There will be a Stalin Museum in Moscow.  Without fail!  By popular demand.
            The role of Stalin was tremendous.  I do not doubt that his name will rise again and duly win a glorious place in history.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 215
 
            Molotov remarked that, "Stalin will be rehabilitated, needless to say."
Naumov and Brent. Stalin's Last Crime. New York: HarperCollins, c2003, p. 335
 
STALIN WAS NOT SIGNIFICANTLY OPPOSED AT THE 17TH PARTY CONGRESS
 
CHUEV:  I have a question about the 17th Party Congress.  Is it true that Stalin received fewer votes than Kirov at the elections to the Central Committee?
MOLOTOV:  No.  How can they say such things?... 
            ...I am sure that at every election to the Central Committee, one our two votes went against Stalin.  Enemies were always present....  Kirov was unsuitable as a speaker of the highest rank.  He was one of several secretaries, a tremendous speaker at mass meetings, but that's it.  Kirov reported everything to Stalin, in detail.  I believe that Kirov acted correctly.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 218
 
            Similarly, the belief that 282 delegates (or sometimes 123 or 125 or 2-4 or 5-6 or 3, depending on the rumor) voted against Stalin at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 has been questioned by recent research.  A special investigation by Central Committee staff in 1989 concluded that 166 ballots were indeed missing, but because the numbers of ballots printed and delegates voting are unknown, "it is impossible definitely to confirm" how many, if any, voted against Stalin.  A 1960 investigation concluded that 166 delegates simply "did not take part in the voting."
            [Footnote]: The whole story about votes against Stalin comes from a single testimony, that of Verkhovykh in 1960.  Other 1934 congress participants have contradicted his claim.  Anastas Mikoyan's "confirmation" of the rigged voting is hardly that; he reports rumors he heard in the 1950s, although he was present at the 1934 Congress. 
            ...Continued release of documents from the 1930s may also weaken the tradition of writing history by anecdote.
Nove, Alec, Ed. The Stalin Phenomenon. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993, p. 141
 
            [Footnote]: The evidence on the number of ballots cast against Stalin in the election of the Central Committee is unsatisfactory.  Both Medvedev and Antonov-Ovseenko make reference to the testimony of a supposed member of the election commission of the 17th Party Congress, Verkhovykh.  At least it can be confirmed from the published record of the Congress that he was a delegate and hence eligible to serve on this commission.  Depending on which account you prefer, he said that there were either 270 or 292 votes against Stalin.  But Antonov-Ovseenko elaborates on this report in such a way as to undermine the credibility of whatever source leaked information to the dissident historians. 
            First, he maintains that Verkhovykh, in oral testimony, recalled that the correct number was not 292, but 289. 
            Second, and more important, he claims that Verkhovykh refused to give an official inquiry any written statement. 
            Finally, and most unsettling, Antonov-Ovseenko describes the alleged refusal of another supposed member of the electoral commission in 1934 to acknowledge that there were more than 'two or three' votes against Stalin.  Apart from these numbers, the trouble with this story is that the person in question, one Napoleon Andriasian, could not have served on the mandate commission of the Congress of 1934 because, according to the record of that event, he was not a delegate.
            Another version of Stalin's alleged troubles with this election maintains that he was elected only because the Central Committee was expanded at the last minute.  This must be incorrect, because the size of the Committee was in fact unchanged with respect to full (not candidate) numbers.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 359
 
KIROV WAS NOT MORE POPULAR THAN STALIN OR QUALIFIED TO REPLACE HIM
 
CHUEV:  And Kirov was not forgiven for enjoying greater popularity than Stalin.
MOLOTOV:  Absurd!  Just look up the stenographic records of the congresses.  Who enjoyed greater authority, Kirov or Stalin?  Just look at Kirov's speeches and collections of articles--what's there?  "It is difficult to imagine a figure as gigantic as Stalin"--I quote from memory what Kirov said.  But where are there political signs indicating in him the character of a top leader?  He had no such aspirations.  He was not that kind of person....  Let them say what they will, but what is valuable in Kirov from a political point of view?  Just cite me his ideas that are distinguished by their value or utility--nowhere!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 219
 
            ...if you say that Kirov was better, what do you know about Kirov, what did he accomplish?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 220
 
            A tenacious legend has been created that Kirov could have replaced Stalin.  But where are his theoretical works?...  He was capable of work but not in the leading roles.  I can tell you bluntly that he would not have been acknowledged as number 1, especially by the senior leaders.... 
            Kirov was a poor organizer, though he could work the masses rather well.  We all treated him fondly.  Stalin liked him.  I would say he was Stalin's favorite.  Khrushchev's casting aspersions on Stalin and insinuating that Stalin had Kirov assassinated--that was foul.
            I used to be friends with Kirov.  I can now recall that only Zhdanov received from Stalin the same kind of treatment that Kirov enjoyed.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 221
 
CHUEV:  Stalin is said to have been afraid that Kirov would replace him.
MOLOTOV:  That's absurd!  Why should he have been afraid of Kirov?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 222
 
            [Footnote]: We cannot admit the story, or rather stories, which have circulated ever since the 17th Congress that in the election to the Central Committee Stalin got fewer votes than anyone else.   The Socialist Courier, published in Paris by the Mensheviks, reported on February 25 that Stalin got fewer votes than two others, the most votes going to Kalinin.   Medvedev reports (page 156) the recollections of a delegate that 270 delegates voted against Stalin, as against only three who crossed out Kirov's name, and that Stalin was elected only because there were as many candidates as members to be elected.   But the story is suspect, since the alleged recollections show unfamiliarity with the voting procedures for the Central Committee.   The voting was secret, and ever since 1923 the announced results have not included the number of votes received by successful candidates.   Only one list was proposed.   Delegates could then show their disapproval by crossing out names on the ballot, and the candidate crossed out on at least half of them would fail of election.   There were about 1200 people voting, and for anyone to be disqualified his name would have had to be crossed out on some 600 ballots rather than 270.   There is every reason to believe that the election of the Central Committee was unanimous.   Medvedev's story is weakened further, as he acknowledges, by the fact that the Central Committee members who were elected comprised Stalin's most recent favorites, such as Yezhov.   Why should a hitherto obscure choice of the dictator get more votes in the election than he himself?   But there are also good reasons why someone would have been interested in spreading rumors of Kirov's popularity with the delegates and dealing a setback to Stalin.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 374
 
The intention of a group of delegates to replace Stalin by Kirov had been affirmed by certain participants of the 17th Congress and denied by others, while the almost 300 votes reportedly opposed to Stalin's membership in the Central Committee cannot be confirmed by documentary evidence.  The re-examination of the ballots showed that only three delegates had opposed Stalin's election.  To be sure, it is impossible to establish today if the documents were not falsified.  But if they were and if Stalin was eager to eliminate embarrassing witnesses, he did not proceed thoroughly, since at least three members of the electoral commission survived the "Great Purge" to give rather contradictory testimonies of the vote at the beginning of the 1960s.
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 6
 
               At the time of the 17th Congress of the Party there was great euphoria because of the First Five-Year Plan.  In fact for this reason this Congress was named the 'Congress of the Victories' by the people.  Molotov's, Stalin's and, if I am not being immodest, my presentation was also very well received by the participants.  Today the critics make an all-out effort to discredit the 17th Congress.  They also concocted the story that 300 delegates voted against Stalin.  I suppose that this kind of gossip was necessary so that one could say that Stalin later took revenge for this.  They also generated the false story that Kaganovich, at the behest of the presidium of the Congress, interfered with work of the Counting Committee to misreport the votes against Stalin. 
THUS SPAKE KAGANOVICH by Feliks Chuyev, 1992
 
TUKHACHEVSKY WAS NOT QUALIFIED TO LEAD THE GOVT
 
CHUEV:  ...if a palace revolution had been carried out in 1937 it would have placed at the head of the country intelligent people such as Tukhachevsky; they would have coped both with the country and with fascism.
MOLOTOV:  That is absurd.  Where is the evidence that Tukhachevsky could do something useful for the country... . Where is it?  What kind of data?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 219
 
            The point is, Tukhachevsky did not know where he was going.  It seems to me that he would have veered to the right.  He was closer to Khrushchev.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 220
 
 
ZHDANOV WAS SECOND TO KIROV AFTER STALIN
 
            After Kirov Stalin liked Zhdanov best.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 222
 
            ...Stalin valued Zhdanov above everyone else.  Stalin held him in exceptionally high esteem.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 232
 
 
MANY BOLSHEVIKS BEGAN THINKING LIKE GENTRY ACCORDING TO MOLOTOV
 
            Of course, I would say that Stalin never completely trusted him [Voroshilov].  Why?  Well, all of us had our weaknesses and had acquired some ways of the gentry.  We were seduced into that lifestyle, there is no denying that.  Everything was provided for us, all our wishes were attended to.  As a result, Voroshilov started to behave like gentry.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 225
 
BOLSHEVIKS HAD NO THEORETICIANS AFTER LENIN
 
            Generally speaking, we had few theoreticians.  Genuine Bolshevik theoreticians were not easy to find.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 228
 
ONLY MOLOTOV AND KAGANOVICH REMAINED LOYAL TO STALIN TO THE END
 
Did the Mensheviks have more theoreticians?
            The Mensheviks were nothing but theoreticians....
            Voroshilov was weak as a theoretician.  Like Kalinin, he leaned a little to the right....  Twenty years have gone by since Stalin died.  And who has remained loyal to Stalin throughout?  Kaganovich and myself.  I know of no one else.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 228
 
            The Jews did not like Kaganovich.  They would rather have had a more intellectual Jew in the Politburo.  Even today Kaganovich is such an ardent supporter of Stalin that no one would dare to say anything derogatory about Stalin in his presence.  Among all of us he was a 200 percent Stalinist.
            He felt I didn't praise Stalin well enough....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 229
 
            As we review these events, it becomes clear that Khrushchev was not, as he represented himself in his 1956 denunciation of Stalin, a moralist horrified by transgressions against a socialist ideal but the leader in a political struggle for power within the Party between the Khrushchev & Molotov groupings, and this conflict had been going at least since Stalin's death.  In 1956, therefore, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin, he did so as the leader of an anti--Stalin faction in the Party.  The policies of this faction soon appeared.  They were those of liberal, anti-socialist "reforms."  Molotov, an old Bolshevik who had worked under tsarist terror, had a long record of devotion to the working class and to socialism.  He had supported Stalin's plans for socialist industrialization, and had for many years at Party Congresses, along with Kaganovich, made the main reports on this subject.  The "everything new" that Molotov opposed were Khrushchev's "reforms."
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 123
 
            "I [Kaganovich] loved Stalin, and he was something worth loving--he was a great Marxist....  We should be proud of him, every Communist should be proud of him....  We have uncrowned Stalin and without realizing it we have uncrowned 30 years of our own work."
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press, 1994, p. 317
 
 
MOLOTOV ASSESSES THE MAJOR PARTY LEADERS
 
            Khrushchev was absolutely a reactionary sort of person.  He merely hitched himself to the Communist party.  He certainly didn't believe in any kind of communism. 
            Bulganin didn't really represent anything.  He never took a firm stand either for or against anything.  He drifted along with the wind, wherever it blew. 
            Beria, to my mind, was not one of us.  He crept into the party with ulterior motives.                      Malenkov was a capable functionary.  ...I don't think Malenkov was very interested in issues of theory and problems of communism. 
            Khrushchev was somewhat interested in these questions, though in a retrograde sense, in order to find out when and how things could be reversed.
            ...Khrushchev wasn't interested in ideas.  He couldn't tell one from the other.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 232-234
 
            A man [Mikoyan] of very few principles, unrestrained and easily influenced by others....  He began to be closely associated with Khrushchev after Stalin's death.  That relationship had not existed before.  It only developed in Khrushchev's later years.  Khrushchev's best friends had been Malenkov and Beria.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 365
 
CHUEV:  They say that Mikoyan suggested to Khrushchev that Stalin be toppled.
MOLOTOV:  I don't rule that out.  Khrushchov’s champions could only by proud of him.  The true communists wouldn’t be among that crowd.... That Mikoyan himself was rotten through and through.
            Mikoyan played a vile role.  He was a chameleon.  He kept adapting himself to the point of embarrassment.  Stalin was not overly fond of him either....  He negotiated good deals, worked perseveringly--he was a very industrious person.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 366
 
 
MOLOTOV IS THE ONE WHO REALLY SPOKE OF STALIN FROM THE HEART
 
CHUEV:  Avtorkhanov writes that "...the only one who was candid in his relations with Stalin was Molotov."
MOLOTOV:  Indeed, of the three who spoke at the funeral, I was the only one who spoke from a heart....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 235
 
STALIN LACKED CONFIDENCE IN THOSE AROUND HIM NEAR THE END
 
CHUEV:  I don't believe Khrushchev grieved over Stalin's death.
MOLOTOV:  No, he was extremely spiteful toward Stalin, and more so toward Beria.  At times Stalin would express scorn for Beria.  He wanted to have him removed.  Whom did he trust?  It's hard to say.  No one, I would say.  Khrushchev?  There's no way he would have trusted that one.  Bulganin was not the right sort.  I don't think one can say that Malenkov was close to Stalin either.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 235
 
COLLECTIVIZATION SOMETIMES REQUIRED HARSH METHODS OF PERSUASION
 
MOLOTOV:  On January 1, 1928, I had to go to Melitopol on the grain procurement drive.  In the Ukraine.  To extort grain.
CHUEV:  From the kulaks?
MOLOTOV:  From everyone who had grain.  Industrial workers and the army were in a desperate situation.  Grain was all in private hands, and the task was to seize it from them....  We took away the grain.  We paid them in cash, but of course at miserably low prices.  They gained nothing.  I told them that for the present the peasants had to give us grain on loan.  Industry had to be restored and the army maintained.
            ...All kinds of rather harsh methods of persuasion had to be applied.  We started with the kulak.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 241
 
            We never knew what they hid away, but often they did hold back stocks of grain.  "Come on!  Give it up!  Quick!"  Those drives were well warranted then.  To survive, the state needed the grain.  Otherwise it would crack up--it would be unable to maintain the army, the schools, construction, the elements most vital to the state.  So we pumped away.  Of course, we did not always succeed.  We were sitting targets for criticism.  They would say, Look, the center is demanding the impossible.  Such talk was rife.  Only the overwhelming authority of the center, with Stalin at the head, enabled us to fulfill the plans.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243
 
            But this does not mean that the proletarian state used no force against the kulaks and their agents, the saboteurs and wreckers who resorted to murder and terrorism to oppose the building of socialism and who wished to restore capitalism.  The dictatorship of the proletariat did exercise its dictatorship over the kulaks, over the minority of exploiters, in the wider interests of the majority of the Soviet people--the workers and peasants--in order to make sure that the vanquished capitalists would not come to power again.  The proletarian state exercised its dictatorship because that exactly is the specific purpose for which it does exist.  Would we not have complete justification for reproaching it if it did not perform this, one of its main functions?
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 176
 
 
MOLOTOV SAYS A TERRORIST ATTEMPT WAS MADE ON HIS LIFE IN 1932
 
            ...In 1932, after I had already been appointed chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, I went to Siberia to procure grain.
            There, apparently, an attempt on my life was made.  In a road accident we rolled over into a ditch.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 242
 
FAMINE WAS NOT CAUSED BY THE COMMUNIST LEADERSHIP
 
CHUEV:  Among writers, some say the famine of 1933 was deliberately organized by Stalin and the whole of your leadership.
MOLOTOV:  Enemies of communism say that!  They are enemies of communism!  People who are not politically aware, who are politically blind.
            ...If life does not improve, that's not socialism.  But even if the life of the people improves year to year over a long period but the foundations of socialism are not strengthened, a crack-up will be inevitable.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243
 
            This destruction of the productive forces had, of course, disastrous consequences: in 1932, there was a great famine, caused in part by the sabotage and destruction done by the kulaks.  But anti-Communists blame Stalin and the `forced collectivization' for the deaths caused by the criminal actions of the kulaks.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 79 [p. 66 on the NET]
 
            In 1931 and 1932, the Soviet Union was in the depth of the crisis, due to socio-economic upheavals, to desperate kulak resistance, to the little support that could be given to peasants in these crucial years of industrial investment, to the slow introduction of machines and to drought.
            Charles Bettelheim. L'Economie soviEtique (Paris: ƒditions Recueil Sirey, 1950), p. 82
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 93 [p. 78 on the NET]
 
            Recent evidence has indicated that part of the cause of the famine was an exceptionally low harvest in 1932, much lower than incorrect Soviet methods of calculation had suggested.  The documents included here or published elsewhere do not yet support the claim that the famine was deliberately produced by confiscating the harvest, or that it was directed especially against the peasants of the Ukraine.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 401
 
            In view of the importance of grain stocks to understanding the famine, we have searched Russian archives for evidence of Soviet planned and actual grain stocks in the early 1930s.  Our main sources were the Politburo protocols, including the ("special files," the highest secrecy level), and the papers of the agricultural collections committee Komzag, of the committee on commodity funds, and of Sovnarkom.  The Sovnarkom records include telegrams and correspondence of Kuibyshev, who was head of Gosplan, head of Komzag and the committee on reserves, and one of the deputy chairs of Komzag at that time.  We have not obtained access to the Politburo working papers in the Presidential Archive, to the files of the committee on reserves or to the relevant files in military archives.  But we have found enough information to be confident that this very a high figure for grain stocks is wrong and that Stalin did not have under his control huge amounts of grain, which could easily have been used to eliminate the famine.
Stalin, Grain Stocks and the Famine of 1932-1933 by R. W. Davies, M. B. Tauger, S.G.  Wheatcroft.Slavic Review, Volume 54, Issue 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 642-657.
 
            This is in response to Ms. Chernihivaka's note about the book of German letters and the reference to what she termed the "Ukrainian Famine" of the early 1930s.
            I would just like to point out that I and a number of other scholars have shown conclusively that the famine of 1931-1933 was by no means limited to Ukraine, was not a "man-made" or artificial famine in the sense that she and other devotees of the Ukrainian famine argument assert, and was not a genocide in any conventional sense of the term.  We have likewise shown that Mr. Conquest's book on the famine is replete with errors and inconsistencies and does not deserve to be considered a classic, but rather another expression of the Cold War.
            I would recommend to Ms. Chernihivaka the following publications regarding the 1931-1933 famine and some other famines as well.  I will begin with my own because I believe that these most directly relate to her question.  "The 1932 Harvest and the Soviet Famine of 1932-1933," and the "Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933."  These two articles show that the famine resulted directly from a famine harvest, a harvest that was much smaller than officially acknowledged, that this small harvest was in turn, the result of a complex of natural disasters that [with one small exception] no previous scholars have ever discussed or even mentioned.  The footnotes in the Carl Beck paper contain extensive citations from primary sources as well as Western and Soviet secondary sources, among others by Penner, Wheatcroft and Davies that further substantiate these points, and I urge interested readers to examine these works as well.
Ukrainian Famine by Mark Tauger. E-mail sent on April 16, 2002
 
            I am not a specialist on the Ukrainian famine but I am familiar with the recent research by several scholars on the matter, and think rather a lot of the deep and broad research that Mark Tauger has conducted over many years.
            That familiarity leads me to believe that there are no simple answers to this.  A "man-made" famine is not the same as a deliberate or "terror-famine".  A famine originally caused by crop failure and aggravated by poor policies is "man aggravated" but only partially "man-made".  Why in this field do we always insist on absolutes, especially categorical, binary and polemical ones?  True/false.  Good/evil.  Crop failure/Man made.
            Many questions have ambiguous answers.
 
1.  Why was the Ukraine sealed off by the Soviet authorities?
 
            Not necessarily to punish Ukrainians.  It was also done to prevent starving people from flocking into non-famine areas, putting pressure on scarce food supplies there, and thereby turning a regional disaster into a universal one.  This was also the original reason for the internal passport system, which was adopted in the first instance to prevent the movement of hungry and desperate people and, with them, the spread of famine.
 
2.  Why were foreign journalists, even Stalin apologists like Duranty, refused access to the famine areas?
 
            For the same reason that US journalists are no longer allowed into US combat zones (Gulf War, Afghanistan) since Vietnam.  No regime is anxious to take the chance on bad press if they can control the situation otherwise.
 
3.  Why was aid from other countries refused?
 
            Obviously to deny the "imperialists" a chance to trumpet the failure of socialism.  Certainly politics triumphed over humanitarianism.  Moreover, in the growing paranoia of the times (and based on experience in the Civil War) the regime believed that spies came along with relief administration.
 
4.  Why do I read and hear stories of families who tried to take supplies from other regions to help their extended families through the period having all foodstuffs confiscated as they crossed back into the famine regions?
 
            The regime believed, reasonably I think, that speculators were trying to take advantage of the disaster by buying up food in non-famine (but nevertheless food-short) regions, moving it to Ukraine, and reselling it at a higher price.  In true Bolshevik fashion, there was no nuanced approach to this, no distinguishing between families and speculators, and everybody was stopped.  As with point 1 above, regimes facing famine typically try to contain the disaster geographically.  This is not the same as intending to punish the victims.
 
5.  If it was a harvest failure, why was the burden of that failure not simply shared across the Soviet Union?
 
            It was.  No region had a lot of food in 1932-33.  Food was short and expensive everywhere.  Everybody was hungry.
 
            With the above suggestions, I do not mean to make excuses or apologies for the Stalinists.  Their conduct in this was erratic, incompetent, and cruel and millions of people suffered unimaginably and died as a result.  But it is too simple to explain everything with a "Bolsheviks were just evil people" explanation more suitable to children than scholars.  It was more complex than that.  Although the situation was aggravated in some ways by Bolshevik mistakes, their attempts to contain the famine, once it started, were not entirely stupid, nor were they necessarily gratuitously cruel.  The Stalinists did, by the way, eventually cut grain exports and did, by the way, send food relief to Ukraine and other areas.  It was too little too late, but there is no evidence (aside from constantly repeated assertions by some writers) that this was a deliberately inflicted "terror-famine."
 
6.  To deny the Jewish genocide quite rightly brings opprobrium.  Surely to deny the terror famine of 1932-33 ought to provoke the same response.
 
            This is a position that I personally find grotesque, insulting and at least shallow.  Nobody is denying the famine or the huge scale of suffering, (as holocaust-deniers do), least of all Tauger and other researchers who have spent much of their careers trying to bring this tragedy to light and give us a factual account of it.  Admittedly, what he and other scholars do is different from the work of journalists and polemicists who indiscriminately collect horror stories and layer them between repetitive statements about evil, piling it all up and calling it history.  A factual, careful account of horror in no way makes it less horrible.
            Ukrainian Famine by J. Arch Getty, E-mail sent on May 7, 2002
 
            "There is no evidence, it [1932-33 famine] was intentionally directed against Ukrainians," said Alexander Dallin of Stanford, the father of modern Sovietology.  "That would be totally out of keeping with what we know--it makes no sense."
 
            "I absolutely reject it," said Lynne Viola of SUNY--Binghamton, the first US historian to examine Moscow's Central State archive on collectivization.  "Why in god's name, would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?"
 
            "He's [Conquest] terrible at doing research," said veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College.  "He misuses sources, he twists everything."
 
            Which leaves us with a puzzle: Wouldn't one or two or 3.5 million famine-related deaths be enough to make an anti-Stalinist argument?  Why seize a wildly inflated figure that can't possibly be supported?  The answer tells much about the Ukrainian nationalist cause, and about those who abet it.
            "They're always looking to come up with a number bigger than 6 million," observed Eli Rosenbaum, general counsel for the World Jewish Congress.  "It makes the reader think: 'My God, it's worse than the Holocaust'."
IN SEARCH OF A SOVIET HOLOCAUST [A 55 Year Old Famine Feeds the Right] by Jeff Coplon. Village Voice, New York City, January 12, 1988
 
            The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead to the conclusion that even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine.  This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide.  The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.
            ...The data presented here provide a more precise measure of the consequences of collectivization and forced industrialization than has previously been available; if anything, these data show that the effects of those policies were worse than has been assumed.  They also, however, indicate that the famine was real, the result of failure of economic policy, of the “revolution from above,” rather than of a “successful” nationality policy against the Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.
            Tauger, Mark. “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review, Volume 50, Issue 1 (Spring, 1991), 70-89.
 
            Conquest replies,
            Perhaps I might add that my own analyses and descriptions of the terror-famine first appeared in the USSR in Moscow in Russian journals such as Voprosy Istorii and Novyi Mir, and that the long chapter printed in the latter was specifically about the famine in Ukraine and hence relied importantly on Ukrainian sources.
 
            Tauger replies,
            Mr. Conquest does not deal with these arguments.  He most nearly approaches in his assertion that in Ukraine and certain other areas “the entire crop was removed.”  Since the regime procured 4.7 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, much less than in any previous or subsequent year in the 1930’s, this would imply that the harvest in Ukraine was only on that order of magnitude or even less than my low estimate!   Obviously this could not have been the case or the death toll in Ukraine would have been not four million or five million but more than 20 million because the entire rural population would have been left without grain....
            I have yet to see any actual central directive ordering a blockade of Ukraine or the confiscation of food at the border.  The sources available are still too incomplete to reach any conclusion about this.
            Tauger, Mark & Robert Conquest.  Slavic Review, Volume 51, Issue 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 192-194.
 
            Tauger replies further,
            Robert Conquest’s second reply to my article does not settle in his favor the controversy between us over the causes of the 1933 famine.  On his initial points, I noted that the famine was worse in Ukraine and Kuban than elsewhere, in great part because those regions’ harvests were much smaller than previously known.  I rejected his evidence not because it was not “official” but because my research showed that it was incorrect.
            Conquest cites the Stalin decree of January 1933 in an attempt to validate Ukrainian memoir accounts, to discredit the archival sources I cited and to prove that the Soviet leadership focused the famine on Ukraine and Kuban.  The decree’s sanctions, however, do not match memoir accounts, none of which described peasants being returned to their villages by OGPU forces.  The experiences described in those accounts instead reflect enforcement of a September 1932 secret OGPU directive ordering confiscations of grain and flour to stop illegal trade.  Since this was applied throughout the country, the Ukrainian memoir accounts reflect general policy and not a focus on the Ukraine.
            Several new studies confirm my point that hundreds of thousands of peasants fled famine not only in Ukraine and Kuban, but also in Siberia, the Urals, the Volga basin, and elsewhere in 1932-1933.  Regional authorities tried to stop them and in November 1932 the Politburo began to prepare the passport system that soon imposed constraints on mobility nationwide.  The January decree was thus one of several measures taken at this time to control labor mobility, in this case to retain labor in the grain regions lest the 1933 harvest be even worse.  Its reference to northern regions suggests that it may even have been used to send peasants from those areas south to provide labor.  Neither the decree itself nor the scale of its enforcement are sufficient to prove that the famine was artificially imposed on Ukraine.
            ...Ukrainian eyewitness accounts, on the other hand, are misleading because very few peasants from other regions had the opportunity to escape from the USSR after World War II.   The Russian historian Kondrashin interviewed 617 famine survivors in the Volga region and explicitly refuted Conquest’s argument regarding the famine’s nationality focus.  According to these eyewitnesses, the famine was most severe in wheat and rye regions, in other words, in part a result of the small harvest.
            ...Both Russian and western scholars such as Kondrashin...and Alec Nove...now acknowledge that the 1932 harvest was much smaller than assumed and was an important factor in the famine.
            Tauger, Mark. Slavic Review, Volume 53, Issue 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 318-320.
 
FIGURES ON FAMINE DEATHS ARE ABSURD AND FAR TOO HIGH
 
CHUEV:  But nearly 12 million perished of hunger in 1933....
MOLOTOV:  The figures have not been substantiated.
CHUEV:  Not substantiated?
MOLOTOV:  No, no, not at all.  In those years I was out in the country on grain procurement trips.  Those things couldn't have just escaped me.  They simply couldn't.  I twice traveled to the Ukraine.  I visited Sychevo in the Urals and some places in Siberia.  Of course I saw nothing of the kind there.  Those allegations are absurd!  Absurd!  True, I did not have occasion to visit the Volga region....
            No, these figures are an exaggeration, though such deaths had been reported of course in some places.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 243
 
            What can one say about Conquest's affirmation of 6,500,000 `massacred' kulaks during the different phases of the collectivization? Only part of the 63,000 first category counter-revolutionaries were executed. The number of dead during deportations, largely due to famine and epidemics, was approximately 100,000. Between 1932 and 1940, we can estimate that 200,000 kulaks died in the colonies of natural causes.  The executions and these deaths took place during the greatest class struggle that the Russian countryside ever saw, a struggle that radically transformed a backward and primitive countryside. In this giant upheaval, 120 million peasants were pulled out of the Middle Ages, of illiteracy and obscurantism. It was the reactionary forces, who wanted to maintain exploitation and degrading and inhuman work and living conditions, who received the blows. Repressing the bourgeoisie and the reactionaries was absolutely necessary for collectivization to take place: only collective labor made socialist mechanization possible, thereby allowing the peasant masses to lead a free, proud and educated life. 
            Through their hatred of socialism, Western intellectuals spread Conquest's absurd lies about 6,500,000 `exterminated' kulaks. They took up the defence of bourgeois democracy, of imperialist democracy.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 98 [p. 82 on the NET]
 
            Lies about the collectivization have always been, for the bourgeoisie, powerful weapons in the psychological war against the Soviet Union. 
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 98 [p. 85 on the NET]
 
            The borders of the Ukraine were not even the same in 1926 and 1939. The Kuban Cossaks, between 2 and 3 million people, were registered as Ukrainian in 1926, but were reclassified as Russian at the end of the twenties. This new classification explains by itself 25 to 40 per cent of the `victims of the famine-genocide' calculated by Dushnyck--Mace.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 107 [p. 91 on the NET]
 
(Alec Nove)
            Additionally, the figures on famine-related deaths cannot be precise, for "definitional" reasons....  Ukrainian statistics show a very large decline in births in 1933-34, which could be ascribed to a sharp rise in abortions and also to the non-reporting of births of those who died in infancy.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 269
 
            Concerning the scale of the famine in 1932/33, we now have much better information on its chronology and regional coverage amongst the civilian registered population.  The level of excess mortality registered by the civilian population was in the order of 3 to 4 million... which is still much lower than the figures claimed by Conquest and Rosefielde and Medvedev.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 290
 
            The evidence presented to establish a case for deliberate genocide against Ukrainians during 1932-33, remains highly partisan, often deceitful, contradictory, and consequently highly suspect.  The materials commonly used can almost invariably be traced to right-wing sources, anti-Communist "experts," journalists or publications, as well as the highly partisan Ukrainian Nationalist political organizations.  An important role in the thesis of genocide is assumed by the number of famine deaths--obviously it is difficult to allege genocide unless deaths are in the multi-millions.  Here, the methodology of the famine-genocide theorists can at best be described as eclectic, unscientific; and the results, as politically manipulated guesstimates.
            A "landmark study" in the numbers game is the article "The Soviet Famine of 1932-1934," by Dana Dalrymple, published in Soviet Studies, January 1964.  According to historian Daniel Stone, Dalrymple's methodology consists of averaging "guesses by 20 Western journalists who visited the Soviet Union at the time, or spoke to Soviet emigres as much as two decades later.  He averages the 20 accounts which range from a low of one million deaths (New York Herald Tribune, 1933) to a high of 10 million deaths (New York World Telegram, 1933."
            As Professor Stone of the University of Winnipeg suggests, Dalrymple's method as no scientific validity; his "method" substitutes the art of newspaper clipping for the science of objective evidence gathering.  This becomes apparent when one discovers the totally unacceptable use of fraudulent material built into the attempt to develop sensational mortality figures for the famine.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 45
 
            While it is not possible to establish an exact number of casualties, we have seen that the guesstimates of famine-genocide writers have given a new meaning to the word hyperbole.  Their claims have been shown to be extreme exaggerations fabricated to strengthen their political allegations of genocide.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 74
 
            The scope of the hardships is chauvinistically restricted, distorted, and politically manipulated.  Other nationalities who suffered--Russians, Turkmen, Kazaks, Caucasus groups-- are usually ignored, or if mentioned at all are done so almost reluctantly in passing.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 99
 
            Dr. Hans Blumenfeld, writing in response to Ukrainian Nationalist allegations of Ukrainian genocide, draws on personal experience in describing the people who came to town in search of food:
            "They came not only from the Ukraine but in equal numbers from the Russian areas to our east.  This disproves the "fact" of anti-Ukrainian genocide parallel to Hitler's anti-semitic Holocaust.  To anyone familiar with the Soviet Union's desperate manpower shortage in those years, the notion that its leaders would deliberately reduce that scarce resource is absurd....  Up to the 1950s the most frequently quoted figure was 2 million [victims].  Only after it had been established that Hitler's holocaust had claimed 6 million [Jewish] victims, did anti-Soviet propaganda feel it necessary to top that figure by substituting the fantastic figure of 7 to 10 million...."
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 100
 
            Had the 1941 population of Soviet Ukraine consisted of the remnants and survivors of a mass multi-million holocaust of a few years previous, or if they had perceived the 1932-1933 famine as genocide, deliberately aimed at Ukrainians, then doubtless fascism would have met a far different reception; Soviet Ukrainians would have been as reluctant to defend the USSR as Jewish survivors would have been to defend Nazi Germany.
Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism. Toronto: Progress Books,1987, p. 102
 
KULAKS REFUSED TO HAND OVER THE GRAIN FOR TWO YEARS
 
            Back then our position was restriction of the kulak, not liquidation.  Not until the autumn of 1929, in October or November, did Stalin launch the slogan of liquidation of the kulaks as a class....  You see, we would say to the peasants that the grain was needed, neither the working-class nor the army could get along without it.  But the kulak would not hand it over.  What were we to do?  So, a year passed, then another, by which time the liquidation of the kulaks as a class had been prepared.  There was no other way.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 245
 
LENIN WOULD HAVE CARRIED OUT COLLECTIVIZATION THE SAME WAY
 
CHUEV:  Some argue that Lenin would have carried it through differently.
MOLOTOV:  They are opportunists.  They just don't understand.  They are obtuse.  They are unable to get to the heart of the matter.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 245
 
FOR SOCIALISM KOLKHOZES MUST EVOLVE INTO SOVKHOZES
 
            ...the kolkhozes [collective farms] must evolve so as heighten the very level of socialization, that is, to be transformed into sovkhozes [state farm's].  There is no other way.  That was stated by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 252
 
LIES DOMINATE NOWADAYS
 
            ...Nowadays you don't get the real facts handed to you on a silver platter.  They are mixed up and corrupted in every way, so to speak, and obscured by all kinds of other facts.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 253
 
            Since 1945 they [bourgeois historians] have been in possession of material proving that the conditions in the Soviet Union were just the opposite to the myths they had been creating.
Sousa, Mario.  The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.
 
            With few exceptions, the Smolensk archives have remained practically untouched thereafter.
            The archive material never got a first page position in Western mass media.  The reason is that the political life in the Western region of Soviet Union as reported in the Smolensk archives had nothing in common with the concoction of monstrous lies and myths which were displayed (and still are) in mass media in the West.  The archive material, which is a collection of documents with contributions from hundreds of thousands people with a wide range of opinions about all aspects of life could not be used in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union.
Sousa, Mario.  The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.
 
            The research of Getty has destroyed some myths and lies about the Soviet Union, but the most important is above all that it gives the individual a possibility of judging for him/herself.  And this, to draw one’s own conclusions is in fact important.
Sousa, Mario.  The Class Struggle During the Thirties in the Soviet Union, 2001.
 
PURGING IS A RISKY BUSINESS
 
            Testing for loyalty and reliability, you know, is very complicated.  Herein lies the danger for a state, especially a dictatorship of the proletariat, any dictatorship--it requires harsh, unquestioning discipline.  But who is to maintain it?  People who do not always want it, down deep oppose it, and oppose it in practice as long as that is possible.  But the moment they sense danger, they go too far to curry favor and to protect their careers.  Many, many deeds have been committed by such people, because we do not have ready-made pure people, purged of all sins, people who would carry through a very complicated, difficult policy fraught with all kinds of unknowns.  Verify or not, verification itself is not always appropriate.  To stage a purge of the party is very dangerous.  The best people are the first purged.  Many people who are honest and speak frankly are expelled while those who keep everything in the dark and are eager to curry favor with the party chiefs retain their positions.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 255
 
REPRESSION WAS NECESSARY EVEN THOUGH IT GOT SOME INNOCENT PEOPLE
 
            ... many honest Communists perished then.  There is no smoke without fire.  The security people overdid it.  They were overzealous in fulfilling their tasks.  But many wavered, and good people often perished as a result.
            A great many people cheered "Hurrah!" and were for the party and for Stalin in words but vacillated in deeds.  Khrushchev, who was a Trotskyist in his time, presents a striking example....
            I bear responsibility for this policy of repression and consider it correct.  Admittedly, I have always said grave mistakes and excesses were committed, but the policy on the whole was correct. 
            All the Politburo members, including myself, bear responsibility for those mistakes.
            The allegation persists that the majority of the condemned were innocent and were wrongly punished.  But in the main it was the guilty, those who needed to be repressed to one degree or another, who were punished.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 256
 
 
CHUEV:  Didn't Stalin merely make a scapegoat of Yezhov, thereby placing all the blame on him?
MOLOTOV:  Too simplistic.  That version is pushed by those who misunderstand the state of the country at the time.  Of course the demands originated with Stalin, and of course there were excesses, but all that was permissible, to my mind, for the sake of the main objective--keeping state power!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 264
 
CHUEV:  Nowadays it is said, "Yes many lives were sacrificed in order to defend Soviet power.  But who needs a system that caused so many millions to perish?  Wouldn't a monarchy or a constitutional democracy have been better?"
MOLOTOV:  Every well-off individual in bourgeois society will talk that way, but those not well off--the worker, the peasant, the poor man--can't agree with this.  Lives were sacrificed under the old regime, and if not for Soviet power the number of lives lost would have been greater; there would have been ever more wars without end.  That would have been inevitable.
CHUEV:  Just try to prove it!
MOLOTOV:  It does not require proof.  Life will demonstrate it to those who still don't see it.  But the masses of workers and peasants do.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 268
 
            We could not pause [in the 1930s] to go into a person's record thoroughly and get the objective facts about him.  We did not have the time or the resources to defer action.  In certain cases the fate of the cause hung by a thread.  I believe we acted correctly, though it entailed certain inevitable, even grave, excesses in repression.  But there was no other way during that period....  We can and must be criticized, even charged with excesses.  But I don't think we had an alternative then.  It was the best of all possible alternatives....  Our mistakes, including the crude mistakes, were justified.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 270
 
            1937 was a very grave year.  Had we not done what we did, our losses would have been greater.  This I don't doubt.  Had the opposition prevailed, we would undoubtedly have incurred even greater losses.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 277
 
            Stalin in my opinion, pursued a correct line....  Yes, mistakes were made.  But look, Rokossovsky and Meretskov were freed.
CHUEV:  And how many others like them perished?
MOLOTOV:  Not many.  The terror was necessary, and it couldn't have been completed without mistakes....
            Vlasov [a captured Soviet General who voluntarily organized an army from among fellow POWs to fight the USSR] would have been as nothing compared to what might have happened.  Many people were wavering politically.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 278-279
 
CHUEV:  Then Stalin is to blame for all that?
MOLOTOV:  No.  You can't say Stalin is....
CHUEV:  Who then?
MOLOTOV:  It couldn’t have been done without his consent, of course.  He was in desperate straits.  There were so many people around him who changed....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 282
 
            I would like to see you in our positions then.  I wonder how you would've coped.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 283
 
            That policy of repression was the only salvation for the people, for the Revolution.  It was the only alternative in keeping with Leninism and its basic principles.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 287
 
            1937--we could not have done without it.  The very saints could not have accomplished anything with their sweet talk in those critical periods.  They would have failed miserably.  You can't do without harsh measures against ferocious enemies.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 289
 
 
FIGHTING THE WAR REQUIRED TOUGH LEADERSHIP
 
CHUEV:  Yevtushenko writes in his novel that what was built on fear could not be regarded as victory.
MOLOTOV:  If heroes like Yevtushenko had been placed on a pedestal, would we have won the war?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 258
 
LENIN CHOSE STALIN TO LEAD THE BATTLE AGAINST FACTIONS
 
            ...Under Lenin there were so many disagreements, so many opposition groups of every conceivable stripe.  Lenin regarded this as very dangerous and demanded resolute struggle against it.  But he could not take the lead in the struggle against the opposition or against disagreements.  Someone had to remain untainted by all repression.  So Stalin took the lead, assuming the burden of responsibility in surmounting the vast majority of these difficulties.  In my opinion he generally coped with this responsibility correctly.  All of us supported him in this.  I was one of his chief supporters.  I have no regrets over it.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 259
 
STALIN AND MOLOTOV NEVER ISSUED ORDER FOR TORTURE
 
CHUEV:  I have heard that Stalin and you issued a directive to the NKVD to apply torture.
MOLOTOV:  Torture?
CHUEV:  Did you?
MOLOTOV:  No, we never did that.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 259
 
DISTRICT PARTY SECRETARIES COULD SENTENCE PEOPLE JUST BEFORE THE WAR
 
CHUEV:  An individual could be sentenced at the will of a district party secretary.
MOLOTOV:  That was possible.  The true Bolsheviks could not afford to hesitate on the eve of World War II.  It's most important to realize that.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 260
 
ONLY STALIN AND MOLOTOV WERE TRUE LENINISTS
 
CHUEV:  It is also said that Stalin and Molotov considered only themselves to be true Leninists.
MOLOTOV:  There was no alternative.  Had we not regarded ourselves as Leninists, and had we not attacked those who wavered, we could have been weakened.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 260
 
STALIN REPRESSED THOSE WHO NEEDED TO BE REPRESSED
 
            Recently a chauffeur drove me here from Moscow.  He was an elderly man whom I had never seen before.  I accept any driver they send over to me.  I normally listen to the news radio station to get the latest news and enjoy some music.  But this time my driver wanted to talk and asked if I would turn off the music.  I wondered what he would say....
            He remarked, "Isn't it great that in Russia's there is a Siberia!"...
            I thought, what was he up to?
            "What exactly do you have in mind when you mention the benefits of Siberia?"  I asked.
            "I think you know what's on my mind. There was the time when all that human scum and rubbish had to be crushed.  Stalin was far-sighted; Joseph Vissarionovich was a man of vision.  Those who had to be put out of the way were done away with just in time.  Just in time because it was necessary to act strongly, resolutely, and mercilessly.  Comrade Stalin took the job firmly in hand."
            "Right.  I agree with you," I told him.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 260
 
OVERSIGHT OF THE SECURITY AGENCIES WAS INADEQUATE
 
CHUEV:  Didn't the security agencies place themselves above the party?
MOLOTOV:  No, that's not so....  There was not enough time.  We lacked resources.  I did not say that the Politburo was overly trusting, but I did say that insufficient oversight was exercised.  I disagree that we were overly trusting.  The oversight was inadequate.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 262
 
            I believe there were deficiencies and mistakes.  It couldn't have been otherwise with our enemies operating within the security agencies in charge of investigations....  The major deficiencies were that the security agencies had been left without due oversight by the party during certain periods.  The negligence was not purposeful.  The resources for adequate oversight were insufficient.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 287
 
            ...These errors were largely caused by the fact that at certain stages the investigations fell into the hands of people who were later exposed as traitors guilty of heinous, hostile, antiparty acts.  These belatedly exposed degenerates--traitors within the security agencies and party organizations--obviously at times, with malice aforethought, pushed certain incorrect measures against honest party members and nonparty people.  The party and the Soviet state could not permit delay or postponements in carrying out the punitive measures which had become absolutely necessary....  For crude abuses of power People's Commissar for Internal Affairs Yezhov, guilty of certain crude distortions of party policy, was unmasked and then condemned to the "highest measure of punishment."
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 288
 
            As soon as he arrived in Kiev, Uspensky summoned all NKVD officers and said he would suppress such traditions as synagogue gatherings.  Anyone who did not want to work with him could leave, and some of Emma's [Sudoplatov's wife] friends took advantage of the offer.  In the presence of a large audience, Uspensky signed their applications for transfer into the reserve for appointments to vacancies at lower levels in other republics.  Uspensky was responsible for mass tortures and repressions, and Khrushchev was one of the few top Politburo members who personally joined Uspensky in interrogating prisoners.
            During the 1938 purge, when Yezhov, head of the NKVD, lost the confidence of Stalin and the hunt began for "traitorous" chekists, Uspensky tried to escape abroad.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 111
 
 
MISTAKENLY RELIED ON GPU’S WORD
 
            In the first place, as chairman of the Council of Ministers, I am accountable for all the repressions.  I am responsible for....  I signed most--in fact, almost all--the arrest lists.  Of course we debated, then made a decision.  In the end, however, the decision was based on trust in the GPU's word.  Haste ruled.  Could one go into all the details?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 263
 
EXCEPT FOR THE MILITARY TRIAL THE TRIALS WERE OPEN AND PUBLIC
 
            But in our country everything was made public with the exception of two military tribunals.  For reasons of military secrecy these were closed trials.  The enemies of Soviet power have always been good at concocting ingenious stories.  The open trial lasted for 12 days, with the world press attending and with 21 individuals, all well known to the public, sitting in the dock.... Our enemies also attended the trials.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 267
 
            The Trial of the Sixteen was supposed to be conducted in accordance with the law of December 1, 1934, which established extraordinary procedures for reviewing all cases involving terror: these cases were to be held behind closed doors and the defendants were to be deprived of the right to appeal for clemency.  However, as an exception to this law, the court session lasting from Aug. 19 to 24 was open, and besides "representatives at Soviet society," foreign journalists and diplomats were in the courtroom.
Rogovin, Vadim. 1937: Year of Terror. Oak Park, Michigan: Labor Publications, 1998, p. 36
 
THERE WAS NO SCRIPT FOR THE TRIALS
 
            Those who allege that the trials were badly scripted are, in their obtuseness, simply allied with the White Guards.  No GPU or any other security service could have fabricated the trials that way.  Three major trials were held: in 1936, 1937, and 1938, with much material released to the public....
            To say that people like Krestinsky and Rosengoltz, people like Yagoda, like Bukharin and Pyatakov all followed some kind of script is absurd!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 268
 
THE TALENTED PEOPLE KILLED WERE TALENTED THE WRONG WAY
 
CHUEV:  You are reproached inasmuch as Stalin allegedly killed off the most talented people in the country.
MOLOTOV:  The most talented being Trotsky, Zinoviev, that ilk?  With such talented people we would have crept backward.  There is talent and there is talent....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 269
 
DEFENDANTS WERE NOT PROMISED THEIR LIVES IF THEY CONFESSED
 
CHUEV:  A new version has developed with regard to the open trials of the 1930s.  It is said that the defendants were promised life in exchange for exhaustive confessions--something on that order.
MOLOTOV:  That's a White Guard version.  It's their fabrication.  Such notions appeared earlier, too.  Are they complete fools, or what?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 269
 
HIGH OFFICIALS LOST FAITH IN THE CAUSE
 
            Past mistakes and losses of life had been great because we proved too trusting of individuals who could no longer be trusted.  Their degeneration was already complete, and we got rid of them belatedly....  But why should those individuals have initially proceeded in one direction and then made a U-turn to march in the opposite direction?  Personal ambition would be something petty and narrow.  The trouble was that they no longer believed; they had lost all faith in the cause and consequently had to seek a way out.  But only implacable enemies of Soviet power could point to another way out.  Either I defend the October Revolution or I am against it and look for allies among its enemies.
            You see, it’s never easy when you must grapple with difficulties.  Not everyone has sufficient stamina for it.  But the party keeps moving forward.  It keeps advancing.  The opposition desperately looked for a crack in which to hide.  No way.  You are known by the public.  You are Trotsky, you are Bukharin.  You feel you are supposed to say what you have always said.  They repeated their past affirmations of faith, but down deep they no longer believed in the cause.  Here you have what turned them into such spineless creatures in the end....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 266-267
 
            In the Politburo itself were people who did not believe in our cause.  Rykov, for example.  And Zinoviev, too.
            ...The kulak mentality can still be seen today, and on a grand scale, too.  Party members defend the kulaks!  "They're hard workers..." some argue.  Many writers say such things.  Complete blockheads!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 269
 
RUDZUTAK WAS A RIGHTIST WORKING WITH RYKOV AND TOMSKY
 
            ...The trials fully exposed him [Rudzutak] as an active accomplice of the rightists.  He actually had personal associations with Rykov and Tomsky.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 275
 
REPRESSIONS OF WIVES AND CHILDREN WERE NECESSARY
 
CHUEV:  Why were the repressions extended to wives and children?
MOLOTOV:  What do you mean, why?  They had to be isolated somehow.  Otherwise they would have served as conduits of all kinds of complaints.  And a certain amount of demoralization.  That's a fact, definitely.  That was evident at the time....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 277
 
TROTSKY WORKED WITH THE NAZIS
 
            In his writings published abroad he implied--and in his letters to partisans in the USSR explicitly ordered--that now the struggle against the party should resort to all means up to and including terror and wrecking within the country, and dirty, traitorous political deals with governments of bourgeois states, including Hitlerite Germany.  Trotsky and others maintained ties with the intelligence services of bourgeois countries with a view to speeding up an armed attack on the USSR by the aggressive imperialist nations.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 288
 
PEOPLE REPRESSED BY STALIN SUPPORT AND COMPLIMENT STALIN
 
CHUEV:  "Stalin himself had to admit in 1938 that something had gone wrong and that things had to be sorted out," said Golovanov.  "I am lucky to have had a very close escape then.  Later I was expelled from the party, I was nearly arrested, I was out of work.  My family starved, with one loaf of brown bread for a week.  My sister's husband, a noted security officer, was shot.  I wrote about those years in my book.  I believe then that Stalin had gone on a rampage to destroy everything.  But after I met him and worked for him for a few years, I came to realize he was different.  In fact, he was the man I have portrayed in my book of reminiscences.  The fact that I or Rokossovsky, who also suffered in 1937--to say the least!--hold such a high opinion of Stalin and won't allow his name to be trampled into the dust, is especially unpleasant for many people.
            "When Khrushchev asked Rokossovsky to write some filth about Stalin, Rokossovsky responded, 'Comrade Stalin is a saint to me.' The next day Rokossovsky comes to his office and finds Moskalenko sitting at his desk, who hands him the orders on his retirement.  That was how it was arranged.  Rokossovsky says, 'I get up in the morning, stretch a little, and realize I have no job to go to.  No one needs us these days.  We are merely stumbling blocks for those who wish to portray the past in their own way.'
            "At one government reception someone toasted Khrushchev and everyone came up to him with his glass, the lame Meretskov being no exception.  At that point Rokossovsky and myself were somewhere in the center of the crowd, and we didn't budge.  We just went on with our conversation, which evidently could not have gone unnoticed, since we seemed to be the two tallest men in the crowd.  We have never been invited to those reception since....
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 290
 
            Look at Rokossovsky.  He was tortured, nonetheless he denied all the charges.  He implicated no one.  And no one else was arrested.  He was incarcerated in the Shlisselburg prison.  Then he was released.  Rokossovsky is still respected for this by the army.  Stalin held Rokossovsky in very high esteem.  By the way, after the Stalingrad battle he became the second military officer after Shaposhnikov....  He considered Rokossovsky a great military captain.  It was no accident that Rokossovsky commanded the victory parade on Red Square.  It was to honor service he rendered!  Stalin asked, "Rokossovsky, did they beat you up there?"  "They did, Comrade Stalin."  "We still have a lot of yes-men in our country," Stalin concluded.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 295
 
MOLOTOV::  She [Molotov’s wife] certainly endured great hardship, but I repeat, she never changed her attitude toward Stalin.  She always thought highly of him.
IVANOVICH, SHOTA:  Once a relation of hers started to assail Stalin at a dinner, and she abruptly put him in his place.  'Young man, you understand absolutely nothing about either Stalin or his times.  If only you knew the burden he bore in office!'
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 324
 
            The meeting had lasted about two hours.  This time Stalin did not invite us to dinner in his home.  I must confess that I felt a sadness and an emptiness because of this, so great was my own human, sentimental fondness for him still.
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p. 184
 
            And yet, Sakharov's response to the death of Stalin was utterly typical.  He heard the news while he was working on the Soviet bomb project and wrote home to his first wife, Klavdia: "I am under the influence of a great man's death.  I am thinking of his humanity."
Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb. New York: Random House, c1993, p. 166
 
STALIN NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL THE REPRESSIONS BY ANY MEANS
 
            "If you want to to know what I [Golovanov] think of '37, I will tell you--it was a national calamity.  Millions suffered.  But it would be wrong to conclude that Stalin was 100 percent responsible.  Who did he have as his principal assistants?  Mekhlis supervised the Army, Khrushchev supervised non-military matters, the Moscow party organization.  Fifty-four thousand people in Ukraine were sent off by Khrushchev when he chaired the notorious troika.  It was he who signed the verdicts!  Certainly Stalin is politically responsible for all of that in the first place as head of state.  But you can't say all of the individual verdicts were sanctioned by him."
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 291
 
            Stalin was in a position where, if they gave him documents against a particular person, he himself could not sort out all these matters.  He had neither the time nor the capability, due to the structure of state power.... Most of the repressions were not caused by him personally.  If a special tribunal found someone guilty, the guilt lies in equal measure on Stalin and the tribunal.
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 277
 
MOLOTOV WAS  KEPT IN THE DARK BY BERIA AND KHRUSHCHOV
 
            ...Beria stopped keeping me informed during Stalin's last years.  I was on the sidelines then.  Under Khrushchev I was entirely in the dark about some events.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 292
 
GUS HALL SUPPORTS THE CZECH INVASION
 
            In remarks printed in Pravda, Gus Hall, chairman of the Communist Party of the USA, correctly judged the measures we initiated in Czechoslovakia during the events there.  He said the Soviet Union, with other countries, acted correctly by intervening in Czechoslovak affairs, notwithstanding the fact that the Communist Party of Italy was opposed, the French party was opposed, the British party and others were opposed.  Although he lived in America, he was nevertheless faithful to the truth when he said the action was absolutely necessary.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 299
 
STALIN SAYS THE BEST WAY TO CONVERT OTHER COUNTRIES TO SOCIALISM IS BY EXAMPLE
 
GOLOVANOV:  Stalin said that no propaganda, no agitation would be enough to unite the world proletariat around us.  Instead we need to show that the people in our state live better than people live in America or in any other capitalist country.  This would be the best kind of agitation, the best kind of propaganda.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 301
 
            (Molotov picks up the party program booklet and reads Khrushchev's conclusion that other nations will follow us once they see we live better than they)
            You parrot Khrushchev's rubbish.  That's nothing short of consumerism and even nationalism.  Had the Bolsheviks waited for everyone to become literate, we would never have had a revolution.  The workers in the Western countries enjoy better living conditions than we because their bourgeoisie robbed other countries as well as their own.  Each Englishman used to have 10 slaves....  If we wait until we first raise our standard of living, expecting that others will then imitate us, we shall be nationalists who devote themselves solely to their own affairs, not communists.  This is worse than Khrushchevism, this is utopianism.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 302
 
            There is no denying that the regime succeeded to a considerable extent in channeling the enthusiasm of the younger generation to building up mammoth projects such as Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk, Dneproges, Zaporozhe, and Stalingrad.  There was widespread feeling that young Communists could (and would) "storm heavens."  The mood proved infectious: The Soviet example of seemingly lifting oneself up by one's own bootstraps found increasing interest and support in the West at the very time when the capitalist world faced a severe recession.  The "socialist sixth of the world" was transforming itself, and the Russian example, as many enthusiastic visitors predicted, would serve as an inspiration for everyone else.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 35
 
            And Trotsky never seemed to realize that when Stalin said he could build socialism in a single country, the country was Russia, which is not a country at all--but a continent [of many nationalities].  Nor did it occur to Trotsky apparently that far and away the best single advertisement for world communism, in the future, would be a Russia which was successful, stable, safe.
Gunther, John. Inside Europe. New York, London: Harper & Brothers, c1940, p. 526
 
STANDARD OF LIVING IS HIGHER IN SOCIALIST EASTERN EUROPE THAN THE SU
 
MOLOTOV:  I agree with you (Golovanov) that the standard of living in the socialist countries (of Eastern Europe) is higher than ours, but by 1 1/2 times, not twice ours....  I believe the standard of living is higher in the socialist countries; they consume more meat, have more footwear per capita.  As to how much, I assume one and half times more.  But I also believe this serves our interests.  Take another example.  Our Baltic peoples live at a higher level than Muscovites.  We need this.  It is a policy that is in keeping with the interests of Moscow.
 
            Central Asia has rapidly industrialized in the period of Soviet power and the standard of living of its people raised to approximate Southern European levels.  This contrasts sharply with the acute differential between the U.S. and Puerto Rico, the colonial character of whose relationship with the U.S. is manifested in a much lower standard of living.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 295
 
STALIN’S RETURN COULD BRING BETTER TIMES
 
GOLOVANOV:  If Stalin were alive today, the Soviet people would live much better, there would be five times greater aid to Vietnam, and we would have excellent relations with China and India.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 302
 
INTELLECTUALS SYMPATHIZE WITH THE KULAKS
 
            For the most part, our Russian intellectuals were closely linked with the well-to-do peasants who had a pro-kulak mentality.  Ours was a country of peasants.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 309
 
STALIN’S JUDGMENT NEAR THE END WAS OCCASIONALLY POOR
 
            Stalin had undergone so many years of ordeal and had taken so much on his own shoulders that in his last years he suffered from impaired judgment.  Impaired in the sense that a simple mistake might seem to him evidence of some dastardly plot.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 317
 
STALIN CARRIED A HEAVY BURDEN AND BURNED OUT AT THE END
 
            Stalin shouldered a burden so heavy that it naturally left him burned out....  but the main thing is that he was utterly drained in every way.  Also he was afraid of taking medicine.  He had good reason.  Stalin had enemies enough who might put one over on him.  His fear that someone might slip some poison either into his food or into his medicine, however, went beyond all limits....
            To a certain extent this is understandable, because really it was very difficult to bear the entire burden on his own two shoulders.  Apparently he had all kinds of doubts whether anyone induced to take up this burden would have the patience, the will, and the strength to bear it.  That was his predicament.
            Although these events did not leave me untouched, and although I might not have remained in one piece had he lived on, I have regarded him and still regard him as a great man who fulfilled such immense and arduous tasks as none of us, none of those in the party back then, could have fulfilled.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 327
 
KIROV WAS NOT QUALIFIED TO BE GEN. SEC. OR STALIN’S SUCCESSOR
 
            To speak of Kirov as some kind of deputy or successor to Stalin is entirely absurd to any literate and knowledgeable communist.  That choice would have been totally at odds with the nature of the relationship between Stalin and Kirov, and above all with Kirov's own perception of his potential.  It so contradicts the realities of that period that only a criminal type such as Khrushchev could go so far as to allege that Stalin had special reason to finish off Kirov.
            True, Kirov had told Stalin at the 17th Party Congress that a group of delegates had proposed to nominate him for top office in the party.  But Kirov as general secretary?  Utterly, simply absurd!  Kirov was a highly effective agitator and a good communist.  He was not and did not claim to be a theoretician.  Never.  It goes without saying that he was incapable of ideologically crushing Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev.  Others were more capable, feasible, or likely as a potential leader than Kirov!  Indeed, far more!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 327
 
BERIA DID NOT CARE WHAT KIND OF GOVERNMENT EAST GERMANY HAD
 
            Beria... advanced the following argument: "Why should socialism be built in the GDR?  Let it just be a peaceful country.  That is sufficient for our purposes....  The sort of country it will become is unimportant."
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 334
 
MOLOTOV:  A stable Germany was good enough for him....  I was in favor of not forcing a socialist policy, while Beria favored not supporting socialism at all.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 335
 
MOLOTOV: It became quite clear that Beria did not hold Communist positions.  In this situation we felt that in Beria we were dealing with someone who had nothing in common with our Party, a person of the bourgeois camp, the enemy of the Soviet Union.
            The capitulating essence of Beria's proposals regarding the German question is obvious.  He virtually demanded capitulation before the so-called "Western" bourgeois states.  He insisted that we reject the course to strengthen the people's democratic order in the GDR, which would lead to socialism.  He insisted on untying the hands of German imperialism, not only in West Germany but in East Germany....
            You see how what Beria had previously concealed in his political persona was now exposed.  Also, what we previously saw only vaguely in Beria, we now began to see clearly.  We now clearly saw that here was someone alien to us, a man from the anti-Soviet camp.
            It was not so easy to expose Beria.  He artfully disguised himself, and for many years--concealing his true face--he sat in the leadership center.
Stickle, D. M., Ed. The Beria Affair. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1992, p. 29
 
 
KHRUSHCHOV WAS A BUNGLER
 
            The development of the virgin lands began prematurely.  It was unquestionably an absurd undertaking....
            Khrushchev was so carried away with his idea [the Virgin lands program] that he was like a runaway roan!  An idea alone solves nothing conclusively; it may be helpful, but only to a limited extent.  You have to make the right calculations, weigh alternatives, consult experts, sound out the people.  You can't just shout, get going!  get a move on!  He bit off more than he could chew--about 40 to 45 million hectares of virgin lands to be opened up.  This was unmanageable, absurd, and unnecessary.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 346-347
 
            Khrushchev, this disgusting, loud-mouthed individual, concealed his wiles and maneuvers under a torrent of empty words.
            The cult of Khrushchev was being built up by the tricksters, the liberals, the careerists, the lick-spittles and the flatterers...  His [Stalin's] place and authority was usurped by that charlatan, clown, and blackmailer.
Hoxha, Enver. The Artful Albanian. London: Chatto & Windus, 1986, p. 161
 
            Soviet help in the economic sphere was also considerable.  Khrushchev's pro-active policy cost the Soviet Union many billions of dollars, but he regarded it as an investment to strengthen Soviet influence in the region at the expense of the West.  His revolutionary diplomacy did not always produce the desired result, however.  The report presented on Oct. 14, 1964, to the Central Committee plenum that ousted him pointed out that in the ten years he had been in power, the USSR had undertaken some 6000 projects.  Beneficiaries included Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, India, and Ethiopia, to name but a few..  Projects in Guinea alone included an airport, a cannery and sawmill, a power station, a refrigeration plant, a hospital, a hotel, a polytechnic, geological surveys and various research projects.  Yet when Khrushchev's 'friend' Sekou Toure requested the withdrawal of Soviet personnel from Guinea, even the use of the airport they had built at Conakry, as a stopover en route to Cuba, was prohibited to them.  In Jakarta the USSR had built a stadium for 100,000 spectators, in Rangoon a hotel, an atomic research center in Ghana, a sports complex in Mali--the list is interminable.  All these costly ventures only became a bone of contention when the leadership wanted to get rid of Khrushchev.
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Autopsy for an Empire. New York: Free Press, c1998, p. 228
 
 
KHRUSHCHOV ATTACKS MOLOTOV IN REGARD TO FARMING
 
            Molotov was a schematist and a conservative; he was a total ignoramus about farming, but that didn't stop him from objecting that the Virgin Lands campaign was premature and too expensive.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 135
 
 
STALIN’S MISTAKE WAS IN NOT TRAINING A SUCCESSOR
 
            Stalin's mistake was that he had not trained anyone to fill his position.  Khrushchev took over, not by chance.  Of course he was not the right man for the top office.  But we had no unity in our group, and we had no program.  We merely agreed to have him removed, but at the same time we were totally unprepared to assume power.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 347
 
            Speaking of Khrushchev, Stalin is to blame, as I and all of us are to blame, for failing to see that it was not merely a matter of Khrushchev, a typical anti-Leninist, but of a trend, that of playing up to public opinion.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 364
 
 
20TH PARTY SPEECH BY KHRUSCHOV
 
            Everyone knew that Khrushchev was going to deliver that [anti-Stalin] report at the 20th Party Congress.  The report had not been discussed in the Central Committee, but we knew the essence of it....  When Khrushchev delivered his speech at the 20th Congress I was already sidelined....  To speak out would have been unexpected at that time, and no one would have supported us.  No one.
CHUEV:  Was Khrushchev's report discussed in the Politburo?
MOLOTOV:  It was.  The majority supported it without reservation.
            ...Given the atmosphere in the party at the time, if we, or even I, had presented our views, we would have been easily expelled.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 349-351
 
TRIED TO GET RID OF KHRUSHCHOV IN 1957
 
            Khrushchev got by because we had many Khrushchevites.
            In 1957 Khrushchev was relieved of his duties for three days.  This happened at one of the Politburo sessions.  This, of course, had to be announced.  He was chairing Politburo sessions; he was merely relieved of the chairmanship.  Nothing more occurred then.  He wasn't removed from his job, and he couldn't be removed.  The Central Committee plenum would decide this.  How else could he have been removed?
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 353
 
            At the 20th Party Congress a Presidium [the name adopted in 1952 for the old Politburo] consisting of 11 members had been elected.  Later, in 1957, we decided to remove Khrushchev.  At the Politburo he chaired its sessions; we decided to replace him with Bulganin [chairman of the Council of Ministers].  The point was that starting with Lenin--and it was always so--the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars [from 1946, Council of Ministers] always chaired sessions of the Politburo.  This was a Leninist tradition....  Khrushchev was the first to break with this Leninist tradition....  He was not chairman of the Council of Ministers, nevertheless he chaired Politburo sessions....  Now we had Bulganin chair.
CHUEV:  Did Khrushchev remain silent?
MOLOTOV:  No way!  He screamed, he was furious....  But we had already reached an agreement.  We were seven out of 11, and his supporters were but three, including Mikoyan.  We had no program to advance.  Our only goal was to remove Khrushchev and have him appointed minister of agriculture....
            Zhukov is a great military man but a poor politician.  He played a decisive role in elevating Khrushchev to a pedestal in 1957.  But Zhukov himself cursed him soon afterward....
            We failed to have him removed as first secretary; we just didn't manage it.  They convened a plenary session of the Central Committee, and the plenum sided with them--the game was over!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 354
 
CHUEV:  As soon as you relieved Khrushchev of his chair functions, why didn't you appeal to party organizations, to the people?
MOLOTOV:  The party organizations were not in our hands.
CHUEV:  Anyway, you failed to take advantage of that moment.
MOLOTOV:  Indeed, I wasn't able to take advantage of it.  We had another disadvantage--we were not prepared to put forward a counterprogram of our own.  But Khrushchev did exactly that: "Life under Stalin was hard; from now on it is going to be better."  People bought it.  The overwhelming majority voted against me.  A good many people bore me a grudge....  The workers also bought the line: "You will have it easier now, and there will be no more rushing ahead."
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 357
 
 
TERROR IS NECESSARY AT TIMES
 
            I ought to have been punished, true, but expulsion from the party?  Punishment, of course, because sometimes the ax must be used without sorting things out.  I believe we had to pass through a phase of terror.  I am not afraid of that word, because back then we had neither the time nor the opportunity to sort things out, for not only Soviet power in Russia but the international communist movement as well were at risk.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 356
 
(Sinclair’s comments only)
            History knows all about the French terror, and yet it credits that revolution with having broken the feudal system throughout most of Western Europe, and having helped to bring republican ideas to all the world.  Historians whom we respect today consider this revolution in its totality one of the great forward steps of humanity.
Sinclair and Lyons. Terror in Russia?: Two Views. New York : Rand School Press, 1938, p. 54
 
 
MOLOTOV WAS EXPELLED FROM THE PARTY FOR SPEAKING OUT
 
            ...I was not expelled from the party because of the repressions but rather because we spoke out against Khrushchev and wanted to have him relieved of his duties.  When the repressions were condemned at the 20th Congress, I was not only not expelled from the party but was even elected to its Politburo!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 357
 
SOME WANTED MOLOTOV AS LEADER
 
IVANOVICH, SHOTA:  Children were shot to death in Georgia in 1956.  They removed Mikoyan's portrait and hung it in an outhouse, where his home was supposed to be.  They hitched Khrushchev's portrait to a streetcar, but they carried your portrait at the head of a marching column of protesters that demanded, “We want the Central Committee headed by Molotov!”  Did it really happen like this? 
MOLOTOV:  Children died then, and you know which children?  Those whose parents were in jail in 1937.  The children that were shot to death were not allowed a decent burial.  People wailed, they couldn't understand.  "Your parents perished at the hands of Stalin, but you are for him?"
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 358
 
FOOD WAS NEVER PURCHASED FROM ABROAD
 
            ...But we never resorted to purchasing food from abroad.  We didn't want to do that because we needed equipment and metals in the event of war....  That consideration came first, and no one could deny it.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 359
 
KHRUSCHOV HID HIS CRIMES AND PROMISED AN EASIER LIFE
 
            Khrushchev asked former KGB chairman Semichastny to find all the documents related to his work in the Ukraine.  That was done, by the way, in the heat of the anti-Stalin campaign.
            Surely, measures were taken to destroy all the documents on repressions in the Ukraine that he had ever signed.
            How did Khrushchev happened to be moved up to the top?...  Khrushchev promised a quieter, more relaxed life at the top.  Many went for this instantly....  Khrushchev promised better living conditions, and a good many people took the bait, though it was a deception.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 359
 
  Khrushchev was a capable man, too....  And backing him with his preconceived ideas were those who would also like to live easier.  They hoped that the cause initiated by Lenin and Stalin could be promoted without difficulty.  That was a deception.  Lenin and Stalin never said that while imperialism existed we would easily advance along the path we had chosen.  There are inevitable hardships along the way.  If you don't agree with this, then go to hell or wherever you please,...  Khrushchev was a sleight-of-hand artist, a good practical worker and energetic leader.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 361
 
DUBCEK AND BUKHARIN ARE SIMILAR RIGHTISTS
 
CHUEV:  Bukharin and Dubcek are now counterposed to Stalin.
MOLOTOV:  They are both right-wingers, kulaks who escaped.  Bukharin & Dubcek have a lot in common, by the way.
            A struggle still lies ahead for the party.  Khrushchev was no accident.  We are primarily a peasant country, and the right-wing is powerful.  Where's the guarantee to prevent them from gaining the upper hand?  The anti-Stalinists in all probability will come to power in the near future, and they are most likely to be Bukharinists.  [8-14-73, 3-8-74]
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 373
 
STALIN SOMETIMES ERRED ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM
 
CHUEV:  Some kind of demarcation must be drawn between socialism and communism.
MOLOTOV:  That goes without saying.  The line is already sharply drawn.  Under communism there is no state, while Stalin allowed for the existence of the state under communism.  That is absurd from the point of view of Leninism.  Stalin said, under communism there should be no state, but if capitalist encirclement remains....
CHUEV:  There will be an army and state apparatus.
MOLOTOV:  What kind of communism is that?  Good housing, good living conditions, everything provided for--this is enough from the philistine’s point of view.  If all the poor live more or less well, they say, that means we already have socialism, not capitalism.  But this in itself is not complete socialism....
            Marx holds that in a society based on collectivist principles, producers will not engage in exchange of their commodities.  There will be no trade. Will they then dump their goods into a garbage pit?  No, they will get along without trade, without commodity-money relations.  Here you have socialism.
CHUEV:  In that case, what distinguishes communism from socialism?
MOLOTOV:  A lot.  The point, you see, is this.  When classes do not exist, when there are no money-commodity relations, and the level of production is still not high enough so that each receives according to his needs....
CHUEV:  To fully satisfy his needs?
MOLOTOV:  No, not fully, but for the most part.  Generally speaking, maximum satisfaction of human needs will never be achieved.  Stalin’s assertion that it would be is empty, a banality so to speak.  What does maximum satisfaction of needs mean?  Everyone gets himself a piano?  everyone gets himself an automobile?  That is absurd.  Socialism means satisfaction of all basic needs, not maximum satisfaction.  Everyone will have the right to use publicly owned facilities.  Along with the other former ministers--and not only ministers--I will have my meals at a public dining facility.  I pay sixty rubles per month and take my meals.  Having completed 100 work days, you would be entitled to a certain remuneration....
CHUEV:  What kind of accounting would be practiced?  Socialism is accounting.
MOLOTOV:  The most rigorous, rigorous accounting.  Communism is a higher stage than socialism, because there will be such abundance that it will be possible to eliminate the distinction between physical and intellectual labour as well as to eliminate social classes.  It will also be possible to eliminate the distinction between town and country, but differences in standards of living will remain.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 378-380
 
            A socialism in which money dominates is not the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.  There is no such socialism.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 383
 
            The party proclaimed from the lofty tribune of the party congress, "The present generation of Soviet people will live under communism."  This proposition is so remote from reality that the people have ceased believing anything.  As never before, the slogan "The people and the party are one" rang true.  The party deceived the people, and the people having lost faith and working slapdash, began to deceive the party.
            I have often thought about this and have come to the conclusion that this happened because there was no correct conception of what constitutes socialism.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 394
 
STALIN:  The society which we have built cannot possibly be called "state socialism."  Our Soviet society is socialist society, because the private ownership of the factories, works, the land, the banks, and the transport system has been abolished and public ownership put in its place.  The social organization which we have created may be called a Soviet socialist organization, not entirely completed, but fundamentally, a socialist organization of society.  The foundation of this society is public property: state, i.e., national, and also co-operative, collective farm, property.  Neither Italian fascism nor German National "Socialism" has anything in common with such a society.  Primarily, this is because the private ownership of the factories and works, of the land, the banks, transport, etc., has remained intact, and therefore, capitalism remains in full force in Germany and in Italy. 
            Yes, you're right, we have not yet built communist society.  It is not so easy to build such a society.  You are probably aware of the difference between socialist society and communist society.  In socialist society certain inequalities in property still exist.  But in socialist society there is no longer unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities.  In socialist society everyone is obliged to work, although he does not in return for his labor receive according to his requirements, but according to the quantity and quality of the work he has performed.  That is why wages, and, moreover, unequal, differentiated wages, still exist.  Only when we have succeeded in creating a system under which in return for their labor people will receive from society, not according to the quantity and quality of the labor they perform, but according to their requirements, will it be possible to say that we have built communist society.
Stalin, J. The Stalin-Howard Interview. New York: International Publishers, 1936, p. 11
 
            [Letter from Sydney Bloomfield to Dimitrov, Aug. 12, 1938, discussing changes in the policies of the U.S. Communist Party]
            ... Communism is the classless society in which the exploitation of man by man has been abolished; in which the state has withered away; in which the economic and other material conditions of life are on such a high level that the relations between men are on a high idealistic plane based upon the contribution of the individual to society according to his ability and from which the individual receives according to his needs; that Communism, which is the highest development of Socialism (which can be realized in one country) is universal.  Now, since Americanism has not yet shown any sign of any society higher than capitalism, and sense even in its development (in one country) the most it possibly could develop to, would be Socialism, therefore to call it "Communism" (regardless of which century) would be incorrect from a Marxian standpoint.
Koenker and Bachman, Eds. Revelations from the Russian Archives. Washington: Library of Congress, 1997, p. 612
 
            The principle of socialism is that in a socialist society each works according to his ability and receives articles of consumption, not according to his needs, but according to the work he performs for society.  This means that the cultural and technical level of the working-class is still not a high one, that the distinction between mental and manual labor persists, that the productivity of labor is still not high enough to insure an abundance of articles of consumption, and, as a result, society is obliged to distribute articles of consumption, not in accordance with the needs of the members of society, but in accordance with the work they performed for society.
            Communism represents a higher stage of development.  The principal of communism is that in a communist society each works according to his abilities and receives articles of consumption, not according to the work he performs, but according to his needs as a culturally developed individual.  This means that the cultural and technical level of the working-class has become high enough to undermine the basis of the distinction between mental labor and manual labor; that the distinction between mental labor and manual labor has already disappeared, while productivity of labor has reached such a high-level that it is able to insure an absolute abundance of articles of consumption, and as a result society is able to distribute these articles according to the needs of its members.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 106
 
            There is no reason to doubt that only such a rise in the cultural and technical level of the working-class can undermine the basis of the distinction between mental labor and manual labor, that it alone can ensure the high level of productivity of labor and the abundance of articles of consumption which are necessary in order to begin the transition from socialism to communism.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 107
 
            ... we say openly and honestly that the victory of socialism in our country is not yet final.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 162
 
 
LENIN ERRED ON THE PAY STRUCTURE OF SOCIALIST SOCIETY
 
            ...under socialism, Lenin said, no official will be paid a higher wage than the average worker's.  None of the officials, including the general secretary of the party and the chairman of the council of ministers, should receive compensation higher than that of the average worker.  This principle was practiced by the Paris Commune.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 380
 
            Lenin declared in 1918 that we could pay the top bourgeois specialists more than others.  ...but we could tolerate it as a temporary expedient.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 399
 
 
PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE IS NOT A MARXIST-LENINIST PHRASE
 
CHUEV:  Am I right, the slogan "peaceful coexistence" was not used under Lenin?
MOLOTOV:  It was never used, and Lenin never used it.  In those days it would have been naive, utterly naive, to talk about peaceful coexistence.  As if we would have begged, "Please give us peace!"  The imperialists would have given us no kind of peace whatever....  In my view it is a correct slogan today [4-29-82], but we must bear in mind that some people, pacifistically minded people, incorrectly interpret this slogan.  The very idea draws people toward a pacifist way of thinking.  Under Lenin the old program condemned such views.  Pacifist ideas are pernicious. 
            In 1921 we made no use of the slogan.  We stood for peace,...  We intended to attack no one.  But we were opposed to pacifism....
            We are, as it were, begging for peace.  But to beg for peace means exposing one's weakness.  And to show one's weakness to the strong is politically disadvantageous and inexpedient.  For Bolsheviks it is unseemly....
            Stalin's published works contain no slippery expressions such as peaceful coexistence.  I don't recall any.  Absolutely none at all in Lenin.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 388-389
 
            There can be only one long-range goal if we are to move forward: only international revolution.  There is nothing, no alternative, more reliable than this.
            It is our duty to preserve peace.  But if we believe that without international revolution we can fight for peace and delay war, if we still believe that it's possible to arrive at communism in this way, that is deception from a Marxist viewpoint, both self-deception and deception of the people.
            We must maintain peace in every way and delay the onset of a new war, especially war against the socialist countries.  But we must not get too deeply engaged in favor of the Arabs and the others when they put their national interests first.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 389-390
 
            To wrest the working class from the clutches of capitalism is possible only with sacrifice.  Anyone who wants to overthrow capitalism without sacrifice would do better to enroll in another party, the party of pacifists, idlers, babblers, and incorrigible bourgeois ideologues...  In short, the working class can tear itself away from capitalism only through the greatest of sacrifices.  If this is not to one's taste, then just go on living in slavery.  There is no alternative.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 393
 
THE MAJOR PROGRESS OF THE SU WAS DONE UNDER STALIN’S LEADERSHIP
 
            Since Stalin's death we have lived on the reserves built up in Stalin's time.  [12-18-70]
            I propose a toast--to Stalin!  No one else could have borne, no one else could have endured the burden he carried on his shoulders.  None but he had the iron nerve and strength it took!
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 401
 
            ...Yet it is a fact that 'Stalin found Russia working with a wooden plough and left her equipped with atomic piles', even though the epoch of the wooden plough still persisted in lingering on all too many levels of her national existence.  This summary of Stalin's rule is, of course, a tribute to his achievement.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 624
 
            Isaac Deutscher, the former Trotskyite and an independent Marxist author, was not uncritical of certain aspects of Stalin's rule.  But he, too, was overawed in his overall assessment of the man:...
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 17
 
 
            A few pages further down, Deutscher observes:
            "...it is a fact that 'Stalin found Russia with a wooden plow and left her equipped with atomic piles’....  This summary of Stalin's rule is, of course, a tribute to his achievement"  The words quoted by Deutscher are quoted from his own obituary of Stalin published in the Manchester Guardian of March 6, 1953.
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 50
 
            ... Even Roy Medvedev, no friend of Stalin's and the author of the thoroughly anti-Stalin Let History Judge, has been obliged to say: "Stalin found the Soviet Union in ruin and left it a superpower.  Gorbachev inherited a superpower and left it in ruin.”
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 50
 
 
            ...However, we must give them all their due.  Despite their crimes, Beria, Stalin, Molotov, and Pervukhin succeeded in transforming the Soviet Union from a backward agrarian hinterland into a superpower armed with sophisticated nuclear weapons.  While committing equally monstrous crimes against their opponents and innocent bystanders, Khrushchev, Bulganin, and Malenkov contributed much less to the transformation of the USSR.  Unlike Stalin, they greatly weakened the state through their own power struggles.  Gorbachev and his aides, governed no less by personal ambition, caused the crumbling of the state.  Gorbachev and Yakovlev behaved like traditional party bosses, exploiting the name of democracy to strengthen their own power base.  They were naive as statesman and under the illusion that they were capable of outmaneuvering their rivals and preserving their power.  They accomplished nothing in domestic policy or in foreign affairs.  In 1989 Gorbachev moved Honecker out of power in East Germany, hoping to strengthen socialism, but it backfired.  He and Shevardnadze were incapable of negotiating economic concessions from the West in return for the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 428
 
            These advances are all connected, directly or indirectly, with Stalin.  Stalin's armies paved the way for revolution in Eastern Europe and assisted it in China.  Once the foundations of socialism were established under his leadership in the USSR, a model was given to the world, for socialism, although differing in specifics and in different countries, is --like feudalism or capitalism--necessarily everywhere the same in its general nature.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction.  Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 136
 
            He [Stalin] gave positive leadership and transformed a vast, backward agrarian nation into a modern industrial power.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. xi
 
 
            Soviet Russia today [1979] is a superpower with a Navy probably already larger than the United States Navy, an Army certainly larger, and a weapon capacity at least equal.  Stalin was the architect and creator of this military and economic might, which has been achieved within an astonishingly brief span of years.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. xv
 
            ...For such people [the urban citizenry] Stalinism provided an important means of upward social mobility, participation, and criticism.  Under the Gensec's rule, the country moved from backwardness to superpowerdom.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 232
 
            When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union was the second greatest Industrial, scientific, and military power in the world, and showed clear signs of moving to overtake the U.S. in all these areas.  This was despite the devastating losses it suffered while defeating the fascist powers of Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.  The various peoples of the USSR were unified.  Starvation and illiteracy were unknown throughout the country.  Agriculture was completely collectivized and extremely productive.  Preventive health care was the finest in the world, and medical treatment of exceptionally high quality was available free to all citizens.  Education at all levels was free.  More books were published in the USSR than in any other country.  There was no unemployment.
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 8
 
            Under his leadership, the Soviet Union had emerged as the strongest power in Europe by far and as a world power equal to the United States.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 11
 
            Survivors of the Stalinist period reminded the public that for many people the 1930s had been a period of happiness and enthusiasm, when a feeling prevailed that great things were being achieved.  A typical representative of the generation that "made it" under Stalin was Ivan Benediktov, who became the people's commissar of agriculture in 1938 at the age of 35, remained in key government positions for many years, and eventually served as ambassador to India and Yugoslavia (1959-70).  Among the main points made in Stalin's defense are the following: Promotion under Stalin was by merit only.  Many very young people (such as Voznesensky, Ustinov, Kosygin, Tevosian, and Vannikov) were appointed to key positions in their early 30s--and proved themselves.  Thousands of innocents suffered, but the overall number has been grossly exaggerated; the general atmosphere was not one of fear, repression, and terror but of a mighty wave of revolutionary enthusiasm, of pride in country and party, and of belief in the leadership.  Decisions taken at the top were far more democratic than generally believed; Stalin was not an extremist, but on the whole a fair and reasonable man.  In fact, Khrushchev's style was more autocratic than Stalin's.  As for the murder of the Red Army leadership, there is reason to believe that they plotted not against Stalin but against Voroshilov, who they thought was not equal to his task.  Such behavior would not have been tolerated in any country.
            ... The 1930s had been a time of great enthusiasm, of national unity and pride, of belief in the leadership, and of a historical mission; young people had been given chances like never before, and so on.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 244
 
            Stalin was, as we know, an abnormally suspicious, but also a sane and rational man.  He had, by 1934, just succeeded, not in making the Soviet Union strong, but in putting it in the way to being so.
Snow, Charles Percy. Variety of Men. New York: Scribner, 1966, p. 261
 
            This was a fantastic exaggeration but also a recognition of one indisputable achievement of Stalin's reign: from the weak third-rate industrial and military country which she had been in 1924, Russia had become one of the world's two superpowers.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 8
 
            He [Stalin] left the Soviet Union as a world power and an industrial colossus with a literate society.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 3
 
THE TRANQUIL LIFE IS NOT FOR REAL REVOLUTIONARIES
 
            "Go your own way!"--if that's the policy we are going to follow regarding Poland, then we are in for trouble at home.
            We are all interconnected....
            In fact, an ever more ferocious and perilous struggle is unfolding....  I am against the tranquil life!  If I craved a tranquil life, it would mean I have been "philistinized."  [11-9-81]
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 402
 
            We need to strengthen the party line to prevent philistines from getting the upper hand.  Yes, more than a few who desire a restful life will be found out there.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 412
 
            It was Stalin, they declare, who built the Soviet Union into a superpower.  It was Stalin who industrialized a peasant country, took it from wooden ploughs to atomic weapons, thrust it into the 20th-century, and made the West tremble at the might of Russia.  Above all, it was Stalin who won the war, destroyed Hitler, beat the Germans.  As they talk of Stalin, his admirers romanticize the exploits of their own youth, when, with Stalin at the helm, they were building a Brave New World.  And now, amid the disarray of Gorbachev's perestroika, they long nostalgically for the order and discipline imposed by the strong boss in the Kremlin.  Those were times, they assert, when factories worked--and so did workers--unlike today!
Smith, Hedrick. The New Russians (Pt. 1). New York: Random House, 1990. p. 132
 
DIFFICULT PERIODS LIE AHEAD
 
            We have passed through difficult periods, but in my opinion even more difficult one's lie ahead.  [6-16-83]
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 404
 
MOLOTOV COMPLIMENTS CASTRO
 
            Jaruzelski, in my opinion, has come to our rescue....  Until Jaruzelski the only pleasant surprise of that kind I had previously was Fidel Castro.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 408
 
KRIVITSKY KILLED HIMSELF AND THE SECRET POLICE DID NOT DO IT
 
            Walter Krivitsky, an intelligence officer who defected in 1937 and emerged in America in 1939, wrote a book, In Stalin's Secret Service, and in February 1941 was found dead in a hotel room in Washington, D.C..  It was assumed that he was assassinated by the NKVD, although the police verdict was that his death was a suicide.  There was an NKVD order issued to look for Krivitsky, but this was routine for all defectors.  We were not sorry to see him go, but it was not through our efforts that he died.  We believed he shot himself in despair as a result of a nervous breakdown.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 49
 
STALIN WANTS TROTSKY OUT OF THE WAY BECAUSE WAR IS COMING
 
            Trotsky and his followers were a significant challenge to the Soviet Union, competing with us to be the vanguard of the world Communist revolution.  Beria suggested I should be put in charge of all anti-Trotskyite NKVD operations so as to inflict the decisive blow on the headquarters of the movement....
            Then Stalin stiffened, as if giving an order, and said, "Trotsky should be eliminated within a year, before war inevitably breaks out.  Without the elimination of Trotsky, as the Spanish experience shows, when the imperialists attack the Soviet Union we cannot rely on our allies in the international Communist movement.  They will face great difficulties in fulfilling their international duty to de-stabilize the rear of our enemies by sabotage operations and guerrilla warfare if they have to deal with treacherous infiltrations by Trotskyites in their ranks.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 67
 
            Contrary to what was later written by General Volkogonov, who was not in the room that night, Stalin did not rage over the failure of the assassination attempt.  If he was angry, he masked it in his determination to proceed with the elimination of Trotsky.  Certainly, he was displeased that the attempt had been botched, but he appeared to be patient and prepared to play for higher stakes, putting his whole agent network on the line in a final effort to rid himself of Trotsky.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 77
 
            Stalin and Trotsky opposed each other, resorting to criminal methods to achieve their ends.  The main difference was that during his exile abroad Trotsky opposed not only Stalin, but also the Soviet Union.  This confrontation was a state of war that had to be resolved through victory or death.  There was no way for Stalin to treat Trotsky in exile as merely a writer of philosophical books; Trotsky was an active enemy who had to be destroyed.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 81
 
SECRET POLICE DID NOT KILL SEDOV
 
            Trotsky's son, Sedov, who took his mother's name, was closely watched by our agents.  He was the chief organizer of the Trotskyite movement in the 1930s after he left Turkey and moved to Paris in 1933.  We used two independent networks.  One was headed by Mark Zborowski,...  Volkogonov, however, claims in his biography of Trotsky that Zborowski arranged the smuggling and also helped to kill Sedov in a French hospital, where he died in February 1938 under mysterious circumstances after his appendix was removed.
            Sedov definitely died in Paris, but I found no evidence in his file or in the file of the Trotskyite international that he was assassinated.  If that were the case, somebody would have been decorated or claimed the honor.  At the time, there were accusations that heads of intelligence were taking false credit for elimination of Trotskyites, but no details or examples were provided.  The conventional wisdom is that Sedov's death resulted from an NKVD liquidation operation.  In fact the record shows that Shpigelglas reported Sedov's death from natural causes to Yezhov, who commented: "A good operation.  We did a good job on him, didn't we?"  Shpigelglas was not about to argue with Yezhov, who tried to take credit for Sedov's death when reporting it to Stalin.  This contributed to the belief that the NKVD did away with Sedov.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 82
 
            When Eitingon and I discussed with Beria the plan to eliminate Trotsky the death of Sedov was never raised.  It is easy to assume that Sedov was assassinated, but I do not believe that to be the case, and the reason is very simple.  He was so closely watched by us and trusted by Trotsky that his presence in Paris kept us informed about Trotskyite plans to smuggle agents and propaganda materials to the Soviet Union via Europe.  His liquidation would have lost us control over information about Trotskyite operations in Europe.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 83
 
            Sedov's operation was successful and for a few days he seemed to be making a normal recovery.  Then he had a sudden relapse which baffled his doctors.  Despite repeated blood transfusions, he died in great pain on Feb. 16 at the age of only 32.  The contemporary files contain no proof that the NKVD was responsible for his death.
Andrew and Mitrokhin. The Sword and the Shield (Pt 1). New York: Basic Books, c1999, p. 75
 
            On the night of 13 February 1938 he [Lyova, Trotsky’s son] was seen wandering half-naked and delirious through corridors and wards, which for some reason were unattended and unguarded.  He was raving in Russian....  Another operation was carried out urgently, but it brought no improvement.  The patient suffered terrible agony, and the doctors tried to save him by repeated blood transfusions.  It was in vain.  On 16 February in 1938 he died at the age of 32.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 396
 
            This was the third time he was mourning a child; and each time there was greater remorse in the mourning.  After Nina's death, in 1928, he reproached himself for not having done enough to comfort her and not even having written to her in her last weeks.  Zina was estranged from him [Trotsky] when she killed herself; and now Lyova had met his doom at the post where he had urged him to hold out.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 398
 
            Much later, in 1939, a message of dubious trustworthiness, which reached Trotsky through an American journalist, claimed that Sergei had still been alive late in 1938; but after that nothing more was heard about him.
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 402
 
STALIN DEFINITELY WANTED TO AVOID A TWO FRONT WAR
 
            The strategic goal of the Soviet leadership was to avert war on two fronts, in the Far East and in Europe, at any cost.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 96
 
ENGLAND AND FRANCE SENT LESSER FIGURES TO NEGOTIATE PRIOR TO THE WAR
 
            The French and British delegations that arrived in Moscow in August 1939 to probe the possibility of an alliance against Hitler were headed by secondary figures.  Stalin's policy of appeasing Hitler thus was based on the reasonable belief that hostility against Soviet communism by the Western world and Japan would forever keep the USSR in isolation from the international community.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 97
 
            What is certain is that, if the western governments had wanted to drive him [Stalin] into Hitler's arms, they could not have set about doing so more effectively than they did.  The Anglo-French military mission delayed its departure for 11 precious days.  It wasted five days more en route, traveling by the slowest possible boat.  When it arrived in Moscow its credentials and powers were not clear.  The governments whose prime ministers had not considered it beneath their dignity to fly to Munich almost at Hitler's nod, refused to send any official of ministerial standing to negotiate the alliance with Russia.  The servicemen sent for military talks were of lesser standing than those sent, for instance, to Poland and Turkey.    If Stalin intended an alliance, the way he was treated might almost have been calculated to make him abandon his intention.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 434
 
THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP SECRET PROTOCOLS WERE NOT SECRET
 
            ...When I look now at the Molotov-Ribbentrop secret protocols, I find nothing secret in them.  The directives based on these agreements were definite and clear, and were known not only to the intelligence directorate but to the heads of military, diplomatic, economic, and border guards administrations.  In fact, the famous map of the division of Poland, which was attached to the protocols in October 1939, was published a week later in Pravda, without Stalin's and Ribbentrop's signatures, for the whole world to see.  By then, of course, Poland had fallen to Germany, and Britain and France had entered the war.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 98
 
KHRUSCHOV’S  DETENTION OF KOST-LEVITSKY WAS UNNECESSARY
 
            The remaining Ukrainian nationalist leaders had Nazi connections only at lower levels, mainly intelligence operatives of Abwehr and the Gestapo, and in this situation they had no political value to British or French authorities once the war began. So Khrushchev's claim in his message to Stalin that the detention of Kost-Levitsky was important in defeating Western plans to set up a Ukrainian provisional government-in-exile was nothing but misleading self-aggrandizement.
            I sensed that, and when ordered to assess the importance of Kost-Levitsky's detention in Moscow I emphasized in my report to Beria, which was then sent to Molotov, that his detention was in no way justified.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 106
 
STALIN ABANDONED HIS PLAN TO HAVE HITLER KILLED
 
            ...In 1943 Stalin abandoned his original orders to try to eliminate Hitler; he feared that if Hitler was killed his Nazi henchman would be purged by the German military and a separate treaty would be signed with the allies without Soviet participation.
            Such a fear was not without foundation.  We were aware that in the summer of 1942, on the initiative of Pope Pius XII, the Vatican's representative in Ankara had approached the German ambassador, von Papen, urging that he exert his influence to bring about a separate peace between Britain, the United States, and Germany.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 115
 
NAZIS VIEWED SOVIET DEFENSES AS WEAK
 
            Two other little-known matters remain to be mentioned.  In May 1941, a German Junkers 52 intruded into Soviet airspace undetected by Soviet air defense and landed safely at the central airfield in Moscow near Dynamo Stadium.  This caused an uproar in the Kremlin and led to the purge of the military command; first came dismissals, then the arrest and execution of top figures in the administration of the air force and in the command of the Red Army.  To Hitler, this spectacular landing signaled that combat readiness of the Red Army was low.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 121
 
PAVLOV WAS INCOMPETENT
 
            On June 20th Eitingon reported to me that he was displeased by a talk he had with General Pavlov, commander of the Byelorussian military district.  Because they had known each other in Spain, Eitingon asked his friendly advice on what trouble spots Pavlov foresaw in his territory.  Eitingon said that Pavlov either was drunk or understood nothing about the coordination of various fighting services in modern warfare.  Pavlov anticipated no problems and believed that even if the enemy at first seized the initiative on the border he had enough strength in reserve to counter any major breakthrough.  He saw no necessity for subversive operations to cause disorganization among the attacking force.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 124
 
            During the German aggression, in June 1941, General Pavlov, commander of the Western Front, displayed grave incompetence and negligence.  The result was the loss of Minsk, the Byelorussian capital, on June 28.  Stalin recalled Pavlov and his staff to Moscow.  Zhukov noted that “On a proposal of the Military Council of the Western Front, brought to trial together with him were...other generals of the Front Headquarters.”  They were tried and shot.
            Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 260.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 251 [p. 227 on the NET]
 
            On June 26 Stalin phoned Zhukov in Ternopol, ordering him to return to the General Headquarters at once.  The enemy was approaching Minsk, and Pavlov, commanding the West Front, had evidently loss control....  On June 28 Russian troops surrendered Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia.  German troops carried out a savage massacre of the inhabitants and destroyed most of the city.
            Twice on June 29 Stalin came to the General Headquarters.  He was in a black mood and reacted violently to the chaotic situation on the West Front.  Zhukov conferred by telegraph with Gen. Pavlov, but it was clear that the situation was hopeless.  On the next day Stalin ordered Zhukov to summon Pavlov to Moscow.  On his arrival Zhukov hardly recognized him; he had changed so much in the eight days of the war.  Pavlov was removed from his command, and with the other generals from this front, he was put on trial.  All were shot.
            Stalin held them responsible for the destruction of the West Front.  He attached special importance to this front against which he believed the Germans would deliver their main assault.... The most serious mistake was that the troops were not deployed in depth along the extensive western frontier with the result that the German armored divisions, advancing at speed, were able to outflank and encircle strategic positions.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 326
 
            Pavlov was still on Stalin's mind.  Before becoming commander-in-chief of the Western front, he had made quite a good impression.  True, he hadn't had much experience and his rise after Spain had been rapid.  But why had his headquarters been so remiss?...  Still, the question nagged at Stalin: how could Pavlov have lost everything so miserably?  He called Poskrebyshev and asked, 'Who, apart from Pavlov, has been sent to the military tribunal?  When's the trial?  Where's the draft sentence?  Get me Ulrich!'  Poskrebyshev brought in a thin file and laid it on the desk.  It was labeled '(Draft) Sentence':
            ...The file went on to state that it had been established by preliminary investigation that:
            "the accused, Pavlov and Klimovskikh, were participants in an anti-Soviet military conspiracy and that they had used their positions to carry out enemy work by not training the personnel under their command for military action, that with their conspiratorial aims in mind they had weakened the preparedness for mobilization of the troops in the military district, they had disrupted the administration of the forces and surrendered weapons to the enemy without a fight, thus causing great damage to the fighting capacity of the Red Army."
            Stalin skipped most of the document, which continued in this vein, but read the last section:
            "Thus the guilt of Pavlov and Klimovskikh... and that of Grigoryev and Korobkov... has been established.  As a result of the above....all four [are sentenced] to the highest form of punishment, namely to be shot, and all their personal property to be confiscated."
            Stalin turned to Poskrebyshev and said: 'I approve the sentence, but tell Ulrich to get rid of all that rubbish about "conspiratorial activity".  The case shouldn't drag out.  No appeal.  And then inform the fronts, so they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy.'
            ... The accused asked to be sent to the front in any capacity; they would show their loyalty to the fatherland and their military duty by giving their blood.  They asked the court to believe that everything that had happened was the result of extremely unfavorable circumstances.  They did not deny their guilt.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 421-422
 
STALIN REFUSES TO SIGN A SEPARATE PEACE WITH THE NAZIS
 
            In my view, Stalin and the leadership sensed that any attempt at capitulation--in a war that was so harsh and unprecedented--would automatically ruin the leadership's ability to govern the country.  Apart from their true patriotic feelings, of which I am convinced, any form of capitulation was for them unacceptable.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 147
 
 
             In a little while Stalin was on the line.  I reported to him about Hitler's suicide and the letter from Goebbels proposing armistice.
            Stalin answered:
            "Now he's done it, the bastard.  Too bad he could not have been taken alive.  Where is Hitler's body?"
            "According to General Krebs Hitler's body was burned."
            "Tell Sokolovsky that there can be no talks--either with Krebs or any other Hitlerites--only unconditional surrender," said the Supreme Commander.
Zhukov, Georgi. Reminiscences and Reflections Vol. 2. Moscow: Progress Pub., c1985, p. 390
 
CHECHENS WOULD NOT COOPERATE WITH THE RED ARMY
 
            Only in the Chechen area was the local population reluctant to cooperate with the Red Army.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 149
 
VLASOV WAS EXECUTED AS A TRAITOR
 
            [Footnote] Colonel Vlasov, highly regarded by Khrushchev and Stalin, boldly escaped encirclement in the defense of Kiev and Moscow but was captured by the Germans in the spring of 1942.  Vlasov was turned and created an army of Russian prisoners of war to fight for Hitler.  Vlasov's troops were used for punishment expeditions against partisans in the Balkans and in Poland against the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1944.  Vlasov surrendered to the Americans in May 1945 and was handed over to Soviet authorities, who tried and executed him by hanging.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 169
 
            In his book on Vlasov, The History of the Vlasov Army (in German), Hoffman states, apparently on the basis of the Vlasov archives, that by May 1943 the Wehrmacht had 90 Russian battalions and almost as many national legions at its disposal.  These figures are grossly inflated, and the attempt to portray the Vlasov movement as a viable alternative to Bolshevism is unconvincing in the extreme.  Vlasov's formations were not composed of 'ideological fighters', so much as a mixed bag of criminals and nationalists, but mainly of people who had found themselves in a hopeless situation and were possessed by the single idea that here lay a way to survive.  Vlasov's resort to such White emigres as Ataman Krasnov, General Shkuro, General Kluch and others, is eloquent testimony to the movement's ideological poverty.
            It was mainly Soviet military success that undermined the Vlasov movement, dispelling as it did the depression, the panic and the apathy that had provided a rich soil for defections.  Stalin, however, chose to explain the Vlasov movement as evidence that not all the 'enemies of the people' had been exposed before the war.  Strict supervision was to be maintained over returnees from captivity, special measures were to be introduced at the front, with punitive action against anyone overheard voicing their doubt about their commanders' abilities.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 445
 
 
ROSENBERGS WERE NOTHING MORE THAN MINOR COURIERS
 
            Semyonov was the case officer of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after Ovakimian recruited them.  The Rosenbergs were never more than minor couriers and were never involved with our major networks, but their later arrest had global repercussions.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 177
 
            Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were recruited by Ovakimian, our resident in New York, in 1938.  The irony is that the Rosenbergs are portrayed by the American counterintelligence service as the key figures in delivering atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, but actually they played a very minor role.  They were absolutely separate from my major networks gathering atomic secrets.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 213
 
            I first learned of the arrest of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1950 from a TASS report.  I was not concerned about it.  This might strike some as odd, but it is important to note that as well as being responsible for the thousands of fighters behind German lines during the war, we had hundreds of agents in the United States, not including illegals, sources, and informers.  As the director of Department S., I was familiar with our personnel, though not with any but their most important sources; the Rosenbergs were not important or significant sources of information.  It occurred to me that they might have been related to our intelligence operations, but they were not major players in my atomic intelligence networks.  I considered the whole affair to be routine business.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 213
 
 
            The involvement of the Rosenbergs in atomic spying was the outcome of our efforts to utilize any and all possible sources of information, but the Rosenbergs were never a significant source.  They were a naive couple overeager to cooperate with us, who provided no valuable secrets.  I said that I was completely unaware of their providing technological information of high value to Semyonov.  They were spies recruited by Ovakimian who worked for us because of their ideological motivations.  Their contributions to atomic espionage were minor.
            It was clear from the very beginning that the case had acquired a political character far out a proportion to their actual role as spies.  More important than their spying activities was that the Rosenbergs served as a symbol in support of communism and the Soviet Union.  Their bravery to the end served our cause, because they became the center of a worldwide communist propaganda campaign.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 216
 
STALIN GETS SERIOUS ABOUT BUILDING AN ATOMIC BOMB
 
            Stalin was fascinated by the potential of the bomb.  In late October 1942, he had suggested that the plan for our offensive to surround the Germans at Stalingrad be called Uranium.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 203
 
            On July 20th, 1945, 10 days after the information on the imminent explosion of the American nuclear bomb was reported to Stalin, he made up his mind to set up the Special State Committee on Problem No. 1, making it a more powerful, Politburo committee.  On August 20th, 1945, two weeks after the Americans dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, we once again reorganized our atomic project.  Beria was appointed chairman of the new Special State Committee.
            [Footnote] By upgrading it to the status of a Politburo committee, under the aegis of the Communist party, Stalin stressed the urgency of its task and increased its power to complete the bomb.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 202
 
            Meetings were usually in Beria's study; heated discussions erupted from time to time.  I remember Pervukhin, deputy prime minister, indignantly reprimanding and attacking Voznesensky, a member of the Politburo and his superior, for his reluctance to consider allocations of supplies of nonferrous metals for the needs of chemical processing plants that were engaged in the project.  I had always assumed that members of the bureaucratic structures were subordinated to each other in accordance with their status.  A member of the Politburo was always beyond criticism, at least by a person in a lower rank.  It was not so in the special committee, where Politburo members and key ministers behaved almost as equals.  It also startled me that Pervukhin was Beria's deputy in this committee, in which Voznesensky & Malenkov, members of the Politburo and far outranking Pervukhin, were ordinary members.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 204
 
            For me, Kurchatov remains a genius, the Russian Oppenheimer, but not a scientific giant like Bohr or Fermi.  He was certainly helped by the intelligence we supplied, and his efforts would have been for naught without Beria's talent in mobilizing the nation's resources.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 211
 
 
STALIN’S ATOMIC DIPLOMACY
 
            Just as Fuchs enabled us to determine that the United States was not ready for nuclear war against the Soviet Union, Penkovsky told the United States that Khrushchev was not prepared for nuclear war against the United States.
            Stalin pursued a tough policy of confrontation against the United States when the Cold War started; he knew he did not have to be afraid of the American nuclear threat, at least until the end of the 1940s.  Only by 1955 did we estimate the stockpile of American and British nuclear weapons to be sufficient to destroy the Soviet Union.
            That information helped to assure a communist victory in China's civil war in 1947-1948.  We were aware that President Truman was seriously considering the use of nuclear weapons to prevent a Chinese communist victory.  Then Stalin initiated the Berlin crisis, blockading the Western-controlled sectors of the city in 1948.  Western press reports indicated that Truman and Attlee, the British Prime Minister, were prepared to use nuclear weapons to prevent Berlin's fall to communism, but we knew that the Americans did not have enough nuclear weapons to deal with both Berlin and China.  The American government overestimated our threat in Berlin and lost the opportunity to use the nuclear threat to support the Chinese nationalists.
            Stalin provoked the Berlin crisis deliberately to divert attention from the crucial struggle for power in China.  In 1951, when we were discussing plans for military operations against American bases, Molotov told me that our position in Berlin helped the Chinese communists.  For Stalin, the Chinese communist victory supported his policy of confrontation with America.  He was preoccupied with the idea of a Sino-Soviet axis against the Western world.  Stalin's view of Mao Tse-tung, of course, was that he was a junior partner.  I remember that when Mao came to Moscow in 1950 Stalin treated him with respect, but as a junior partner.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 210
 
HISS WAS NOT A PAID  OR CONTROLLED SOVIET AGENT
 
            One of the officials we had established confidential relations with was Alger Hiss, a member of the American delegation.  I had the feeling that Hiss was acting under the instructions of Hopkins.  In conversation, Hiss disclosed to Oumansky, and then Litvinov, official U.S. attitudes and plans; he was also very close to our sources who were cooperating with Soviet intelligence and to our active intelligence operators in the United States.  Within this framework of exchange of confidential information were references to Hiss as the source who told us the Americans were prepared to make a deal in Europe.
            On our list of psychological profiles, Hiss was identified as highly sympathetic to the interests of the Soviet Union and a strong supporter of postwar collaboration between American and Soviet institutions.  However, there was no indication that he was a paid or controlled agent, which I would have known or would have been marked.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 227
 
STALIN TOLD THE SECRET POLICE TO NOT TRACK DOWN ORLOV
 
            Vyshinsky, clearly distressed, was relieved by my final remark: "But Comrade Stalin personally ordered the NKVD not to track down Orlov or persecute members of his family."
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 231
 
KHRUSHCHOV IS RESPONSIBLE FOR KILLINGS
 
            On one occasion, during the summer of 1946, I was summoned to the Central Committee headquarters...together with Abakumov.  There I met Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, in Kuznetsov's office.  Kuznetsov, secretary of the Communist Party, was very formal even though he knew me socially.  He informed me that the Central Committee had agreed to the suggestion of Comrade Khrushchev to secretly liquidate the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, Shumsky, who was reported by the Ukrainian security service to have established contacts with Ukrainian emigres.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 249
 
            Khrushchev knew that Romzha was infiltrating both government and party administrations but didn't know how.  Fearing exposure of his ineptitude, Khrushchev initiated Romzha's secret assassination.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 253
 
            I sensed that my rehabilitation case would drag on because no one in power was willing to reveal in print the truths that would compromise Khrushchev's liberalization, now being portrayed as the model for their own reforms.  Decisions of the earlier leadership to eliminate political opponents like Trotsky and Shumsky, the Ukrainian nationalist, had not been brought up again for discussion in the press, nor had they been repudiated by Gorbachev and Yakovlev.  They could not permit themselves to expose Khrushchev, either as an accomplice to Stalin or as an organizer of his own secret political murders.  The heroic memory of the Twentieth Party Congress, in which Khrushchev exposed Stalin's crimes, would have been stained.  The delegates at the Congress and the members of the Central Committee knew about his and their participation in Stalin's crimes.  Thus, if my case were brought into the daylight, the entire party leadership under Khrushchev would be exposed as having used Beria and the men who worked under him as scapegoats for themselves.  Gorbachev's leadership would then be held responsible for concealing the guilt of the mentors who had brought them to power.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 427
 
[Moscow Soviet Chairman, Vasili Pronin, who was chairman from April 1939 to 1945 says], Khrushchev sanctioned repressions against mainly good communists and Soviet workers.  Under him, all the 23 Moscow party secretaries were arrested, some without Stalin even being aware.  All secretaries of districts, provinces, territories, such as Katselebogen, Margolin, even his own staff were arrested.  While Khrushchev was still in the Ukraine in 1938, he demanded the cleansing and arrest of all functionaries in Moscow.
 
QUESTION: Are you saying that the so-called repressions [in Moscow] were in most part the work and responsibility of Khrushchev?
 
ANSWER: I would say in the largest measure.  After 1938, when Shcherbakov came to head the the Moscow party organization, none of the Moscow City comrades were repressed or let go off the job.  I remember a meeting of the Politburo in July of 1940: There was a question brought up my Khrushchev and his friends about taking Shcherbakov from his position--because of some question as to his competence.  Also, he was accused of not taking enough action to get rid of "enemies" in the organization.  Stalin was instrumental in saving Shcherbakov.  In my presence, after Shcherbakov came to head the Moscow Party organization, he was instrumental in getting rid of the commander of the NKVD from the party for fabricating accusations against party functionaries and their arrest.  They were all saved by the intervention of Stalin and Shcherbakov.
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 24-25
 
 
BANDERA’S GUERRILLAS KILL THOSE WORKING FOR THE GOVERNMENT
 
            In Bandera's last attempt to keep the nationalist movement intact, terror became the common feature of life in the Western Ukraine.  Local authorities loss control in the countryside.  Guerrilla commanders prohibited the conscription of the local population into the Red Army.  Bandera's men killed conscripts' entire families and burned their houses to establish guerrilla rule in rural areas.  The climax of this campaign came with the assassination of Kostelnik on the steps of the Cathedral in Lvov while he was leaving after a religious service.  The assassin was blocked by the crowd and shot himself, but he was identified as a member of the terrorist squad personally supervised by Bandera's deputy Shukheyevich, for seven years head of the Ukrainian guerrilla underground.  During the war Shukheyevich held the rank of Haupsturmfuhrer in the Gestapo division that liquidated the Polish intelligentsia and the Jewish ghetto in Lvov in July 1941.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 251
 
            We went to find Lebed's relatives, two nephews who were heading anti-communist guerrilla detachments.  Lebed wanted to convince them to give up the armed struggle.  Lebed's own cousin had been shot by a Bandera group for accepting an offer to become the chairman of the local kolkhoz, even though they knew that his daughter and two sons were in the anti-communist underground.  The stoicism of the cousin's daughter made a deep impression on me.  Although deeply depressed, she accepted the execution of her father as inevitable because he didn't obey the warnings of the resistance.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 255
 
            The policy of repression led to a declaration of war on two fronts by the OUN, against the Red Army and against the Germans, but in reality they never attacked the Germans.  In 1944 Bandera and Melnik were freed [by the Germans] and allowed to lead the armed struggle of the Ukrainian nationalists against the Red Army, which at that time was on the offensive.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 397
 
BRITISH AND US PLANES GET IN FIGHTS OVER SOVIET AIRSPACE
 
            [Footnote] Sudoplatov adds: "About once a month during the late '40s and early '50s American and British planes violated our airspace; in most cases they were attacked by our fighter planes, and both sides suffered heavy losses in those dogfights.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 257
 
TIMASHUK’S LETTER REGARDING THE DOCTOR’S PLOT
 
            It is generally believed that the Doctors' Plot began with a hysterical letter to Stalin accusing Jewish doctors of plans to murder the leadership by means of maltreatment and poisoning.  The notorious letter of Lydia Timashuk, a doctor in the Kremlin PolyClinic, was written and sent to Stalin not in 1952, just prior to the arrest of the doctors, but in August 1948.  To her letter, which charged that Academician Vinogradov was maltreating Zhdanov and others and caused Zhdanov's death, Stalin's reaction had been: "Absurd."  Her letter remained on file for three years without action and was only dug up at the end of 1951....
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 298
 
STALIN PROMOTES ZHUKOV
 
            Zhukov continued to be commander of the military districts in Odessa and Siberia, and in 1952 Stalin made him a candidate member of the Central Committee.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 314
 
CHAOS SURROUNDED STALIN’S FUNERAL
 
            The arrangements for every delegation attending Stalin's funeral were equally mismanaged.  These were stupid, minor inconveniences, but tragically, hundreds of mourners were killed in the crush of unregulated crowds.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 340
 
            The ancient custom of embalming and mummifying against which Krupskaya had so vehemently protested in her day and on which Stalin had so insisted, also seemed perfectly natural.  The center of Moscow was packed with mourning crowds, in some places so dense that there were a number of fatalities.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 576
 
            At Stalin's funeral, the crowds were such that many were crushed to death.  Sakharov describes the scene: 'People roamed the streets, distraught and confused, with general music in the background.  I too got carried away.'
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 314
 
            Only a non-Soviet would have missed the reference: in the days after Stalin's death, the crowd outside the Hall of Columns was so dense and emotional that hundreds of people were crushed to death--a fitting tribute.
Remnick, David. Lenin's Tomb. New York: Random House, c1993, p. 288
 
            But the reaction to Stalin’s death in March 1953, when popular grief took a widely hysterical form, indicates that respect and even affection for him was substantial.  He incarnated pride in military victory.  He stood for industrial might and cultural progress.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 545
 
            Crowds gathered.  Muscovites raced to catch a glimpse of the dictator’s remains before the funeral.  Trains and buses from distant provinces were packed with passengers avid to see Stalin lying in state.  By Metro and bus everyone came to the capital’s centre and then walked up on foot to the cobbled square with somber eagerness.  On 8 March the human mass became too large for the police to control.  Far too many people were converging from all directions.  Panic ensued as many tried to turn back.  The result was disastrous.  Thousands of individuals were trampled and badly injured, and the number of people who suffered fatal asphyxiation went into the hundreds.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 588
 
            The militia were unable to control the press of people, who stampeded, and many of them including women and children were trampled to death....
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 255
 
            Harrison Salisbury, who had been a correspondent in Russia for almost 9 years, wrote that the crush of people, young and old, men and women and some children, was something that he had never seen there before, 'a spontaneous crowd'.  To attempt to curb the influx from the rest of the country, the authorities had to suspend incoming rail services, and the last trains that did arrive had people clinging in ice and snow to the roofs of the carriages.  Despite the best efforts of police and troops, and the use of parked trucks to contain the crowd, the press of mourners crushed to death some of their number.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 309
 
MOLOTOV’S WIFE WAS CAUGHT UP IN THE ANTI-ZIONISM EFFORT
 
            What startled me most was that Zhemchuzhina, Molotov's wife, had maintained clandestine contacts through Mikhoels and Jewish activists with her brother in the United States.  A letter to her brother dated October 5th, 1946, before she was arrested, was purely Communist in outlook but otherwise nonpolitical....  In her testimony she had denied that she had attended a synagogue service in Moscow in March 1945 devoted to Jews who had died in the war.  Four independent witnesses placed her there.  The diplomatic corps was also represented.  Surely Molotov encouraged her to go because it was useful to have American observers see his wife there after the Yalta conference, but as she was his wife, his instruction was oral, without record.  Later, she did not want to implicate him so she denied that episode, but it was used against her and against him in the anti-Semitic campaign and in ousting him from power.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 343
 
            In February 1949 the initiative for the arrest of Molotov’s wife came not from Stalin but from people who were competing for his succession.
Beria, Sergo. Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin. London: Duckworth, 2001, p. 169
 
 
EAST GERMAN RIOTS CAUSED BY DISAGREEMENT IN GOVT
 
            Ulbricht, together with other GDR leaders, was called to Moscow in early June 1953, and we informed them of our policy, approved by the Presidium on June 12....
            While I did not attend the meeting with the East German delegation--at which Beria, Malenkov, Khrushchev, Molotov, Semyonov, and General Grechko (commander of Soviet troops in Germany) were present--I later learned that Ulbricht strongly disagreed.  Therefore, Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev decided to remove him.
            The outburst of strikes and riots that occurred on June 17 may have resulted from the rebel leaders thinking that the government could not respond.  Another theory is that Ulbricht provoked the uprising by refusing to meet the demand for increased pay for the striking workers.  I believe both factors were involved.
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 365
 
THOSE WHO FOLLOWED STALIN REPRESSED PEOPLE
 
            Despite my rehabilitation, my medals have not been returned to me; let no one forget that I, too, have been a victim of political repression.  [But not by Stalin]
Sudoplatov, Pavel. Special Tasks. Boston: Little, Brown, c1993, p. 431
 
STALIN’S DEAD WIFE TREATED HIM WELL AND STALIN WAS KIND TO HER FAMILY
 
            It's not true that after my mother died her family repudiated my father.  On the contrary, they all did their best to make him happy.  They treated him with consideration, and he was cordial and kind to them all.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 19
 
STALIN’S WIFE, DAUGHTER, FAMILY AND AIDES HATED BERIA
 
            ...Everyone close to us hated him [Beria],...  Everyone in the family loathed him and felt a premonition of fear, especially my mother, who, as my father himself told me, "made scenes" and insisted as early as 1929 that "that man must not be allowed to set foot in our house."
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 19
 
            I shall come back later to Beria, who seems to have had a diabolic link with all our family and who wiped out a good half of its members....
            Had it not been for the inexplicable support of my father, whom Beria had cunningly won over, Kirov and Ordzhonikidze and all the others who knew Transcaucasia and knew about the Civil War there would have blocked his advance.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 58
 
            Redens was arrested in 1937.  That was the first blow.  Soon afterward both the Svanidzes were arrested.
            How could such a thing happen?  How could my father [Stalin] do it?  The only thing I know is that it couldn't have been his idea.  But if a skillful flatterer, like Beria, whispered slyly in his ear that "these people are against you," that they were "compromising material" and "dangerous connections," such as trips abroad, my father was capable of believing it.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 77
 
            With typical cunning Beria played on my father's bitterness and sense of loss [at my mother’s death].  Up to then he had simply been an occasional visitor to the house in Sochi and my father was on vacation there.  Now that he had my father sympathy and support, however, he quickly wormed his way up to the job of First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party....
            Once he was First Secretary in Georgia, it didn't take Beria long to reach Moscow, where he began his long reign in 1938.  From then on he saw my father every day.  His influence on my father grew and grew and never ceased until the day of my father's death.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 136
 
            I speak advisedly of his influence on my father and not the other way around.  Beria was more treacherous, more practiced in perfidy and cunning, more insolent and single-minded than my father.  In a word, he was a stronger character.  My father had his weaker sides.  He was capable of self-doubt.  He was cruder and more direct than Beria, and not so suspicious.  He was simpler and could be led up the garden path by someone with Beria's craftiness.  Beria was aware of my father's weaknesses.  He knew the hurt pride and the inner loneliness.  He was aware that my father's spirit was, in a sense, broken.  And so he poured oil on the flames and fanned them as only he knew how.  He flattered my father with a shamelessness that was nothing if not Oriental.  He praised him and made up to him in a way that caused old friends, accustomed to looking on my father as an equal, to wince with embarrassment.
            Beria's role was a terrible one for all our family.  How my mother feared and hated him!  And it was her friends...who were the first to fall, the moment Beria was able to convince my father that they were hostile to him.
            ...The spell cast on my father by this terrifying evil genius was extremely powerful, and it never failed to work.
            ...Beria's role in the Civil War in the Caucasus was highly ambiguous.  He was a borne spy and provocateur.  He worked first for the Armenian nationalists and then for the Reds as power swung back and forth.  Once the Reds caught him in the act of treason and had him arrested.  He was imprisoned awaiting sentence when a telegram arrived from Kirov, who was chief of all operations in the Caucasus, demanding that he be shot as a traitor....  I can't imagine, moreover, that Kirov would ever have allowed Beria's election to the Central Committee.
            But Kirov used to live in our house.  He was one of us, an old colleague and a friend.  My father liked him and was attached to him.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 137
 
            He [Ordzhonikidze] was well acquainted with Beria from his days in the Caucasus and couldn't stand him.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 139
 
            Beria, of course, was a bloody butcher, a rapist, and a revolting person.
Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin's Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 351
 
            Vlasik went on to say that, once he had been summoned by Beria for interrogation, 'I knew I could expect nothing but death, as I was sure they had deceived the Head of government.'
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 570
 
            And that was why he [Beria] had been unable to conceal his joy at my father's death.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Only One Year. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 375
 
            "During the civil war," Svetlana reminds us, "Beria fought first with the Reds and then with the Whites--as the situation changed so did his allegiance.  At one time, fighting for the Whites, he was taken prisoner by Kirov and Ordzhonikidze who were then leading the Red Army there, and they ordered his execution.  But this order was overlooked: he was a little Mr. Nobody and the army had to move on and there were other matters to consider.  So they forgot to shoot him."...
            "Nobody in our family liked him [Beria], though at the beginning my father regarded him as a very good worker.  Yes, he committed this sin."...
            The only thing that mattered to Beria was power, even in those early days.  He was both immoral and apolitical: his only creed was that the ends justify the means....
            Volodya said, "Everyone in our family knew then he was a scoundrel.  Nadya spoke out against him quite openly, so did my mother, Anna Sergeyevna.  He was quite obviously a villain.  He wanted to isolate Stalin from his relatives, to close every possible uncontrolled channel through which reality might reach Stalin."...
            "He hated all of our family," adds Kyra [the niece of Stalin's wife].  Svetlana said, "he is very clever, and very manipulative.  He got everything he wanted.  And he was a horrible man with a horrible face.  According to my [Svetlana] mother too he was horrible!  She wouldn't have him around.  She was outspoken enough to tell father [Stalin] that he shouldn't invite him to the house.  Every time they went on vacation to the Black Sea Beria would visit them because Georgia was where he was stationed--he was boss of the KGB at the time.  She loathed him, couldn't stand him, couldn't sit near him.  She called him a 'dirty old man' and without doubt he noticed her antipathy.  There were quarrels over him with father; he would arrive and my mother would scream at Father, "Don't let him come here!  Don't let him in!"
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 102-104
 
            Svetlana says, "Children  have instincts about people like this.  There was something unpleasant about him [Beria].  The others--Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich--had a certain dignity, they talked to my father as equals, calling him Joseph, and ti, the familiar form of 'you".  Beria could not handle these older statesmen who remembered and loved Nadya, and who had been close to the family for a long time.  They never flattered my father.  Beria was always flattering him.  Father would say something, and Beria would immediately say, "Oh yes, you are so right, absolutely true, how true!" in an obsequious way.  None of the others, even if they did agree with him, were flapping their wings like this and being 'yes men'.  He was a creep.
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 158
 
STALIN LOVED HIS DEAD WIFE TREMENDOUSLY
 
            My grandparents took her [my mother] death terribly hard.  They understood only too well how much my father must be suffering.  And so, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, looking back, nothing in their attitude changed.  No one spoke openly of the pain all three of them shared, but it was always imperceptibly present.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 48
 
            The next day he [my father] suddenly started talking to me for the first time about my mother and the way she died.  We were by ourselves.  The anniversary of her death, November 8, fell during the November 7 holiday every year.  It ruined the holiday for him for all time, and in his last years he tried to spend November in the south.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 193
 
            In the first years of their life together Stalin loved his young wife very much, and she responded in kind.  They soon had a son, Vasily (in the past that had been one of Stalin's party names).  A few years later their daughter, Svetlana, was born....
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 55
 
            As his bodyguards indicated in conversations with me many years afterward, Stalin... following the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45... would frequently order a detour from routes of his daily travel between the Kremlin where he worked and his dacha outside Moscow, so that the caravan of cars could stop at the Novodevichi Cemetery [where his wife was buried].
Deriabin, Peter. Inside Stalin's Kremlin. Washington [D.C.]: Brassey's, c1998, p. 186
 
            I have stated these facts in view of the many legends that now exist about Alliluyeva and her relations with Stalin.  Ten years ago, visiting an acquaintance, I was shown a book in Russian entitled Stalin, on the Life of the Soviet Dictator.  It had been published in Estonia in 1930 when that country was still independent and the home of several emigre publishing houses.  After reading only the first part of this book it was clear that the author, who had a Caucasian surname, had used some of the Soviet materials on Stalin that appeared at the time of his 50th birthday, but had simply invented the rest.  For example, he asserted that Stalin, in the manner of an eastern despot, kept his wife in seclusion in a large Kremlin apartment and that none of Stalin's Circle living in the Kremlin ever saw her face.
            In reality Nadezhda Alliluyeva was an extremely sociable person and a familiar figure in Party circles.
Medvedev, Roy. On Stalin and Stalinism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 81
 
            ...Stalin treasures every memory of his wife with a tenderness little in accord with his nature.
Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite; "The letter of an Old Bolshevik." New York: Praeger, 1965, p. 57
 
            Despite what many subsequently suggested, he [Stalin] attended the ceremony [Nadya’s funeral].
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 293
 
STALIN’S WIFE’S PHILOSOPHY AND MENTAL STATE
 
            In one of her letters as a schoolgirl my mother had stated the rule that "The more time you have, the lazier you are," and it was a rule she always observed when it came to her children.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 98
 
            My nurse told me that before she died my mother was unusually irritable and sad.  One day an old friend from her school in Leningrad came to see her.  They sat and talked awhile in my nursery, which also served us as the room where my mother saw visitors.  My nurse heard my mother say again and again that "everything bored her," that she was "sick of everything" and "nothing made her happy."  The friend asked, "What about the children?"  "Everything, even the children," was my mother's reply.  My nurse saw that it was so, that my mother really was tired of being alive.  But it never occurred to her or to anybody else that she was capable of taking her own life within a matter of days.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 105
 
            Her [my mother] self-control, her tremendous inner tension and discipline, her pent-up irritation and discontent built up more and more pressure within until finally she was like a tightly coiled spring.  And when the spring uncoiled at last, it did so with ferocious force.
            What caused the spring to give, the immediate occasion, was trivial in itself, so trivial one would have said it happened for no reason at all.  It was a minor falling out at a banquet in honor of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution.  My father merely said to her, "Hey, you.  Have a drink!"  My mother screamed, "Don't you dare 'hey' me!"  And in front of everyone she got up and ran from the table.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 107
 
            Nadezhda herself was not endlessly patient with Stalin's way of life....  But the life continued to weigh on her, and in the late 1920s she went to Berlin, where her brother Pavel was then stationed, to consult a neurologist.  There seems to have been some family predisposition to depression; both her sister Anna and her brother Fedor were at various times hospitalized for psychological problems.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 128
 
            Nadya was becoming ever more hysterical, or as Molotov put it, "unbalanced."   Sergo's daughter Eteri, who had every reason to hate Stalin, explains, "Stalin didn't treat her well but she, like all the Alliluyevs, was very unstable."   She seemed to become estranged from the children and everything else.   Stalin confided in Khrushchev that he sometimes locked himself in the bathroom, while she beat on the door, shouting: "You're an impossible man.   It's impossible to live with you!"
            ...This image of Stalin as the powerless henpecked husband besieged, cowering in his own bathroom by the wild-eyed Nadya, must rank as the most incongruous vision of the Man of Steel in his entire career.   Himself frantic, with his mission in jeopardy, Stalin was baffled by Nadya's mania.   She told her friend that "everything bored her--she was sick of everything."
            "What about the children?" asked the friend.
            "Everything, even the children."   This gives some idea of the difficulties Stalin faced.   Nadya's state of mind sounds more like a psychological illness than despair caused by political protest or even her oafish husband.   "She had attacks of melancholy," Zhenya told Stalin; she was "sick."   The doctors prescribed "caffeine" to pep her up.   Stalin later blamed the caffeine and he was right: caffeine would have disastrously exacerbated her despair.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 88
 
            [Footnote]: It was Zinaida [Zhdanov's wife] who was tactless enough to tell Svetlana her mother was mentally "sick."
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 138
 
STALIN WAS A GEORGIAN WHO LOVED RUSSIA
 
            In spite of her mixed blood my mother, of course, was Russian, a real Russian by temperament and upbringing.  My father loved Russia deeply all his life.  I know of no other Georgian who had so completely's sloughed off his qualities as a Georgian and loved everything Russian the way he did.  Even in Siberia my father had a real love of Russia--the nature, the people, the language.  He always looked back on his years of exile as if they were nothing but hunting, fishing, and walks through the taiga.  This love remained with him always.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 119
 
STALIN WAS A KIND FATHER RAISING HIS DAUGHTER
 
            For 10 years after my mother died, my father was a good father to me.  It wasn't easy with the kind of life he led, but he did his best.  Although our home life was shattered, from the time I was six until I was 16 my father was the final, unquestioned authority for me in everything.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 121
 
            But in those years I loved him [Stalin] tenderly, as he loved me.  He used to say I was like his mother.  That touched him, I think.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 143
 
            Sometimes before he [my father] left he'd come to my room in his overcoat to kiss me good night as I lay sleeping.  He liked kissing me while I was little, and I'll never forget how tender he was to me.  It was the warm Georgian tenderness to children.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 144
 
            Events that occurred about that time, in 1942 and 1943, came between me and my father permanently.  We began to become alienated from one another.  But I shall never forget his affection, his love, and tenderness to me as a child.  He was rarely as tender to anyone as he was to me.  At one time he must have loved my mother very much.  And he also loved and respected his own mother.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 153
 
            ...In fact, though Stalin had little time for his young son and daughter, he seems to have had a more affectionate manner towards them than their mother's.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 128
 
            This [Stalin tearing up the letters and photographs of his daughter’s boyfriend] is often presented as the height of Stalin's brutality yet, even today, no parents would be delighted by the seduction (as he thought) of their schoolgirl daughters, especially by a married middle-aged playboy.
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 450
 
            "My father talked about his mother a lot, and always with great love.  People today portray him as a caricature; that he neglected and hated his mother.  He was a very complicated man.  He was made out to be completely black, but there was a great deal else in him.  Because of his love for his mother, there was tenderness, there was love, love towards me.  He used to say to me, "You look like my mother, it's ridiculous how much!  It's unbelievable."  I remember my father now as being loving and tremendously tender towards me; had he had no love in him at all I would not have received that.  I got all the warmth and hugs and kisses."
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 199
 
STALIN’S SONS ARGUED A LOT
 
            Yakov didn't get along with Vasily.  Although they were brothers, they were so different they could never agree on anything.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 148
 
            I saw him [Yakov] angry only twice.  Otherwise I never would have known he was capable of anger.  Both times his loss of temper was occasioned by Vasily's penchant for profanity in front of me and other women, and in general for swearing whenever he felt like it, no matter who happened to be present.  Yakov couldn't stand it.  He turned on Vasily like a lion and they had a fist fight.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 158
 
 
STALIN DEVOTED HIMSELF TO THE CAUSE MORE THAN TO HIS FAMILY
 
            But he [my father] was a bad and neglectful son, as he was a father and husband.  He devoted his whole being to something else, to politics and struggle.  And so people who weren't personally close were always more important to him than those who were.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 154
 
            He lived very much as a bachelor.  His consumptive first wife, in the Caucasus, he never saw again.  He had no home life.  The comrades looked after his children as best they could.  The father's whole life interest and energy was given to the cause of revolution.  A man of so many aliases, changes of abode, imprisonments, and banishments could not very well fulfil his part either as husband or father.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 29
 
            For the past 35 years there has been in his mind only one single thought, and to this he has sacrificed youth, security, health, and all the other blessings of life, not that he himself might govern but that there might be a government according to the principles to which he has sworn fealty.  "My life's task," he said to me, "is to lift up the working classes to another level, not the consolidation of a national State but of a Socialist one which will guard the interests of all the workers of the world.  If each step in my career did not lead towards the consolidation of this State I should look upon my life as having been lived in vain."  He spoke softly and in his customary muffled tone, almost as if talking to himself....
            In Russia, however, at the beginning of the present century whoever was known to be a Socialist had to give up everything that freedom means.  He had to exchange peace and security for a wandering and uncertain existence.  He had to give up home and family and possessions precisely because he was engaged in undermining the foundations of the social order to which they belonged.  Therefore he could not claim them for himself.  In the adventurous spirit of youth a person may enter on such a course of life, but only staunch faith in his principles will enable him to hold out and endure.
            Stalin did not become a Socialist because his parents were downtrodden.  His father was a shoe-maker and at the same time a peasant farmer.  Stalin has something of both these classes in his nature.  He has no grudge against either class.  On the contrary he became revolutionary because of the experience he went through as a student in the clerical seminary to which his father sent him, in the hope that he would be educated for the priesthood.  Had this experience not occurred in his life he would probably have remained in much the same position as his parents were.  Today he might be either a peasant farmer or a small tradesman in some town are other.
            "My parents were uneducated people," he said to me in answer to a question I had put.  "But they did a great deal for me....  Not until I was in the clerical seminary did I become a Socialist, and then out of opposition to the regime in vogue there.  It was nothing but constant espionage and chicanery.  At nine o'clock in the morning we were summoned to our tea, and when we came back to our dormitories we found that all the drawers had been ransacked.  And just as they ransacked our papers they ransacked every corner of our souls.  It was unbearable.  I would have gone to any length and championed any cause that was possible to champion if only I could use it as a protest against that regime.  Just at that time the first illegal group of Russian Socialists came to the Transcaucasian Mountains.  They made a great impression on me and I soon acquired a taste for their forbidden literature."
            When this was discovered he was expelled from the seminary, to the horror of his parents.  At the age of 16 he enrolled as a member of the Socialist party.
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 353
 
MANY LIES HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT STALIN AND HIS FAMILY
 
            Recently in a French magazine I came across an article by a Scots officer who purported to be another eyewitness of Yakov's death.  You have to be skeptical about articles like that because so many false things have appeared in the West about the "private life" of my father and the various members of his family.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 162
 
STALIN LIKED CHURCHILL
 
            You could see he [my father] liked Churchill.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 171
 
STALIN STUDIED HISTORY A LOT
 
            "It's one of those literary types you want to be!" muttered my father in a tone of displeasure....  Study history.  Then you can do what you want."
            ...I once again trusted to my father's authority and went into history.
            I've never regretted it.  History has indeed proved useful.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 184-185
 
            Of one thing I was certain: My Uncle Joe knew his history.  If troubled times and decisive days approached, they would not catch him napping.  If he were ever to go down in defeat, it would not be by default, it would not be without a fight.
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 96
 
            Stalin won three games in a row [of croquet] and arrived chuckling on the veranda, where the table was already set for supper.  Sitting down to attack is food, he announced smilingly, "Tonight, after the supper, in accord with my functions as Secretary-General of the Party, I'm going to put everyone through a proverka."
            Everyone pulled a long face.  The proverka was hardly popular in the Soviet Union.  It is the periodic examination to which all members of the Communist Party must submit to attest the degree of their knowledge of politics, economics, history, etc., according to the Communist conception of these matters.  The proverka has an unfortunate result for those who take it, since a lack of success is apt to mean relegation to an inferior post because of "political ignorance."
            Stalin burst into roars of laughter.
            "Don't be afraid," he chuckled.  "I won't send the results to the special section of the Central Committee of the Party."
            After the meal, the examination began.  The first victim was the head of the Orgraspred, Comrade Malenkov.
            "Tell us, Comrade Malenkov," my uncle began, "who originated dialectic materialism?"
            "Feuerbach."
            "In what year did Karl Marx die?"
            "1883."
            "When was the First International founded?"
            "In 1867."
            "And when was it dissolved?"
            Malenkov didn't know.  He hazarded several dates, all which by my uncle contradicted, with an amused smile.
            "No, Comrade Malenkov... No... No, wrong again."
            He abandoned the effort to get the right answer on this point from his aide, and said, "Let's switch to general history.  When did the Russo-Japanese war begin?"
            "On Feb. 8, 1904."
            "Not exact enough!  At dawn on Feb. 9, 1904, by a treacherous attack of the Japanese against our fleet in the harbor of Port Arthur.  How did the Crimean War end?"
            "As a result of the Congress of Paris and the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1856."
            "Not exact enough!  The Crimean War was ended by a preliminary peace conference held in Vienna in 1855.  The Congress of Paris in 1856 followed the Vienna conference.  What was the name of the English minister who proposed that Russia should occupy the Straits in exchange for an agreement concerning Persia and Afghanistan?"
            "Lord Ellenborough.  That was in 1907.  The agreement was actually signed in 1907, but the English cheated us.  The question of the Straits remained open."
            "Bravo, Comrade Malenkov!  And who else cheated Russia on that same subject?"
            "Baron Aerenthal, in his conversation with Izvolsky about Russian consent to the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary.  Aerenthal claimed later that Izvolsky had misunderstood."
            "Bravo!  You'll make a first-rate diplomat, Comrade Malenkov!"
            Everyone broke into gales of laughter, for it was difficult to imagine Malenkov, with his bashkir face, in the role of a diplomat.  The bashkirs were a people of the Urals of Turkish-Altaien origin, a group to which Malenkov's father belonged.
            My uncle passed on to the others.  He was having a wonderful time.  He delighted in tripping up his victims on the details of the questions, sometimes tricky, which he put to them, and at the same time demonstrating his own minute knowledge of history.
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 132-134
 
            My uncle left Malenkov in peace.  But he was incorrigible and opened fire again a moment later against Zhdanov.
            "Andrei," he said, "is our great specialist in philosophy.  He's even a professor of philosophy at the Academy or Red Professors.  He draws big crowds to his lectures.  I went to one of them myself.  Comrade Zhdanov was talking about the Stoic philosophers, and he had stoically included among them--would you believe it?--Epicurus!  He had confused Epicurus with Epictetus, who wrote a manual of Stoicism.   So poor Epictetus became for him Epicuri de grege porcus" [A pig of the Epicurean herd].
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 212
 
            "I don't understand Latin," Zhdanov said.  "I didn't have a chance to study at a theological school."
            "That's a pity!  Latin is a 'must' for a professor of philosophy."
            Svetlana entered the conversation again.
            "Papa, is it true that Epicurus was dissipated?"
            "Not at all, not at all!"  Stalin said.  "He was the greatest philosopher of all time.  He was the one who recommended practicing virtue to derive the greatest joy from life."
Svanidze, Budu. My Uncle, Joseph Stalin. New York: Putnam, c1953, p. 213
 
 
STALIN SAYS SVETLANA’S HUSBAND IS TOO CALCULATING
 
            "He's [my first husband] too calculating, that young man of yours," he [my father] told me.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 187
 
            My father never asked me to divorce him.  He never expressed a desire for me to do any such thing.  We broke up after three years, in the spring of 1947, for reasons of a personal nature.  I was therefore very much surprised later on to hear it rumored that my father had insisted on a divorce.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 189
 
            My father was pleased, of course, when I was divorced from my first husband, whom he never approved of.  His attitude toward me softened after that, but not for long.  I was a source of irritation to him and hadn't turned out the way he hoped at all.  But he was affectionate with my son.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 190
 
            All of them were lumped together in a single alleged "Zionist center."
            "That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists," my father told me a little later on.  "Papa," I tried to object, "the younger ones couldn't care less about Zionism."  "No!  You don't understand," was the sharp answer.  "The entire older generation is contaminated with Zionism, and now they're teaching the young people too."
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 196
 
 
STALIN IS VERY UPSET WHEN GOES OUT AND SEES THE WAR’S DESTRUCTION
 
            He [my father] went south in the summer of 1946 on his first vacation since 1937.  He traveled by car....  The procession stopped in towns along the way....  My father wanted to see for himself how people were living.  What he saw was havoc wrought by the war on every side.
            The housekeeper Valechka, who accompanied my father on all his journeys, told me recently how upset he was when he saw that people were still living in dugouts and that everything was still in ruins.  She also told me how some party leaders who later rose very high came to see him in the south and report on agricultural conditions in the Ukraine.  They brought watermelons and other melons so huge you couldn't put your arms around them.  They brought fruits and vegetables and golden sheaves of grain, the point being to show off how rich the Ukraine was.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 189
 
STALIN WAS KEPT ISOLATED BY HIS SECURITY PEOPLE
 
            But he [my father] wasn't afraid of people, ever, and the hypocritical remarks you hear today to the effect that "He didn't like the people" sound absurd to me.
            As we pulled in at the various railroad stations, we'd go for a stroll along the platform.  My father would walk as far as the engine, giving greetings to the railway workers as he went.  You couldn't see a single passenger.  It was a special train, and no one was allowed on the platform.  It was a sinister, sad, depressing sight.  Who ever thought up such a thing?  Who had contrived all these stratagems?  Not he.  It was the system of which he himself was a prisoner and in which he was stifling from loneliness, emptiness, and lack of human companionship.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 195
 
STALIN WAS ALIENATED FROM HIS DAUGHTER
 
            It was hard being with him.  It cost me an enormous amount of nervous energy.  We were very far apart, and both of us knew it.  Each of us yearned to be back in his own home alone, to get a rest from the other.  Each was ruffled and upset by the other.  Each of us suffered and was sad.  Why must life be so absurd?  And each of us thought the other was to blame.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 196
 
            ...the more I learned about my mother, the more she grew in my eyes, while my father lost his aureole.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Only One Year. New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 149
 
 
STALIN CRITICIZES HIS DAUGHTER FOR BEING ANTI-SOVIET
 
            "You yourself make anti-Soviet statements, "he [my father] told me one day angrily and in complete earnest.  I didn't try to object or ask him where he got that from.
            My father hadn't been far wrong.  It was by no means as easy and pleasant at the Zhdanov's as I'd thought.  Our house was dreary, empty, quiet, and uncomfortable.  It wasn't easy living there, but one thing we never had, and that was cheapness of spirit.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 197
 
STALIN LOVED HIS DAUGHTER
 
            Dear Svetochka!  ...Where did you ever get the idea that I had abandoned you?!  It's the sort of thing people dream up.  I advise you not to believe your dreams.  Take care of yourself.  Take care of your daughter, too.  Signed Your Little Papa.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 199
 
            "I appreciated him more as a father and a parent when I grew up.  I do appreciate now that he was a very loving father.  I couldn't grasp it at the time.  He always had this tobacco smell, puffing clouds of smoke with his pipe.  He was always kissing me and smooching and I didn't like his mustache on my face.  He would squeeze me and hold me in his hands."
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 132
 
            He said to me several times, "What will you do when I am gone?  You will perish!"  He had the feeling that I would be completely wiped out without him.  His gentle word to me was always, "You little fool".
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 210
 
            Svetlana says, "But I have been made very angry by all the people who have written about me saying "oh she suffered so much, such a cross to bear, such a difficult life to cope with--she must have suffered as a child."  Nobody abused me.  My life was very good and happy until I was 15, and that is a long chunk of time.
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 269
 
STALIN RECEIVED SO MANY GIFTS HE SET UP A MUSEUM FOR THEM
 
            As for the presents which were sent to him from all corners of the earth, he had them collected in one spot and donated them to a museum.  It wasn't hypocrisy or a pose on his part, as a lot of people say, but simply the fact that he had no idea what to do with this avalanche of objects that were valuable, sometimes priceless: paintings, china, furniture, weapons, clothing, utensils, and products of local craftsmanship from everywhere in the world.
            Once in a while he gave one of them, a Rumanian or Bulgarian folk costume or something like that, to me.  On the whole, however, he considered it wrong that any personal use should be made even of the things that were sent to me.  Maybe he realized that the feelings that went into them were symbolic, and he thought the things themselves deserved to be treated as symbols.
            In 1950 a Museum of Gifts was opened in Moscow.
            I was worried at how badly he looked.  He must have felt his illness coming on.  Maybe he was aware of some hypertension, for he'd suddenly given up smoking and was very pleased with himself.  It must have taken a lot of will power, because he'd smoked for 50 or 60 years.  He was probably aware of an increase in his blood pressure, but he hadn't any doctor to take care of him.  Vinogradov, the only one he trusted, had been arrested and he wouldn't let any other doctor near him.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 206
 
            There were so many gifts given to Stalin by people, by different Soviet Republics, all meant for Stalin's personal use like a handwoven carpet.  This huge carpet from Azerbaijan was worked on for three years by about 30 of the best masters.  Stalin, in his usual manner, gave this to the Art Crafts Museum instead of using it in his Kremlin office or at the Dacha.  There was also an Arab stallion that was given to Stalin as a gift.  Only once did Stalin allow this stallion to pull the sled in winter, then he gave this personal beautiful stallion to a stud farm.  Of all the gifts that thousands of people, enterprises, and foreign countries gave Stalin on his 70th birthday, he only kept for himself a pair of gloves and felt boots.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 104
 
            Stalin recived a mountain of presents [on his 70th birthday], some of which were priceless.   The Chinese, for example, had sent magnificent objects made of old jade.   Stalin took none of them and did not even want to look at them, despite Malenkov's insistence.   He did not feel the need to surround himself with beautiful things.   Later, a museum was created for these presents, which was stupid, because splendid antiques appeared there side-by-side with drawings and paintings that showed Stalin as seen by Mexicans or Chinese.
Beria, Sergo. Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin. London: Duckworth, 2001, p. 218
 
 
STALIN DID NOT BELIEVE THERE WAS SUFFICIENT EVIDENCE FOR A DOCTOR’S PLOT
 
            The "case of the Kremlin doctors" was underway that last winter.  My father's housekeeper told me not long ago that my father was exceedingly distressed at the turn events took.  She heard it discussed at the dinner table.  She was waiting on the table, as usual, when my father remarked that he didn't believe the doctors were "dishonest" and that the only evidence against them, after all, was the "reports" of Dr. Timashuk.  Everyone, as usual, remained silent.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 207
 
            The sensational episode of the "Doctors Case" is also put on Stalin's shoulders.  The theory is that Stalin wanted to get rid of the doctors and thus, get rid of Beria.  This was not the truth at all.  The newspaper "Russian Vestnik" printed my interview with the journalist Leontiev.  When you read this interview, you can see by which methods the "comrades-in-arms" of Stalin tried to take over the government.
LEONTIEV: Rybin, please tell us, how the "Doctors episode" came on the scene.  How come the KGB was involved in medicine?
RYBIN: In 1952, Stalin was not feeling well.  To take medicines, Stalin did not like to indulge in this, and did not altogether believe in them, knowing full well that sometimes there are side effects on the organs of a person.  The difficulty of doctors is that sometimes they do not make a proper diagnosis.  There are many cases of a wrong diagnosis, since each person has a different organism that does not always behave the same when taking medicine....
LEONTIEV: Dr. Timashchuk, did she work with the KGB?  Why did this doctor write a letter to you?  How were the relations between doctors and the KGB?
RYBIN: Doctor-cardiologist Timashchuk did not work with the KGB, but she analyzed the situation in the Kremlin with the doctors correctly, how these doctors are treating the government personnel.  Thereafter, she brought this material, in which the KGB got interested in her revelations.  This was not a spy, not a complaint, but actual research into the prescriptions and diagnostic analysis of what the Kremlin doctors were doing....  What made this Soviet patriot, Dr. Timashchuk, suspect what was really going on?
            In 1945, Shcherbakov died; in 1948, Zhdanov; in 1949 Dimitrov; in 1952 Choibalsan.  Before, on personal command by Yagoda, Menzhinsky was "cured" and Gorky and his son were also "cured."  All this pointed to the problem that all was not well with the "Kremlin doctors."  I, during the 1930s, was working in the Secretariat of Ordjonikidze, who was also ailing with an irregular heartbeat.  The head of the Secretariat, Semushkin, called in the doctors.  Dr. Levin also "cured" Menzhinsky and Gorky.  That Ordjonikidze shot himself --is only a legend.
LEONTIEV: But why did the KGB get involved with the doctors of medicine?
RYBIN: This was caused by an observation of Dr. Timashchuk, who was concerned about the health and life of our government leaders.  Putting her on the pedestal was the work of our press in 1952.  The high death rate of the leadership of our country was a signal that all was not well in the Kremlin with the doctors!  This situation made the KGB very wary and concerned.
            In August of 1952, a very important meeting on this problem was held, in which I took part.  Some persons immediately demanded the arrest of the doctors, pointing to the facts already established as to the guilt of some diagnosticians and wrongly prescribed medicines... tied into the sudden death of Dimitrov.  Others suggested that a loyal Commission be appointed to look into this question thoroughly... composed of impartial doctors and medical experts.  Only then should this question be decided upon and steps taken to remedy the situation and sentence the guilty doctors.  During this heated debate, the calm voice of the Government Security Organ, Vlasik, Major General, stated the following: "All the diagnostic machinery, apparatus used by the Kremlin doctors, should be analyzed, looked into by experts.  We found out that the apparatus was in order."  Could Vlasik present such a statement, if Stalin was only interested in the wholesale arrest of all the Kremlin doctors?  Of course not.  But the diagnosis by some doctors was suspect.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 87-89
 
LEONTIEV: Was there any reaction on the part of Stalin to this "Doctors Case"?
RYBIN: Colonel Tukov stated, "Once, Stalin in the car as we were riding, asked, ' 'what must we do?  They died one after another, Shcherbakov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, Choibalsan, but before this, Menzhinsky...Gorky....  It is impossible that this should happen... that one after another, State leaders die so quickly!  It looks like we must replace the old doctors in the Kremlin and get younger doctors to take their place.' 
I replied, "Comrade Stalin, older doctors have more experience, practice, while younger ones are still green without practice." 
"No, we must replace them.  There are too many things that are unexplainable, too many complaints from families.  The NKVD demands the arrest of these doctors which 'cured' Dimitrov, Zhdanov, and others?"
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 91
 
            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.
Medvedev, Roy & Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 32
 
            "I am not sure at what point she [Valya Istomina] was promoted to housekeeper.  Nor do I know how much he could trust her and tell her, although she told me once that he said to her that he didn't believe that the doctors plot was actually a plot, that the doctors had been set out, they were innocent.
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 247
 
TROTSKY AND BUKHARIN HAD MULTIPLE WIVES
 
            She [Granny] had marvelous stories to tell about the Kremlin in those days, about Trotsky's "wives" and Bukharin's "wives" and about Clara Zetkin,...  She was a walking chronicle of her age.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 228
 
BOLSHEVIKS REGARDED THE PARTY AS THE GUARDIAN OF THE PROLETARIAN STATE
 
            The fact of the matter was that Lenin and his associates regarded the Communist Party as the tutor or guardian of the infant proletarian state which was not yet adult or experienced enough to govern itself and order its own ways.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 93
 
STALIN AIDED THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS
 
            Nevertheless, the seed of freedom was bearing fruit and the Chinese nation was ready to hear the Moscow Gospel.  Stalin, like Lenin his master, a subtle opportunist, must have welcomed the chance of confuting by action in China the Trotskyist charge that he was betraying the cause of World Revolution.  Actually, whether Stalin knew it or not, he was swimming with the tide of Russia's eastward surge when in 1925 he sent military and political advisers, Army Commander Blucher, called Galen, and Borodin to Canton, where Sun Yat-sen's brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek, had headed a new nationalist movement for Chinese unity and freedom from foreign control.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 143
 
            In view of the Kuomintang treachery and the Communist Party defeat in the cities, it has been argued that the Communist International was wrong in its united front policy.  Trotsky, for instance, lamented in 1928 that Stalin's "monstrous" policy had "broken the spine of the young Communist Party of China."  Events, of course, showed otherwise.  The Party not only survived but the united front policy had given the very small Communist Party access to the workers and peasants under the massive Kuomintang Party's control.  Mao, for instance, was able to organize the peasants in these years on the scale that he did, not because of his Communist Party membership, but because he was deputy head and actual leader of the Kuomintang's Peasant Movement Training Institute.  (At the same time Chou En-lai was deputy head of the political section of the Kuomintang's Military Academy, and other Communist leaders simultaneously occupied leading positions in the Kuomintang.) Largely because of these connections, the Communist Party grew from a small sect to a party of 57,000 within six years.  If it had not grown thus, it could not have survived the attack upon it--which, given the existing class forces, would have come anyway, alliance or no alliance--and lived to lead movements that soon resulted in a mass revolutionary base including rural Soviets.
            The policy of collaboration between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang was not initiated by Stalin but by Lenin.  Stalin apparently did not come actively on the China scene until 1925, and when he did he followed the already established policy, with which he agreed.  Even after Chiang's attack on the Communist Party, Stalin for a time hoped that the Party could continue an alliance with the left wing of the Kuomintang led by Sun Yat-sen's widow, Ching-ling Soong, among others.  However, the left wing folded under pressure and the right became dominant.  When this happened, Stalin (like Mao) placed the emphasis on the peasantry--with a mass revolutionary perspective--rather than on a new alliance with bourgeois or petty bourgeois leaders:..
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 95
 
            It was only when it became clear that Chiang was uniting with U.S. imperialism for a concerted drive against the communists that the Chinese Communist Party decided that a revolutionary war presented the only way out.  Stalin did not oppose this view because he was opposed to the Chinese revolution as such.  That he was not is shown by his release of large amounts of captured Japanese arms and equipment to the Chinese communists in 1945, following the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.  He opposed Mao's view presumably because he did not believe that the Chinese communists would win a civil war in which Chiang had superior armaments and numbers.... However, the conversation with Djilas also shows that Stalin did not conceive of himself as giving "orders" to the Chinese communists but only advice, and that Stalin was not only pleased but rather amused that they had shown him to be wrong.  Later Stalin welcomed Mao in Moscow.           
            ...Mao, then, did not argue that Stalin had tried to hold back the Chinese revolution at any stage as part of a policy of placing Soviet nationalist interests above international revolutionary ones, as his enemies were contending.  He said only that Stalin made mistakes, "without realizing that they were errors," the implication being, perhaps, that he had too narrow a revolutionary vision.  Mao felt that Stalin had supported the Chinese revolution unselfishly, and, as he noted in 1950, Stalin rejoiced in its triumph.  Stalin also introduced the policy of economic and technical aid to China that was later reversed by Khrushchev.  We should note, too, that, as events were to show, Stalin was right in his feeling that insufficient emphasis was being given to the Chinese working-class.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 98
 
            After the war, Stalin gave a great deal of assistance to the Chinese revolution.  Arms and equipment of all kinds were delivered to the People's Liberation Army, and by the second half of 1947 the winds of victory were filling its sails and Chiang was forced to flee with his remnant to Taiwan.  Given persistent U.S. hostility, Mao was bound to opt for friendship with the Soviet Union, and after the Chinese revolution relations developed rapidly in numerous spheres, culminating in Mao's invitation to Moscow to join in the celebration of Stalin's 70th birthday.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 539
 
            ... Stalin very early outlined the basic theory of the Chinese revolution.  Trotsky attacks this theory, which he sneers at as "guerrilla adventure," because it is not based on the cities as the revolutionary centers, because it relies on class allies of the proletariat, particularly the peasantry, and because it is primarily anti-feudal and anti-imperialist rather than focused primarily against Chinese capitalism.  After 1927, when the first liberated base areas were established in the countryside, Trotsky claimed that this revolution could no longer be seen as proletarian but as a mere peasant rebellion, and soon he began to refer to its guiding theory as the Stalin-Mao line.  To this day, Trotskyites around the world deride the Chinese revolution as a mere "Stalinist bureaucracy."  The Chinese themselves do acknowledge that at certain points Stalin gave some incorrect tactical advice, but they are quick to add that he always recognized and corrected these errors and was self-critical about them.  They are very firm in their belief that they could not have made their revolution without his general theory, his over-all leadership of the world revolutionary movement, and the firm rear area and base of material support he provided.  Thus the only really valid major criticism comes from anti-Communists, because without Stalin, at least according to the Chinese, the Communists would not have won.
Franklin, Bruce, Ed. The Essential Stalin; Major Theoretical Writings. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 21-22
 
            Soviet experts and Soviet weapons helped Mao seize control of Northern and Central China.
Radzinsky, Edvard.  Stalin. New York: Doubleday, c1996, p. 510
 
BUKHARIN, RYKOV, AND TOMSKY RECANT AND ACCEPT THE PARTY LINE
 
            In November 1929 a plenary session of the Central Committee removed Bukharin from the Politburo and issued a sharp warning to Rykov, Tomsky, and others as deviators from and would be diverters of the party line.  Perhaps after all they were cowardly,... because they all recanted in most abject terms and signed a declaration acknowledging the correctness of the party line.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 162
 
            In the critical conditions in June 1930, the right-wing leaders might have been expected to offer opposition....  But they declared their fervent support for Stalin and the party line.  Rykov and Tomsky both made abject confessions before the full Congress that they had been totally wrong, and they pleaded for the party's forgiveness.  Bukharin was absent from the Congress, but he was to abase himself on a later occasion.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 250
 
            Bukharin was not chosen as a delegate to the 16th party congress.  Of course he could have attended the Congress as a member of the Central Committee, but he preferred not to take part in the Congress, especially since he was ill at the time....  All the same, the Congress elected not only Rykov and Tomsky but also Bukharin members of the Central Committee.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 319
 
            The whole speech [ by Stalin] was in this vein, lashing out with devastating criticism against Rykov and Tomsky as well as the chief target [Bukharin].  Bukharin and Rykov were removed from their posts, although they remained members of the Politburo.... 
            In November 1929 the party general line on agriculture was confirmed when Stalin wrote that "the peasants are now joining collective farms not in individual groups, as they used to, but as entire villages, groups of villages, districts, and even regions".  Nevertheless, Bukharin was unwilling to "repent", as he was being asked to do, and on Nov. 17, 1929 he was removed from the Politburo.  A week later, however, tormented by pangs of conscience for their own pusillanimity, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky wrote a brief letter to the Central Committee, in which they condemned their own position: "We regard it as our duty to state that the party and its Central Committee have turned out to be right in this dispute.  Our views have turned out to be erroneous.  Recognizing our errors, we shall conduct a decisive struggle against all deviations from the party's general line and above all against the right deviation."
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 183
 
            ... Those who had recanted were usually reinstated in the party fairly quickly, and they were given responsible jobs and began publishing their articles again.  For instance, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been readmitted into the party in June 1928, openly expressed the hope that 'the party would again require their experience' no doubt with top posts in mind.  Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were still being dubbed 'accomplices of the kulaks' in the press, and yet at the 16th Congress they were elected onto the Central Committee.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 212
 
            After he [Stalin] had finally removed Trotsky from the Russian scene, he hastened to rout the leaders of the right-wing.  Rykov was deposed from the Premiership of the Soviet Government, in which he had succeeded Lenin.  Tomsky was ousted from the leadership of the trade unions, on the ground that he had used his influence to turn the unions against industrialization.  Bukharin was dismissed from the leadership of the Communist International, where he had replaced Zinoviev, as well as from the Politburo.  Before the year 1929 was out, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky repudiated their own views and thus bought a few years of spurious breathing space.
            It would be easy for the historian to pass unqualified judgment on Stalin if he could assume that in his fight against Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky he pursued only his private ambition.  This was not the case.  His personal ends were not the only or the most important stakes in the struggle.  In the tense months of 1928 and 1929 the whole fate of Soviet Russia hung in the balance.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 316-317
 
            Nov. 17, 1929 Plenum (On the Bukharin Group)
            2.  Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky, who have now been forced--after the shameful miscarriage of all their predictions--to admit the party's unquestionable successes and who hypocritically affirm the 'retraction of all differences' in their statement, at the same time refuse to admit the erroneousness of the views set forth in their platforms of January 30 and February 9, 1928, which were condemned by the April Plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission as 'incompatible with the general line of the party.'
McNeal, Robert. Resolutions and Decisions of the CPSU--The Stalin Years: 1929-1953. Vol. 3. Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1974, p. 39
 
            In April 1929 the Central Committee removed Bukharin from his posts as editor of Pravda and president of the Comintern and Tomsky from his post as chairman of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions.  Bukharin's supporter Uglanov lost his positions as secretary of the Moscow Committee, secretary of the Central Committee, and candidate member of the Politburo.  The November 1929, Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 223
 
            The April 1929 Joint Plenary Meeting condemned the "Bukharin group's" views "as incompatible with the party's general line and mostly coinciding with the right-deviation position."  It dismissed Bukharin and Tomsky from their jobs on the Pravda editorial board, the Communist International, and the AUCCTU, but left them on the Central Committee's Politburo.
            ... At the November 1929 Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee "Bukharin's group" made a statement withdrawing their differences with the party, though not directly admitting their previous views to have been wrong.  Despite the statement, the Plenary Meeting decided to drop Bukharin from the Central Committee's Politburo "as the initiator and leader of the right deviators."
Political Archives of the Soviet Union (Vol. 1, No. 2) Commack, New York: Nova Science Publishers, 1990, p. 147
 
            Bukharin, after being expelled from the Politburo, fired as chief editor of Pravda and removed as secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, worked from 1930 to the beginning of 1934 in the Commissariats of Heavy Industry.
Larina, Anna. This I Cannot Forget. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993, p. 328
 
STALIN FOOLED THE JAPANESE WHO WERE PREPARING TO ATTACK
 
            Stalin met the peril [of Japanese aggression in the early 1930’s] with guile and determination.  He and his Soviet Russia have proved their merit since then, but Stalin was never so great as when he did what he now did... and never so vilified as for doing it.  Russia's position was desperate--must I say that again?  Japan, as Russia believed and as was probably true, was on the verge of invasion, and the Red Army had not enough food reserves, irrespective of other supplies, to fight a war; but the Japanese didn't know it, and Stalin's bluff succeeded, at frightful cost to his country.
            Although I had been the New York Times correspondent in Moscow for more than ten years, I don't for a moment pretend that I knew what was going on.  I did not know, for instance, that the grain reserve of the Red Army was greatly depleted, that much of it had been taken to feed the towns and construction camps and pay foreign obligations in 1930 and 1931.  Like other foreigners, including the Japanese, I thought that the measures adopted by the Kremlin to hasten the grain collections in the spring of 1932 meant simply that Stalin had decided he could rush through the fight for rural Socialism and win it by quick ruthless action.  That indeed was the note of the Moscow press, with the obbligato of triumph about the Five-Year Plan in Four, and the great Dnieper Dam, the biggest in the world, to be completed in the summer, two years ahead of time.  The Bolshevik habit of secrecy and distrust, acquired in years of conspiracy and prosecution, of living devious lives under "alias" names, and watching always for police spies in their midst, served Stalin well at this time.  There was a gasoline shortage in Moscow, even for diplomats and other privileged foreigners; the Five-Year Plan demanded it.  Their facilities for travel were restricted; the railroads could hardly bear the strain of the Five-Year Plan.  There came stories from the provinces that the peasants once more were dismayed and bewildered by collectivization methods; that was due to the Five-year Plan.  But no word of the danger of war, no suggestion that the Army needed gas and grain to be able to fight a war, not to mention boots and clothing which vanished from Moscow's stores.  Foreign observers in Moscow were fooled, but so were the Japanese, and it was only many months later that I learned what had really happened in the spring of 1932.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 191
 
STALIN HAD TO EXPROPRIATE GRAIN IN THE WEST TO PREPARE FOR WAR WITH JAPAN
 
            What happened was tragic for the Russian countryside.  Orders were given in March, at the beginning of the spring sowing period in the Ukraine and North Caucasus and Lower Volga, that 2 million tons of grain must be collected within 30 days because the Army had to have it.  It had to be collected, without argument, on pain of death.  The orders about gasoline were hardly less peremptory.  Here I don't know the figures, but so many thousand tons of gasoline must be given to the Army.  At a time when the collective farms were relying upon tractors to plow their fields.
            That was the dreadful truth of the so-called "man-made famine," of Russia's "iron age," when Stalin was accused of causing the deaths of four or 5 million peasants to gratify his own brutal determination that they should be socialized... or else.  What a misconception!  Compare it with the truth, that Japan was poised to strike and the Red Army must have reserves of food and gasoline.
            ... the fact remained that not only kulaks or recalcitrant peasants or middle peasants or doubtful peasants, but the collective farms themselves, were stripped of their grain for food, stripped of their grain for seed, at the season when they needed it most.  The quota had to be reached, that was the Kremlin's order.  It was reached, but the bins were scraped too clean.  Now indeed the Russian peasants, kulaks, and collectives, were engulfed in common woe. Their draft animals were dead, killed in an earlier phase of the struggle, and there was no gas for the tractors, and their last reserves of food and seed for the spring had been torn from them by the power of the Kremlin, which itself was driven by compulsion, that is by fear of Japan....
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 192
 
            Their [peasants] living standards were so reduced that they fell easy prey to the malnutrition diseases--typhus, cholera, and scurvy, always endemic in Russia--and infected the urban populations....
            Russia was wasted with misery, but the Red Army had restored its food reserves and its reserves of gasoline, and cloth and leather for uniforms and boots.  And Japan did not attack.  In August, 1932, the completion of the Dnieper Dam was celebrated in a way that echoed around the world.  And Japan did not attack.  Millions of Russian acres were deserted and untilled; millions of Russian peasants were begging for bread or dying.  But Japan did not attack.
            ...The shortages of food and commodities in Russia were attributed, as Stalin had intended, to the tension of the Five-Year Plan, and all that Japanese spies could learn was that the Red Army awaited their attack without anxiety.  Their spearhead, aimed at Outer Mongolia and Lake Baikal, were shifted, and her troops moved southwards into the Chinese province of Jehol, which they conquered easily and added to "Manchukuo."  Stalin had won his game against terrific odds, but Russia had paid in lives as heavily as for war.
            In the light of this and other subsequent knowledge, it is interesting for me to read my own dispatches from Moscow in the winter of 1932-33.  I seem to have known what was going on, without in the least knowing why, that is without perceiving that Japan was the real key to the Soviet problem at that time, and that the first genuine improvement in the agrarian situation coincided almost to a day with the Japanese southward drive against Jehol.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 193
 
            It meant, to say it succinctly, that Stalin had won his bluff: Japan moved south, not north, and Russia could dare to use its best men....
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 195
 
MANY IN THE OPPOSITION WORKED WITH THE NAZIS
 
            The Bolsheviks have always prided themselves upon their dialectic materialism, that is, upon an unbiased logical interpretation of facts....  Their logic told them that Nazi Germany would attack them, and that the preliminary stages of this attack would be an attempt to win the support of every doubtful, disgruntled, subversive, and disloyal element in the country.  What more fertile soil could be found than the former Opposition, whose members combined personal hostility toward Stalin with the bitterness of defeat and the longing to regain lost power?
            All this may sound complicated and far-fetched, but in reality it is simple and true, and what is more, provides the only reasonable explanation of what happened in Russia.  The Bolsheviks were caught by their own logic.  Once they assumed, as they did assume--rightly, as history showed--that the Nazis would attack them, it followed that there would be a German finger in every treasonable pie, large or small, cooked in Russia.  If this wasn't immediately obvious, as in the Kirov case, it must be sought for and found.  On that principle they proceeded, and found it because it was there.  When Stalin and associates believed in 1933-35 that Hitler planned to attack them and would use the former Opposition or any other anti-Kremlin forces to further his ends, they were working to some extent on an hypothesis.  As time went on this hypothesis, which as I have said was already a logical conviction to them, was confirmed by fact after fact,...
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 215
 
PURGE GOT RID OF THE FIFTH COLUMNISTS
 
            Nevertheless, with all its abuses, sorrows, and injury to national morale and industrial production, the Purge had a certain value.  It eliminated completely Nazi plans for a Fifth Column in the USSR, and not only eradicated the "doubtful elements" with whom Nazi agents had tried to cooperate, but destroyed in toto their espionage and information services.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 230
 
            The actual purge was decided upon after the revelation of the Tukhachevsky military conspiracy.  The discovery of such a plot at the head of the Red Army, a plot that had links with opportunist factions within the Party, provoked a complete panic.
            The Bolshevik Party's strategy assumed that war with fascism was inevitable.  Given that some of the most important figures in the Red Army and some of the leading figures in the Party were secretly collaborating on plans for a coup d'Etat showed how important the interior danger and its links with the external menace were.  Stalin was extremely lucid and perfectly conscious that the confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would cost millions of Soviet lives.  The decision to physically eliminate the Fifth Column was not the sign of a “dictator's paranoia.” as Nazi propaganda claimed.  Rather, it showed the determination of Stalin and the Bolshevik Party to confront fascism in a struggle to the end.  By exterminating the Fifth Column, Stalin thought about saving several million Soviet lives, which would be the extra cost to pay should external aggression be able to profit from sabotage, provocation or internal treason.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 184 [p. 163 on the NET]
 
 
WOMEN WERE NOT FOUND IN THE OPPOSITION
 
            ...it was only natural to expect that there would be some women members of the disloyal Opposition.  Why there were not can perhaps be explained by the generalization that women as a sex benefited more than men from the Bolshevik revolution.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 232
 
STALIN’S REACTION TO MUNICH SELL-OUT
 
            Moscow's reaction to Munich was one of wounded pride and savage anger, but hardly of dismay, despite the Kremlin's certainty of what Munich presaged.  It was as if the Bolsheviks were like a man who has dreaded for years a dire event and done his best to avert it, but finds his efforts vain, and says, almost with relief: "All right, now I know where I stand.  If I have to fight, I'll fight, and depend on myself alone."
            ...The USSR was alone, but it would continue to strive for peace and refused to let itself be used as a cat's-paw by anyone.
            These last words were both cryptic and prophetic.  Stalin meant them as a warning to France and Britain that he saw through their schemes of embroiling Nazi Germany with the USSR.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 242
 
            That, in history's perspective, was the real effect of Munich, that Stalin had a free hand.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 245
 
            In March 1938 Hitler seized Austria.  The crisis over the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia followed.  The belligerence of the Nazi leaders and the threats of violence repeated by German propaganda unnerved the British and French prime minister's.  They held anxious consultations with Hitler, and both governments agreed to bring pressure to bear on Czechoslovakia to surrender the borderlands in the interests of peace.
            Stalin was not readily unnerved.  He responded at once with proposals that Britain, France, and Soviet Russia should present a united front against Germany and prepare with the Czechoslovak High Command a combined military plan.  All three powers should invoke the League of Nations and prepare to enforce the provisions of the charter in the event of German aggression....
            The Soviet government was not consulted or included in the Munich conference which, meeting on September 28-30, 1938, surrendered Czechoslovakia into the hands of Germany.
            The Western powers failed completely to respond to the Soviet proposals for a grand alliance under the aegis of the League.  Churchill observed: "The Soviet offer was in effect ignored.  They were not brought into the scale against Hitler and were treated with an indifference --not to say disdain--which left a mark on Stalin's mind.  Events took their course as if Soviet Russia did not exist.  For this we afterwards paid dearly."
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 302
 
            ...Then the Munich agreement was signed and Stalin realized that the fear of the 'Communist contagion' was greater than the voice of reason.  And he was right.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 348
 
            Winston Churchill summed up the result of the attitude of Britain and France towards the Soviets during the Munich crisis pithily and succinctly: "The Soviet offer was in effect ignored," he wrote.  "They were not brought into the scale against Hitler, and were treated with an indifference - not to say disdain - which left a mark in Stalin's mind.  Events took their course as if Soviet Russia did not exist.  For this we afterwards paid dearly."
Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace. New York: Norton, 1988, p. 31
 
            [In May 1940] Stalin laughed and said:
            "The French government headed by Daladier and the Chamberlain Government in Britain have no intention of getting seriously involved in the war with Hitler.  They still hope to be able to incite Hitler to a war against the Soviet Union.  By refusing in 1939 to form with us an anti-Hitler bloc, they did not want to hamper Hitler in his aggression against the Soviet Union.  Nothing will come of it.  They will have to pay through the nose for their short-sighted policy."
Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 171
 
            Then came intervention, the continuing threat of attack by all nations, halted by the Depression, only to be re-opened by Hitlerism.  It was Stalin who steered the Soviet Union between Scylla and Charybdis; Western Europe and the US were willing to betray her to fascism, and then had to beg her aid in the Second World War.  A lesser man than Stalin would have demanded vengeance for Munich, but he had the wisdom to ask only justice for his fatherland.  This Roosevelt granted but Churchill held back.  The British Empire proposed first to save itself in Africa and southern Europe, while Hitler smashed the Soviets.
Statement by W.E.B DuBois regarding COMRADE STALIN on March 16, 1953
 
STALIN’S POLICY TOWARD THE NAZIS PROVED CORRECT BECAUSE THEY STRUCK WESTWARD
 
            Hitler's book, "Mein Kampf," and his subsequent speeches had made it clear enough that the Ukraine and the Caucasus were his ultimate objective, and the Russians had long been expecting his onslaught.  On that account they had braved ill-repute in Western Europe and in the United States to partition Poland, to garrison the Baltic States, and drive the Finnish frontier further back from Leningrad.  They had done what they could to prepare for the wrath to come; but now they went further still to avert, if possible, the danger.  They signed a new agreement with Germany, increasing their deliveries of oil and grain, and waited, breathless.
            The four weeks from March 12, 1940, when Russia signed peace with Finland, to April 9th, when Hitler struck at Denmark and Germany, must have caused in the Kremlin a state of tension only equaled by the dreadful days of 1932, when the Ukraine and North Caucasus were stripped of gasoline, food, and seed-grain to strengthen the Red Army against a Japanese drive towards Lake Baikal.  Now again, it seemed to the Russians that the issue hung in the balance, as a decade earlier they had waited to see if Japan would move north or south.  Hostile critics of the USSR have declared that this period, the early spring of 1940, marked the depths of Soviet ignominy.  The Russians, these critics averred, made a disgraceful pact with Germany; they raped East Poland and the Baltic States and Southern Finland.  They instructed the foreign Communist parties all over the world to protest against the Franco-British "imperialist" war; they increased their supplies of raw material to Germany, and grovelled at Hitler's feet.
            ...On April 9th Hitler struck at Denmark and Norway, and Stalin knew that the obloquy he had incurred abroad mattered nothing in comparison with what he had gained by Germany's move to the west instead of the east.  What a relief that was, what a crown of success to his policy!  What a final negative to Chamberlain's hopes of winning immunity for Britain and France and embroiling Germany and Russia!
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 255
 
STALIN WAS MUCH MORE REASONABLE AND LESS DOGMATIC THAN HIS CRITICS
 
            The history of the Soviet Union has been a steady swing away from the early ideas of extreme or "militant" communism to more practical and reasonable methods, and inevitable compromise.  Stalin was bitterly attacked by Trotsky and the "Old Bolsheviks" as a backslider from initial ideals.  But he won and they lost because he was practical and dared to reconcile the present possible goal with the ultimate hoped-for goal.
            To put it simply, the Bolsheviks swung way, way off to the "Left," and believed with fanatic enthusiasm that they could make a new "Left" Heaven upon Earth.  Some of them, the Old Bolsheviks and Trotsky, continued to believe it, but Stalin realized that a compromise was necessary.  He declined to allow the growing Russian tree to be bound anew by the iron band of Marxist dogma.  He allowed a free development on Russian rather than dogmatic Marxist lines.
Duranty, Walter. Story of Soviet Russia. Philadelphia, N. Y.: JB Lippincott Co. 1944, p. 277
 
            Nor did Stalin at that time impress people as being more intolerant than befitted a Bolshevik leader.  He was, as we have seen, lesS vicious in his attacks on the opposition than the other triumvirs.  In his speeches there was usually the tone of a good-natured and soothing, if facile, optimism, which harmonized well with the party's growing complacency.  In the Politburo, when matters of high policy were under debate, he never seemed to impose his views on his colleagues....  To party audiences he appeared as a man without personal grudge and rancor, as a detached Leninist, a guardian of the doctrine who criticized others only for the sake of the cause.  He gave this impression even when he spoke behind the closed doors of the Politburo.  In the middle of the struggle Trotsky still described Stalin to a trusted foreign visitor as 'a brave and sincere revolutionary'. 
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 274
 
STALIN IS GENEROUS TO HIS FRIENDS
 
            When I mentioned a loan of $200,000, he called this a trifle, saying that we could not do much with this amount, but that the sum would be allocated to us immediately.  At my remark that we would repay this as well as all shipments of arms and other equipment after the liberation, he became sincerely angry: "You insult me.  You are shedding your blood, and you expect me to charge you for the weapons!  I am not a merchant, we are not merchants.  You are fighting for the same cause as we.  We are duty bound to share with you whatever we have."
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p. 63
 
            During the war, he [Stalin] suddenly noticed that his assistant, Poskrebyshev, was keeping large sums of money in his safe.  With a mixture of puzzlement and suspicion, and looking not at the money but at Poskrebyshev, he asked where it had come from.  'It's your pay as a deputy.  It's been piling up for years now,' Poskrebyshev explained.  'I only use what I need to pay your party dues.'  Stalin said nothing, but a few days later he gave orders that substantial sums be sent to Peter Kopanidze, Grigory Glurdzhidze, and Mikhail Dzeradze.  Stalin himself wrote on the order:
            1) To my friend Pete--40,000.
            2) 30,000 rubles to Grisha
            3) 30,000 rubles to Dzeradze
                        May 9, 1944.  Soso
            On the same day, the wrote a brief note in Georgian:
            Grisha!  Accept this small gift from me.  May 9, 1944.  Yours, Soso.
            There is, however, evidence of another benevolent gesture that he made after the war.  He sent the following letter to the settlement of Pchelok in the Parbig district of Tomsk:
            Comrade Solomon.  I received your letter of January 16, 1947, sent via Academician Tsipin.  I have not forgotten you and the other comrades from Turukhansk, nor will I, I'm sure.  I enclose 6000 rubles out of my pay as a deputy.  It is not a large amount, but will nevertheless be useful to you.  I wish you good health.  Stalin.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 7-8
 
Stalin was articulate, happy, and very generous.  Not too many members of the Central Committee of the CPSU had the loyalty and the camaraderie with their bodyguards or helpers as Stalin had.  When working in the woods, he always either cooked or washed dishes, he never commanded anyone to do what he could not do himself....
            When we were at Borzhomi in the Crimea, friends of Stalin, who were in the underground with him in the early days, came around and Stalin found out that due to many circumstances, his friends were hard pressed for some finances.  Since Stalin never carried any money with him, he passed a hat around and we collected 300 rubles, which Stalin gave to his friends in an envelope.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 53
 
            She [Stalin's first wife] bore him a son, Yakov.  With a babe in arms to look after, she had difficulty making ends meet.  As always, they had no money.  The enormous sums which he obtained went immediately to Lenin.  And in any case this near pauper despised money.  To him, it was part of the system which he had set out to destroy.  When money came his way he unhesitatingly distributed it among his friends.  Sergei Alliluyev writes that "I was supposed to go to Petersburg at the end of July 1907, and had no money, so on the advice of comrades I went to see Koba."  Koba immediately offered him money, but Alliluyev could see how poor he was and of course refused to take it.  Koba was adamant.  He kept trying to force the money on Alliluyev, saying "Take it, take it, you may need it," until Alliluyev finally gave in and took it.  The Alliluyevs owed him a lot.  It was Koba who had saved Sergei's little girl from drowning.
Radzinsky, Edvard.  Stalin. New York: Doubleday, c1996, p. 64
 
            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.
Medvedev, Roy & Zhores Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin. NY, NY: Overlook Press, 2004, p. 91
 
            Sergei Yakovlevich ends his memoirs with this story of a meeting he had with Soso, known now as Koba, in Baku in 1907.
            "... 'Well,' he [Stalin] said as we parted, 'it seems you ought to leave.  I wish you a safe journey.'  Then he added, 'By the way, take this money, you'll need it.'
            I tried to refuse, explaining that I was amply provided with funds, but Koba repeated firmly and calmly: 'Take the money: you have a large family, children.  You must look after them.'
Richardson, Rosamond.  Stalin’s Shadow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994, p. 38
 
STALIN JUSTIFIES THE EXCESSES OF HIS SOLDIERS
 
            Stalin interrupted: "Yes, you have, of course, read Dostoevsky?  Do you see what a complicated thing is man's soul, man's psyche?  Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade--over thousands of kilometers of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones!  How can such a man react normally?  And what is so awful in his having fun with the woman, after such horrors? You have imagined the Red Army to be ideal.  And it is not ideal, nor can it be, even if it did not contain a certain percentage of criminals--we opened up our penitentiaries and stuck everybody into the army.
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p. 110
 
STALIN FORESAW A RAPID RECOVERY OF GERMANY
 
            Someone expressed doubt that the Germans would be able to recuperate within fifty years.  But Stalin was of a different opinion.  "No, they will recover, and very quickly.  That is a highly developed industrial country with an extremely qualified and numerous working-class and technical intelligentsia.  Give them 12 to 15 years and they'll be on their feet again.  And this is why the unity of the Slavs is important."
Djilas, Milovan. Conversations with Stalin. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962, p. 114
 
STALIN BORROWED MONEY FROM THE FASCISTS
 
            In the spring of 1935, while Anthony Eden, Pierre Laval, and Edward Benes were visiting Moscow, Stalin scored what he considered his greatest triumph.  The Reichsbank granted a long-term loan of 200 million gold marks to the Soviet government.
Krivitsky, Walter G. I was Stalin's Agent, London: H. Hamilton, 1939, p. 28
 
SPANISH GOVT WOULD NOT RECOGNIZE THE SOVIET GOVT
 
            The Spanish Republic, after five years of existence, still refused to recognize the Soviet government and had no diplomatic relations with Moscow.
Krivitsky, Walter G. I was Stalin's Agent, London: H. Hamilton, 1939, p. 90
 
REVOLUTION WAS CARRIED OUT BY THE MASSES NOT A SMALL GROUP
 
            One gets the impression from some accounts that the Russian Revolution was run by a small group of conspirators led by Lenin, with Stalin as a subservient but ambitious tool, Lenin periodically issuing diktats and directing matters with a political cunning that resulted in the overthrow of the government.  The implication seems to be that if that government, led by Kerensky, had only been a bit smarter things might have gone the other way.  In fact, of course, the Revolution was a mass movement responding to exploitation and tyranny.  After its initial surge in March 1917--as a "bourgeois-democratic" revolution--it came more and more under the dominance of the working class.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 30
 
            It was not the revolutionists who made the Russian Revolution.  This in spite of hosts of revolutionists who tried their best to make it.  For a century gifted men and women of Russia had been agitated over the cruel oppression of the people.  So they became agitators.  Into the villages, the shops and the slums they went crying.... 
            But the people did not rise.  They did not even seem to hear.  Then came that supreme agitator--Hunger.  Hunger, rising out of economic collapse and war, goaded the sluggish masses into action.  Moving out against the old worm eaten structure they brought it down.  Elemental impersonal forces did what human agencies found impossible.
            The revolutionists, however, had their part.  They did not make the Revolution.  But they made the Revolution a success.  By their efforts they had prepared a body of men and women with minds trained to see facts, with a program to fit the facts and with fighting energy to drive it through.  There were a million of them--perhaps more, possibly less.  The important thing is not their number, but the fact that they were organized to act as receivers of the bankrupt, old order, as a salvage-corps of the Revolution.
Williams, Albert. Through the Russian Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 231
 
STALIN HAD FAR MORE SUPPORT THAN TROTSKY
 
            That Stalin had the Party membership solidly behind him in this controversy with Trotsky and his group is shown by a 1927 Party referendum in which the Trotskyist program was defeated by 725,000 votes to 6,000.  In view of Trotsky's contentions, the vote is surprising in showing how tiny the "opposition" forces were in reality.  They were but a small--although vehement--faction, disowned by the mass of the Party and fighting for a platform that was obviously impractical and objectively reactionary.  To represent the struggle, in 1927 or before, as one between a sinister, maneuvering Stalin and a brilliant, idealistic Trotsky with roughly equal influence within the Party not only smacks more of melodrama than political reality but is a complete misrepresentation.  Stalin had the Party membership solidly behind him, and he had it not through maneuvering but because his socialist-construction policies had gained him wide working-class and Party support.  In essence, he won because he was right.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 48
 
            By means of machinations, trickery, corruption, or else by secret service and crime, or by introducing spies into lobbies and armed forces into council chambers, or by killing one's enemies in bed at night (two a time), one might become, and remain, king or emperor, or duce, or chancellor--one might even become Pope.  But one could never become Secretary of the Communist Party by any such methods.
            A man like Stalin has naturally been violently attacked and has defended himself with equal violence (indeed he has more often than not taken the offensive).  Certainly, but all these noisy, re-echoing discussions took place in the full light of day, in the full sight of everyone, every argument advanced in them being exhaustively examined in the most open manner like a great public trial before a jury of the whole nation as compared with palace intrigue.
            Actually, in the socialist Organization, each man takes his place naturally according to his own value and strength.  He is automatically selected for his position by force of circumstances.  His degree of power depends upon how much he understands and upon how far he can carry out the incontestable principles of Marxism.  "It was simply," says Knorin, "by his superiority as a theorist and his superiority as a practical man that Stalin became our leader."  He is leader for the same reason that he is successful: because he is right.
            ...I once said to Stalin: "Do you know that in France you are looked upon as a tyrant who acts merely according to his fancy, and is a bloody tyrant into the bargain?"  He leaned back in his chair and burst out into his hearty working-man's laugh.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 148-149
 
 
            Through these acts and his writings, the opposition was thoroughly discredited and, during a vote, received only 6000 votes as against 725,000.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 128 [p. 116 on the NET]
 
            In the party, as constituted at the time of Lenin's death, Stalin had overwhelming political support for his style and his aims.  There is no reason to dispute his subjective honesty when he proclaimed his undying loyalty to Lenin.
Laqueur, Walter. Stalin: The Glasnost Revelations. New York: Scribner's, c1990, p. 255
 
THE TESTAMENT WAS NOT KEPT HIDDEN BY STALIN
 
            During the 1927 conflicts, Trotsky brought up documents written by Lenin in his final illness which show that Lenin was attempting to oust Stalin as General Secretary of the Party.  The most famous of these, Lenin's so-called "Testament," had been made known to delegates for the Thirteenth Congress of the Party in 1924....
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 49
 
            Recalling  the July-August 1927 plenum [at the October 1927 combined meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission], Stalin regretted having dissuaded the comrades from expelling Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee immediately.  'Maybe I was being too kind and made a mistake...'
            As for dealing with Lenin's 'Letter to the Congress', Stalin gave his own interpretation:
            "It has been shown time and again, and no one is trying to hide anything, that Lenin's Testament was addressed to the 13th Party Congress, that it was read out at the congress, that the Congress agreed unanimously not to publish it because, by the way, Lenin himself did not want or ask for it to be published."
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 138
 
            His handling of the plenum [the joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission in October 1927] was a masterpiece of persuasion.  He reminded the Opposition that previously he had rejected calls for the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee.  “Perhaps,” he suggested, “I overdid the “kindness’ and made a mistake.”
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 249
 
            The evening before the congress, on May 21, 1924, there was an extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee, called to hear Lenin's Testament.
Bazhanov, Boris. Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, c1990, p. 75
 
            ... it is important to note that the Central Committee did not support Stalin's battle to have the full correspondence openly published surrounding the "Lenin Testament."
Lucas and Ukas. Trans. and Ed. Secret Documents. Toronto, Canada: Northstar Compass, 1996, p. 3
 
            Stalin took up the challenge of the Lenin testament a month later, at the climax of the series of inquisitorial sessions.  "The oppositionists have cried here that the Central Committee is 'concealing' the testament of Lenin.  You know that this question has been discussed a number of times at our joint sessions.  Again and again it has been proved that no one hides anything, that the testament of Lenin was addressed to the Thirteenth Congress, that it, the testament, was made public there, that the congress unanimously decided not to publish it.  One of the reasons for this decision, among others, was that Lenin himself did not wish or demand it.  And nevertheless the opposition has the audacity to declare that the Central Committee is 'concealing' the testament....  It is said that Lenin proposed the removal of Stalin.  Yes, that it is altogether true."  And Stalin then proceeded to read the uncomplimentary part of Lenin's last message relating to him!
Levine, Isaac Don.  Stalin.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 280
 
LENIN ATTACKED STALIN ON THE GEORGIAN NATIONALITIES ISSUE BUT STALIN WAS RIGHT
 
            Another reason for Lenin's dissatisfaction with Stalin was Stalin's handling of a nationalist movement in his native Georgia led by an old Party member, Mdivani.  Stalin felt that Mdivani's group had bourgeois nationalist tendencies.  He handled them, as one of them complained, "with the heavy club of the Center's authority."  Lenin argued that in matters involving the national question one should always tread carefully, avoiding the "Russian frame of mind," and: "In this case it is better to overdo rather than underdo the concessions and leniency towards the national minorities."  He sent a note to Mdivani and others: "I am following your case with all my heart.  I am indignant over Ordjonikidze's rudeness and the connivance of Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.  I am preparing for you notes and a speech."  He asked Trotsky to intervene and take matters out of Stalin's hands: "It is my earnest request that you should undertake the defense of the Georgian case in the Party [Central Committee].  This case is now under 'persecution' by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and I cannot rely on their impartiality."
            In December 1926, under attack by Trotsky, Stalin admitted that Lenin had "rebuked me for conducting too severe an organizational policy towards the Georgian semi-nationalists, semi-Communists of the type of Mdivani."  But he [Stalin] stuck to his original position:
            "Subsequent events showed that the "deviationists" were a degenerating faction of the most arrant opportunism.  Let Trotsky prove that this is not so.  Lenin was not aware of these facts, and could not be aware of them, because he was ill in bed and had no opportunity to follow events.”
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 50
 
            Looking back on events at the time and their subsequent history it appears that Stalin was right and Lenin wrong on these matters, including that of the Mdivani group.  They were apparently a bourgeois nationalist faction in the Communist Party of Georgia; in 1928 Mdivani was expelled.  Furthermore, even if Lenin had been right, his actions cannot be condoned.  If he was in disagreement with Stalin, he should have taken the matter up officially with the Central Committee or Politburo and not attempted to undermine the position of the Party Secretary.  He seems to have become convinced that Stalin's method of work would harm the Party; but he was also disturbed by Trotsky's "excessive self-assurance" and "non-Bolshevism," both of which he noted in his testament.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 52
 
            In February 1923, too, Lenin went still more deeply into the Georgian affair.  The Politburo had meanwhile, without his knowledge, again condemned the Georgian Communists and acquitted Ordjonikidze and Stalin.  Lenin's secretary Fotieva let Lenin know of this debate and he asked for the papers.  Stalin said he could not have them without the Politburo's permission and this would be taxing Lenin with 'day-to-day details'.  Lenin was angry and insisted on having them.  Stalin therefore asked without success to be relieved of the supervision of the invalid.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 102
 
 
STALIN SAYS THE LEFT OPPOSITION IS AS RIGHT AS THE RIGHTISTS
 
            During the course of the struggle against Bukharin, Stalin insightfully discussed the difference between "Rights"--Bukharinites--and "Lefts"--Trotskyists--using as an example the building of the great Dnieprostroy dam.  He said, "If, for instance, the Rights say, 'It is a mistake to build Dnieprostroy,' while the 'Lefts,' on the contrary say, 'What is the good of one Dnieprostroy?  Give us a Dnieprostroy every year' (laughter), it must be admitted that there is some difference between them."  Yet either way they would end up with no Dnieprostroy.  "But," Stalin continued, "if the Trotskyist deviation is a 'Left' deviation, does that not mean that the 'Lefts' are more Left than the Leninists?  No, it does not.  Leninism is the most Left (without quotation marks) tendency in the world working-class movement."  In a later succinct comment he noted the basic identity of the right and the "left": "The 'lefts' are in fact Rights who mask their Rightness by Left phrases."
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 65
 
 
            Zinoviev was immediately removed from the Politburo [in July 1926].
            However, a few weeks later, during a 'stormy' session of the Politburo, at which many Central Committee members were present, Stalin...insisted that the opposition was a 'Social Democratic deviation',...
            Next day the Central Committee voted to remove Trotsky from the Politburo and Kamenev from his candidate membership.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 137
 
 
RIGHTS RESORTED TO TERROR & SABOTAGE AS THEIR SITUATION BECAME MORE DESPERATE
 
            If the Bukharinites were to seriously oppose the Party program, if they really felt the program would destroy socialism by its economic policy and bureaucratic administration, they had to organize and act.  Appeals to the Party and the workers had gotten them nowhere and the Bukharinites were, in fact, a comparatively small and isolated group.  Therefore the only course open to them was one of fomenting rebellion--especially among the richer peasants--sabotage, wrecking, assassination, and terrorism.  As they turned from a political group into a conspiracy, Bukharin testified, moral and psychological disintegration began....
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 68
 
            Terrorism is a policy inconsistent with true Marxism; it is the last refuge of leaders without followers.  The Opposition leaders had waited with Marxist patience for the outburst of the masses.  When this not only did not take place but receded into improbability, the removal of the Party leaders by terrorism, as was admitted by Smirnov and Radek, was a logical policy.
Edelman, Maurice. G.P.U. Justice. London: G. Allen & Unwin, ltd.,1938, p. 215
 
 
EVIDENCE OF THE DEFENDANTS’ GUILT IN THE TRIALS IS OVERWHELMING & NOT FRAUDULENT
 
            The theory that the trials were entirely or mainly fraudulent falls apart in the face of testimony such as Bukharin's and a mass of interlocking evidence given by some 30 witnesses.  That evidence, in turn, was supported in the main by the testimony of witnesses at the previous state trials.  Even if, as ambassador Davies suggested, the Soviet prosecutors had had a script writer of Shakespearean genius, they could not have constructed out of whole cloth such a set of complexly integrated events....  The indication, as Davies argues, is that the defendants were, on the whole, guilty as charged.  In these trials and others, there was evidence of massive and diverse sabotage--in the coal mines, chemical plants, tractor stations, collective farms, the railways.  Combined with deliberate economic misplanning and financial fraud, it constituted a concerted effort to destroy the growing socialist state.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 70
 
            That the myth persists of these trials as an elaborate charade created by inhuman monsters is, in essence, further evidence of the extraordinary scope and depth of anti-Stalin, anti-Soviet defamation.  The myth is made to appear believable by appeal to two facts: the defendants confessed their guilt and most of them were executed.  There is, however, no evidence that the confessions were exacted by torture or drugs; such a claim was denied by Bukharin and others.  The indication is that the defendants confessed because the evidence against them was overwhelming; also, as Bukharin notes, some of them at least had, in spite of their actions, a "duality of mind," a feeling that regardless of their motives, their deeds were morally wrong and would harm their country.  Davies certainly had no trouble in believing that the confessions were genuine.
            Whether it was necessary to execute most of the defendants or whether imprisonment for all would have served is a question that has to be answered in the light of the then-existing conditions.  In a situation of gathering war, with the Italian fascists in Ethiopia, the Japanese militarists invading China, and Hitler supporting Franco and straining for war, the Soviet government obviously decided that a severe counterblow must be struck to stop all efforts to weaken the Soviet state from within.  Whatever the decision, however, responsibility for it cannot have been Stalin's alone or even primarily his.  The charge that it was stems from the view of Stalin as absolute dictator.  But the trials were conducted by the judicial system and although Stalin as Party leader had considerable influence upon that system, he by no means ran it.  The trials, we must also remember, came after the new constitution of 1936 with its mass-democratic structures.  Furthermore, there was a national outpouring of rage at the time against those who were perceived (correctly) as traitors and saboteurs.  The argument that this indignation, which included mass demonstrations, was "rigged" again reflects the automaton picture of Soviet society.  No doubt, the Party participated in and helped to organize such demonstrations and other expressions of popular outrage, but it could not have done so had not the feeling itself existed.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 71
 
            If murder and sabotage took place, what implicates the defendants in the three trials?  There is firstly their admission before the examining authority, repeated by them in court, and there is the corroborating evidence.
            There were 54 defendants in all, some of them old revolutionists; some of them, like Mrachkovsky and Muralov, were men of outstanding physical courage.  Yet the people who reject the genuineness of the plea of guilty, tell us that all these people sat in court for a week or more, and admitted crimes (punishable by death) that they had never committed.  The trials took place in a large hall packed by foreign journalists, and yet out of 54 people, from whom (according to the hypothesis) a spurious confession had been extracted, not one was prepared to denounce the methods by which the confession was extracted.  We are told that the leading group of those 54 were people who were opposing Stalin from the "Left," that they wanted an attack on bureaucracy, and a break with the policy of alliance with bourgeois States.  Yet these men were seen talking freely in court for a week.  Not only do they not give the listening world an account of the alleged political program for which (according to the hypothesis) they are about to die, but Zinoviev, Pyatakov, Radek, Bukharin and the others give an account of their adherence to a quite different programme--a program of capitalist restoration.
            These men had a certain revolutionary reputation in the past.  Their names were household words with millions of workers in the capitalist world.  They had the opportunity to tell these workers that they had carried on a struggle against Stalin because he was "betraying the revolution"; and yet instead of doing this, they exposed themselves as people who had themselves betrayed the revolution.
            And we are actually told by some critics, as we will see, that they did this in order to oblige Stalin.
            Is not the assertion that these men were guilty a thousand times more credible than the fantastic hypotheses that are brought forward to explain away their admissions?
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 243-244
 
            Yet in a summary published in England under the sponsorship of the Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, a preface by the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Herald, R.T. Miller, could say "They confessed because the State's collection of evidence forced them to.  No other explanation fits the facts." Neil Maclean, Labor Member of Parliament for Govan and Chairman of this committee noted in a foreword: "Practically every foreign correspondent present at the [Pyatakov] Trial--with the exception of course of the Japanese and German--have expressed themselves as very much impressed by the weight of evidence presented by the Prosecution and the sincerity of the confessions of the accused."
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 167
 
            By a coincidence I had found independent evidence for the existence of a conspiracy.  My friend Gregersen, on the eve of going on vacation to Copenhagen, was asked by an acquaintance by the name of Grasche to take a book to a friend of his in Denmark.  When Gregersen asked why he did not send it by mail, which functioned quite normally, the answer was that it was a particularly valuable book, a luxury edition of Arabian Nights issued by the Academy of Art.  Gregersen did not get around to picking up the book and did not see the intended recipient, a former Communist of Trotskyist bent who had turned against the Soviet Union.  Soon after this, Grasche was arrested and sentenced as a spy in a public trial.  No
mention was made of a book; but in a different trial the very same edition was identified as having been used as a secret code.  This cannot well be a coincidence.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 174
 
LENIN WOULD HAVE ACTED AS STALIN DID
 
            In such policies, Stalin was trying to strike a balance between mass participation and firm leadership, which would provide guidance and structure for such participation.... Lenin, confronting the problems that the Party faced in these years, could hardly have acted differently than Stalin did.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 78
 
OPPOSITION CLAIM THAT A NEW BOURGEOISIE HAD ARISEN IS FALSE
 
            As we have seen, the "joint opposition" platform of 1927 proclaimed the rise of a "new bourgeoisie" in the USSR and, in the succeeding decades, the phrase became general in world anti-Soviet circles.  But there was no bourgeoisie in any meaningful sense in the USSR.  For there was no economic base for one.  What did arise, as does not seem to have been recognized, was a historically new class.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 78
 
 
STALIN PREDICTED THE FASCIST ATTACK 10 YEARS EARLIER
 
            ...When all that can be said against Stalin is piled and counted, I doubt whether anything less than the terrific drive he imposed on the USSR from 1928 onward, could ever have built a socialist state in that land.  Looking back, one can see how the other leaders--Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin--led towards destruction.  None of them had, I think, as Stalin had, either the insight into the People's needs, or the guts and will that were needed.
            Stalin said: "Build, or be crushed in ten years by foreign invaders."
            They built, and it stood when the foreign invasion came.  So, Stalin proved right,...
Strong, Anna Louise.  The Stalin Era. New York: Mainstream, 1956, p. 126
 
            Taken as a whole Stalin's comments on world affairs comprise a wide yet unified vision of world development.... His judgments, measured and responsible, bear the imprint of serious collective thinking.  Among his more immediate predictions, that of the coming of World War II proved correct.  And his prediction of revolutions following the war--reminiscent of Engels's "last great war dance" projection--also came true in Eastern Europe, China, and Korea.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 87
 
            Hindenburg has published his declaration to the German people.  The die is cast.  Germany has again taken the road that leads to a revival of militarism.  Another world war is inevitable....  I fear that we shall be its first victims....  The Instantsia [Foreign Office] is quite undisturbed.  Koba considers that the Germans will first strike against Poland and that therefore there is no need for us to worry.  We must only go on building our industries at a devil's pace and be ready when another world war breaks out.  Koba's coolness surprises me.  Why is he certain that the Germans will attack the Poles before they attack anybody else?
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 120
 
            So I continued to consider myself a Bolshevik; I never thought of myself as a "Stalinist."  I had been an active revolutionary for more than five years before I had ever heard the name of Stalin.  When I saw photos, I did not like his face.  But I found myself generally in agreement with his policies.  I first doubted his statement in 1928 that the apparent capitalist stability of the 1920s was unstable and would be replaced by a period of wars and revolutions, but he turned out to be right.  He also turned out to be right in other predictions and judgments; I concluded that it was foolish to evaluate a man by his looks, and that I could trust his leadership.
Blumenfeld, Hans. Life Begins at 65. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House, c1987, p. 174
 
STALIN SAID THEY HAD TO CATCH UP IN 5 TO 10 YEARS OR PERISH
 
            ...Stalin was right, saying that we are 50 to a hundred years behind Western Europe, and if we do not close this gap in 5 to 10 years we shall perish.
Chuev, Feliks. Molotov Remembers. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993, p. 201
 
            Thoroughly biased as he is against Stalin, Isaac Deutscher in his biography of Stalin is obliged to make the following admission as to the factors that underlay the Soviet victory in the Second World War:
            "The truth was that the war could not have been won without the intensive industrialization of Russia, and of her eastern provinces in particular.  Nor could it have been won without the collectivization of large numbers of farms.  The muzhik of 1930, who had never handled a tractor or any other machine, would have been of little use in modern war.  Collectivized farming, with its machine-tractor stations scattered all over the country, had been the peasants' preparatory school for mechanized warfare.  The rapid raising of the average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on a considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men.  'We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries.  We must make good this lag in 10 years.  Either we do it, or they crush us'--so Stalin had spoken exactly 10 years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia.  His words, when they were recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action.  And, indeed, a few years delay in the modernization of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat."  (Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, London, Pelican, 1966, page 535).
Brar, Harpal. Trotskyism or Leninism. 1993, p. 496
 
            The climax of the celebrations came on June 24, when the great Victory Parade took place in the Red Square....  Standing on the Lenin Mausoleum, Stalin appeared as a small remote figure, but, as hundreds of German regimental banners were flung down on the steps of the mausoleum and at his feet, he dominated the scene.
            It was in a real sense his victory.  It could not have been won without his industrialization campaign and especially the intensive development of industry beyond the Volga.  Collectivization had contributed to the victory by enabling the government to stockpile food and raw materials and to prevent paralysis in industry and famine in the towns.  But also collectivization, with its machine-tractor stations, had given the peasants their first training in the use of tractors and other machines.  Collectivized farming had been "the peasants preparatory school for mechanized warfare."  The raising of the general standard of education had also contributed by providing a vast reserve of educated men who could readily be trained.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 419
 
            I decided to take advantage of this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with Klim Voroshilov about everything that was going on.  He told me frankly that he disapproved of many things, but there was now no other way: either we can build up our heavy industries and our armament industry within some ten years--that is before Germany has had time to re-arm and the inevitable world war breaks out-- or, as a backward farming country, we should fall victim to that war....  I felt that Koba had won him to his side and that henceforth he would back him to the end, whatever happened.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 133
 
            In political theory, Tsarist Russia was a great power.  In economic fact, its development lagged more than 100 years behind that of Britain and at least 75 years behind Germany.
Nearing, S. The Soviet Union as a World Power. New York: Island Workshop Press, 1945, p. 8
 
            At once he [Stalin] started... the greatest of all industrial revolutions.  "Socialism in one country" had to work.  Russia had to do in a decade something like what England had done in 200 years.  It was going to mean that everything went into heavy industry.  The primitive accumulation of capital wouldn't leave much more than subsistence for the workers.  It was going to mean an effort such as no country had ever made.  Yet in this he was dead right.  Even now, in the 1960s, one can see traces of the primitive darkness from which the country had to be yanked -- side by side with technology as advanced as any in the world.  Stalin's realism was harsh and unillusioned.  He said, after the first two years of industrialization, when people were pleading with him to go slower because the country couldn't stand it:
            "To slacken the pace would mean to lag behind: and those who lag behind are beaten.  We did not want to be beaten.  No, we don't want to be....  [Old Russia]...was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness.  She was beaten by the Mongol khans.  She was beaten by the Turkish beys, she was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all--for backwardness.  For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness.  She was beaten because to beat her was profitable and went unpunished.  You remember the words of the prerevolutionary poet: 'Thou art poor and thou art plentiful, thou art mighty and thou art helpless, Mother Russia.'
            We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries.  We must make good the lag in 10 years.  Either we do it or they crush us."
            At this date, no person of moderate detachment could disagree.
Snow, Charles Percy. Variety of Men. New York: Scribner, 1966, p. 257
 
STALIN CONTENDED THE CP MUST WORK FIRST TO AID THE WORLD PROLETARIAT
 
            The destruction of the USSR would indeed have been followed by devastating attacks on the workers, the unions and political parties, in the capitalist world.  His [Stalin] position is in essence, then, that a Communist Party, whether in a socialist or capitalist country, must work first to advance the interests of the world proletariat and that a central concern in these interests is the preservation of its developing socialist section.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 92
 
            Some Latin poet has said that a thing well begun is half done.  As against this, one may assert, with no less justice, that a thing which is only half done is not done at all.  A succession of great proletarian adventures through the ages has shown us that whenever and in so far as the proletariat does not take everything into its own hands, it takes nothing.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 36
 
            ... the failure to understand the elementary principle of internationalism which lays it down that the victory of socialism in a single country is not an end in itself, but is a means for developing and supporting the revolution in all countries.
            This [failure to understand] is the path of nationalism and degeneration, the path to the complete liquidation of the international policy of the proletariat.  For those who are attacked by this sickness look upon our country, not as part of the whole known as "the international revolutionary movement," but as the beginning and the end of this movement; they think that the interests of all other countries should be sacrificed to the interests of our country.
            Support the liberation movement in China?  Why?  Won't that…be risky?  Won't it embroil us with other countries?  Would not be better for us to create "spheres of influence" in China, acting in concert with other "advanced" powers, and snatch a bit of China for our own benefit?  A useful step, and no risks to run....  Support the liberation movement in Germany?  Is it worth the risk?  Would it  not be better to come to terms with the Entente concerning the Treaty of Versailles, and get something for ourselves by way of compensation?  Keep up friendly relations with Persia, Turkey, Afghanistan?  Is the game worth the candle?  Would it to not be better to re-establish "spheres of influence" with one or the other of the Great Powers?  And so on so forth. 
            Here we have a new type of nationalist "frame of mind," one which tries to liquidate the foreign policy of the October Revolution, and which cultivates the elements of degeneration....
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 280
 
            But overthrowing the power of the bourgeoisie and establishing the power of the proletariat in a single country does not yet guarantee the complete victory of socialism.  After consolidating its power and leading the peasantry after it, the proletariat of the victorious country can and must build up socialist society.  But does that mean that in this way the proletariat will secure a complete and final victory for socialism, i.e., does it mean that with the forces of a single country it can finally consolidate socialism and fully guarantee that country against intervention, which means against restoration?  Certainly not.  That requires victory for the revolution in at least several countries.  It is therefore the essential task of the victorious revolution in one country to develop and support the revolution in others.  So the revolution in a victorious country ought not to consider itself a self-contained unit, but as an auxiliary and a means of hastening the victory of the proletariat in other countries.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 282
 
            [Molotov stated]: As for the world revolution--we never did forget our obligation to the world proletariat.  But unlike the Trotskyists who kept shouting about world revolution--we made one.  Made one, and created a worldwide socialist camp.  We didn't keep shouting about industrialization like the Trotskyists, but we did it.  In just the same way, they talk about collectivization, but it was Stalin who brought the peasants into the kolkhoz.
Radzinsky, Edvard.  Stalin. New York: Doubleday, c1996, p. 253
 
            Stalin and his associates had a pragmatic interest in ending their international isolation; they looked for opportunities for revolutionary self-assertion....
            There was in fact much congruence between policy at home and policy abroad: at the beginning of the 1930s it was extremely radical in both cases.  Communist parties across Europe were encouraged to go on the political attack against their governments.  Ultra-leftist campaigns were approved.  The Comintern, which had tended towards caution in Germany after the failure of revolution to occur there and had eliminated leftist leaders who sympathized with Trotsky, started to campaign against those whom it accused of “rightism’.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 382-383
 
SU DID NOT FORCE SOCIALISM ON EASTERN EUROPE BUT IT AROSE INTERNALLY
 
            The common notion in the capitalist world that the countries of Eastern Europe had a kind of regimented socialization thrust upon them by Soviet bayonets is, of course, a myth, again based ultimately on the bourgeois view of the workers as robots.  True, as the Soviet armies, in pursuit of the Nazi armies, moved through Eastern Europe, this very action involved the overthrow of the pro-Nazi governments, in, for example, Rumania and Bulgaria.  Revolt would have come anyway, however, once the Nazi political power behind those governments crumbled.  And it is true also that in some of these nations Soviet representatives later helped--as they should have--to develop socioeconomic bases for socialist construction.  The real power and initiative, however, had to come from, and did come from, the peoples of those countries themselves.  Furthermore, in two of these nations, Albania and Yugoslavia, the Soviet armies were not directly involved.  The revolutions there arose almost entirely from internal actions.  In Yugoslavia, for instance, a partisan army of 80,000 was mustered to fight the German invasion; by the end of the war this army and grown to 800,000 and was holding down more German divisions than the combined U.S.-British forces in Italy.  Furthermore, Yugoslavia before the war had had a strong Communist Party, with a bloc of deputies in the national parliament.  And Czechoslovakia had had powerful Socialist and Communist Parties from the 1920s on.
            In short, in many of these countries there had been a considerable socialist-oriented political movement, which, although suppressed by the Nazis, managed to survive and form a core when the Nazi and native reactionary forces were defeated.  For instance, in Bulgaria, one of the most economically backward of these countries--a poor, partly feudal nation in contrast to capitalist Czechoslovakia--the Communist Party in 1932 elected 19 of 35 members to the city council of Sofia.  When the Nazi dictatorship was overthrown, following the war, an election was held by "direct, secret, and universal suffrage" (according to the Statesman's Yearbook for 1955), in which the anti-fascist Fatherland Front of Communist, Socialist, and peasant parties won 364 seats to the opposition's 101.  Clearly this movement grew mainly out of the situation within Bulgaria.  We might note, too, that in Czechoslovakia in 1946, the Communist Party won 38 percent of the vote in a national election.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 99
 
            Nor did Stalin yet give any clear impression that he would sponsor revolution in the countries of the Russian zone.  Communist propagandists there spoke a nationalist and even clerical language.  King Michael of Romania was left on his throne; and he was even awarded one of the highest Russian military orders for his part in the coup in consequence of which Rumania had broken away from Germany.  The Soviet generals and the local Communist leaders did honor to the Greek Orthodox clergy in the Balkan countries.  In Poland they courted the Roman Catholic clergy.  There was no talk yet of socialization of industry.  Only long overdue land reforms were initiated.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 519
 
            The old Bolshevism, in other words, believed in revolution from below, such as the upheaval of 1917 had been.  The revolution which Stalin now carried into eastern and central Europe was primarily a revolution from above.  It was decreed, inspired, and managed by the great power dominant in that area.  Although the local Communist parties were its immediate agents and executors, the great party of the revolution, which remained in the background, was the Red Army.  This is not to say that the working classes on the spot did not participate in the upheaval.  Without their participation the venture would have been only a flash in the pan.  No revolution can be carried out from above only, without the willing cooperation of important elements in the nation affected by it.  What took place within the Russian orbit was, therefore, semi-conquest and semi-revolution.  This makes the evaluation of this phenomenon so very difficult.  Had it been nothing but conquest it would have been easy to denounce it as plain Russian imperialism.  Had it been nothing but revolution, those at least who recognize the right of the nation to make its revolution--a right of which every nation has made use--would have had no scruples in acclaiming it.  But it is the blending of conquest and revolution that makes the essence of 'socialism in one's zone'.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 554
 
SU AIDED RATHER THAN EXPLOITED EASTERN EUROPE AFTER WWII
 
            As a result of dislocations from the war, particularly in those economies already at a low, partly feudal level, all possible assistance was needed to move the whole bloc of nations toward socialism.  And this the USSR, although devastated by the war, provided as best it could, giving both economic aid and political assistance; within the bloc the better-off nations, such is Czechoslovakia, aided the weaker ones.  In 1949 the whole bloc formed the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON).  That these efforts soon paid off is clear from the economic figures.  For instance, Hungary, which had produced a yearly average of 600,000 tons of steel in the years 1936-38, produced 1,540,000 in 1953.  It has, as we have noted, been contended that Stalin used these nations as virtual colonies to supply raw materials for the USSR.  But although the USSR certainly needed all the help it could get, there is no evidence of a colonial-like exploitation.  On the contrary, the evidence indicates that the USSR often gave material and professional aid that it could well have used itself.  The relationship in essence was that of the proletarian alliance that Stalin had earlier described, a relationship between a socialist country and a group of countries trying to move toward socialism.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 100
 
            In Poland and Hungary the Communist-inspired land reform fulfilled, perhaps imperfectly, a dream of many generations of peasants and intellectuals.  All over eastern Europe the Communists, having nationalized the main industries, vigorously promoted plans for industrialization and full employment such as were beyond the material resources and the wit of native 'private enterprise', notoriously poor in capital, skill, and enterprise.  With fresh zeal and ambition they took to hard educational work, trying to undo the age-old negligence of previous rulers.  They did much to calm nationalist vendettas and to promote cooperation between their peoples.  In a word they opened before eastern Europe broad vistas of common reform and advancement.  It was as if Russia had imparted to her neighbors some of her own urge for trying out new ways and methods of communal work and social organization.  It ought perhaps to be added that, considering the vastness and the radical character of the upheaval, it is remarkable that Stalin and his men brought it off not without terror, indeed, not without indulging in a long series of coups, but without provoking in a single country within the Russian orbit a real civil war, such as that waged in Greece.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 535
 
            It is the Soviet Union that has supplied the heavy machinery, modern equipment, raw materials, that have permitted the so rapid industrialization of the People's Democracies and the so rapid rise in the living standards of their peoples.  It is the USSR that has sent them Soviet technicians, not to spy on them in the old Western tradition, not to take over their economies like the Nazi and American "experts," but to help them to train their own advanced technicians in the most modern techniques perfected in the Socialist Soviet Union.
            Soviet long-term credits have been used by the People's Democracies to obtain from the Soviet Union metallurgical, chemical, machine-building materials.  The USSR has sent them whole large-scale modern industrial installations--machine-tool factories, power plants, hydro-electric stations.  With the help of Soviet equipment, the People's Democracies are now able, themselves, to produce heavy and complex industrial goods previously imported, to manufacture many machines for the first time in their history, including the machines that will lay the basis for the development of socialist agriculture.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 183
 
            While the most rapid improvement in economic conditions, social welfare and cultural development has generally occurred in the Asiatic Republics of the USSR, the various European national minorities, especially those of the Baltic Republics and the Jews have achieved the highest level of economic development and social welfare in the entire USSR.  The three Baltic Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, are respectively the wealthiest of all Republics.  In 1970, the average income in rubles per capita for the three republics was 1500--13 percent higher than in the Russian Republic....
            During pre-1917 Czarist rule, and its independence period before 1940, Lithuania was a relatively backward, largely agricultural economy.  Since it became part of the Soviet Union its rate of industrial output has been the most rapid of all the Republics, increasing 54 times between 1­940 and 1978, compared to 20 times for the Soviet Union average and 17 times for Russia proper.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 72
 
 
            Economically, in general, the European republics have fared very well under Soviet power.  Six of them have had a more rapid rate of industrialization than has Russia proper, and two of them less rapid; three of them are more developed than the Russian Republic, and five somewhat less developed.  In general, there is no evidence that the economic relationship between the non-Russian European Republics and the Russian Republic is either exploitative, or of a type in which industrial production is concentrated in Russia.  All eight European national minority Republics appear to have derived considerable benefit from their association in the Soviet Union.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 74
 
STALIN AIDED ALBANIA WHILE KHRUSCHOV STABBED HOXHA IN THE BACK
 
            In this situation, the Albanians, although relying mainly on their own efforts, at first received some help from Yugoslavia, but aid from the USSR became of major importance when difficulties developed with Yugoslavia.  And it was forthcoming.  In 1947 Albania entered into a trade agreement with the Soviet government.  By 1951, 57% of Albania's foreign trade, imports and exports, was with the USSR.  Albania was able to import machinery, chemicals, textiles, and building materials while exporting the products of its mining and oil industries.  Soviet assistance was given for the construction of industry in all areas, including oil.  And trade agreements were also made through COMECON.  Hoxha paid particular tribute to Stalin for this aid (1948): "We owe the extension of our light and heavy industry to the great aid of the Bolshevik Party, to Comrade Stalin and the Soviet state, who helps us unsparingly in this respect as in all other respects."  But with the death of Stalin in 1953 and the subsequent rise of Khrushchev, the situation began to change, and Hoxha wrote:
            "However, in this field of our relations and contacts with the post-Stalin Soviet leadership, too, we very soon saw the first signs that things were no longer going as before.  There was something wrong, there was no longer that former atmosphere, when we would go to Stalin and open our hearts to him without hesitation and he would listen and speak to us just as frankly from his heart, the heart of an internationalist communist.  More and more each day, in his successors, instead of communists, we saw hucksters."
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 100
 
            Certainly in the relations of the USSR with Albania or of Stalin with Hoxha, there is no hint of Soviet exploitation.  In fact, just the contrary.  The atmosphere in the interviews, as Hoxha indicates, was warm and friendly; Stalin's interest in the Albanian people and their construction of socialism, sincere; and the trade and other economic agreements were of mutual benefit.  There is no reason to believe that this was not generally true of Stalin's relationships with the communist leaders of other nations, although, of course, there were exceptions....  What has happened is that Stalin's differences with other leaders have been played up, often in a malicious gossip-column style, as by Djilas, and the basic comradeship pervading these relations has been obscured.  That Stalin made mistakes is true, and indeed, inevitable.  However, they were not his alone but of the leadership of the International, and there is no evidence that anyone else could've done better.  In fact, when we consider Trotsky's narrow leftism and Bukharin's "thesis" that world capitalism had "stabilized" itself--on the brink of the Great Depression--it is clearly fortunate for the world proletariat that in these years the International had Stalin's guiding hand behind it.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 102
 
KHRUSHCHOV IGNORES STALIN’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS & GIVES THE BOURGEOIS DESCRIPTION
 
            "I will probably not sin against the truth," Khrushchev declared in his 1956 speech, "when I say that 99 percent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before the year 1924, while Lenin was known to all."  This is probably true as a statement of an isolated fact but its import distorts the truth.  For it omits Stalin's early Party history, his courageous struggles under tsarist terrorism and his long support of Lenin, his leadership of the Party within Russia as head of the Russian Bureau, his founding of Pravda, his recognized leadership in the Central Committee where he gave the political report in Lenin's absence in July 1917, his military service during the civil war, his leadership against the Trotskyist opposition.  Khrushchev's comment supports by implication the bourgeois caricature of Stalin as a maneuvering upstart.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 123
 
            It is in the light of this growing anti-socialist influence that we have to view Khrushchev's "secret speech."  The speech has nothing to do with Marxism.  It does not examine the class or even the political forces behind events but is a superficial, essentially bourgeois narrative centered around a personal vilification of Stalin.  Moreover it was a reactionary document, applauded by the world bourgeoisie and serving to split the world Communist community.
            This bourgeois-type outlook is clear in the policies associated with Khrushchev and his group both before and after their seizure of executive political power (which they were perhaps able to do because of the decimation of the working class in the war).  They extended private plots and privately owned farm animals, dismantled much of the central economic planning system, gave factory directors more power, elevated profit as a major incentive to production, favored consumer goods over capital goods, and allowed a cultural "thaw," the essentially bourgeois nature of which is made clear in Ehrenburg's autobiographical writings and other works....
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 134
 
NUMBERS GIVEN FOR NUMBERS EXECUTED ARE FAR TOO HIGH
 
            Finally, on executions, Conquest reports: "It will be seen that no exact estimate of total executions can be given, but that the number was most probably something around one million."  This figure is even more speculative than those on numbers in prison camps, since Commissariat for Internal Affairs budgets, payroll discrepancies, and census statistics give no basis for statistics on executions.  The figure one million is based mainly on prisoners' reports and calculations by former Internal Affairs officers, neither of whom would be likely to give objective estimates and most or all of whom can have known only a segment of the total operation.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 127
 
            Should all Gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression?  Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes ("counterrevolutionary offenses") numbered from 12 to 33% of the prison population, varying from year to year.  The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.
            Total executions in 1921 to 1953, a 33 year span inclusive, were 799,455.  No breakdown of this figure was provided by the researchers.  It includes those who were guilty of nonpolitical capital crimes, as well as those who collaborated in the Western capitalist invasion and subsequent White Guard Army atrocities.  It also includes some of the considerable numbers who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and probably German SS prisoners.  In any case, the killings of political opponents were not in the millions or tens of millions--which is not to say that the actual number was either inconsequential or justifiable.
            The three historians who studied the heretofore secret gulag records concluded that the number of victims was far less than usually claimed in the West.  This finding is ridiculed by anti-communist liberal Hochschild    .  Like many others, Hochschild has no trouble accepting undocumented speculations about the gulag but much difficulty accepting the documented figures drawn from NKVD archives.
Parenti, Michael.  Blackshirts and Reds, San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997, p. 80
 
NUMBERS GIVEN FOR THOSE IN PRISON ARE FAR TOO HIGH
 
            Until the Soviet government releases figures--if it has them--the controversy on numbers will continue.  All that we can say on the present evidence is that an unusually large number of men--very few women seem to have been involved--appear to have been in labor camps at the time for one reason or another, and that an unknown number of those arrested were executed.
            In addition to those executed, a large number were said to have died in the labor camps from malnutrition and ill-treatment.  Conquest argues that 90 percent of those imprisoned in the labor camps perished.  But this does not make any sense, for the camps were, after all, labor camps--lumbering, road building, Canal construction, mining, farming, and so on--and there would be no point in having 90 percent of the workers perish if the state wanted to get the work done.  No doubt some people died in the camps, as in any prison camp, but again, the numbers will remain speculative unless statistics become available.
            But the question of numbers, however, of imprisonments or debts, is not the essential question.  The basic issues are those of motivation and guilt.  Why were these people arrested?  What had they done?  Why was the penal code amended to secure swift arrest and imprisonment?  The underlying, indeed sometimes outspoken thesis of Khrushchev, Medvedev, Conquest, and others is that of a sadistic persecution of innocent people by an insane dictator.  But this view smacks more of sensationalist journalism than of social analysis.  Moreover, Stalin alone could not have initiated the prosecutions.  Even if the whole Party leadership was not involved, the central leadership certainly was.  At the time, this inner core of leaders included Molotov, Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Voroshilov, and Manuilsky.  Thus, if the professional anti-Stalinists are to be believed, we are confronted with not one insane dictator but a group of insane dictators.  When we consider the records of these men, their years of heroic revolutionary work, and their determined struggle for socialist industrialization, it is clear that, mistaken or not, they must have believed they were acting in the face of a threat to socialism.  They were all responsible and serious men, not men who would persecute for the sake of persecution or who would lightly endorse executions.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 128
 
(Sheila Fitzpatrick)
            From the recent researches of Zemskov and Dugin in the NKVD archives, it appears that the highest Western estimates on the size and mortality rate of the GULAG'S convict population were substantially exaggerated.
            [Footnote: Conquest's estimate of 8 million political prisoners (not including common criminals) in labor camps at the end of 1938 is almost 20 times greater than the figure of under half a million "politicals" in the GULAG cited by Dugin from the NKVD archives, and four times as great as the total GULAG and prison population cited by Zemskov from the same source.  According to Zemskov's figures, the entire convict population (including both "politicals" and "criminals") of the GULAG'S labor camps and labor colonies on January 1, 1939, numbered 1,672,438, with an additional 350,538 prisoners held in jails in mid-January of the same year--a total of a little over 2 million.]
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 248
 
(Alec Nove)
            Figures purporting to represent the number of victims of "Stalinist repression" are also subject to definitional ambiguity.  This particularly affects exiles.  These range from those who were given a minus (i.e., could live anywhere "minus" a list of forbidden cities) through to those exiled to remote areas often under harsh conditions, but not kept behind wire.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 262
 
            In 1937, the average number detained in the GULAG was given by the Soviet historian Zemskov as 994,000, the total rising to a maximum of 1,360,019 in 1939.  It follows that the larger part of the detainees were not "technically" in the Gulag, but rather in prison, "colonies," and [special settlements].  The same conclusion is suggested by the evidence for 1939 (unless we suppose all the evidence to be faked in the archives).
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 269
 
            Dugin has studied tables showing numbers "in" and "out" of detention for the period 1930-53, and comes to the conclusion that the probable total number passing through camps, colonies, and prisons in the whole period came to 11.8 million or 8,803,000 for the period 1937-50.  He also reproduces a table showing numbers in [camps and colonies] on Jan. 1, 1946, to be 1,371,986 of which 516,592 were condemned for counter-revolutionary activities (203,607 for "treason to the Motherland," 15,499 for "spying," etc.).  These figures naturally exclude exiles and possibly also the prison population.  He criticizes those (including Roy Medvedev & Solzhenitsyn, as well as Conquest) who persist in citing much higher figures that cannot be supported by evidence....
            Another source gives the following figures: Emelin, a military historian, states that in June 1941 there were 2.3 million [detainees], which may be the total for the Gulag, colonies, and prisons, excluding [special settlements].  By the end of 1941, 420,000 of these detainees were serving in the Red Army.  In 1941-43 a million "previously sentenced" persons were serving.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 271
 
            The new material on labor camps and other repressed groups has tended to confirm my arguments that the level of population in the Gulag system in the late 1930s was below 4 to 5 million.  Zemskov's figures indicate that the Gulag population (excluding colonies) reached an early peak of 1.5 million in January 1941, and this can be reconciled with Nekrasov's figures of 2.3 million at the beginning of the war, if we include prisoners in labor colonies and jail.  There were also at this time a large number of [special settlements]: By 1939, according to both Ivnitsky & Zemskov, there were only 0.9 million of the original five or so million former kulaks in their place of exile.  Even if we allow another 1.5 million for Baltic and other mass groups in [special re-settlements], there would still be in the order of about 4 million.  Although this represents to my mind a sufficiently large and disgraceful scale of inhumanity, these are very much smaller figures than have been proposed by Conquest and Rosefielde in the West and by Medvedev & Ovseenko in the USSR.
Getty and Manning. Stalinist Terror. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 290
 
            The question of how many [deaths of prisoners] will not be settled by this or any other discussion.  In the former USSR claims continue to appear that high totals are correct, though they are not supported by substantial documentation.  Those who see more deaths of prisoners than are indicated by existing data are abandoning the best kinds of evidence used in any other field in favor of speculation.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 140
 
            Throughout the 1930s and 1940s numerous people were arrested and sent to the labor re-education camps which, after their transformation in 1937, became penal colonies, functioning to aid the construction of the virgin regions.  The number of people so confined has been subject to wild speculation in the extensive anti-Soviet literature that developed with the onset of the cold war.  Estimates in these sources for those interned in 1938 range from 2 to 12 million; many such estimates are based on the self-interested speculation and rumors of those once assigned to the camps.  Others are based on such factors as alleged discrepancies in Soviet census data, where it is assumed that apparent discrepancies between different grand totals are equal to the number of people in (or on the pay-roll of) the labor camps, discrepancies between projections of populations assuming a particular 'normal' birth and death rate and the number of people actually reported in a census; the number of newspaper subscriptions (multiplied by the alleged number of people who read a paper) etc..  These highly speculative estimates have been subject to a careful review and criticism by British Soviet expert, Wheatcroft (1981).  After examining the statistical discrepancies, population projections, etc. on which estimates in the Western literature are based, Wheatcroft argues as follows about the logical maximum of the number that could have been in the labor camps in 1939:
            [In 1938 one of the 38 labor camp clusters, Vorkuta, was known to have 15,000 people under detention.  To quote Wheatcroft], "Vorkuta was certainly one of the better-known camps, and there is no indication that it was smaller than average.  Assuming the Vorkuta population to be typical gives an estimate of less than 600,000 for the total of those confined in 1938."
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 245
 
            ... The coincidence of the figures based on known information about the Vorkuta administration and the number of camp administrations, together with a reasonable ratio applied to the disenfranchisement data gives great credibility to an estimate of roughly one million people working in the labor camps in the 1937-38 period, or about .5% of the Soviet population.
            For a sense of the significance of this figure it can be pointed out that in 1978, out of a total U.S. black population of 23 million, about 200,000 (roughly 1%) were incarcerated.
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 246
 
            To look a little further ahead, "forced labor" in the Soviet Union was to be used, especially after 1947, as the most potent weapon of anti-Soviet propaganda.   The most fraudulent figures, bearing no relation whatsoever to the real facts, were produced by "Russian experts," the biggest fraud of all being the seemingly academic and scholarly work by two old Mensheviks, David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky.   Anyone who dared challenge their assertion in their Forced Labor in Russia that the camp population was around 10 or 12 million people was treated ipso facto as a communist or Soviet agent, though even the most elementary study of the problem would have shown up the utter absurdity of the Dallin-Nicolaevsky figures."
Werth, Alexander. Russia; The Post-War Years. New York: Taplinger Pub. Co.,1971, p. 34
 
            It must be acknowledged that none of the data that we yet possess will allow us to arrive at an entirely reliable estimate of the number of arrests in those years.
            The more so, since data that became available on the population in Soviet concentration camps are far from confirming traditional assessments.
            ... the fact that apparently 3,378,234 people had been sentenced "for counter-revolutionary and state crimes"... by courts and extra-judicial bodies during the whole period between 1930 and 1953, does not seem to signal anything near the order of magnitude of the estimates authors usually advance for the number of arrests in 1936-38....  Nevertheless, all the indications are that the figures quoted by the traditional literature are incompatible with the available evidence....
            It seems very likely that a less tendentious selection in a more systematic reading of the source material than those made by the authors of the traditional version would alter our view of this crucial period in Soviet history.  Seeing how inadequate the literature is which provides our knowledge, it is unlikely that any researcher who devotes himself to the considerable task of sifting through such a vast and unexplored wealth of source material would be motivated merely by perversity.  But of course it all depends on the sources which he analyzes and the problems with which he tries to come to grips.
            Thus even if there is no reason to question the sincerity of most of the authors of those memoirs, on which most of the "classical" literature is based, the frequent occurrence in their accounts of themes like the role of Kirov as an opponent of Stalin as shown at the 17th Congress, or the systematic extermination of the old guard of the Party, is such as to throw a degree of doubt on the accuracy of the information that they give, and the relevance of their explanations of the whys and wherefores of historical events across the country at large.
Rittersporn, Gabor. Stalinist Simplifications and Soviet Complications, 1933-1953. New York: Harwood Academic Publishers, c1991, p. 13-15
 
            In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations.  They found that the total population of the entire gulags as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976.  At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.
            ...Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished.  In any given year, 20 to 40% of the inmates were released, according to archive records    .
            Almost a million Gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military.  The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privatization was the common lot of the entire Soviet population.  (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.)  In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000.  By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to three per 1000.
Parenti, Michael.  Blackshirts and Reds, San Francisco: City Light Books, 1997, p. 79
 
            As to the dismal swamp of the aggregate numbers directly involved in the Terror, I did not write much about them, nor did I offer my own estimate.  I simply said that my findings tend to support the lower of the available calculations, and they do.  As for Weissberg's and Beck and Godin's estimates, I believe they are fraught with uncertainties. 
            First, as Weissberg admitted, he may have counted many prisoners twice; how many, he did not know.  I have found numerous cases of prisoners transferred from prison to prison, from camp to camp, from camp to prison, and the like. 
            Second, as I have shown, there is serious reason to challenge his idea on prisoner turnover.              
            Third, his account does not make clear how he knew that all he counted came only from Kharkov and vicinity; any number may have come from much farther away [which would raise the total number], which would require lowering the percentage arrested. 
            Fourth, we simply do not know how typical Kharkov or any other place was.  Moscow, Leningrad, and other large cities certainly had substantial prisons and inmate populations; but did Omsk, Vologda, and Kursk have them?  I do not know, and I will wait for evidence. 
            Fifth, at least one of these careful calculations of a camp's size has been seriously undermined in light of more specific evidence: two Poles who were not in the Vorkutstroi system estimated that it contained 250,000 prisoners by 1938.  Since they wrote, an actual inmate has published the figures of just over 15,000 in 1938 and 19,000 in 1941. 
            Sixth, I am not convinced that we should take the word of NKVD officers on the aggregate figures.  They may have tried to protect themselves by arguing that they were part of some massive process that overwhelmed them along with everyone else; this impression is left by remarks one of them made to Weissberg.  It is hard for me to believe that anyone much below Ezhov and Stalin could ever have learned hard information on the grand totals. 
            Finally, prisoners made their estimates of the numbers in all sorts of unscientific ways.  Gustav Herling remembered that the amateur statisticians he knew in the cells based their estimates on "stories, scraps of conversation overheard in corridors, old newspapers found in the latrine, administrative orders, movements of vehicles in the courtyards, and even the sound of advancing and receding footsteps in front of the gate.  Clearly, he and his fellow prisoners did not have numbered receipts at their disposal, and I have not seen them mentioned in this fashion in any other account.  No prisoner was in a position to have firsthand knowledge of the total number of prisoners on any scale larger than a small quantity of cells or camps.
            I am not saying that Weissberg's or any other estimate is wrong, merely that I have much less confidence in any method of calculation than Conquest does.  To repeat a point made in my article, available evidence is so fragmentary that it must be interpreted with great caution.
            Thurston, Robert W. "On Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives, and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest." Slavic Review 45 (1986), 242-243.
 
REPRESSION UNDER STALIN WAS GREATER THAN UNDER LENIN BECAUSE OF HIGHER NUMBERS
 
            The repression in Stalin's time was not in essence different from that in Lenin's.  It was simply on a larger scale; and it was on a larger scale because the enemies of socialism were more numerous and better organized.  That the repression had been basically directed at those engaged in anti-socialist actions, was, Stalin contended, shown by the fact that reactionaries everywhere immediately took up the cry of "injustice" and condemned the USSR out of hand (as they had also in Lenin's day):
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 131
 
EVERYTHING CONSIDERED THE BOLSHEVIKS ACTUALLY MADE FEW MISTAKES
 
            When the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 this was the first time in history that a group with scientific understanding of the historical process had taken power and went on to change society by consciously utilizing these processes.  The wonder, then is not that they made mistakes but that they made so few and that on the whole they succeeded.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 136
 
STALIN WAS PRECISE AND WANTED CLARITY AND PRECISION
 
            It was impossible to go to Stalin without being perfectly familiar with the situation plotted on the map and to report tentative or (which was worse) exaggerated information.  Stalin would not tolerate hit-or-miss answers, he demanded utmost accuracy and clarity.
            Stalin seemed to have a knack of detecting weak spots in reports and documents.  He immediately laid them open and severely reprimanded those responsible for inaccuracies.  He had a tenacious memory, perfectly remembered whatever was said and would not miss a chance to give a severe dressing-down.  That is why we drafted staff documents as best we possibly could under the circumstances.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, APPENDIX 1
Portrait of Stalin by Zhukov, p. 140
 
            Brevity, clearness, and accuracy were his main characteristics.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 8
 
            It was impossible to go to Stalin without being perfectly familiar with the situation plotted on the map and to report tentative or (which was worse) exaggerated information.  Stalin would not tolerate hit-or-miss answers, he demanded utmost accuracy and clarity.
            Stalin seemed to have a knack of detecting weak spots in reports and documents.  He immediately laid them open and severely reprimanded those responsible for inaccuracies.  He had a tenacious memory, perfectly remembered whatever was said and would not miss a chance to give a severe dressing-down.  That is why we drafted staff documents as best we possibly could under the circumstances.
            Stalin based his judgments of crucial issues on the reports furnished by General Headquarters representatives, whom he would send to the Fronts for on-the-spot assessment of the situation and consultations with respective commanders, on conclusions made at the General Headquarters and suggestions by Front commanders and on special reports.
Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 282
 
            Stalin wanted daily reports on the situation at the fronts.  And one had to have the facts at one's finger tips to report to the Supreme Commander.  One could not go to him with maps that had "white spots" on them, or report approximate, much less exaggerated, information.  He did not tolerate hit-or-miss replies.  He wanted them to be exhaustive and clear....
            The Supreme Commander had a knack of detecting week spots in reports and documents.  He saw them instantly and reprimanded the culprit most severely.  He had a tenacious memory and remembered everything that was said to him, and never missed an opportunity to take people to task for anything they forgot.  That is why documents of the General Staff were always most carefully prepared.
Zhukov, Georgi. Reminiscences and Reflections Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Pub., c1985, p. 364-365
 
            Skvirsky was often on the telephone to Stalin during the war.  'Stalin didn't like beating around the bush.  He had no patience with too much talk.  In my experience, I saw that he wanted frankness and no varnishing of the facts.  Also, he favored commanders who applied themselves and carried out their assignments well.'
Axell, Albert. Stalin's War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 117
 
            According to Marshal Vasilevsky, Stalin worked very hard himself.  But he also made sure that others worked to capacity.  The highest standard was insisted on in all matters involving the armed forces, extending to the drawing up of documents.  The Marshal says that Stalin even paid attention to improving the literary quality of documents: 'Stalin never forgave carelessness in work, our failure to finish a job properly, even if this happened with a highly indispensable worker without a previous blemish on his record.'  His demands were in most cases, just, the Marshal goes on: 'His directives and commands showed Front commanders their mistakes and shortcomings [and] taught them how to deal with all manner of military operations skillfully.'
Axell, Albert. Stalin's War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 139
 
            The new uncut edition of Zhukov's memoirs, though containing additional criticisms of Stalin, retains Zhukov's homage to his Commander-in-Chief: 'With strictness and exactitude Stalin achieved the near-impossible.'  Also: 'He had a tremendous capacity for work, a tenacious memory, he was a very gifted man.'  And: 'Stalin's merit lies in the fact that he correctly appraised the advice offered by the military experts and then in summarized form-- in instructions, directives and regulations--immediately circulated them among the troops for practical guidance.'
Axell, Albert. Stalin's War: Through the Eyes of His Commanders. London, Arms and Armour Press. 1997, p. 163
 
OVERALL DESCRIPTION OF STALIN’S PERSONALITY
 
            After 1940, when I served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army and later, during the war, as Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, I had occasion to get to know Stalin closely.
            Stalin's outer appearance has been described on more than one occasion.  Though slight in stature and undistinguished in outward appearance, Stalin was nevertheless an imposing figure.  Free of affectation and mannerisms, he won the hearts of everyone he talked with.  His visitors were invariably struck by his candor and his uninhibited manner of speaking, and impressed by his ability to express his thoughts clearly, his inborn analytical turn of mind, his erudition and retentive memory, all of which made even old hands and big shots brace themselves and be "on the alert."
            Stalin did not like to remain seated during a conversation.  He used to pace the room slowly, stopping now and then, coming up close to the person he was talking with and looking him straight in the face.  His gaze was clear, tenacious, and seemed to envelope and pierce through the visitor.
            Stalin spoke softly, clearly shaping his phrases, almost without gesticulation.  He used to hold his pipe, though not lighted at times, and stroke is mustache with the mouthpiece.
            He spoke Russian with a Georgian accent, but flawlessly.  In his speech he often used figures of speech, similies, metaphors.
            One seldom saw him laughing; and when he laughed he did so quietly, as though to himself.  But he had a sense of humor, and appreciated sharp wit and a good joke.
            Stalin had excellent eyesight.  He never used glasses in reading.  As a rule, he wrote by hand.  He read widely and was extensively knowledgeable in many different fields.
            His tremendous capacity for work, his ability quickly to grasp the meaning of a book, his tenacious memory--all these enabled him to master, during one day, a tremendous amount of factual data, which could be coped with only by a very gifted man.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, APPENDIX 1
Portrait of Stalin by Zhukov, p. 141
 
            We finish with the third “truth” about Stalin's personality: the brutal and cold man, of mediocre intelligence, with no consideration for his fellow humans and who had nothing but contempt for his aids.
            In fact, the men who had to “endure” this monster day after day for those four terrible war years offer a radically different picture of Stalin.
            Here is how Zhukov described his “master”:
            “After 1940, when I served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army and later, during the war, as Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, I had occasion to get to know Stalin closely.  Though slight in stature and undistinguished in outward appearance, Stalin was nevertheless an imposing figure.  Free of affectation and mannerisms, he won the heart of everyone he talked with.  His visitors were invariable struck by his candour and his uninhibited manner of speaking, and impressed by his ability to express his thoughts clearly, his inborn analytical turn of mind, his erudition and retentive memory, all of which made even old hands and big shots brace themselves and be “on the alert’.''
            Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 283
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 261 [p. 235 on the NET]
 
 
            Lenin and Stalin were faced with a host of inconsistent adversaries whose want of confidence, of energy, of courage and--as one of them who was afterwards converted remarked--whose incredulity resulted in their losing the northern provinces and upset them so much that they gave utterance to the most puerile and paralyzing inconsistencies.
            Here Stalin and Trotsky really appeared as the exact opposite to one another.  They are two types of men situated at opposite poles of contemporary humanity.  Stalin relies with all his weight upon reason and practical common sense.  He is impeccably and inexorably methodical.  He knows.  He thoroughly understands Leninism, and the part played in government by the working classes and by the Party.  He does not try to show off and is not worried by a desire to be original.  He merely tries to do everything that he can do.  He does not believe in eloquence or in sensationalism.  When he speaks, he merely tries to combine simplicity with clearness.  Like Lenin, he is always driving the same points home.  He asks a large number of questions (because they show him the temper of his audience) and he relies largely on the same words, like some great preacher of old.  And he has an unerring way of putting all the strong and all the weak points before you.  He has no equal in ferreting out reformist complacency and opportunist laziness in a man.  "With whatever veil," says Radek, "opportunism covers his miserable body, Stalin tears it aside."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 175
 
            The qualities that set him over other men and made him the arbiter of their destinies were his great and highly disciplined intelligence, is single-mindedness, his implacable will, his courage, and his ruthlessness.  Although his formal education had been limited, he read widely.  He studied the history of Russia and other countries and was mindful of the past in the formulation of policy, in day-by-day government, and in the conduct of the war.  He acquired a considerable expertise in many fields and could pass from one subject to another with mastery, and he forgot nothing.
            ... As a man Stalin was remarkable and at times bewildering.  Notwithstanding his popular reputation, he was human.  He was sensitive to the feelings of others and capable of great warmth.  He possessed a lively sense of humor.
Grey, Ian.  Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. xiv
 
            After 1940, when I served as Chief of Staff of the Red Army and later, during the war, as Deputy Supreme Commander-in-Chief, I had occasion to get to know Stalin closely.
            Stalin's outer appearance has been described on more than one occasion.  Though slight in stature and undistinguished in outward appearance, Stalin was nevertheless an imposing figure.  Free of affectation and mannerisms, he won the heart of everyone he talked with.  His visitors were invariably struck by his candor and his uninhibited manner of speaking, and impressed by his ability to express his thoughts clearly, his inborn analytical turn of mind, his erudition and retentive memory, all of which made even old hands and big shots brace themselves and be "on the alert."
            Stalin did not like to remain seated during a conversation.  He used to pace the room slowly, stopping now and then, coming up close to the person he was talking with and looking him straight in the face.  His gaze was clear, tenacious, and seemed to envelop and pierce through the visitor.
            Stalin spoke softly, clearly shaping his phrases, almost without gesticulation.  He used to hold his pipe, though not lighted at times, and stroke his mustache with the mouthpiece.
            He spoke Russian with a Georgian accent, but flawlessly.  In his speech he often used figures of speech, similes, metaphors.
            One seldom saw him laughing; and when he laughed he did so quietly, as though to himself.  But he had a sense of humor, and appreciated sharp wit and a good joke.
            Stalin had excellent eyesight.  He never used glasses in reading.  As a rule, he wrote by hand.  He read widely and was extensively knowledgeable in many different fields.
            His tremendous capacity for work, his ability quickly to grasp the meaning of a book, his tenacious memory--all these enabled him to master, during one day, a tremendous amount of factual data, which could be coped with only by a very gifted man.
            It is hard to say which of his character traits was predominant.
            Many-sided and gifted as Stalin was, his disposition could not be called even.  He was a man of strong will, reserved, fervent, and impetuous.
            Ordinarily calm and sober-minded he sometimes lost his temper, and objectivity failed him.  He virtually changed before one's eyes--he grew pale, a bitter expression came to his eyes and his gaze became heavy and spiteful.  I knew of few daredevils who could hold out against Stalin's anger and parry the blow.
Zhukov, Georgii. Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. London: Cape, 1971, p. 283
 
            Stalin did not like to remain seated during a conversation.  Usually, he walked about the room slowly, stopping from time to time, coming close to the person he was talking with, and looking him straight in the eyes.  He had a sharp, penetrating gaze.  He spoke softly and clearly, separating one phrase from the next, and almost never gesticulated.  Mostly, he held his pipe, even if unlit , and stroked his mustache with its mouthpiece.  He spoke with a distinct Georgian accent, but his Russian was fluent, and he often used figures of speech, similes, and metaphors....
            Seldom did anyone see Stalin laugh.  When he did, it was more like a chuckle, as though to himself.  But he had a sense of humor, and liked a good joke.  He had keen eyesight, and never used glasses to read, even after dark.  Usually, he wrote what he needed himself, by hand.  He read widely, and was well-informed in a variety of fields.  His extraordinary capacity for work, his ability to grasp the crux of the matter quickly, enabled him to look through and assimilate a huge amount of information--and only an extraordinary person could match this feat....
            It is hard to say what feature of his character predominated.  A gifted man and many-sided, Stalin could never be called a man of even disposition.  He had a strong will, he was impetuous, he was secretive.  Though usually calm and reasonable, he would at times become highly irritable.  And when he was angry he stopped being objective, changed abruptly before one's eyes, grew paler still, and his gaze became heavy and hard.  Not many were the brave men who stood up to Stalin's anger and parried his attacks....
            Stalin's routine was rather singular.  He worked chiefly in the evening hours and at night, hardly ever rising before noon.
Zhukov, Georgi. Reminiscences and Reflections Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Pub., c1985, p. 365-366
 
STALIN KNEW A LOT ABOUT ARMAMENTS, WEAPONRY, AND MILITARY MATERIAL
 
            I can only repeat that Stalin devoted a good deal of attention to problems of armament and materiel.  He frequently met with chief aircraft, artillery, and tank designers whom he would question in great detail about the progress achieved in designing the various types of equipment in our country and abroad.  To give him his due, it must be said that he was fairly well versed in the characteristics of the basic types of armament.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, APPENDIX 1
Portrait of Stalin by Zhukov, p. 142
 
            The Commissar for Armament, Vannikov, related that early in 1941 Stalin favored the 107-mm gun as the main armament for tanks, and he surprised Vannikov when he added that it was a good weapon, "for he knew it from the Civil War."  Vannikov had advocated the 85-mm antiaircraft gun for the purpose, but Stalin's preference for the 107-mm proved justified: with some modification it was found to be excellent as an antitank weapon and remained in service.
            Stalin demanded precise replies to his questions, and he was quick to show displeasure with vague and inadequate information.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 278
 
            Stalin took a direct interest in the development of weapons, and indeed his approval was needed before any prototype or major change went into production.  The improved T-34 medium tank and the IS heavy tank were, the Russians claimed, the most effective tanks in the war, and most German officers admitted their superiority.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 365
 
            On the next evening the discussion was on the war in the Pacific.... 
            At this point Brooke asked whether the Trans-Siberian railways could maintain the necessary supplies for the 60 Red Army divisions.  Antonov looked to Stalin for the answer, although Brooke felt sure that he knew it.  Stalin did not respond, and Antonov explained that the railway could meet the supply needs of the Red forces.  Then Stalin intervened and gave what Brooke called "an astonishing presentation of technical railway detail" with the conclusion that the Trans-Siberian Railway would not be able to maintain adequate supplies.  Brooke observed that more than ever before he was impressed by Stalin's military ability.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 408
 
            The avid interest with which he studied the technical aspects of modern warfare, down to the minute details, shows him to have been anything but a dilettante.  He viewed the war primarily from the angle of logistics, to use the modern expression.  To secure reserves of manpower and supplies of weapons, in the right quantities and proportions, to allocate them and to transport them to the right points at the right time, to amass a decisive strategic reserve and to have it ready for intervention at decisive moments--these operations made up nine-tenths of his task.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 469
 
            During the spring of 1942, our designers-constructors came out with a new tank.  Because of the lack of enough tanks, we suffered losses.  The new tank was brought to the Kremlin where experts, including Stalin, tried to find weaknesses, potential problems and what our tanks were in opposition to and how they measured up.  The design was good but it had a weakness.  The designer said that the tank must stop for a salvo of 3-4 cannon shots then proceed.  Stalin did not altogether agree with this and asked the artillery General how this would affect the possibility of Germans aiming at that time in scoring a hit on the stationary object.  The designer was upset, but Stalin asked him:
            How long will it take to get the weak points corrected?
            One month, comrade Stalin.
            We'll give you three months.  Do not undermine us.  The front is desperately in need of a tank that can have its cannon operating as it is rolling over the terrain.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 43
 
            These facts are meant to show that Stalin was interested in every aspect of warfare....  It was impossible for us to know when he rested.  The lights were burning continually, he was always at the maps, always on the telephone with front commanders, getting their positions, advice.  He slept in his overcoat, with his boots on.
Rybin, Aleksei. Next to Stalin: Notes of a Bodyguard. Toronto: Northstar Compass Journal, 1996, p. 44
 
Stalin was no pampered potentate.  He worked exceptional hours on affairs of state, major and minor.  He achieved some understanding of modern technology; he knew that modern warfare, to which he was completely converted, needed new weapons, supplies and transport, and he placed these areas of the war effort on the same level as the military campaigning.  Stalin's contribution to the modernization of the Soviet war effort and to its ultimate triumph cannot be ignored.  He worked for a more modern state before 1941, and its achievement made possible Soviet victory.
Overy, R. J. Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, c1997, p. 348
 
            I can only say once again that even before the war Stalin devoted a good deal of attention to armaments and materiel.  He frequently summoned aviation, artillery and tank designers, whom he questioned in detail about progress in their field at home and abroad.  To be fair, I must say that he was quite well versed in the characteristics of the basic types of armaments.
            Stalin urged chief designers and directors of munitions factories, many of whom he knew personally, to produce new models of aircraft, tanks, guns, and other major weapons within established time limits, and to make sure that their quality should be superior to foreign models.
            Not a single weapon was adopted or discarded without Stalin's approval....
Zhukov, Georgi. Reminiscences and Reflections Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Pub., c1985, p. 367
 
            Stalin had an amazingly good memory.  I have never met anyone who remembered so much as him.  Stalin knew not only all the commanders of the fronts and armies, and there were over a hundred of them, but also several commanders of corps and divisions, as well as the top officials of the People’s Defense Commissariat, not to speak of the top personnel of the central and regional Party and state apparatus.  Throughout the war Stalin constantly remembered the composition of the strategic reserve and could at any time name any particular formation.  He did not need constant reminders; he knew very well the situation at the fronts, the good and bad sides of the generals, the potential of industry in satisfying the needs of the Front, the GHQ’s capacity in supplies of arms, artillery, tanks, planes, ammunition, and fuel that the troops needed, and he himself distributed them about the fronts.
Vasilevskii, Aleksandr M.  A Lifelong Cause. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981, p. 451
 
            Stalin's remarkable memory, which Vasilevsky considers the best he ever encountered, enabled him to deal personally with the assignment of his high command.
            "Stalin knew not only all the commanders of the fronts and armies, and there were over a hundred of them, but also several commanders of corps and divisions, as well as the top officials of the People's Commissariat of Defense, not to speak of the top personnel of the central and regional party and state apparatus.  Throughout the war Stalin constantly remembered the composition of the strategic reserve and could at any time name any particular formation"
            recalled Vasilevsky.  With this knowledge of individual personalities Stalin engaged in frequent reshuffling of commands, probably more than was useful.  He usually preceded a new senior posting with an interview and often discharged unsuccessful officers the same way, or by personal telephone call.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 243
 
KHRUSHCHOV LIES ABOUT STALIN
 
            ...we weren't surprised when he [Stalin] demoted Kuznetsov.  I later insisted we review Stalin's decision about Kuznetsov.  We restored him to his rank as a full admiral, and returned him to active service either as commissar or as Bulganin's deputy in charge of the navy.
            [Footnote: Kuznetsov had been People's commissar (minister) of the navy and commander-in-chief of the USSR naval forces, during World War II.  After the war he was First Deputy Minister of Defense as well as commander-in-chief of the navy until Stalin demoted him to the command of the Pacific fleet in 1947.  Kuznetsov was reinstated as minister of the Navy by Stalin in 1951, not by Khrushchev after Stalin's death.]
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 18
 
            Khrushchev stated that about this time Stalin thought the end had come.  He exclaimed: "All Lenin created, we have lost forever!"  After this outburst he did nothing "for a long time"; and he returned to active leadership only after a Politburo deputation pleaded with him to resume command.  But Khrushchev's allegations are not supported by others who were at his side.  In fact, Stalin had never been more in command than during these critical days when all seemed lost.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 325
 
            Nor do I take all of Khrushchev's 'revelations' at their face value: I do not accept, in particular, his assertion that Stalin's role in the Second World War is virtually insignificant.  This allegation was obviously meant to boost Khrushchev himself at Stalin's expense; and it does not accord with the testimonies of many reliable eyewitnesses, of Western statesmen, and generals who had no reason to exaggerate Stalin's role, and of Soviet generals who have recently written on this subject in a sober and critical vein.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. viii
 
            There is a legend that Stalin suffered a nervous collapse on hearing of the German invasion and hid himself away to wring his hands in a drunken stupor, wailing "All that Lenin created we have lost forever!"  This story was fostered by Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his campaign to shatter the icon of Stalin, which was still casting its huge shadow across party and people.  But Khrushchev was far from Moscow at the time of "Barbarossa," in Kiev.  Those who were in the Kremlin, such as Colonel-General (later Marshal) Voronov, commander of Soviet anti-aircraft defenses, tell a different story, recalling that Stalin was working furiously in his office during the days following the invasion, though he seemed nervy and low-spirited and attended command meetings only erratically.
Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace. New York: Norton, 1988, p. 643
 
            The statement that Stalin let himself collapse in confusion during the first days of the war is rubbish.   Both my mother and the head of the Party in Moscow, Shcherbakov, told me what happened in those crucial days.   Once the German attack had been confirmed, Stalin, far from collapsing, set himself to receive the military and other leaders.   My father spent three-quarters of his time with Stalin, when not busy performing tasks entrusted to him by Stalin.
Beria, Sergo. Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin's Kremlin. London: Duckworth, 2001, p. 69
 
            Khrushchev, who was not in the room, claimed that Nikolaev had said he had done it on assignment from the Party....
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 149
 
STALIN CARRIED OUT SENSIBLE COLD WAR PREPAREDNESS
 
            Our armed forces after the war weren't weak--they were strong in spirit.  But unless supported by good equipment and the latest armaments, their spirit would quickly evaporate.  We had to assess the situation soberly.
            Stalin drew the correct conclusion: he saw that the reactionary forces of the West were mobilizing against us, that they had already accumulated hundreds of atomic bombs, and that the prospect of a military conflict with the United States was all too possible and not at all encouraging for our side.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 62
 
            Although the new western regions were not adequately prepared for defense, the first echelons of the forces of the western military districts were transferred to them and joined by other units still in the formative stages.  Stalin ordered a strong fortified line to be built along the new border, just as there was along the old one.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 742
 
BERIA RELEASED DANGEROUS CRIMINALS AFTER STALIN DIED
 
            After Stalin's death, Beria demonstrated his "generosity" by letting out a lot of criminals.  He wanted to show off his "liberalism."  However, in actual fact, this action of his was directed against the people because these criminals who got out of jail went right back to their old trades-- thieving and murdering.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 118
 
KHRUSHCHOV INSTITUTED CAPITALIST PROGRAMS
 
            I realize that by publicly advocating material incentives I'm opening myself up to those know-it-alls who will say our people should be motivated not by money but by ideological considerations.  That's nonsense.  I'm old enough to know from experience that the majority of collective-farm administrators who are paid a flat salary won't take any chances for the sake of improving production.  Stalin refused to knowledge that fact, and so did some of the people who were in the leadership at the same time I was.  The main thing in the struggle for socialism is the productivity of labor.  For socialism to be victorious, a country must get the most out of every worker.  And when I say "get the most," I don't mean by force.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 127
 
KHRUSHCHOV ATTACKS CENTRALIZATION
 
            Some people might say that the division of regional administrations into industrial and agricultural boards is crude and inefficient.  I say it's better than the petty tyranny which comes from [centralized] administration.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 152
 
KHRUSHCHOV CRITICIZES MAO
 
            They'd fill our ears with a lot of Mao Tse-tung's gibberish.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 165
 
KHRUSHCHOV ACCUSES STALIN OF GIVING PART OF THE UKRAINE TO POLAND AFTER WWII
 
            However, Stalin's decision to set Poland's eastern frontier along the Curzon Line created a problem because he failed to take into account the national interests of both the Ukrainians and the Byelorussians.  The Ukrainians were particularly unhappy.  Only a few years before, in 1939, the eastern and western territories of the Ukraine had been united by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.  For the first time in their history the Ukrainian people had found themselves joined in one state, a Soviet state.  Triumphant celebrations had taken place in Kiev and Moscow.  Our country had attained its maximum territorial gains and simultaneously satisfied the aspirations of the Ukrainian people.  Now, after the war, Stalin decided to concede some of the Western Ukraine back to Poland.
            Take the town of Kholm for example.  Under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact it had become part of the Ukraine.  Now, along with other regions, Kholm was to be part of Poland again.  The population of these areas was overwhelmingly Ukrainian, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were to be placed under Polish jurisdiction.
            Stalin made major concessions to the Poles, creating great difficulties for our State and for me personally.  I'm thinking particularly of the way he played favorites with the new Polish leadership and helped Poland at the expense of the Soviet Union....
            So there we were, aiding the Poles economically at great cost to ourselves and restoring to them territories in the Ukraine.  Yet, believe it or not, I later met some Polish comrades who were still dissatisfied with the borders Stalin had given them in the wake of Hitler's retreat.  They thought their border with the Soviet Union should be even farther to the east.
            Once Stalin made up his mind to adjust Poland's eastern border back to the Curzon Line, he decided to let any Ukrainians who wished to do so move from the new frontier regions of Poland across the border into the Soviet Ukraine.  Likewise, the Polish population of the Soviet Ukraine was given the option of moving to Poland.  The same measures were taken with respect to the Poles and Byelorussians living on either side of the frontier around Brest.  Stalin ordered me, as the representative of the Ukraine, and Ponomarenko, who was Secretary of the Central Committee of the Byelorussian Communist Party, to contact the Polish provisional government and work out a scheme for an exchange of populations.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 178-180
 
KHRUSHCHOV ADMITS STALIN SHOWED MORE TOLERANCE THAN HE DID
 
            In fact, it was more complicated than that.  After the liberation of Lvov people had brought the exhibit out of storage and put it on display.  It was a panorama of paintings showing scenes from the 19th-century Polish revolt against Russian rule.  One scene was the aftermath of a battle in which a force of Polish insurgents had defeated some Russian troops, taken the Russian general prisoner, and were leading him off into captivity.  There were also other episodes from the history of the Poles' struggle against tsarist Russia.  In no time at all the exhibit was literally the object of a pilgrimage by Poles living around Lvov.  The exhibit obviously struck a sensitive chord in their hearts.  We didn't like the implications of such a pilgrimage, so we took the exhibit down and put it back in storage.
            Of course, you could look at the exhibit historically and say the scenes it recreated all belong to the past.  But the past is always relevant to the present, and the content of the exhibit could be construed as anti-Russian.  Pictures depicting battles between Poles and Russians didn't serve our goal of establishing closer ties among our three fraternal nations: Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine.  On the contrary, such an exhibit might serve to induce Poles to repeat that whole episode from their history.
            With this in mind, I felt I had to warn Beirut and Osobka-Morawski about the possible consequences of moving the exhibit from Lvov to Warsaw: "Go ahead and take it if you insist, but I'm telling you if you put it on display, it will stir up the opposite of fraternal feelings between our people.  It will be like a call to battle, urging your people, 'Fight Russia!  Defeat the Russians!'"
            Stalin didn't agree.  He supported the Polish comrades, saying, "But this is all history, it's over and done with.  Look at us: we staged a production of the opera Ivan Susanin, which is an anti-Polish work, and it didn't do any harm to our present-day goals."
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 185-186
 
RED ARMY WAS IN NO POSITION TO IMMEDIATELY AID THE WARSAW UPRISING
 
            The Poles in London wanted postwar Poland to be in the hands of a bourgeois, capitalist, reactionary, anti-socialist, anti-Soviet, pro-Western government headed by Mikolajczyk.  The political goals set by Mikolajczyk in cahoots with Churchill required that Warsaw be liberated [by British and American forces] before the Soviet army reached the city.  That way, a pro-Western government supported by Mikolajczyk would already be in control of the city by the time the Soviets arrived.  But it didn't work out that way.  Our troops under Rokossovsky got there first.  The anti-Communist Poles in London thought the Soviet army would enter the city as soon as we reached the Vistula.  That's why they ordered Bor-Komorowski to stage a last-ditch revolt against the Germans.
            However, our forces didn't do what the insurgents expected.  They didn't enter the city.  Instead, Rokossovsky's army waited on the right bank of the Vistula.  You might ask why we didn't cross the river immediately and liberate the city.  Well, there were a number of factors.  First, the river itself posed a major natural obstacle; it would take time to ford and cost us heavily in men and equipment.  Second, an advancing force always suffers more casualties than a defending force.  Both these considerations meant we had to wait for reinforcements to catch up with our advance units.  Furthermore, our commanders figured we would suffer fewer losses if, rather than attacking frontally, we could drive the Germans out of the city by attacking them from the left bank and then closing in on them with a flanking action which our troops were already preparing south of Warsaw where they had established a bridgehead.  But all these preparations took time.  That's why we had to wait on the far side of the river during the Polish uprising inside the city.
            The Germans suppressed the Warsaw revolt and took the insurgents prisoner, including General Bor-Komorowski.  Usually when the Hitlerites captured the leader of an insurrection in occupied territory, they would have no mercy; they would shoot him at once.  But this Bor-Komorowski was allowed to live and after the war conducted anti-Polish and anti-socialist activities--which makes me wonder what sort man he was.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 188
 
            On August 1, 1944, the Polish government in London set off an insurrection in Warsaw.  These reactionaries began their criminal adventure solely to prevent the Red Army from liberating the Polish capital.  The Red Army, which had just advanced 600 kilometres, had lost many men and much matEriel.  It was impossible for it to go forward to Warsaw and help the insurrection.  In fact, the Polish reactionaries had deliberately hidden from the Soviets their intention to start the insurrection.  But the Nazis, having concentrated several divisions in Warsaw, massacred the population and destroyed the capital.
            K. K. Rokossovsky, A Soldier’s Duty. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985, pp. 254--263.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 265 [p. 243 on the NET]
 
Stalin saw this as a war within a war.  He wrote to Churchill and Roosevelt:
            “Sooner or later, the truth will be known about the handful of criminals who, in order to seize power, set off the Warsaw adventure.”
Staline, Discours 9 fevrier 1946 (Euvres Editions NBE, 1975), vol. XIV, p. 376.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 265 [p. 243 on the NET]
 
            Rokossovsky's advance to the outskirts of Praga, the suburb of Warsaw on the opposite bank of the broad Vistula, made liberation seem at hand.  Already on July 24, however, general Bor-Komorowski, commanding the Polish underground army in Warsaw, had decided to order an uprising before the Red Army could reach the city.  He was fanatically anti-Russian.  He was determined that the Poles should liberate their own city and prepare the way for the London government to take power, excluding the Polish Communists.  For these reasons and also from stubborn pride he avoided all contact with Rokossovsky and the Russian High Command, refusing even to consider co-ordinating action with the Red Army.
            The people of Warsaw were, however, expecting Rokossovsky's forces to cross the river and come to their aid....  They were bewildered when no Russian crossing was attempted and the Russian guns fell silent.
            On Aug. 1 Bor-Komorowski's underground army of 40,000 men attacked the Germans in the city.  They were poorly armed and lacked supplies, but they fought bravely.  The battle raged for 63 days, but the uprising was savagely crushed.  Over 200,000 of the city's inhabitants were killed.  The Germans expelled the 800,000 survivors and razed the city to the ground.
            The uprising and what Churchill called the "Martyrdom of Warsaw" aroused controversy.  The Allied leaders suspected that Stalin had ordered the Red Army to halt at the Vistula and that he was callously leaving the city to its fate.  The London Poles actively fomented these suspicions in Britain and the United States.  In fact, Rokossovsky's forces had been halted and were in no position to cross the river and liberate the city.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 398
 
Footnote:  The Warsaw uprising is still a matter of controversy.  The latest contribution is Nothing but Honour which fails to present the full story.  Among the major factors which are minimized or ignored are, first, that Rokossovsky's forces, exhausted after their rapid advance, were halted by the German offensive; the second factor concerns General Bor-Komorowski.  He lacked the training and experience for high command, and he gravely miscalculated the situation.  Not only did he deliberately reject all idea of coordinating the uprising with the Red Army, but he also failed to secure firm undertakings of Allied support.
            On learning of the uprising General Anders, commander of the Polish II Corps in Italy, denounced Bor-Komorowski's action as "a serious crime" and "madness."
            It was, indeed, a terrible tragedy and one for which Stalin and the Red Army have been unfairly criticized.  It left scars on Russian-Polish relations which took many years to heal.  But it also had the effect of making many Poles realize that they must show realism and come to terms with Russia.  For the Polish government in London it was a political and military defeat from which it never recovered.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 506
 
            After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Anders was plucked from his Siberian prison camp and asked to form a new Polish army from fellow prisoners, to fight alongside the Red Army.
Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace. New York: Norton, 1988, p. 361
 
 
            The situation was further complicated by the failed Warsaw uprising, organized by the emigre leaders without the knowledge of the Soviet government.
Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin's Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 259
 
            On Aug. 1, 1944, armed insurrection against the Germans broke out in Warsaw.  The insurgents were led by officers who took their cue from the Polish Government in London.  The Red Army had rapidly approached Warsaw, and the commanders of the rising mistakenly believed that the German garrison was about to evacuate the city.  The mass of the insurgents were animated by the desire to liberate their capital through their own efforts.  Their commander, however, was himself guilty of a gross political mistake--he gave the order for action without trying to establish contact and to co-ordinate the rising with the command of the advancing Russian army.  Incidentally, the commander of that Russian army was a Pole, Marshall Rokossovsky.  That mistake sprang, of course, from the political situation.  The leaders of the rising hoped that they would either be in control of the Polish capital before the entry of the Russians, or that, failing this, they would exert moral pressure on the Russians to acknowledge the political claims of those who had helped them to expel the Germans.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 522
 
            It soon turned out that the timing of the insurrection was disastrous.  Rokossovsky's army had been stopped by the Germans at the Vistula and then thrown back.  The German garrison, far from evacuating the capital, turned all its might and fury against the insurgents.  A somber and desperate battle developed, in which the Poles fought with unique romantic heroism, and the Germans revenged themselves by burning and pulling down street after street and house after house, until the city of Warsaw virtually ceased to exist.  The Poles begged for help.  Mikolajczyk appealed to Stalin.  Stalin's behavior was extremely strange, to say no more.  At first he would not believe the reports about the rising and suspected a canard.  Then he promised help but failed to give it.  So far it was still possible to put a charitable interpretation upon his behavior.  It may be, it is indeed very probable, that Rokossovsky, repelled by the Germans, was unable to come to the rescue of Warsaw, and that Stalin, just conducting major offensives on the southern sector of the front, in the Carpathians and in Rumania, could not alter his strategic dispositions to assist the unexpected rising.  But then he did something that sent a shudder of horror through the allied countries.  He refused to allow British planes, flying from their bases to drop arms and food to the insurgents, to land on Russian airfields behind the fighting lines.  He thereby reduced British help to the insurgents to a minimum.  Then Russian planes appeared over the burning city with help, when it was too late.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 523
 
            The British and American governments begged Stalin to support the insurgents.  Stalin refused, arguing that the insurrection had begun without any prior coordination with the Soviet command and that it was an adventure for which the London Poles were to blame.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 416
 
            It has long been conventional in the West to hold Stalin and the Red Army responsible, indirectly, for the horrors that befell Warsaw....  It is said that the Polish Home Army expected help from the Soviet Union.  Instead the Red Army sat on the Vistula and watched the destruction of the city in front of them....
            The truth is far more complicated than this.  The Warsaw rising was instigated not to help out the Soviet advance but to forestall it.  Polish nationalists did not want Warsaw liberated by the Red Army but wanted to do so themselves, as a symbol of the liberation struggle and the future independence of Poland.  This ambition was all the more urgent because only days before, on July 21, a Communist-backed Polish Committee for National Liberation was set up with Stalin's blessing.  At Lublin on July 22 the Committee was declared to be the new provisional government; four days later a pact of friendship was signed, with the Soviet Union recognizing the new government.  All of this was at least technically within the terms agreed at Tehran, where Churchill and Roosevelt had half-heartedly acquiesced to Stalin's request to keep the frontiers of 1941 and his share of Poland as divided in the German-Soviet pact.  What Polish nationalists and the Western Allies could not tolerate was the almost certain fact that any new Polish state born of German defeat would be dominated by the Soviet Union.  The Polish government in exile in London, led by Mikolajczyk, urged the Home Army to launch a pre-emptive nationalist insurrection and remained unalterably opposed to any idea that the Soviet Union should keep the territory seized in 1939.
            The real issue was not political--there was nothing knew about the hostility between Soviet leaders and Polish nationalists--but military.  Could the Red Army have captured Warsaw in August 1944 and saved its population from further barbarities?  The answer now seems unambiguously negative.  Soviet forces did not sit and play while Warsaw burned.  The city was beyond their grasp.  In the first days of August the most advanced Soviet units were engaged in bitter fighting on the approaches to the city; the small bridgeheads over the Vistula were subject to a fierce German onslaught.  To the north both sides desperately contested the crossing of the Bug and Narew rivers, which might have opened up another avenue to the Polish capital.  This was hardly inactivity, though it could little benefit the Poles.  Stalin was completely, and no doubt correctly, dismissive of the military potential of the Polish army.  "What kind of army is it?" he asked Mikolajczyk, who was visiting Moscow in early August, "without artillery, tanks, air force?  In modern war this is nothing...."  Soviet commanders knew that this was not like Kiev or Minsk; their forces were tired and short of arms, and the Germans had made the defense of the Warsaw district a priority.  Late in August 1944 General Rokossovsky, whose troops were tied down on the Warsaw front, told a British war correspondent that "the rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of entering Warsaw.  That point had not been reached at any stage....  We were pushed back...."  When Zhukov was sent to the Warsaw front in early September to report to Stalin on the confused situation there, he concluded on military grounds that the Vistula could not yet be crossed in force.  German war memoirs, which are less suspect as a source, confirm that the Red Army was prevented from helping Warsaw by the sudden stiffening of the German defense.
Overy, R. J. Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, c1997, p. 296-297
 
            With incredible courage they [the Poles] held out for no less than nine weeks against the most savage attacks.  But their tragic gamble failed, first because they had underestimated the reaction of the Germans, who instead of abandoning the city brought up powerful reinforcements to suppress the uprising; second, because they notified neither the Western Allies nor the Russians of their intentions; and third (and in part, because of that), because they received virtually no help from outside.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 852
 
            Stalin can hardly be blamed for the decision to launch the Warsaw uprising.  This was a tragic, if understandable, mistake by the AK commanders and the exiled government, deliberately made without consultation with any of the three major Allies.  Stalin appears to have been surprised as well as irritated by it.  It occurred at a time when the Russian advance in the center had run out of steam and preparations for the next phase of the campaign had not yet begun.  This was not in fact launched until mid-January 1945.
            Given the unexpected German rally and counterattack on the Vistula front it would have been difficult for Rokossovsky's forces to have broken through to relieve the Warsaw insurgents, even if Stalin had wanted to.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 854
 
            At the end of September 1944 I returned to General Headquarters from Bulgaria.  A few days later the Supreme Commander [Stalin] instructed me to promptly go to the area of Warsaw....
            First of all I wished to find out how things were in Warsaw itself whose residents had not long before staged an uprising against the fascist aggressors.  The German Command dealt ruthlessly with the insurgents and subjected the population to brutal reprisals.  The city was razed to the ground.  Thousands of civilians perished in the wreckage.
            As was established later, neither the command of the Front nor that of Poland's First Army had been informed in advance by Bor-Komorowski, the leader of the uprising, about the forthcoming events in Warsaw.  Nor did he make any attempt to coordinate the insurgents' actions with those of the First Byelorussian Front.  The Soviet command learned about the uprising after the event from local residents who had crossed the Vistula.  The Stavka [Soviet military command] had not been informed in advance either....
            On instructions by the Supreme Commander [Stalin], two paratroop officers were sent to Bor-Komorowski for liaison and coordination of actions.  However, Bor-Komorowski refused to receive the officers.
Zhukov, Georgi. Reminiscences and Reflections Vol. 2. Moscow: Progress Pub., c1985, p. 301
 
STALIN WANTED TO HEAL WITH THE POLES THE RUSSO-NAZI TREATY WOUND
 
            Stalin was especially pleased that we had been able to help the Poles; he knew our assistance would make good marks for us with the Polish people.  The treaty of 1939 had deeply wounded the Poles, and the wound was still fresh.  Stalin wanted to do everything he could to heal that wound as soon as possible.  Naturally, he didn't say so to me outright, but I could sense what he was thinking.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 193
 
STALIN TELLS CHURCHILL HE WANTS ELECTIONS IN POLAND TO HEAL THE WOUNDS
 
            Stalin wrote to Churchill that elections were the only way to solve the problem of what political course Poland would follow.
            ...The elections were a success for us and a failure for Churchill.  The essence of his policy had been to promote Mikolajczyk to a position from which he could determine both the internal and foreign policies of the Polish state.  When the results were in, however, Mikolajczyk's party had been defeated.  The Polish Workers' Party and the parties allied with it received an absolute majority of the votes.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 194-196
 
MOST OF THE POLISH PEOPLE SUPPORTED THE SOCIALIZATION OF POLAND
 
            Thus, despite vacillation on the part of certain elements in the population, the majority--and especially the working class--in the end overwhelmingly decided to engage in the socialist reconstruction of the Polish state....
            I didn't hear a single report or even a single rumor about armed resistance among the Polish population.  If trouble had broken out, I certainly would have known about it.  Comrades Beirut and Gomulka would have informed Stalin about it in my presence.  Even if they hadn't informed him--even if they'd tried to keep secret and outbreak of some kind--we still would have found out.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 197-198
 
            On September 17 1939, following the escape of the Polish government into Romania, the Red Army marched into the territory Poland stole in 1920.  The Red Army was welcomed as liberators by the local population, who were only too happy to see the rule of the Polish gentry broken.  Even the Polish soldiers themselves welcomed the Red Army, which met virtually no resistance.  The territory that was stolen from Ukraine and Byelorussia was restored to them and became part of the USSR.  The territory of Lithuania was restored to it, including its capital, Vilnius.
Mukhin, Y.I.,  Katyn Detective,1995
 
KHRUSHCHOV OPPOSES COLLECTIVIZATION
 
            Personally I think Gomulka was absolutely right to oppose collectivization.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 206
 
KHRUSHCHOV REFUTES HIS OWN CRITICISM OF STALIN REGARDING GOMULKA
 
            Then one day, when I was at Stalin's he received a phone call.  He listened impassively, hung up, and came back to the table where I was sitting.  As was his habit, he didn't sit down but paced around a room.
            "That was Beirut calling," he said.  "They have arrested Gomulka.  I'm not sure it was the right thing to do.  I wonder whether they have sufficient grounds to arrest him."
            That's exactly what began to happen in Poland, and Stalin was largely to blame.  Of course Stalin had his aides, but they were just sycophants.  Just as Lenin warned us in his Testament, Stalin mistrusted everyone; and he acted cold-bloodedly on his mistrust.
            [Yet Khrushchev just said Stalin doubted the wisdom of arresting Gomulka]
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 207
 
GOMULKA FAVORS A FORM OF SIMPLE CAPITALIST PRIVATE FARMS OVER COLLECTIVES
 
            Gomulka, of course, had never favored collective farms in the first place.  As I've already recounted, his opposition to collectivization provided the basis for one of the charges brought against him after the war by Beirut and his colleagues.  Gomulka preferred "circles," or farmers' co-operatives, which allowed several peasants to pool their resources to buy seed, fertilizers, and machinery; they would till their land collectively, but the land itself would remain divided into patches, each of which was the private property of an individual peasant.  The surplus of what was collectively produced could then be sold through the circle.  Strictly speaking, this was not a socialist form of production.  Nor was it a system of cooperatives in our socialist understanding of the term.  The Polish "circles" were closer to what we would call workers' cooperatives or partnerships.  They were like small companies in that the land continued to belong to the peasants.  Thus the system was a throwback to the old days.  However, the organization of farmlands was an internal matter for Poland, and we never took Comrade Gomulka to task for it.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 240
 
KHRUSHCHOV SAYS HE WAS FORCED TO RETIRE
 
            I say "continue" because a number of years have passed since I retired--that is, since I was forced to retire.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 266
 
KHRUSHCHOV EXPOSES HIS IGNORANT FOREIGN POLICY OF AIDING GOVTS INSTEAD OF MASSES
 
            Later there were other upsetting incidents.  The Guineans asked us to build them an airfield capable of handling the heaviest planes.  We willingly obliged and sent our specialists down there to build the airfield.  Then along came the so-called Caribbean crisis, when military conflict threatened any moment to flare up between the USSR and the United States.  Our communications with Cuba took on vital importance.  Our planes needed at least one stopover on their way to Havana, but the countries where our planes usually stopped suddenly refused us landing rights.
            The airfield we'd built in Guinea would have been a perfect refueling point, but the Guinean government wouldn't let us use it.  They tried to justify their refusal on the grounds that "technical conditions" weren't right.  We might well have asked, who knew more about the technical conditions--the government of Guinea or the Soviet engineers who built the airfield?  The Guinea's action seemed clearly in favor of the United States and contrary to the interests not only of the Soviet Union, but of all peoples struggling for independence.  After that incident we no longer trusted Guinea's motives.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 382-383
 
            I'd like to say a few words about Yemen.  Even before our visit to England in 1955, Crown Prince al-Badr asked us to give his country military aid and we agreed.  As I've already mentioned the British Minister of War told me in London that a little birdie had whispered in his ear that we were selling arms to Yemen.  The little birdie was right.  As a result, al-Badr became confident in us, and we continued to help him over the years....
            He asked us to give him economic assistance so that Yemen could build a port.  The British wouldn't let them use the harbor in Aden any more.  Al-Badr said, "Can you imagine that since ships have to anchor a great distance offshore, all the cargo and passengers have to be carried ashore on the dockers' backs?"  We agreed to build a seaport for them....
            After his father died, al-Badr ascended the throne.  As often happens, a liberal prince became a reactionary king.  He turned out to be an extremely cruel leader, a literal slave driver.  After a while, the chief of the royal security guard led a palace revolt and over-threw him.
            For a long time there were rumors that al-Badr had been killed and buried under the rubble of the palace, but it turned out that by some miracle he had survived.  He'd put on woman's clothing and snuck away.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 385-386
 
US DEMANDED LEND-LEASE SHIPS BE RETURNED AND THEN SUNK THEM
 
            Returning to the subject of Lend-Lease, I remember that the United States insisted we return the cargo ships they'd given us during the war.  What did the Americans do with those ships after we gave them back?  They didn't even bother to take them back to the United States to scrap them--they just took them out to sea and sank them then and there.  That's how much our former allies cared for the blood we'd shed in the fight against our common enemy.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 397
 
KHRUSHCHOV THINKS TRUMAN IS A FOOL
 
            By then Roosevelt--who had always treated us with such understanding--was dead, and the United States was headed by Truman, an aggressive man and a fool.  His policies reflected his stupidity and his class hatred.  He was vicious and spiteful toward the Soviet Union.  He had neither an ounce of statesmanship nor an iota of common sense.  I can't imagine how anyone ever considered him worthy of the Vice-Presidency, much less the Presidency.  The whole world knows from the newspapers how he once slapped a journalist for criticizing his daughter's singing.  That incident alone told us something about Truman's statesmanship, to say nothing of his suitability for so important a post as the Presidency of United States.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 402
 
KHRUSHCHOV DENOUNCES REUTHER’S PEACEFUL-COEXISTENCE BETWEEN CLASSES
 
            I have always favored peaceful coexistence among countries, but Reuther favored peaceful coexistence among classes, which is a fundamental contradiction to our Marxist-Leninist teaching.  Worse, it is treason to the cause of his fellow workers.  I'm afraid such treason is all too common among American trade-union leaders.
Talbott, Strobe, Trans. and Ed. Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little Brown, c1970, p. 447
 
STALIN COULD PERSUADE WORKERS AND TALK TO THEM IN THEIR LANGUAGE
 
            He would approach a worker, speak to him in a friendly way, and attach him to himself for ever.  He would make a malcontent of one who was apathetic, and a revolutionary of a malcontent.
            Sosso's natural simplicity, his complete indifference to the conditions of personal life, his strength of character and his knowledge, which even at that time was remarkable, gave him authority, called people's attention to him and kept it there.  The Tiflis workers called him "our Sosso." 
            Orakhelashvili, who was Sosso's companion at that time, puts the matter in a nutshell: "He was neither pedantic nor vulgar."  He looked upon the militant Socialist as an interpreter who said the same things as the wisest theorist, but adapted them to the intelligence and degree of education of his listeners.  How did he do this?  By imagery and by giving vivid examples.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 10
 
            "'Our Soso,' the workers spoke of him.  It is well known that for intellectuals active in labor circles the most difficult thing was to find 'a common language with the workers.'  In this regard Stalin was and remains to this day a rare exception.  He has always been remarkably capable of explaining to workingmen the most complicated things and events in a clear, simple, and convincing manner.  He was just as able to find the ' tongue' of the peasants with whom he frequently came in touch in the revolutionary work in Georgia....
            Yenukidze said, "Stalin never sought personal popularity.  The circle of his persistent activity he limited exclusively to the working men and that of his underground coworkers.  That is why the advanced workers and professional revolutionists knew him well and rated highly his qualities as an organizer and revolutionist."
Levine, Isaac Don.  Stalin.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 15-16
 
STALIN DID NOT ABUSE OPPONENTS OR TALK IN VIOLENT LANGUAGE
 
            "He never abused an opponent," adds the same eyewitness [Orakhelashvili].  "We suffered so much from the Mensheviks that when we found ourselves addressing one of them in a speech we could not prevent ourselves from going for him hammer and tongs and lashing him with our tongues.  Stalin never liked this form of attack.  Violent language was for him a prohibited weapon.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 11
 
WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A REVOLUTIONARY AND STALIN HAD ALL OF IT
 
            The vocation of secret agitator and professional Revolutionary, which attracted him in the wake of so many others, is a terrible vocation.  One becomes an outlaw, spied upon by the machinery of the State, hounded by the police; the quarry of the Tsar and of his countless and well-nourished underlings, all armed to the teeth and huge of fist.  One is like an exile whose temporary liberty hangs by a mere thread and who hides himself and watches.  One is the tiny Revolutionary, almost alone in the crowd, swamped by the immense forces of Capitalism which have the nations in their grip from pole to pole--not only the 180 million subjects of the Tsar but everyone else in the world--and one is the man who, with a few friends, wants to alter all that.  One appears now here, now there, to arouse resentment and to excite people to action, and one's only weapons are one's own convictions and the power of one's words.  To follow that calling in which, clearly silhouetted on the horizon, no matter what path one takes, stand prison, Siberia, and the gallows, it is not sufficient merely to have a vocation.
            One must have iron health at the service of indomitable energy, and an almost limitless capacity for work.  One must be in the championship class for doing without sleep and one must be able to throw oneself from one task into another at a moment’s notice, to fast and to freeze, to avoid capture and to know how to escape if one is captured.  One must prefer to have one’s skin seared with a red-hot iron or one’s teeth smashed sooner than blurt out a name or an address.  One’s whole heart must be devoted to the cause; it is impossible for it to harbour any other object, for one is a wanderer on the face of the earth and one never has either leisure or money.
            And that is not all.  One must have hope so firmly implanted in one that in the darkest moments and when faced by the bitterest defeats one must never cease to believe in victory.
            And even that is not enough.  Above everything else one must have clarity of vision and a perfect knowledge of what one wants.  It is in this that Marxism specially arms Revolutionaries and gives these new men such a grasp of circumstances (and allows, and has allowed them such extraordinary foresight!).
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 12
 
            Whoever imagines, when looking at Stalin's amazingly circuitous path and life, that he has renounced revolution, has a surprise in store for him one day.
Ludwig, Emil. Three portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. New York Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, c1940, p. 94
 
STALIN SAYS A GOOD LEADER MUST FIRST CONSULT THE MASSES BEFORE ACTING
 
            And the great incentive, for those who are trying to bring about social progress, is faith in the masses.  This faith in the great mass of the workers is the watch-word, the battle-cry which Stalin has uttered most often in the course of his career.  "The most unseemly malady which can attack a leader," he tells us, "is fear of the masses."  The leader needs them more than they need him.  He learns more from them than they learn from him.  As soon as a leader begins to make his plans without taking the masses into his conference, he is damned, as regards both victory and the cause.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 16
 
            The older members were in favor of the distribution, in small doses, of "pure propaganda" to selected workers who should be charged with spreading the gospel.  The younger members were for direct contact, for "the street."  It is hardly necessary to add that Stalin supported the latter tendency, and made it triumph.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 17
 
            No, under no conditions would our workers now tolerate the domination of one person.  Individuals of the greatest authority are reduced to nonentities as soon as they lose the confidence of the masses, and as soon as they lose contact with the masses.  Plekhanov used to enjoy exceptional authority.  And what happened?  As soon as he began to commit political errors, the workers forgot him; they abandoned him and forgot him.  Another instance: Trotsky.  Trotsky also used to enjoy very great authority, although, of course, not as much as Plekhanov.  What happened?  As soon as he lost contact with the workers, he was forgotten....  They remember him sometimes--with bitterness....  As far as our class-conscious workers are concerned, they remember Trotsky with bitterness, with irritation, with hatred.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 245
 
            The art of leadership is a serious matter.  One must not lag behind a movement, because to do so is to become isolated from the masses.  But one must not rush ahead, for to rush ahead is to lose contact with masses.  He who wishes to lead a movement, and at the same time keep touch with the vast masses, must conduct a fight on two fronts--against those who lag behind and against those who rush on ahead.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 256
 
            Even an absolute dictator - which Stalin was not - has to sell his policies to his people if he is to survive, particularly if he is asking them to risk their lives.
Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace. New York: Norton, 1988, p. 328
 
            Koba is a cynic but his knowledge of the masses is undeniable.  No leader of our party, not even Ilyich, has understood the masses better than Koba....  Trotsky is but a novice in this field.  He invents the masses instead of studying them.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 220
 
            But the fact that as these leaders rise they get further away from the masses, and the masses begin to look up at them from below and do not venture to criticize them, cannot but give rise to a certain danger of the leaders losing contact with the masses and the masses getting out of touch with the leaders.
            This danger may result in the leaders becoming conceited and regarding themselves as infallible.  And what good can be expected when the top leaders become self-conceited and begin to look down on the masses?  Clearly, nothing can come of this but the ruin of the Party.
Stalin, Joseph. Works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Pub. House, 1952, Vol. 11, p. 34
 
STALIN WAS AN EDUCATOR IN MARXIST IDEAS AND ORGANIZED DEBATES IN PRISON
 
            Simon Vereshtchak, a Revolutionary Socialist and a fierce political enemy of his [Stalin] informs us that in 1903 he was in the same prison as Stalin, in Baku--a prison, made to hold 400 prisoners, into which 1500 were crowded.  "One day a new face appeared in the cell containing the Bolsheviks.  Someone said: 'It's Koba.'" What did Koba do in prison?  He educated people.  "Educational circles were formed, and the Marxist Koba stood out prominently among the professors.  Marxism was his subject and he was undefeatable on it...."  And Vereshtchak describes this young man, "wearing a blue, open-necked, satinet blouse, no belt or hat, a cloak thrown over his shoulder, and always carrying a book in his hand."  Arranging big organized debates.  (Koba always preferred these to individual discussions.)...
            A little later, when he occupied cell No. 3 in the Bailoff prison, Koba again organized courses of study.  Imprisonment only succeeded in altering his activities in a relative way.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 22
 
            In Tiflis, young Socialists were quick to label themselves Iskra-men, and Djugashvili was one of them.  Like others, he now awaited impatiently the successive copies of the paper arriving by clandestine mail at rather long intervals.  The advent of a new copy was a festive event.  Here was the intellectual authority on which he could confidently lean, for each copy of Iskra brought food for thought and plenty of solid arguments that would come in very usefully in debates with opponents.  The periodical also reinforced the young man's self-confidence.  He could now confound his opponents with pointed arguments and sharp phrases coined by the leading theorists abroad and get from the people on the spot some of the credit due to those who had briefed him.  He was, of course, too young and too little educated, though knowledgeable by local standards, to make any contribution of his own to Iskra.  But his mind was trained enough to absorb and assimilate the main lines, if not all the subtle shades, of the views it propounded.  To the workers of whom he had political charge he would now expound not only the general ideas of socialism and the reasons why Tsardom and capitalist exploitation should be opposed: he could also recount the specific arguments against agrarian socialism, legal Marxism, and economism.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 34
 
            Koba imposed upon himself a rigid discipline, rose early, worked hard, read much, and was one of the chief debators in the prison commune.  After many years ex-inmates remembered him arguing against agrarian Socialists and other opponents of Iskra.  His manner in debating was logical, sharp, and scornful.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 49
 
            The difference that Stalin was able to turn to his advantage was his experience on the ground in Russia as a local organizer, something that few of the other original Bolshevik or Menshevik leaders could claim, and that recommended him to Lenin.  An important part of that experience was the periodic interruption of arrest, imprisonment, exile, and escape.  In all he was arrested seven times and five times escaped; of the nine years between March 1908 and March 1917 he spent only a year and a half at liberty.  In the Russian revolutionary tradition, prison and exile for many political offenders served as their "universities," where they read widely, got a solid grounding in radical literature and ideas, often from experienced teachers and took part in frequent debates organized by the prison commune.  This was where Stalin did his best to make up the deficiencies in his education, particularly in his knowledge of Marxist writings.  Most of those who knew him in prison agree in recollections of a man who subjected himself to discipline, always had a book in his hand, and took a prominent part in debates, in which his manner is described as confident, sharp-tongued, and scornful.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 32
 
            Stalin never engaged in any arguments with individuals.  "He always challenged his opponents to an 'organized debate.'  These debates were held almost on a scheduled program.  They were on such issues as the agrarian question, and the tactics of revolution, or on philosophical topics.  The arguments on the agrarian problem were especially heated and sometimes ended in blows.  I remember such a discussion in which Koba took part.  His comrade Ordjonikidze came to the defense of his thesis, and wound up by striking his opponent in the face.
            Koba's appearance and mannerisms did not conduce to ease at these debates.  He lacked wit and expressed his thoughts somewhat dryly.  The mechanical precision of his memory, however, amazed everybody.  He had apparently learned by heart all of Marx's 'Capital.'  Marxism was his element, and in it he was invincible.  There was no power that could dislodge him from a position once he had taken it.  He was able to quote a corresponding formula from Marx for every phenomenon.  This created a strong impression on the young and unenlightened members of the party.
Levine, Isaac Don.  Stalin.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 79-80
 
STALIN MAINTAINED MARXIST THEORY AGAINST REVISIONISTS
 
            All realistic theory is supple, since it adjusts itself to life.  But it is supple at its extremity, not at its foundation; on the side of circumstances, not on that of principles (which are, indeed, originally an imaginary synthesis of realities).  The rigorous upholding of these principles, and their defense against the slightest attempted modification, was one of Stalin's most exacting and unremitting  tasks.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 30
 
STALIN DESCRIBES HIS FIRST ENCOUNTERS WITH LENIN
 
            The meeting between Lenin and Stalin, in Stalin's own words:
            "I first made Lenin's acquaintance in 1903.  I did not meet him then, but we corresponded.  I have retained an unforgettable memory of that first epistolary meeting.  I was an exile in Siberia at the time.  In studying Lenin's Revolutionary activities from the end of the last century, and particularly after the appearance of Iskra (The Spark), in 1901, I arrived at the conviction that in Lenin we possessed no ordinary man.  To my mind he was not just a mere Party leader, but a real creator, for he alone understood the nature and urgent needs of our Party.  When I compared the other leaders with Lenin, they always seemed to be a head shorter than he.  Beside them, Lenin was not a person of the same order of things, but a commander of a superior type, a mountain eagle, a fearless fighter leading the Party forward through the hitherto unexplored paths of the Russian revolutionary movement.  This impression anchored itself so firmly in the depths of my mind that I felt compelled to write about him to a close friend of mine who happened to be away from Russia at the time, and to ask him for his opinion of him.  Sometime later I received an enthusiastic reply from my friend, addressed to Siberia, and at the same time I received a simple but profound letter from Lenin.  I understood that my friend had shown him my letter.  Lenin's letter was relatively short, but he criticized incisively and intrepidly the practical work of our Party, and disclosed with remarkable clarity and precision the whole future plan of action of the Party.
            I met him for the first time in December 1905, at the Bolshevik Conference of Tammerfors (in Finland).  I was expecting to see, in the eagle of our Party, a great man not great only in the political sense, but physically great also, for in my imagination I pictured Lenin as a giant, fascinating, and symbolic.  What was my surprise then, to see before me a man of less than middle height, in no way distinguishable from ordinary human beings!
            A great man is supposed to arrive late at meetings, so that the assembly may anxiously await his arrival.  The appearance of a great man is always heralded by remarks such as: Sh!... Silence!... Here he comes!  But I found that Lenin had arrived long before the others, and I saw him in a corner engaged in the most ordinary conversation with one of the least important of the delegates.  He was quite clearly not behaving according to the accepted rules.”
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 30
 
LENIN COMPLIMENTS STALIN’S WRITINGS
 
            Lenin put the greatest value on Stalin's writings.  In 1911 he expressed himself as follows: "Kobi's articles deserve the closest attention.  It is difficult to imagine a better refutation of the opinions and hopes of our pacifiers and our conciliators."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 45
 
SOME PEOPLE WANT TO DISTORT THE ROLE OF THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
 
            A large number of people did not wish to push things further than the overthrow of the historic muck-heap surmounted by a hedged-in crown, further than by replacing the hereditary dictatorship of Peter the Great's descendants by a middle-class government professing to be democratic, to which would be returned in rotation two or three Parties all equally democratic in word and anti-democratic in deed; with a President instead of an Emperor, an armchair instead of a throne.  No difference except the erasure of a few coats of arms, slight alterations in the flag and the postage-stamps, and, at the beginnings of almanacks and directories, a change in the personnel charged with keeping the people in subjection.  And the dictatorship of proletariat and, in consequence, social justice sinking head first into this republican mixture.  And the system of endemic warfare and the exploitation of man by man remaining intact.  A fresh lie, in fact, a fresh political crime against the people.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 50
 
LENIN AND STALIN BEGAN TO CREATE A STATE WITHIN A STATE
 
            Lenin brought into existence what one might call duality of power: a Socialist State within the State.  Side-by-side with the official Government, he created another Government, fully constituted, having its form in the Petrograd Soviet, functioning and consolidating itself, quite ready to become the only one.  And the mass of workers openly began to prefer this Government to the official Government beside it.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 51
 
RULING CLASS DID NOT REALIZE A NEW REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD WAS ARISING
 
            Unblemished Socialism, which had stood its ground and preserved its revolutionary integrity, blazed forth from the Kremlin, and suddenly the other Socialism, the Socialism of half-measures, of subterfuges, and of dreams, which blissfully recommended gradual and piecemeal progress, all of whose acquisitions middle-class power would gradually have absorbed and assimilated so as to reinforce itself thereby against the masses--was relegated into the past, with all the old superstitions and obsolete ideas.
            These poor pontiffs, who had been unable to perceive their own downfall, found themselves, overnight, in the position of Rip van Winkle returning home after sleeping for a hundred years.  But it was not so much that they had slept as that the great mass of the people had awoken.  This was an entirely new phase in the history of mankind.  Nothing of the sort had ever happened before since the beginning of the world.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 55
 
LENIN REMAINED IMPASSIVE WHEN FACING THOSE STALIN CALLED THE HYSTERICS
 
            ...against those whom Stalin called "the hysterics," that is to say the revolutionary-Socialists and the Anarchists (Spiridovna threatening Lenin with the revolver at a meeting; Lenin remaining quite impassive, apparently almost amused....
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 56
 
LENIN CONSULTED WITH STALIN BEFORE SENDING TROTSKY BREST-LITOVSK ORDERS
 
            It was Trotsky, who had rallied to Bolshevism and was an important member of the Government, who carried out the negotiations on the spot.  Lenin directed them from the seat of government, with the help of Stalin.  To a telegraphic demand for instructions which Trotsky sent him on a private wire, Lenin replied by the following telegram, dated February the 15th, 1918: "Reply to Trotsky, I must first consult Stalin before replying to his question."  A little later, on February the 18th, Lenin telegraphed to Trotsky: "Stalin has just arrived.  We will examine the situation together and send you a joint reply as soon as possible.  Lenin."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 59
 
            Too little is known of the decisive part played by Stalin at the time of the Treaty of Brest.  A large section of the Left of the Party--those who had been most energetic in seizing power--were against the signature of the Treaty; Trotsky was also against it, with his formula of "neither peace nor war" because he believed that the war would not really end except with the world Revolution.  Lenin and Stalin alone were for its immediate conclusion.  Lenin hesitated to use his personal authority.  Stalin decided him to do so.  This little conversation of theirs must have weighed heavily on the destinies of the Revolution.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 60
 
            Trotsky's furious sallies made no impression on his German opponents.  They knew the weakness of his position.  Suddenly, on Jan. 18, they produced a map of eastern Europe, showing the new frontiers, which deprived Russia of extensive territories.  The ultimatum enraged Trotsky.  He swore he would break off negotiations.  Then, having received a telegram, signed "Lenin-Stalin," instructing him to return to Petrograd for discussions, he agreed to an adjournment until Jan. 29.  There is further evidence, cited by Trotsky himself, showing how closely Stalin stood to Lenin at this critical time.  A certain Dmitrievsky observed that "even Lenin at that period felt the need of Stalin to such an extent that, when communications came from Trotsky at Brest and an immediate decision had to be made, while Stalin was not in Moscow, Lenin would inform Trotsky: 'I would like first to consult with Stalin before replying to your question.' And only three days later Lenin would telegraph: 'Stalin has just arrived.  I will consider it with him, and we will at once gave you our joint answer.' "
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 106
 
STALIN SAVES THE DAY ON MILITARY FRONTS SUCH AS TSARITSYN
 
            At Moscow, the Revolutionary-Socialist rising was brewing.  To the west, Muraviev was abandoning the cause.  In the Ural district the Czech counter-Revolution was developing and consolidating.  To the extreme south, the English were advancing on Baku.  "Everything was blazing in a circle afire."  Stalin arrived at Tsaritsyn.  A continuous stream of telegrams passed between Lenin and him.  Stalin had not come to Tsaritsyn as an army inspector, but in order to organize the food supply through southern Russia.  The situation at Tsaritsyn was vitally important.  The revolt of the Don region and the loss of Tsaritsyn also meant the loss--the disastrous loss--of the whole wheat area of the Northern Caucasus.      
            From the moment of his arrival: "I am bullying and swearing at all those immediate.  Rest assured, Comrade Lenin, that no one is being spared, neither myself nor anyone else--and that whatever happens we will send you wheat.  If our military specialists (who are blockheads) had not been idle or asleep, our line would never have been pierced, and if we managed to re-establish it, that will not be thanks to them but in spite of them."
            For Stalin found the whole region in the state of "incredible disorder."  The Soviet organizations--Syndicalist and Communist-- and also the military organizations had become completely dislocated and were all at sixes and sevens.  On all sides they were confronted by the tremendous spread of the Cossack counter-Revolution which had received powerful reinforcements from the German Army of Occupation in the Ukraine.  The White troops had seized, one by one, the districts around Tsaritsyn, putting a complete stop to the "corn collection" awaited by Moscow and Petrograd and, moreover, seriously threatening Tsaritsyn itself.
            At the first superficial glance, Stalin realized that he must take over the military command, which was weak and wavering.  On July 11th he telegraphed to Lenin: "Matters are complicated by the fact that the Headquarters Staff of Northern Caucasia is absolutely incapable of fighting the counter-Revolution....  Considering themselves to be employees of General Headquarters, and to be charged solely with preparing plans of campaign, they hold themselves quite aloof, like onlookers, and take no interest whatever in the operations...."
            Stalin was not the sort of man to be content merely with finding things out.  Where action was necessary, he acted: "I do not think I am justified in looking on at such indifference when Kalinin's front (in Northern Caucasia) has it supplies cut off and when the whole of Northern Russia is cut off from its wheat-fields.  I will rectify this weakness and many other local weaknesses too.  I am taking and will take the proper measures, even to the extent of removing the regimental and staff officers who are ruining the cause--in spite of any formal difficulties which I will over-ride if necessary.  For this, naturally, I take full responsibility on myself with the superior authorities."
            Moscow replied telling him to set the whole Red organization on its feet: "Re-establish order, form the detachments of troops into a regular Army, appoint a proper command, get rid of all insubordinates."  This order came from the Revolutionary War Council, mentioning that "this telegram is sent with Lenin's approval."
            When this summary order, these two lines of writing in which was compressed a colossal task, arrived at Tsaritsyn, the situation had grown much worse.  The remains of the Red Army of Ukraine were pouring in, helter-skelter, retiring before the advance of the German Army over the Don steppes.
            It seemed impossible that order could be established in such a situation.  But the indomitable will-power of one-man set itself to do so.  Out of the earth itself he made a Revolutionary War Council rise which there and then set to work to reorganize the regular Army.  Army Corps were swiftly created and divided up into divisions, brigades, regiments.  All counter-revolutionary elements were removed from the staff, from the supply system, and from the military formations behind the line--as well as from all the Soviet and Communist organizations there.  There were plenty of staunch Bolsheviks of the old kind to give them a firm foundation and set them on their feet.  And that is what happened.  Everything was put into order again, and at the very edge of the counter-revolutionary canker of the Don there arose a strong and clear-headed Red Staff, presenting an unbroken front to the brigands on both sides of the line.
            But that was not all.  The whole town was contaminated with White elements.  Revolutionary-Socialists, Terrorists, and Ultra-Monarchists, all met together there.  (This constant, inevitable collaboration of so-called pure Revolutionaries with the worst enemies of the Revolution--they attacked it together as fiercely as they could--calls for no comment.)
            Tsaritsyn served as a shelter for masses of middle-class refugees, who flaunted themselves in the company of White officers, who scarcely troubled to conceal their identity, who monopolized the side-walks, and filled the streets and the public gardens round the orchestras.  Tsaritsyn was a center of open conspiracy.
            But it suddenly ceased to be so.  The local Revolutionary War Council, directed by Stalin, created a special Cheka charged with examining all these people closely.  And at the moment when Civil War was re-doubling its fury on all sides, and on all sides the alien enemies of the Revolution were endeavoring to stifle it by every means they could devise, not a day passed without the most dangerous plots being discovered.
            A certain Nossovitch --who, from being Chief of the Military Direction of operations, went over to Krasnoff's Army, gives a full account of this situation in a White newspaper entitled The Surge of the Don (in the issue for February 3rd, 1919).  He is obliged to render justice to Stalin who, even though his mission of chief provisioner was gravely compromised by the succession of events in the neighborhood, "was not the sort of man to abandon anything he had begun," and he shows him taking the whole military and civil administration into his own hands at the same time, and thwarting one by one all the attempts and all the machinations of the avowed enemies of the Revolution.
            Stalin took the responsibility, but he wanted the authority too, as all those who use it to good purpose want it.  The renegade Nossovitch again bears witness to another interesting event: "When Trotsky, alarmed at the destruction of the existing military commands which had been so painstakingly created, sent a telegram saying that it was necessary for the Headquarters Staff and the Commissars to be reestablished in their offices and given an opportunity of doing their work, Stalin took the telegram and, with a firm hand, scrawled upon it the words: 'No attention to be paid to this.' Thus no attention was paid to the telegram and the whole of the Artillery command and a part of the Headquarters Staff remained where they had been put, on a ship at Tsaritsyn.
            Moreover, in order to ensure that his orders were carried out, and to consolidate the Bolshevik regime, Stalin personally visited the whole front (a front which measured nearly 400 miles).  This man, who had never served in the army, possessed such a comprehensive sense of organization that he was able to understand and to solve all the most intricate and difficult technical problems (especially as the situation became more critical daily and rapidly complicated all these problems still further).
            "I remember, as though it had happened today," said Kaganovich, "that at the beginning of 1918 Krasnoff's Cossack troops attacked Tsaritsyn, trying by an encircling movement to throw the Red troops back on the Volga.  For several days these Red troops, which were under the orders of a Communist Division largely formed of Donetz workers, repelled the attack of the perfectly organized Cossacks with incredible vigor.  Those were indeed terrible days.  You should have seen Stalin at that time.  Calm, as always, wrapped in his thoughts, literally never sleeping at all, he divided his tireless labors between the firing-line and Army Headquarters.  The situation at the front was almost desperate.  Krasnoff's Armies...were pressing our exhausted troops hard and causing us immense losses.  The enemy front, horseshoe-shaped, with its flanks resting on the Volga, was daily closing in more and more.  There was no way out for us.  But Stalin did not trouble about this.  He had one idea only: they must win.  This indomitable will of Stalin's transmitted itself to his immediate assistants and, in spite of being in a situation from which there was practically no escape, no one for a moment had any doubts about victory.
            "And we triumphed.  The routed enemy army was thrown well to the other side of the Don."
            The same gloomy situation and the same epic achievements took place on the eastern front at Perm.
            At the end of 1918 this front found itself terribly threatened, and almost lost.
            The Third Army had fallen back and had been compelled to surrender Perm.  Harassed and pressed by the enemy, who were advancing in a half-circle, this Third Army was, by the end of November, completely demoralized.  The story of the previous six months, filled with perpetual fighting, was a heart-breaking one; with no reserves, in utter ignorance of what was happening in the back areas, with abominable rations (the 29th Division went for five days without receiving a single mouthful of bread), 35 degrees of frost, the roads absolutely impassable with, an excessively long front--more than 250 miles of it--and a backboneless Staff, "the Third Army  was in no condition to resist enemy attacks." 
            In addition to this, the officers, ex-servants of the Tsar, went in for wholesale betrayal and whole regiments, disgusted by a command of incompetent carousers, surrendered to the enemy.
            A rout followed: a retreat of nearly 200 miles in 20 days, and a loss of 18,000 men, dozens of guns and hundreds of machine-guns.  The enemy was drawing closer and was threatening Viatka and the whole of the eastern front.
            Lenin telegraphed to the Revolutionary War Council of the Republic as follows: "We have received from the neighborhood of Perm a series of reports from the Party informing us of the drunkenness and catastrophic condition of the Third Army.  I am thinking of sending Stalin there."
            The Central Committee sent Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.  Stalin temporarily shelved the main object of the mission, which was to "inquire into the loss of Perm," and substituted for it the question of the steps to be taken to restore the situation.  This situation was much more serious than anyone had thought, as he explained to the President of the Council for National Defense (Lenin) in a telegram in which he asked, in order to meet the peril, for immediate reinforcements.  A week later he enumerated the various causes for the surrender of Perm and, with Dzerzhinsky, proposed a series of measures for raising the fighting efficiency of the Third Army and for providing for the future.  With his extraordinary rapidity of decision he applied these numerous measures of military and political organization--and in the same month (January 1919), the enemy advance was checked, the eastern front took the offensive, and its right-wing seized Uralsk.
            And a drama of the same sort occurred during the spring of 1919 in the Seventh Army, before Yudenich's White Army, to whom Kolchak had issued orders "to seize Petrograd," and to draw into his sector the Revolutionary troops of the eastern front.
            Yudenich, backed by Estonian and Finnish White Guards and supported by the British Fleet, suddenly took up the offensive and actually seriously threatened Petrograd, as will be remembered.
            The Central Committee sent Stalin off and in three weeks he reestablished the victorious revolutionary resistance.  At the end of 20 days all signs of hesitation and confusion had disappeared from the Army and from the Staff.  The workers and Communists in Petrograd were mobilized and the desertion to the enemy ceased.  The enemies and traitors were seized and destroyed.
            And Stalin even directed operations which were purely military.  He telegraphed to Lenin: "Immediately after Krasnaya Gorka, Seraya Loshad had been dealt with....  All the forts and citadels are being rapidly restored to order.  Naval specialists assure me that the capture of Krasnaya Gorka has upset the whole theory of naval science.  I can only deplore what they call science.  The swift capture of Gorka is explained by violent intervention on my part and by that of civilians in general in the operations--intervention going so far as canceling orders issued on land and at sea and insisting upon our own orders being carried out in their stead.  I feel it my duty to inform you that in the future I shall continue to act thus, in spite of my respect for science."
            And now the southern front.
            "Everyone," writes Manuilsky, ""remembers autumn 1919.  It was the deciding, critical moment of the whole Civil War."
            Manuilsky traces the essential features of the situation, the main one of which was Denikin's penetration of the entire southern line.  Provisioned by the Allies, supported and helped by the British and French General Staffs, Denikin's White Army advanced upon Orel.  The whole vast southern front was falling back in slow waves.  Behind the line the situation was no less disastrous.  Difficulties of supply grew momentarily greater and greater, and presented almost insoluble problems.  Industry, three-quarters of which was destroyed, lacked raw materials, fuel and manpower, and was coming to a standstill.  Throughout the whole country and even at Moscow, the activities of the revolutionaries were increasing.  Danger threatened Tula as much as Moscow.
            What was to be done in this headlong rush towards disaster?  The Central Committee sent Stalin to the southern front as a member of the Revolutionary War Council.  "Today," writes Manuilsky, "there is no longer any need to conceal the fact that Stalin, before leaving, insisted on the Central Committee complying with three conditions.  First, Trotsky was not to meddle with the southern front and was to remain where he was.  Secondly, a number of Army leaders whom Stalin considered to be incapable of restoring the situation in the Army were to be recalled immediately.  And thirdly, other leaders, chosen by Stalin and capable of carrying out this task, should immediately be sent to the southern front.  These conditions were accepted in their entirety."
            But the colossal war machine consisting of the southern front extended from the Volga as far west as the Polish-Ukrainian frontier, and massed hundreds of thousands of soldiers on the borders of the nation.
            Stalin discovered nothing but confusion and deadlock at the front.  An atmosphere of mingled storm and despair.  The Red Army of the Republic was beaten along the main line of defense: Kursk-Orel-Tula.  The eastern flank was uselessly marking time.
            What was to be done?  There was a plan of operations upon which the Superior War Committee had decided in the previous September.  This plan consisted of launching the main attack by the left wing, from Tsaritsyn to Novorossisk across the Don steppes.
            The first thing that struck Stalin was that this plan had remained unchanged since September.  "The attack is to be launched by Korin's group, and its task is to annihilate the enemy on the Don and the Kuban."
            Stalin examined this plan carefully and critically--and decided that it was no good.  Or, rather, that it was no longer any good.  It had been quite good two months before, but the circumstances had altered.  Something else must be found.  Stalin saw what was wanted and sent Lenin fresh suggestions.  Let us read his letter, an historic document which throws a light on the situation in the vast southern sector and, at the same time, on the undaunted clear-sightedness of the man who wrote it:
            "...What is there to compel the Higher Committee to keep to the old plan?  It can obviously only be the spirit of obstinacy, so short-sighted and so dangerous for the Republic, which is fostered in the Higher Committee by the "Ace of Strategists."  [And allusion to Trotsky].
            To sum up: the old plan, which, owing to recent events, is now out of date, must in no case be put into operation, as it would endanger the Republic and would certainly improve Denikin's position.  A new plan must be substituted for it.  Not only are conditions and circumstances ripe for this, but they urgently call for such a change....  Otherwise, my work at the southern front becomes meaningless, criminal, and useless, which gives me the right, or, rather, compels me to go no matter where, even to the devil, but not to remain here."  Yours, Stalin.
            The Central Committee did not hesitate to adopt Stalin's plan.  Lenin with his own hand wrote to the General Staff of the southern front giving them their change of orders.  The main attack was launched towards Kharkov, in the Donetz-Rostov basin.  One knows what happened.  Denikin's armies were pushed into the Black Sea.  The Ukraine and Northern Caucasia were delivered from the White Guards, and the Revolution won the Civil War.
            Stalin's successes seem, because of their rapidity and completeness, to be little short of magical.  What is rare, indeed quite exceptional, is to find such a perfect mixture of all the elements which go to make up successful achievement--both in theory and in practice--in the same man.  To be really successful one must have the clear-sightedness to see and the courage to declare that the longest way round is often the shortest way home, and one must also have the power to direct the march of events accordingly.
            Another result of Stalin's transfer to the southern front was the creation of the Cavalry Army, which played so important a part in finally mopping up the Whites.  By his pertinacity he succeeded in giving ideas adopted in this respect which were not shared by the whole of the Revolutionary Military Committee, starting with the southern front.  To him also is due a certain modification in military tactics, namely the part played by shock troops.  Once the main point of attack was decided upon, the best troops were immediately concentrated upon it, with a view to gaining a rapid initial success.  At the same time as he was developing his strategy of direct action, Stalin did not lose sight of military organization and of the necessity of subordinating everything to the harmony of military organization as a whole.  In 1919 he had written, in agreement with Dzerzhinsky: "An Army cannot act as an independent, self-sufficient and completely autonomous entity; in its actions it depends entirely upon the Armies on its flanks, and above all upon the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Republic.  The most aggressive Army, under no matter what conditions, may be defeated as a result of bad leadership from the center and by absence of contact with the neighboring Armies.  On each front, a strict system of centralization of the activities of the various Armies must be established as regards carrying out definite and carefully considered strategic orders.  Capriciousness or lack of proper care in the issuing of orders, without considering their effect carefully and from every angle, manifested by their being suddenly changed or by their vagueness (as is sometimes the case with the Revolutionary Council of the Republic) makes it impossible to command Armies successfully."
            Meanwhile the Civil War flared up again owing to the activities of Wrangel, lavished with money, soldiers, and munitions by France and England, who insisted at all costs on fulfilling their mission of aiding and abetting the White Russians in their attempt to restore the regime of the knout and of slavery.
            Wrangel announced far and wide that he was about to embark upon a Polish campaign, and he left the Crimea and seriously threatened the only recently freed Donetz basin and through it the whole of the South.
            The first thought of the Central Committee was once more to have recourse to Stalin and on August 3rd, 1920, it passed the following resolution:
            "In view of Wrangel's success and the alarm over the Kuban, the tremendous and altogether exceptional importance of the Wrangel front must be recognized and it must be considered as an independent front.  Stalin must be charged with forming the Revolutionary Military Council; all available forces must be concentrated on that front; Egorov or Frunze must be put in command at the front, as arranged by the Higher Council in consultation with Stalin."  Stalin was told by Lenin: "The Political Bureau has divided up the various fronts so that you may be able to devote yourself exclusively to that of Wrangel."
            Stalin organized the new front.  He then had to leave the work temporarily owing to illness, but was back when the Polish campaign began, as a member of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the south-west front.  The rout of the Polish Army, the liberation of Kiev and of the Ukraine, and the deep thrust into Galicia, were, in large measure, the result of his direction of affairs.  It was he who conceived the idea of the famous raid of the First Cavalry Army.
            Stalin was twice decorated with the Order of the Red Flag and elected a member of the War Council of the Republic (on which he sat from 1920 to 1923), following on the masterly way in which he had invariably managed to restore the situation in all the most keenly contested and stormy sections of the Civil War front.
            We say "Civil War," but the term is inaccurate.  The Russian Revolution was counter-attacked not only by the Whites, but also by the Great Powers.  The Red Army had before it the rank-and-file and the Staffs of the Tsarist, French, and English Armies, and also those of the Japanese, American, Rumanian, Greek--and others.
            The qualities which Stalin displayed in these moving circumstances were no revelation to those who knew him.  He merely applied in a new sphere of activity his strength and personal resources, namely lightning-like promptness and sureness of action, thorough grasp of the outstanding points of any particular situation, a thorough understanding of the real causes and inevitable consequences of any particular set of circumstances and of the proper place occupied by such circumstances in the general scheme of things, a horror of disorder and confusion, and dogged perseverance in preparing, creating, and coordinating all the conditions necessary for the success of a project once it had been thoroughly examined and it had been decided to embark upon it.  All this is true Marxism, transferred to the field of battle.
            This leader, who had fathomed the secrets of success and had brought them to such a pitch of perfection, was very severe, even ruthless, towards incompetence, and inexorable in dealing with treachery or sabotage.  But a whole series of cases may be quoted in which he warmly intervened in favor of men who seemed to him to have been accused without sufficient proof, for instance Parkhomenko, who was condemned to death and whom he set free.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 63-82
 
            Towards the end of May 1918, reports reached Moscow about the desperate conditions, both civil and military, in Tsaritsyn.  Stalin was sent there to organize grain deliveries.  Accompanied by his young wife whom he had just married, he arrived on June 6, 1918, with two armored cars and an escort of 400 Red guards.  On the following day he reported to Lenin that he had found a "bacchanalia of profiteering and speculation" and had taken prompt action.  He sacked corrupt and inefficient officials, dismissed unneeded revolutionary committees, appointing Commissars to bring order into labor and transport organization and to ensure grain deliveries to Moscow.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 121
 
            Tsaritsyn was coming under severe pressure.  Food deliveries and the city itself were threatened.  Stalin began taking a direct part in military operations.  On July 7 he reported urgently to Lenin....
            Three days later, not having received an immediate reply, Stalin sent an angry message.  He objected to Trotsky's highhanded action in ignoring the Tsaritsyn headquarters and dealing directly with the sectors under its command.  In particular Trotsky was not to make postings without consulting the people on the spot.  He went on to demand aircraft, armored cars, and six-inch guns "without which the Tsaritsyn front will not remain in being."  Finally he asserted his own authority, stating that "to get things done, I must have full military powers.  I have already written about this, but have received no reply.  Very well .  In that event I myself, without formalities, will remove those army commanders and Commissars who are ruining things.  I am obliged to do this in the common interest and, in any case, the lack of a chit from Trotsky will not stop me."  On the following day he sent another telegram, informing Lenin that he had already taken full military responsibility and had removed commanders and military specialists who were dilatory or incompetent.
            Stalin's messages to Lenin were couched in forthright and even rude terms.  They were, however, communications to an equal, sent at a time of crisis.  Although he had respect and affection for Lenin, he did not treat him with deference.  Indeed, far from taking umbrage, Lenin acted promptly.  On July 19, 1918, the Supreme War Council created a war council of the North Caucasus Military District, and Stalin was officially appointed chairman of the council.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 122
 
            Since his return to Petrograd in April 1917, Lenin had had occasion to meet Stalin on many occasions, and by now he had evidently come to see him as a reliable executive.  The taciturn Georgian rarely asked questions or raised doubts in public about Central Committee decisions, he would take on any job and generally seemed satisfied with the role that had been assigned to him.  Just as calmly, he accepted his commission to Tsaritsyn.
            ...As a result of measures taken by the center and the military soviet, Tsaritsyn was quickly made ready for a siege.  The White assault under General Denikin was not successful, despite the support of the former tsarist officer Colonel Nosovich, who had acted as a military expert for the Soviet regime and had now turned traitor.  Tsaritsyn, like other locations where Stalin served during the civil war, acquired not merely a legendary name, but virtually a mystical significance in Soviet history.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 39
 
            The Southern Front, whatever the clumsiness of Stalin's 'strategic' letter, had performed handsomely in the final victory over Denikin's White Army.  If Stalin had erred in Poland, so had Lenin--who had ignored advice from Radek and others that the Poles would fight him to the last.  And Stalin had, when not intervening in military affairs, managed the vast territories in the fighting areas with the maximum firmness and effectiveness.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 88
 
            That Stalin had not lost Lenin's confidence is shown by the further missions to the front on which he was employed during the remainder of the civil war.  In January 1919 he was dispatched to the eastern front to report on the disastrous fall of Perm; in May he stiffened the defenses of Petrograd against the Whites and had 67 naval officers at Kronstadt executed for disloyalty; later in the year he was switched back to the southern front to block an advance on Moscow by the Whites after Denikin's capture of Orel.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 100
 
            Stalin's objections to the order detaching some armies from his group were eminently reasonable: the Southwestern Front did indeed have to watch not only the Polish forces around Lvov, but Wrangel's hundreds of miles to the east, and it was true that they had to be on guard against a possible Rumanian intervention which would have come from behind Lvov.
Ulam, Adam. Stalin; The Man and his Era. New York: Viking Press, 1973, p. 189
 
            Alighting from this train, Stalin went immediately to Bolshevik party headquarters and ascertained that Tsaritsyn was infested with spies, counter-revolutionists and agents of the interventionist powers, plotting to deliver the city to the approaching White Cossack's....
            Stalin's blunt dispatches to Lenin eased the Leader’S anxiety but infuriated War Commissar Trotsky.  Stalin was truly cleaning out the stables, as he so aptly put it; army officers appointed by Trotsky were discharged or court-martialed; some were even shot for disloyalty to the State....
            Each day convinced Stalin that victory in the civil war would be won only by cleaning out the rear dangers, which were paralyzing every Red Army in the field.  Disruptive political plotting, starvation, inefficiency, corruption, and every other modern ailment of a smashed society were combining to dislocate the Red battle preparations, whereas the British, French, and German troops were coordinating with the White Russians under seasoned Czarist commanders....
            One by one, Stalin removed local commanders while Trotsky fumed and raged....
            When a Supreme Order from Trotsky reached the North Caucasus Command Headquarters at Tsaritsyn, Stalin boldly posted it with this inscription penned across it: "to be disregarded!"...
            Conditions improved steadily after Stalin arrested the entire Ordnance Department and a section of the Headquarters Staff and put them on a barge in the river....
            The battlefront then ran 600 km around Tsaritsyn.  Stalin personally visited every important sector of the front, solving local problems, tightening up morale and improving the organization of supplies, in readiness for the impending blow.
Barrett, James. Stalin and God. New York: Booktab, Inc., 1943, p. 35-36
 
            The revolution called.  Stalin was one of the first to go to the front.  He had never been a soldier.  He brought to the battle-line, however, an organizing skill, a stubbornness, a resoluteness, and an authority which made him one of the most feared war commissars....
            Early in June, 1918, Stalin was dispatched to the lower Volga, to Tsaritsyn,now Stalingrad,the outlet for the rich grain-producing districts of the northern Caucasus.  His position there was one of controller of food supplies.  Upon his arrival, he found that the Red forces were highly disorganized.  The Cossacks were getting close to the city, and the Bolshevist rule was feeble in the region.  Stalin immediately applied himself to the job of stamping out all disorganization introducing a state of martial law.  He at once came into conflict with the army commanders who were under the orders of the revolutionary war council of which Trotsky was the chief.  The first decisive conflict with Trotsky developed here.
Levine, Isaac Don.  Stalin.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 167
 
KILLING OTHERS FOR HUMANITY IS JUSTIFIED
 
            Actually, and obviously, it is one's duty to strike down a fellow-creature to save a thousand, to save a hundred thousand, to save the future, and to build a better world in which man will no longer be the slave or the victim of man.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 83
 
COMPARED TO THE BLOOD SHED UNDER OPPRESSION THE BLOOD OF REVOLUTION IS MINIMAL
 
            One says, complacently: "All revolutions are bloody, so I do not want any revolution, because I am too sensitive."  Those preservers of the existing social order who express themselves thus are, unless they are merely playing a part, pitiably shortsighted.  The countries which are not Soviet ones are actually in the very midst of a regime of blood.  We hear, on all sides, of outrages and massacres.  One has only to look around one to see them.  But most people cannot see so far.  They are incapable of noticing the sufferings of others.  And, above all, they did not consider revolution from the point of view of what it brings to man, but from that of the discomforts and worries which it brings to themselves.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 84
 
            Sardonic words!  But the verdict of history will be that the Russian Revolution--vastly more fundamental than the great upheaval in France in 1789--was no saturnalia of revenge.  It was to all intents a "bloodless revolution."
            Take the most exaggerated estimates of the shootings in Petrograd, the three days' battle in Moscow, the street-fighting in Kiev and Irkutsk, and the peasants' outbreak in the provinces.  Add up the casualties and divide it into Russia's population--not the 3 million involved in the American Revolution, nor the 23 million of the French Revolution, but the 160 million of the Russian Revolution.  The figures will show that in the four months it took the Soviet to establish and consolidate its power--from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the White Sea on the north to the Black Sea on the south--less than 1 in 3000 Russians were killed.
            Sanguinary enough to be sure!
            But look at it in the perspective of history.  Rightly or wrongly, when the fulfillment of the national destiny of America demanded that we cut out the cancer of slavery, vast property rights were confiscated, and in doing this we did not stop until we had killed one in every 300 people.  Rightly or wrongly, the peasants and workers feel it essential to cut out of Russia the cancer of Czarism, landlordism, and capitalism.  Such a deep-seated and malign disease called for a major surgical operation.  Yet it was performed with comparatively little letting of blood.  For, like children, the nature of a great folk is to forgive and forget--not to retaliate.  And vindictiveness is alien to the spirit of working people.  In those early days they strove hard to conduct a civil war in a civil manner.
            In a large measure they succeeded.  The death-toll of both Whites and Reds together was not equal to the casualties in a single big battle of the World War.
Williams, Albert. Through the Russian Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 160-161
 
 
BOLSHEVIKS TRY TO RE-EDUCATE PRISONERS FIGHTING AGAINST THEIR OWN INTERESTS
 
            Menzhinsky, head of the OGPU, who died recently, once explained to me at length how absurd it was in principle to tax the political Party which directs the Soviet Union with cruelty or indifference to human life, since its ultimate aim is to bring everyone in the world together and to work for universal peace.  And, in fact, he pointed out to me that the revolutionary police, brothers of the great mass of workers, are constantly on the lookout for any opportunity for "setting right" or "curing" not only common law prisoners (on this side of prison organization the Bolsheviks have carried patience and indulgence to an almost paradoxical point), but also political prisoners.  Communists start from the double principle that transgressors of the common law are people who do not understand their own interests and are ruining their own lives, and that the best thing to do is to impress this upon them, and that the enemies of the proletarian revolution, the forerunner of universal Revolution, are equally (if they are sincere) people who are mistaken, and that the best thing is to prove it to them.  Hence the constant effort to turn every kind of prison into a place of education.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 84
 
REPRESSION SHOULD BE MINIMAL AND KEPT TO A BALANCE OF NOT TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE
 
            The problem of repression, therefore, is reduced to a question of the necessary minimum, having due regard to general progress.  It is just as wrong to fall short of this minimum as to go beyond it.  The man who spares people who are working against the cause of humanity is a malefactor.  The duty of true kindness is to think of the future.
            If the Russian Revolution had, to the intense satisfaction of a few sanctimonious idealists, adopted the system of automatic forgiveness and of not defending itself with the same weapons with which it was attacked, it would not have survived for long.  It would have been stabbed in the back by France, England, and Poland, who would immediately have brought the Tsar and the Whites back to Petrograd, as they tried to do by every other means in their power.  The reason the work of the Revolution subsists and is already brightening the future of humanity is because it fought without faltering and without mercy that appalling network of treachery, and all the plots--all stabs in the back--woven by White Guards, imperialist spies, diplomats and detectives, wreckers, Revolutionary-Socialists, Anarchists, and Nationalist Mensheviks, the degenerate Oppositionists, all more or less subsidized from abroad-- all that raffle furiously attacking the country which had given the subversive example of rising in order to make the liberty of the worker and human dignity secure.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 85
 
BEING TOO LENIENT OR GENTLE REPEATEDLY COST THE BOLSHEVIKS
 
            Stalin, replying some time ago (towards the end of 1931) in an interview relating to "the severe and implacable attitude of the Soviet Government in its struggle against its enemies," said as follows:
             "When the Bolsheviks came into power, they began by showing leniency towards their enemies.  The Mensheviks continued to exist lawfully and to bring out their newspaper.  So did the Revolutionary-Socialists.  Even the Cadets (Constitutional-Democrats) continued the publication of their newspaper.  When general Krasnoff organized his counter-revolutionary march on Petrograd and fell into our hands we might, according to the rules of war, at least have kept him prisoner.  More than that, we ought to have shot him.  But we freed him on parole.  What was the result of this?  We soon found that this leniency only undermined the stability of the power of the Soviets, and that we had made a mistake in giving proof of our forbearance towards the enemies of the working classes.  If we had continued to be so forbearing we should have committed a crime against the working classes and we should have betrayed their interests.  This soon became an obvious fact.  We quickly discovered that the more indulgent we showed ourselves towards our enemies the stronger was the resistance they put up against us.  In a short time the Revolutionary-Socialists, Gotz and others, and the Mensheviks of the Right, organized the rising of the pupils of the Military School at Petrograd, which resulted in the death of a great number of our Revolutionary sailors.  The same Krasnoff, whom we had freed on parole, organized the White Cossacks.  He joined Mamontoff and for two years carried on an armed struggle against the power of the Soviets....  It is easy to see that we had made a mistake in being too gentle."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 85
 
            They [the bourgeoisie] advocate a maximum of leniency, they advise the dissolution of the GPU....  But can anyone guarantee that the capitalists of all countries will abandon the idea of organizing and financing counter-revolutionary plotters, terrorists, incendiaries, and bomb-throwers after the liquidation of the GPU?  To disarm the revolution without having any guarantees that the enemies of the revolution will be disarmed--would not that be folly, would not that be a crime against the working-class?  No, we do not want to repeat the errors of the Paris Communards.  The Communards of Paris were too lenient in dealing with Versailles, for which Marx rightly reproved them at the time.  They had to pay for their leniency, and when Thiers came to Paris, tens of thousands of workers were shot by the Versailles forces.  Do the comrades think that the Russian bourgeoisie and nobility are less bloodthirsty than those of Versailles and France?  We know, at any rate, how they behaved towards the workers when they occupied Siberia, the Ukraine, and the North Caucasus in alliance with the French and British, Japanese and American interventionists.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 233
 
            Within thirty hours of sentence of death being passed upon them, it was carried out.  Thus ended the career of men who, as we shall see, had abused the repeated leniency that had been shown them by the Soviet people whom they had so thoroughly and so often betrayed.
Shepherd, W. G. The Moscow Trial. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, p. 10
 
IF NOT FOR THE ATTACKS BY OUTSIDE POWERS STALIN WOULD FAVOR NO DEATH PENALTY
 
            And I will add to this what Stalin said to me personally, seven years ago, with regard to the famous "Red Terror."  He was speaking of the death penalty.  We are naturally all in favor of the suppression of the death penalty.  Indeed we believe that there is no need for us to retain it in the interior administration of the Soviet Union.  We would have abolished the death penalty long ago had it not been for the outer world, the great Imperialist Powers, which have compelled us to retain it in order to preserve our existence."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 86
 
            Stalin had abolished the death penalty in 1947, apparently to please Western opinion, though some executions seem still to have taken place.  Early in 1950, 'in response to numerous demands by workers' he restored it, with a view to coping with the new wave of treachery in the top leadership.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 289
 
            The immediate post-War period in the Soviet Union for the most part continued to be one of relative tolerance.  In Roy Medvedev's words:
            "... right after the War the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decreed an end to the death penalty, even for the most serious crimes.  The spy mania and the universal suspicion that prevailed before the War tended to disappear, especially in view of the drastic change in the international situation.  The Soviet Union was no longer isolated."
Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. London: Zed Books, 1984, p. 258
 
FEDERATION OF SOVIET NATIONS  IS BETTER FOR ALL THAN INDEPENDENCE
 
            Because, for all weak or backward nations (representing the majority of the Russian group) the system is amazingly more advantageous and intelligent, from whatever point of view one looks at it, than the system of simple and pure independence.  Federated nations work towards a common end and are scientifically at peace with one another.  As foreigners, however, instead of co-operation there is competition, which changes, by force of circumstances, into antagonism and enmity --with all the burdens, all the slaveries, all the perils and all the smotherings of conscience which go with it.  The Soviet nations are at once small and great.  If they were to leave the Union they would become small without any compensating factor.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 99
 
STALIN FOUGHT GREAT RUSSIAN CHAUVINISM OVER OTHER NATIONALITIES
 
            However, when the Soviets first came into power, there was a somewhat special "Asiatic" conception of the problem of nationalities.  It was manifested by strong "colonializing tendencies," that is to say the subjection of the distant country, and a preponderance of the Russian element in its administration and in the development of its Soviet assimilation.  Russian workers and Russian propagandists went into Asia, directed everything and settled everything themselves, the native population being "neglected by socialism," according to Stalin's own expression.
            This did not agree with one of the principles of Leninist Marxism, which was a particularly dear one to Stalin, namely the untrammelled, direct and conscious participation of all in the common work.  So Stalin fought bitterly against these eruptions of Muscovite exclusivism mingled with socialist organization, and against putting into practice methods which were very nearly "protectorate" or colonial methods in dealing with Soviet natives, as being a system which was erroneous in theory and foolish in practice.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 104
 
            Some people depict the struggle of the borderland "governments" as a struggle for national liberation and against the "soulless centralism" of the Soviet government.  This, however, is wrong.  No government in the world ever granted such extensive decentralization, no government in the world ever afforded its peoples such plenary national freedom as does the Soviet government of Russia.  The struggle of the borderland "governments" was and remains a struggle of the bourgeois counter-revolution against socialism.  The national flag is tacked on to the cause only to deceive the masses, only as a popular flag which conveniently covers up the counter-revolutionary designs of the national bourgeoisie.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 187
 
            Culture in general attracted his occasional,and unpredictable,interventions.  Stalin’s aide Mekhlis rang up Pravda cartoonist Yefimov in 1937 and told him to come immediately to the Kremlin.  Suspecting the worst, Yefimov feigned influenza.  But “he’--Stalin--was insisting; Yefimov could postpone the visit at most by a day.  In fact Stalin simply wished to say that he thought Yefimov should cease drawing Japanese figures with protruding teeth.  “Definitely,’ replied the cartoonist.  “There won’t be any more teeth.’
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 305
 
BULLITT SAYS PEOPLE WILLBE JUDGED BY THE EXTENT TO WHICH THEY DEFENDED THE SU
 
            And in the midst of all this hatred and all this defeat, in the midst of all this malediction, it was strange to hear the voices of people who, like Bullitt, then an obscure journalist, say things like this: "There  will come a day when all the man of our age will be judged by the extent to which they have understood and defended the magnificent effort of Red Russia."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 116
 
DESTRUCTION BY THE INTERVENTION WAS TERRIBLE
 
            This, then, was the situation which the new government had to face all around it, surrounded as it was by the capitalist menagerie.  Everything to be done?  It was worse than that: everything had to be re-done.  It was a double task.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 117
 
CONFISCATIONS DURING THE REVOLUTION MUST BE THOROUGH AND COMPLETE
 
            So, in spite of everything, this Revolution must be carried on to the bitter end.  The middle classes must be completely crushed, the bridges must be cut (to undo is to create in another sense); one must confiscate and completely expropriate; commerce, industry, everything must be seized.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 118
 
LENIN AND STALIN OPPOSE A CONCESSION THAT ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV FAVOR
 
            There was a certain amount of anxiety in the ranks and indeed, a certain amount of hesitation at the top.  For instance, the former industrial magnet Urkwarth offered to take, and pay for, a concession of the Ural factories from which he had been expropriated.  Kamenev and Zinoviev, in a fit of panic, were in favor of granting this concession.  Stalin was against the proposal.  Lenin also was against it, but he hesitated.  Bela Kun, who was working in the Ural district, was summoned to inform the Central Committee of the state of mind of the workers and officials on the spot.  These were against the concession, which was for Urkwarth merely a means of getting his foot once more into the stirrup, and which would mean more trouble than profit for the Republic.  When the meeting that was to decide the matter took place, Zinoviev and Kamenev endeavored to obtain from Stalin a declaration against the concession which they favored (as a matter of fact they admitted afterwards).  But Stalin refused to speak before those who came from the Ural had put forward their point of view, which, explained by Bela Kun, led to the concession being refused and the tempting bait being rejected.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 119
 
            It was solemnly asserted at Moscow that: "The State does not grant industrial concessions or conclude commercial treaties, except insofar as neither of them are capable of undermining the foundations of its economy."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 125
 
 
NEP COULD NOT BE AVOIDED
 
            They had to do without everything and to realize that the Soviet State had to construct its economic system with its own resources.
            And for that they had also in the immediate present, when War Communism was out of date, to consider a new transitory economic position, at the same time that the political and social struggle in the West, and in the rest of the world, was to take the equally transitory form of immediate war aims on a partial united front.
            It was in these conditions that the Soviet state judged that it would be able to do quietly what it had not been willing to do at any price two years previously, and passed from the methods of War Communism to those of the market; and the New Economic Policy was created (the NEP).
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 121
 
            The next year, 1922, was a good one for Russian peasants: the crops were abundant and the taxes reasonable.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 388
 
 
RELATIVE POWER OF PRIVATE OWNERS AND THE STATE UNDER NEP
 
In the struggle which was brewing, "the proletarian power had on its side the most highly developed productive forces of the country.  In short, it appeared in the market as a landowner, as a purchaser and as a vendor with much more power than its competitors, because it had the additional advantage of possessing political power" (and particularly fiscal power, which assured it of a financial weapon and allowed it to make certain supplementary profits on private enterprise).  "The middle classes had on their side past experience and relations with foreign capital."  (Report at the Fourth Congress, 1922.)
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 123
 
            In 1936 Stalin stated, Our industry presented an unenviable picture at that time (1924), particularly heavy industry.  True, it was being gradually restored, but it had not yet raised its output to anywhere near the pre-war level.  It was based on the old, backward and poorly equipped technique.  Of course, it was developing in the direction of socialism.  The proportion of the socialist sector of our industry at that time represented about 80 per cent of the whole, but the capitalist sector still controlled no less than 20 percent of industry.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 211
 
 
BOLSHEVIKS REALIZE POWER RESTS ON A BALANCE BETWEEN THE TOWNS AND PEASANTRY
 
            The Bolsheviks, who are the least blind of men when looking into the future, knew quite well that the future of the socialist State depended upon harmony between the productive economy of the land and that of the towns (in the same way that the Revolution itself, indeed, only succeeded because the peasants as a whole had accepted it--in some cases had even assisted it--or had let it go on).
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 124
 
THOSE OPPOSING NEP ARE THE OPPORTUNISTS
 
            In 1921, those who deserved to be called opportunists, in the bad sense of the word, were, among the socialist ranks, not those who approved of the NEP, but those who opposed it.  Because the latter would have sacrificed the future to the present, whereas the correct meaning of the word opportunism should be to sacrifice the present to the future.  The opportunism of Lenin and of Stalin--and of all great strategists--is a step backward in order to take two steps forward.  For stupid or frightened people, and also for wavering Socialists who, unconsciously are not, are seeking some sort of loophole, it is two paces back in order to take one pace forward.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 127
 
LENIN COMPROMISED IN AREAS OTHER THAN THE NEP
 
            The fact remains that the same man [Lenin] who, from 1903 to 1912, had done everything with the forceful obstinacy, which "went beyond" so many of his companions, to divide the Revolutionary Party in two, even though it was being hunted and its ranks decimated by Tsarism--and who acted thus precisely because the party needed its whole strength--has admitted, when this Party was victorious, that he compromised on a great number of points with middle-class methods.  If you think that this is contradictory, you are mistaken--for the man in command of the situation was just as right in one case as in the other.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 128
 
STALIN MADE THE RIGHT DECISIONS AT THE RIGHT TIME
 
            All those who have seen Stalin at work recognize that his most important quality is a capacity for "grasping a situation in all its complexity and detail, for putting all that is most essential to the fore, and for fixing his whole attention on what is most important for the time being."  It may be observed that when those who really know--such as Kuibyshev, who directs the State Plan--speak of Stalin's accomplishments, they do not only say: "he did so and so," they say: "he did so and so at the right time."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 130
 
LENIN WAS THE GREATEST AND EMBODIED THE REVOLUTION
 
            This great bereavement took place at the beginning of 1924.  Lenin died on January 21st, at the age of 54.  It seemed incredible to all the men who had hitherto surrounded him so closely.  They could not realize the fact that they had lost the man in whom the whole Russian Revolution was incarnate --the man who carried it in his head, had planned it, had created it and had saved it from subsequent disaster, Lenin, one of the greatest conquerors of history, the most sincere; the man who has done most for humanity up to the present time.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 146
 
 
DECISIONS MUST BE MADE AFTER CONSULTING THE MASSES
 
            He [Stalin] strongly indicts "the lack of faith in the creative faculty of the masses" (under the pretext that they are not sufficiently developed intellectually).  If they are properly taught they will both lead themselves and lead you.  No "aristocracy of leaders with regard to the masses," because it is the masses themselves who are called upon to destroy the old order and to build up the new.  Not to be nursemaids and governesses to the crowd: because, quite definitely, they learn less from our books than we learn from them.  So that it is only by collaboration with the masses that proper government can take place.
            "To be at the wheel and to stare blindly ahead until a catastrophe occurs does not mean leadership.  The Bolsheviks do not understand the act of leadership in this way.  To lead one must foresee....  If you are isolated, even with other comrades who are also leading, you will only see everything if, at the same time, hundreds of thousands, millions of workers are on the look out for weaknesses, discover errors and apply themselves to the achievement of the common task."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 151
 
STALIN BELIEVES PERSUASION NOT FORCE SHOULD BE USED WITH THE MASSES
 
            And in dealing with the masses, persuasion, not violence, must be used.  When Zinoviev defended the theory of dictatorship of the Party in 1925, Stalin rose up in arms against "this narrow point of view" and declared that there must be complete harmony between the Party and the mass of the people, and that mutual confidence should not be destroyed by any abstract and unlimited rights which the party chose to confer upon itself.  In the first place, the Party may be mistaken: and even if it is not, the masses may take some time to see that it is right.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 151
 
            In his answers to Ludwig's questions Stalin kept his end up most creditably.  He explained that force alone could not possibly keep the Communists in power and that they would have been overthrown but for the fact that they always told the truth; that he was no more than a continuation of Lenin; that in any case all decisions were taken in 'our Areopagus', the Central Committee.
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 183
 
            The three or four rooms and the corridors that we passed through were quite simple but efficiently furnished as offices.  A carpet with wide red borders leads to Stalin's room.  He received us there immediately.  My companion was a young journalist who speaks several languages excellently and translates very precisely.  Stalin and Mustapha Kemal are the only men with whom I have had to converse through the medium of an interpreter.  The room which we entered was long and at the far end of it a medium-sized man in a light brown jacket stood up from his chair.  He was dressed with painful neatness, just as the room was arranged with the hygienic accuracy of a doctor's consulting room.  A large table stood in the middle, as in an ordinary board-room, with plain water carafes and glasses and large ashtrays.  Everything was in apple-pie order.  The walls were colored dark green.  Pictures of Lenin and Marx and several other people unknown to me hung there, but they were all just enlarged photographs.  Stalin's desk was also in perfect order and on it was a photograph of Lenin, besides four or five telephone apparatuses, such as one finds in all these government offices.
            "Good evening," I said, in stumbling Russian.  He smiled and seemed somewhat embarrassed but he was extremely courteous and began by offering me a cigarette.  He assured me that I was at full liberty to say what I liked and to ask whatever questions I liked and that he had an hour -and-a-half free.  But when I drew out my watch at the end of the time he made a prohibitive gesture and kept us for another half-hour.  A certain degree of embarrassment is as graceful in a man of power as it is in a beautiful woman.  In the case of Stalin it did not surprise me at all because he scarcely ever sees people from the West.  None of the present ambassadors or envoys, and scarcely any of the great experts, have ever seen him.  The only foreigner who has free access to him is little old Cooper, the American hydraulic engineer, who is constructing the cofferdam on the Dnieper.  Though my interpreter holds an important position in the Bolshevik Press organizations, he had never seen Stalin before.  Since he had to speak constantly through the medium of the interpreter, Stalin was looking away from me practically all the time and for the whole two hours he kept on drawing figures on a piece of paper.  With a red pencil he drew red circles and arabesques and wrote numbers.  He never turned the pencil round though at the other end it was blue.  During the course of our conversation he filled many sheets of paper with red markings and from time to time folded them and tore them to pieces.  The result was that I managed to get his glance straight into my face only for a few seconds....  His look was dour and the expression veiled.  But it was not the glance of a misanthropist.
            In the long pauses that were necessary for translation and re-translation I had a very good opportunity for observing his movements, especially as he speaks so slowly.  Such pauses enable an interviewer to introduce a change of theme in the conversation and thus the better to search the mind of his interlocutor.  Stalin's habit of sitting absolutely immobile and of scarcely ever emphasizing a word with a gesture made this all the easier.  When I am conversing with anybody I have a habit of standing up and walking about.  If I had done it here it might have been considered strange.
            What completed the picture of Stalin, as I have already described it, was the heavy and muffled tone of his voice.  It was the kind of voice that could never speak the word of destiny "I Will" with fiery emotion.  He could only let the syllables fall like heavy hammer blows.  The chief impression that I got of him was that of a protector.  Stalin is a man before whose name many men and women have quaked, but one could never imagine a child or an animal doing so.  In a former age such a man would have been called the father of his country.
            ...Stalin gave me an exhaustive answer each time and I shall not shorten it here.  He spoke in short clear sentences, not as a man who is accustomed to simplify things before public audiences, but as a logical and constructive thinker whose mind works slowly and without the slightest emotion.  This man who is now the exponent of the whole Moscow ideology struck me as a typical disciple of Hegel....  Stalin takes the point of an argument immediately, lays it on the table, as it were, talks around it and then comes close to it and carefully brings historical data and statistical percentages to bear on it.  When he spoke he seemed to me to be absolutely a contradiction of Prince Bulow.  He scarcely ever gave me the merely official answer, the experience which I have had with most of the other Communists.
            Although he could not have been prepared for most of my questions and although he has not had the experience of our European ministers of State who are asked the same questions week after week, and although he knew that I would publish his answers to the world, he did not correct himself once.  He had all the historical data and names at his fingertips.  He did not ask for any copy of what my interpreter wrote down and he did not ask for any corrections to be made.  I had never before experienced the same kind of self-confidence.  In all my conversations with other leaders, I have not taken down what they have said at the moment but have recorded it afterwards and submitted it to them for authorization.  But here I took the stenographical text as it was taken down by another person and when I examined it I could not find the slightest omission and yet nothing had been bettered.  Outside of one mere private question, he did not ask me to tone down anything or omit this or that.  When I recall to mind the habits of our poor ministers, when they are preparing a parliamentary speech or having an interview corrected by the head of their press bureau, I am filled with respect for the shoe-maker's son from the Caucasus....
            "You have led a life of a conspirator for such a long time," I said, "and do you now think that, under your present rule, illegal agitation is no longer possible?"
            "It is possible, at least to some extent."
            "Is the fear of this possibility the reason why you are still governing with so much severity, 15 years after the revolution?"
            "No.  I will illustrate the chief reason for this by giving a few historical examples.  When the Bolsheviks came to power they were soft and easy with their enemies.  At that time, for example, the Mensheviks (moderate Socialists), had their lawful newspapers and also the Social Revolutionaries.  Even the military cadets had their newspapers.  When the white-haired General Krasnow marched upon Leningrad and was arrested by us, under the military law he should have been shot or at least imprisoned, but we set him free on his word of honor.  Afterwards it became clear that with this policy we were undermining the very system that we were endeavoring to construct.  We had begun by making a mistake.  Leniency towards such a power was a crime against the working classes.  That soon became apparent.  The Social Revolutionaries of the right and the Mensheviks, with Bogdanov and others, then organized the Junker revolt and fought against the Soviets for two years.  Mamontow joined them.  We soon saw that behind these agents stood the great Powers of the West and the Japanese.  Then we realized that the only way to get ahead was by the policy of absolute severity and intransigence...."
            "This policy of cruelty," I said, "seems to have aroused a very widespread fear.  In this country I have the impression that everybody is afraid and that your great experiment could succeed only among this long-suffering nation that has been trained to obedience." 
            "You are mistaken," said Stalin, "but your mistake is general.  Do you think it possible to hold power for 14 years merely by intimidating the people?  Impossible.  The Czars knew best how-to rule by intimidation.  It is an old experiment in Europe; and the French bourgeoisie supported the Czars in their policy of intimidation against the people.  What came of it?  Nothing."
            "But it maintained the Romanovs in power for 300 years," I replied.
            "Yes, but how many times was that power not shaken by insurrections?  To forget the older days, recall only the revolt of 1905.  Fear is in the first instance a question of the mechanization of administration.  You can arouse fear for one or two years and through it, or at least partly through it, you can rule for that time.  But you cannot rule the peasants by fear.  Secondly, the peasants and the working classes in the Soviet Union are by no means so timid and long-suffering as you think.  You believe that our people are timid and lazy.  That is an antiquated idea.  It was believed in formerly, because the landed gentry used to go to Paris to spend their money there and do nothing.  From this arose an impression of so-called Russian laziness.  People thought that the peasants were easily frightened and made obedient.  That was a mistake.  And it was a three-fold mistake in regard to the workers.  Never again will the workers endure the rule of one man.  Men who have reached the highest pinnacles of fame were lost the moment they lost touch with the masses.  Plechanow had great authority in his hands but when he became mixed up in politics he quickly forgot the masses.  Trotsky was a man of great authority, but not of such high standing as Plechanow, and now he is forgotten.  If he is casually remembered it is with a feeling of irritation."  (At that point he sketched something like a ship with his red pencil.)
            I did not intend to mention Trotsky to Stalin, but since he himself had broached the subject, I asked: "Is the feeling against Trotsky General?"
            "If you take the active workers, nine -tenths speak bitterly of Trotsky."
            There was a short pause during which Stalin laughed quietly and then took up the thread of the question again: "You cannot maintain that people may be ruled for a longtime merely by intimidation.  I understand your skepticism.  There is a small section of the people which is really afraid.  It is an unimportant part of the peasant body.  That part is represented by the kulaks.  They do not fear anything like the intimidation of the reign of terror but they fear the other section of the peasant population.  This is a hang-over from the earlier class system.  Among the middle-classes, for example, especially the professional classes, there is something of the same kind of fear, because these latter had special privileges under the old regime.  Moreover, there are traders and a certain section of the peasants that still retain the old liking for the middle-class.
            "But if you take the progressive peasants and workers not more than 15 percent are skeptical of the Soviet power, or are silent from fear or are waiting for the moment when they can undermine the Bolshevik date.  On the other hand, about 85 percent of the more or less active people would urge us further than we want to go.  We often have to put on the brakes.  They would like to stamp out the last remnants of the intelligentsia.  But we would not permit that.  In the whole history of the world there never was a power that was supported by nine-tenths of the population, as the Soviet power is supported.  That is the reason for our success in putting our ideas into practice.  If we ruled only by fear not a man would have stood by us.  And the working classes would have destroyed any power that attempted to continue to rule by fear.  Workers who have made three revolutions have had some practice in overthrowing governments.  They would not endure such a mockery of government as one merely based on fear." 
            "When I hear repeatedly about the power of the masses," I said, "I am surprised at the hero worship that is more prevalent here than anywhere else, for this is the last place that one would logically expect to find it.  Your materialistic conception of history, which is what separates me personally from you--for I hold that men make history--should prevent leaders and symbols from being shown in the form of statues and pictures on the street.  You are the very people who, logically, ought not to revere the Unknown Soldier or any other individual.  Now how can you explain that contradiction?"
            "You are mistaken.  Read that part of Marx where he speaks of the poverty of philosophy."
            Above Stalin's head hung a portrait of the white-haired Karl Marx.  And every time the conversation turned to the great Socialist, I had to look at the portrait.
            "There," continued Stalin, "you will find that men make history.  But not in the way that your fancy suggests.  Men make history rather in their reactions to the definite circumstances in which they find themselves placed.  Every generation has a new set of circumstances to face.  In general it can be said that great men are of value only insofar as they are able to deal with the circumstances of their environment.  Otherwise they are Don Quixotes.  According to Marx himself, one should never contrast men and circumstances.  As far as my opinion goes, it is history that makes men.  We have been studying Marx for 30 years."
            "And our professors interpret him differently," I suggested.
            "That is because they try to popularize Marxism.  He has himself never denied the importance of the role of the hero.  It is in fact very great."
            "May I therefore conclude that here in Moscow also one man rules and not the council.  I see 16 chairs around the table."
            Stalin looked at the chairs: "The individual does not decide.  In every council there are people whose views must be taken into account but wrong views also exist.  We have had the experience of three revolutions and we know that out of 100 decisions made by individuals 90 are one-sided.  Our leading organ is the Central Committee of the Party and it has 70 members.  Among the 70 members are some of our most capable industrialists and our cooperatives and our best tradesmen, also some of our ablest authorities on agriculture and co-operative as well as individual farming, finally some men who have a first-class knowledge of how to deal with the various nationalities that make up the Soviet Union.  This is the Areopagus in which the wisdom of the party is centered.  It gives the individual the possibility of correcting his partial prejudices.  Each contributes his own experience for the general benefit of the Committee.  Without this method very many mistakes would be made.  Since each person takes his part in the deliberations our decisions are more or less correct."
            "So you refuse to be a dictator," I said, "I have found the same tactics are used by all dictators.  In Europe you are painted as the bloodthirsty Czar or the aristocratic freebooter from Georgia."
            He laughed in a genial way and blinked at me as I continued: "Since there are stories going around of bank robberies and other burglaries which you organized as a youth in order to help the party, or at least countenanced, I should like to know how much of all these we are to believe."
            The peasant instinct in Stalin now came to the fore.  He went across to his writing-desk and brought me a pamphlet of about 20 pages which contained his biographical data in Russian but naturally nothing in answer to my question.
            "There you will find everything," he said, obviously pleased at this debonair way of giving a negative answer.  I began to laugh and asked: "Tell me if you do not feel yourself to be the follower of Stenka Rasin, the noble rapparee whose legendary deeds I have heard recounted on the Volga, where they were done."
            He returned to his constructive logical way of talking.
            "We Bolsheviks," he said, "apart entirely from our national origin, have always been interested in personalities like Bolotnikow, Stenka Rasin, Pugatschew, because they emerged spontaneously from the first elementary uprising of the peasantry against the oppressor.  It is interesting for us to study the first signs of that awakening.  Historical allegories, however, are out of the question; and we have not idealized Stenka Rasin.  Individual uprisings, even when organized with the capacity that characterized these three leaders I have mentioned, lead to nothing.  A peasant revolution can attain its ends only when it is united with the revolution of the workers and led by the latter.  Only a revolution integrally organized and welded together in all its parts can lead to its goal.  This you cannot have among the peasants because they alone form an independent class.  Moreover, the three insurrectionary leaders that I have mentioned were all Tsarist.  They were against the landed gentry but for our good Czar.  That was their battle cry."
            The hands of the watch that I had placed before me on the table showed that our time was growing short.  I put another question in an innocent way, as if I did not know about America in Russia: "Everywhere in this country," I said, "I find that America is respected.  How is it possible that any State whose aim is to overthrow capitalism can pay its respect to a country in which capitalism has reached its highest grade of development?"
            Without a moment's pause, Stalin gave a magnificent answer: "You are overstating things.  Here there is no general respect for everything that is American.  There is only a respect for the American sense of practicality in everything, in industry, in literature and in business; but we never forget that it is a capitalist land.  They are sound people, or at least there are many sound people there, sound in mind as well as in body, sound in their whole attitude towards work and towards everyday facts.  The practical business side of American life in its simplicity has our admiration.
Ludwig, Emil. Leaders of Europe. London: I. Nicholson and Watson Ltd., 1934, p. 369-378
 
 
STALIN IS NOT THE MAN HE IS DEPICTED AS BEING
 
            Stalin is not at all the sort of man he is supposed to be on the "other side" of the human race,...   but then this other half of the world is composed of a multitude of men born blind, guided by others who have willfully blinded themselves.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 152
 
ECONOMIC ADVANCEMENTS IN THE 20’S
 
            Nineteen twenty-seven is an important date because it marks a definite stage in development.  It was at this date that the USSR reached the level of pre-war Tsarist economy.  The figures of 1927 are in nearly every case higher than those of 1913, in only a few rare instances falling below them.
            In general agricultural production the pre-war level was passed by one billion rubles, or about 8%.  In industry it was passed by 200 million rubles, representing an increase of 12 percent.
            The railways, the length of whose permanent ways, in 1913, on the territory now administered by the USSR, was about 36,500 miles, had increased to about 48,200 miles.  For the whole of the former territory of Russia the mean increase in the workers wages was 16.9% over pre-war figures.  (Figures arrived at by taking purchasing-power into account)
            Educational development had reached sensational proportions.  Let us quote a few salient facts.  In 1925 there were, in the primary Soviet schools, 2,250,000 more pupils than there had been in the Russian schools in 1913, and there were double as many as there had been in the technical schools.  Twice as much money was being spent per head on education, and there were ten times as many scientific institutions.
            The national revenue was 22,500,000,000 rubles.  As for mechanical energy, the USSR ranked immediately after the United States of America, Canada, England, Germany, and France. 
            As regards socialization proper.  In industrial production, 77 percent of the activity was collectivist, 14 percent private enterprise, and the remainder co-operative.  In agricultural production, socialist 2.7%, private 93.3%.  In commerce, socialist 81.9%, private 18.1%.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 155
 
            Preparations for the 14th Party Congress (as distinct from the 14th Conference) took place against a background of the first successes in economic and cultural construction.  In 1925, gross output of agricultural production was 112 percent of pre-war levels.  This was remarkable.  The NEP was beginning to bear fruit.  Industrial production, which for five years had lain in total ruin, reached three-quarters of its pre-war level.  The first new plants had made their appearance, most notably the power stations.  And all this when the best foreign economists had predicted that pre-war levels would not be achieved for 15 to 20 years.
            Substantial results had also been accomplished in the battle against illiteracy.  A network of schools have been established, notably in the national republics.  Major steps have been taken to create a system of higher education and a series of important measures were adopted to speed up cultural and educational work.  The All-Russian Academy of Sciences was transformed into its All-Union equivalent.  By this time works of world repute had been produced by the historians Pokrovsky and Vernadsky, the geneticist Vavilov, the agrobiologist Vilyams, the chemist Zelinsky, the geologists Fersman and Gubkin, the physicist Ioffe, and many other pioneers of Soviet science.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 111
 
            Stalin gives the following remarkable figures of the growth of industry [in his Political Report to the 16th Party Congress]:
            "In 1926-27, we had in the whole of industry, both large and small scale, reckoning also flour milling, a gross output of 8641 million pre-war rubles, i.e., 102.5 percent of the pre-war level.  The following year we had 122 percent.  In 1928-29 we had 142.5 percent and in the current year (1930) (estimated) not less than 180 percent of the pre-war level."
            During the same period the freight carried on the railroads increased by 66 percent.  Railway construction increased considerably, likewise bridge construction.  The whole commercial turnover doubled.  Foreign trade, exports and imports, which in 1927-28 was only 47.9% of the pre-war total, increased to about 80%.  The average yearly increase in the national income during the first three years of the Five-year Plan amounted to 15 percent.
            These are all figures quoted by Stalin himself and there is no reason to think them materially inaccurate.  Foreign observers of the immense activity might have been tempted to estimate the actual success in more rosy terms.  Stalin is a stickler for facts, and window-dressing is not a feature of his political life.
Graham, Stephen. Stalin. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1970, p. 132
 
DIFFERENCES WITH THE OPPOSITION IN THE 20’S ARE NOT SMALL
 
            The Opposition.  In 1927 took place the massed offensive of the Opposition, all along the line, against the leadership of the Russian Party and of the Communist International.... 
            Of what, exactly, did this Opposition consist?  Reference used constantly to be made to it in our part of Europe.  It is still quite frequently mentioned, even now.  At first sight this Russian phenomenon or, rather, this phenomenon imported from Russia, is quite incomprehensible, except to the initiated.  One hears that prominent revolutionaries, militant Socialists of the highest rank, suddenly begin to treat their Party as a foe, and to be treated as foes by it.  One sees them suddenly leave the ranks and fight like demons amid torrents of abuse.  They are eliminated, excluded, exiled--and all for questions of disagreement on what seem to be negligible shades of difference.  One is tempted to conclude that everyone in the land of the New is terribly and fantasticly stubborn.
            Not at all.  When one goes closely into the matter one sees that what seemed complicated is really quite simple--but that what seemed superficial is really not so at all.  It is not a question of shades of meaning, but of the widest possible differences really affecting the whole question of the future.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 157
 
OPPOSITION REFUSES TO ACCEPT THE MAJORITY VOTE AND BECOMES A FACTION
 
            One may also assert that certain individual tendencies of mind and of character are apt to identify themselves with certain political tendencies.  Narrowness of mind and short-sighted aggressiveness may manifest themselves by prejudice and opposition--intellectual and moral cowardice by lower middle-class opportunism and lapsing towards Reformism and Menshevism.
            It is this which gives the Opposition its great importance and its formidable scope, because it is the divergence of tendencies in question which brings about wide divergence in the interpretation of communist doctrine.  Divergence from the practical interpretation of the doctrine, that is–to say from Marxism, a different assessment of the "peculiar requirements of the moment," may have quite unforseen consequences, or may give a different meaning to the whole policy.  A mistake about an isolated fact may be corrected like a mistake in an arithmetical sum.  But an error in tendency is a general deformation, beginning at the bottom and, increasing by geometrical progression, bringing with it an enormous number of modifications of detail susceptible of changing the whole face of national history--to say nothing of resulting in terrible disaster.  It is a modification of the "line" of the great Party which is the motive force of the State.
            In its origin, the Opposition is a tendential malady.
            But it is a particular kind of tendential malady of the gravest possible kind, whose main symptom is lack of discipline, definite separation and drifting apart from the majority of the leaders.  The opposing tendency to that of the majority is no longer a subject for discussion, but an object for war.
            It is in this way that the functions of the Opposition differ radically from those of self-criticism.  The name of self-criticism is to bring all the tendencies back into a common path.  Nothing is more natural than that different tendencies should exist; nothing is more healthy than clear and open discussion on any points at issue.  Self-criticism ensures this maximum freedom of expression of opinion, which is the privilege of the Bolshevik Party.
            But the Opposition does not follow the lines of self-criticism.  It's essential and most pernicious characteristics are that it forms itself into a separate body, refuses to identify itself with the decision of the majority-- the majority vote being the only democratic  method and, indeed, the only sensible method of settling a disagreement until the facts can be thoroughly co-ordinated.  In this case, something remains over after the vote is taken.  The Opposition seizes this something and consolidates around it in a solid body.  Instead of accepting the decision more or less openly, it fights it, "The Opposition View" becomes indurated and overgrown, and the State organism is attacked by a parasitic growth in its interior.  In this way, the Opposition brings about what is called a split, the prelude to a definite schism.  Self-criticism always remains open, but the Opposition closes itself up.  The self-critic remains inside the community.  With the Opposition, the figure "2" makes its appearance.  And so, in this way, we see "liberty of opinion" pathologically creating a group in the bosom of the Party which takes the form of a Party itself and constitutes a permanent conspiracy.  When this Opposition group considers itself to be sufficiently strong (and outside the Party it relies, like all oppositions, on the support of the various adversaries of the State policy), it goes to war and tries to seize the reins of power in order to change its heterodoxy into orthodoxy.
            Lenin had very explicitly fought this particularism, by which the disease starts, at the Tenth Congress, and he had caused the following resolution to be adopted: "Each organization of the Party must keep a strict watch to insure that the freedom of necessary criticism of the mistakes of the Party, of analyzing the fundamental policy of the Party, of taking notice of all its practical experience, of applying its decisions, of considering the remedies for any errors that may be made, and everything that follows from these things, should not become the prerogatives of certain men or of certain groups collected around a definite platform but should be quite open to all the members of the Party."
            On what questions was the Opposition most active?  According to what has just been said, and when it becomes a question of unreasonable persistence, in the Party mechanism, of general tendencies running contrary to those of the majority, and of the consolidating of those tendencies--it is easy to understand that the Opposition showed itself in all the great administrative problems of the USSR and of the Communist International.  It always attempted to approach all these problems from an angle different to the one from which the administrative majority envisioned them and approached them.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 160-162
 
            Now according to the party rules adopted at the 10th Congress, with Trotsky's approval, the actions in which he engaged, in particular consultations with the group of Forty-Six, indisputably constituted "factionalism."  The crime was compounded by the leakage of his two letters--accidental or deliberate, no one could tell--to the public.  The Party Conference that convened in January 1924, therefore, was entirely within its rights in condemning Trotsky and "Trotskyism" as a "petty-bourgeois" deviation.
Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1993, p. 485
 
            The crisis I referred to occurred in September 1923.  An acute economic depression was causing discontent among the workers and peasants, in some cities even giving rise to strikes-- a phenomenon as portentous as it is rare in Soviet Russia.  And at the same time two secret societies were discovered within the Communist Party, called the "Workers' Group" and "Workers' Truth"--the one Menshevik in tendency, and the other Anarcho-syndicalist.
Eastman, Max. Since Lenin Died. Westport, Connecticutt: Hyperion Press. 1973, p. 33
 
OPPOSITION UNITES AROUND TROTSKY
 
            The whole Opposition gravitated around the personality of Trotsky.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 164
 
            This Opposition, gathered around Trotsky, issued a memorandum of their grievances, a "platform."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 180
 
            In reality, the USSR and the international Communist movement faced multiple threats from multiple enemies and potential enemies.  But to those who felt endangered, Trotskyism came to embody those threats; multiple threats emanated from one "enemy" who acted as the agent of all enemies, who used the language and logic of Bolshevism to destroy it.  A host of perceived dangers had one name.
Chase, William J., Enemies Within the Gates?, translated by Vadim A. Staklo, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2001, p. 227.
 
 
TROTSKY WAS AN ANTI-BOLSHEVIK MENSHEVIK AT HEART
 
            Whatever may have been the various causes which incited it, the great reason for Trotsky's schism is chiefly his conception of political principles.  Even if the incidental cause is vanity, the fundamental cause is ideological.  It is based upon a fundamental divergence of tendencies between his own and Lenin's principles of Bolshevism.  It reveals a different political temperament, a different set of values and different methods.  And it is as a result of the intensive and bitter development of these fundamental differences and of their exploitation that Trotsky gradually took an opposition stand against the whole of the official Bolshevik policy.
            Menshevik to start with, Trotsky always remained a Menshevik.  He may have become anti-Bolshevik because he was a Trotskyist, but he certainly did so because he was an old Menshevik.  Let us put it, if you wish, that the Trotskyist aroused the old Menshevik in him.  Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 166
 
TROTSKY WAS TOO INDECISIVE, IMPRACTICAL, AND VACILLATING TO LEAD
 
            ...But, above all, the two people [Lenin and Trotsky] are not on the same scale, and in any case, one cannot reasonably put any other personality on a parallel with the gigantic figure of Lenin.
            But Trotsky's very qualities had serious counterparts which easily changed them into defects.  His critical sense, hypertrophied but without any broadness (Lenin's, like Stalin's, was encyclopedic), rivetted his attention upon details, prevented him from visualizing situations as a whole and made him pessimistic.
            Besides, he had too much imagination.  He had an uncontrolled imagination.  And this imagination, jostling against its own self, would lose its balance, and cease to be able to distinguish the possible from the impossible (which, in any case, is not the function of the imagination).  Lenin used to say that Trotsky was perfectly capable of producing nine good solutions and a Tenth disastrous one.  The men who worked with Trotsky will tell you that, every morning when they awoke, they murmured, as they opened their eyes and stretched themselves: "I wonder what Trotsky is going to invent today."
            He saw all the alternatives too clearly, so that all sorts of doubts would assail him.  The thesis and the antithesis haunted him at the same time.  "Trotsky is a human shuttle cock," said Lenin.  So he would hesitate and vacillate.  He was unable to make a decision.  He was afraid, and consequently always instinctively opposed the actual work in hand.
            Again, he was too fond of talking.  He would become intoxicated by the sound of his own voice.  "Even when speaking confidentially to a single person, he becomes declamatory," said one of his former companions.  To sum up, Trotsky possessed the eminent qualities of an advocate, of a debater, of an art critic, and of a journalist--but not that of a statesman having to break new ground.  He lacked the exclusive and absolute sense of reality and of life.  He lacked the great straightforward ruthlessness of the man of action.  He did not possess really strong Marxist convictions.  He was afraid.  He had always been afraid.  It was out of fear that he remained a Menshevik, and it is equally out of fear that he has become unbalanced and is sometimes seized with frantic attacks of extremeness.  One cannot understand Trotsky unless one can discern his weakness through his fits of violence.
            In a general survey Manuilsky has given us an even broader view of the matter: "The almost uninterrupted succession of Oppositions was the expression of the retirement of the feebler elements of the Party from Bolshevik positions."  All Opposition is a confession of retrogression, discouragement, incipient paralysis, and sleeping sickness.
            It was the same abroad: "During the period of the actual and relative stabilization of Capitalism, Socialists began to waiver and to leave the ranks of the Communist International."  It is hard work having to keep on marching forward, constantly bearing that manner.  After a certain time one's feet grow tired, one's fingers lose their grip--unless one has a vocation for it.
            It is because of the platitude, the bustling pettiness and the impotence of Menshevism, because of what Stalin has called "the dissolute character of the Mensheviks in the matter of organization, "that Trotsky was beaten.  If Trotsky had been right he would have won.  In the same way as the Bolsheviks who, at the dawn of the New Era, opposed the Mensheviks in the heart of the Social-Democratic Party and forced a separation, would themselves have been beaten--if they had been wrong.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 167-169
 
            Trotsky appears to me as the type of the pure revolutionary: of great service in the emotional stress of war, but of no further use when all that is needed is calm, steady, systematic work instead of exultation.  As soon as the heroic period of the revolution was past, his vision of men and affairs became distorted and he began to see all things in a false light.  Obstinately, long after Lenin had adapted his views to the facts, Trotsky clung to the principles which had been proved during the heroic, emotional, but which were bound to go awry the moment they had to serve everyday needs.  As his book shows, Trotsky knows how to carry away crowds in moments of great excitement.  Certainly when feelings ran high he was able to let loose a mighty flood of enthusiasm, but what he could not do was to "canalize" the flood and turn it to account in the building up of a great state.
            This Stalin can do.
            Trotsky is the born writer.  His affectionate descriptions of literary activities make good reading, and I take him at his word when he says: "A well-written book, in which one finds new thoughts, and a good pen, with which one can communicate one's own thoughts to others, have always been and still are for me the most precious and intimate products of civilization."  Trotsky's tragedy is that he was not content with being a great writer.  This insatiability turned him into a contentious doctrinaire who, by the mischief he made, and meant to make, caused innumerable people to forget his merits.
            I know this type of writer and revolutionary well, even if only in miniature.  Certain leaders of the German revolution, the Kurt Eisner's and Gustav Landauers, had much in common with Trotsky, although, of course, on a smaller scale.  Their rigid adherence to a dogma, their inability to adapt themselves to changed circumstances, in short, their lack of practical political psychology, made these theorists and doctrinaires fitted for political action for a short time only.  For the greater period of their lives they were good writers, but no politicians.  They did not find the way to the heart of the people.  They did not know enough of popular and mass psychology.  They felt a kinship for the masses which the masses did not feel for them.
            While the great conflict between Trotsky and Stalin rests on differences of opinion on all-important points, these differences arise from a more fundamental divergence.  It was the natures of the two men which led them to opposite conceptions in regard to the most important questions of the Russian Revolution, to the nationality problem, the peasant problem, and to the question whether it was possible to establish socialism in any one country.  Stalin held the opinion that complete and practical socialism could be established without a world revolution, and, moreover, that by the protection of the national interests of the various Soviet peoples, it could be established in one separate country; he believed that the Russian peasant had the possibility of socialism within him.  Trotsky disputed that.  He declared world revolution to be a necessary condition for the establishment of socialism; he adhered rigidly to the Marxist doctrine of absolute internationalism; he advocated the tactics of the permanent revolution and demonstrated with a great show of logic the correctness of the Marxist position that the establishment of socialism in any one country was impossible....
            Before the end of 1935 at the latest, the whole world recognized that socialism had been established in one country and that, what was more, the military resources had been created for the defense of this new structure against any conceivable foe.
            What could Trotsky do?  He could keep quiet.  He could admit himself beaten and say he had been wrong.  He could reconcile himself with Stalin.
            He found it impossible.  He could not conquer himself.  The man who had seen so much that others had not seen, now failed to see what every child saw.  Food was being produced at a great pace; the machines were functioning; raw materials were being reclaimed as never before; the country was electrified and motorized.  Trotsky would not admit it.  He said that the very fact that all this had been accomplished so quickly, and the feverish tempo of the construction, must result in fragility.  The Soviet Union, the "Stalin State," as he called it, must sooner or later fall to pieces of its own accord, and it was bound to collapse in any case as soon as the Fascist powers attacked it.  And Trotsky launched forth into extravagant outbursts of hatred against the man in whose name the construction had become a fact.
Feuchtwanger, Lion. Moscow, 1937. New York: The Viking Press, 1937, p. 97-101
 
            During the crisis [Brest Litovsk] the 'deserter and strike-breaker' of October, Zinoviev, rallied to his [Lenin] side; and Lenin was as quick in forgetting an old grievance as he had been ruthless in voicing it.  On the other hand, Trotsky suffered a temporary eclipse.  He had laid bare an important weakness of his--a certain lack of plain realism, a propensity to verbal solutions and theatrical gestures in a situation which brooked neither.  His eclipse was not serious.  His moral authority was still second only to Lenin's.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 192
 
(by Joseph Hansen)
            Even Deutscher viewed Trotsky's engagement in building a world party of socialist revolution as a "foible."
Trotsky, Leon. My Life. Gloucester, Massachusetts: P. Smith, 1970, p. v
 
            He [Trotsky] was, as I have hinted, an intellectual's politician not a politician's.  He was arrogant, he was a wonderful phrase-maker, he was good at points of dramatic action.  But, as with Churchill (there are some resemblances), his judgment, over most of his career, tended to be brilliantly wrong.  In politics, particularly in the life-and-death politics of revolution, you can't afford to be brilliantly wrong.
            ...He was a brave and dashing extemporizer: but when it came to steady administrative policies, he could suddenly swing into a bureaucratic rigidity stiffer than any of the others'. 
            Above all, he [Trotsky] hadn' the animal instinct that a politician needs.  When Lenin died, he was convalescing in the Crimea.  He didn't return to Moscow.  He did not obey one of the oldest of political rules: never be too proud to be present.  In a time of crisis, the first essential is to be on the spot, in physical presence, in the flesh.
Snow, Charles Percy. Variety of Men. New York: Scribner, 1966, p. 255
 
LENIN AND TROTSKY CLASH OVER THE IDEA OF SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY
 
            The Opposition naturally applied itself first of all to the most important problem of the Russian Revolution: the possibility of building up a Socialist System in a single country.
            Lenin had taken up his position with regard to this problem even before the Revolution.  At that time he wrote: "The development of Capitalism differs entirely in each country.  From which we arrive at the incontestable conclusion that Socialism cannot conquer in every country simultaneously.  It will start by conquering one or more countries...and this will not only arouse irritation, but also a direct tendency on the part of the middle classes of other countries to crush the victorious proletariat of the socialist State."
            The victory of the October Revolution brought the victors face-to-face with two tasks: the socialization of the world and the solid construction of Socialism in one place.  Which was the one by which to begin or, rather, from what side should this dual task be approached.
            Lenin considered that the more important task was clearly that of building up a socialist society where it was possible to build it up, namely, in Russia.
            Trotsky was afraid that this would lead the Revolution to a dead end.  This advance over a single sector on the whole capitalist front seemed to him to be doomed to failure.  He was afraid and the Menshevik in him was resurrected, or, rather, aroused.  Under those conditions, he said, the Russian Revolution must be considered as a provisional one only.
            It will be recalled that during the Sixth Congress of the Party, in the middle of 1917, Preobrazhensky had attempted to have it laid down that the socialization of Russia should be dependent upon the establishment of Socialism in every other country.  And it is because Stalin had risen vigorously against this that no vote was taken upon the amendment, inspired by Trotsky, making the possibility of founding a Socialist society in disaffected tsarist Russia depend upon the success, in the first instance, of the World Revolution.
            Karl Radek, whose opinion in the circumstances is all the more interesting because he allied himself--for a time-- to Trotsky's outlook, says in this connection: "Trotsky returned to the point of view of the Second International, which he had himself formulated at the Second Congress of the Russian Party, before the split--namely that the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' should mean the power of an organized proletariat representing the majority of the nation."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 169-170
 
            Trotsky's point of view did not then coincide with the opinion of Lenin, who in 1915 and 1916 argued that not only could a revolution be made and power taken in one separate capitalist country but that "socialist production could be organized" and proletarian power defended against encroachment by other countries.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 129
 
REGARDING SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY TROTSKY ALIGNS WITH THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS
 
            So that, unless the proletarian Revolution could command half the votes plus one, there was nothing to be done.  For Trotsky, not only the victory of the proletariat in a single country, but even its victory in this single country unsupported by an absolute majority, reduced itself to an "historic episode."  Trotsky, then, became clearly a partisan of this "civilized European Socialism" which the Second International opposed to Leninism.  The Social-Democrats placed no confidence in the Revolution.  The Social-Democratic leaders thought that socialist-revolution was only possible in a country of highly developed Capitalism, not in Russia, because of lack of a solid foundation of labor.
            Trotsky's general theory consisted in establishing the doctrine that the socialist economic system in process of construction is completely dependent upon the world capitalist system, from whence follows a gradual fatal capitalist degeneration of the Soviet economic system, in the midst of a capitalist world.  Radek also said--at that time: "We have no power in the face of World Capitalism."  These, and others, were afraid.  One can detect the breath of apprehension, the access of panic which gathered this Opposition group into its eddy.
            Lenin never lost sight of the world organization of socialist policy.  Lenin never lost sight of anything.
            ...Dependence on foreign capitalism you say?  Comrade Trotsky has said in the course of his speech: "That in reality we find ourselves constantly under the control of world economics."  Is this right, asks Stalin?  No.  That is the dream of capitalist sharks, but it is not the truth.  And Stalin goes on to show that the supposed control is not exercised from the financial point of view, either on the nationalized Soviet banks, or upon industry, or upon foreign commerce, which are also nationalized.  Neither is this control exercised from the political point of view.  So that it is not exercised in any of the practical meanings of the word "control."  All these people keep parading a bogey of control.  On the other hand, "to broaden our relations with the capitalist world does not mean making ourselves dependent upon it."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 171-173
 
TROTSKYISM IS COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY
 
            The struggle against Trotskyism is the struggle against a muddled, meddling, and cowardly lower middle-class--in a word, counter-revolutionary in the heart of the Party.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 175
 
            Stalin's contribution [to the attack on Trotsky in late 1924] was a reasoned and destructive attack....
            Examining Trotsky's main heresies, he demonstrated by quotations from Lenin's writings that Trotsky had been in direct conflict with the master at all stages.... The most damaging part of Stalin's attack came in quotations from Trotsky's correspondence in 1913 with Chkhiedze in which Trotsky had written that Lenin was "the professional exploiter of everything that is backward in the Russian workers' movement."  He had also written that "the whole foundation of Leninism at the present time is built on lying and falsification."  Stalin closed his speech with the statement that "Trotsky has come forward now with the purpose of dethroning Bolshevism and undermining its foundations.  The task of the party is to bury Trotskyism as an ideology."
            The speech sent a shock of horror through the party.  It seemed impossible that any member, least of all a leading Bolshevik like Trotsky, could have written in such terms of Lenin.  But Stalin's evidence was irrefutable.  The charge that Trotsky had been all long a vicious enemy of Lenin and Leninism was accepted as proven.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 203-204
 
            Some Bolsheviks think that Trotskyism is a faction of Communism, which has made mistakes, it is true, which has done many foolish things, which has sometimes even been anti-Soviet, but which is nevertheless a faction of Communism.  Hence a certain liberalism in dealing with Trotskyists and people who think like Trotsky.  It is scarcely necessary to prove that such a view of Trotskyism is profoundly wrong and pernicious.  As a matter-of-fact, Trotskyism has long since ceased to be a fraction of Communism.  As a matter-of-fact, Trotskyism is the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, which is carrying on the struggle against Communism, against the Soviet government, against the building of socialism in the USSR.
            That is why liberalism towards Trotskyism, even when the latter is shattered and concealed, is stupidity bordering on crime, bordering on treason to the working class.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 263
 
            It is sufficient for our purposes merely to indicate the few salient new ideas which gradually crystallized in the course of the polemics between the Stalinist machine and the Opposition and acquired decisive significance insofar as they provided ideological leverage for the initiators of the struggle against Trotskyism.  It was around these ideas that the political forces rallied.  They were three in number.  In time they partly supplemented and partly replaced each other. 
            The first had to do with industrialization.  The triumvirate again by coming out against the program of industrialization proposed by me, and in the interest of polemics branded it super-industrialization.  This position was even deepened after the triumvirate fell apart and Stalin established his bloc with Bukharin and the Right Wing.  The general trend of the official argument against so-called super-industrialization was that rapid industrialization is possible only at the expense of the peasantry....
            At the second stage, in the course of 1924, the struggle was launched against the theory of permanent revolution.  The political content of this struggle was reduced to the thesis that we are not interested in international revolution but in our own safety, in order to develop our economy.  The bureaucracy feared more and more that it was jeopardizing its position by the risk of involvement implicit in an international revolutionary policy.  The campaign against the theory of permanent revolution, devoid in itself of any theoretical value whatsoever, served as an expression of a conservative nationalistic deviation from Bolshevism.  Out of this struggle emerged the theory of socialism in a separate country....
            The third idea of the bureaucracy in its campaign against Trotskyism had to do with the struggle against leveling, against equality.  The theoretical side of this struggle was in the nature of a curiosity.  In Marx's letter concerning the Gotha Program of the German Social Democracy, Stalin found a phrase to the effect that during the first period of socialism inequality will still be preserved, or, as he expressed it, the bourgeois prerogative in the sphere of distribution.  Marx did not mean by this the creation of a new inequality but merely a gradual rather than a sudden elimination of the old inequality in the sphere of wages.
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 395-396
 
STALIN SAYS THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IS THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
 
            Tirelessly, Stalin began at the beginning, put each principle in its proper place, and once more laid it down that "the fundamental question of Leninism, its starting-point, is not the peasant question but the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the question of the conditions of obtaining it, and the conditions of its retention.  The question of the peasantry as allied to the proletariat in its struggle for power, is a subsidiary question."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 177
 
            Stalin, supported by Molotov and several others, defended Lenin's new conception: the dictatorship of the proletariat, resting on the poorest peasants, can alone assure a solution of the tasks of the democratic revolution and at the same time open the era of socialist transformations.  Stalin was right as against Volodarsky, but he did not know how to prove it.
Trotsky, Leon, Stalin. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1941, p. 216
 
 
THE OPPOSITION’S FIGURES ARE INACCURATE & ITS PROGRAM IMPRACTICAL
 
            In the first place, many of the precise details (statistics) upon which the Opposition relies in framing its accusations of deviation and its predictions of headlong disaster are indisputably inaccurate, either because the figures given are incorrect, or because they are misleading owing to all the elements of a particular question not having been taken into consideration.
            For instance: the so-called increase in industrial and transport shortage in relation to demand (this was the main complaint); the delay in the increase of wages in proportion to the work done; the shortening of the working day; the increase in the difference between the wages of men and women; the lowering of the wages of youths; the increase of unemployment; the amount allocated to the unemployed; etc....
            In the second place, many of the charges are brought without a proof, while in other cases they are in direct contradiction to earlier decisions of the Party and to results already achieved.  For instance: the disguising of the progress made by the kulaks; the suppression of democracy within the Party; the abandonment of the idea of industrialization (in the shadow of the NEP); the attempt to oppose co-operation in electrification (also in connection with the NEP).
            In the third place, a great number of the proposals of the Opposition are quite obviously dangerous, clumsy and likely to produce disastrous results.  All this category of definite proposals shows a lack of appreciation of realities, and possesses a character of bluff and demagogism, either because the proposals are bad in themselves, or because they are inopportune and premature.
            For instance (apart from the two obvious criticisms of the disadvantages of the NEP, the exploitation of that temporary state of affairs brought about by immediate necessities, and the demand that it should be put an end to immediately): That support should be given to the nationalist deviations to the Right, which might have the affect a breaking up the Soviet Federation.  That wholesale prices should be increased (the 15th Congress pointed out the formidable repercussions that would eventually result from such a measure, which the Opposition adopted without considering the mechanism of Socialism as a whole, but solely in order to secure the goodwill and support of the peasants).  That restrictions should be placed on production (the closing down of factories and over-organization).  That measures, equally demagogic, of mass exemption from contributions of the poor peasants and the withdrawal of State capital from co-operative schemes should be adopted (which would mean the reinforcement of private capital).  That a surtax should be levied upon the rich, tantamount to confiscation, and that private capital should be suddenly abolished and the NEP liquidated before it had entirely done its work.  That supplementary requisitions of wheat should be made (infallibly provoking the crash of the whole struggling credit policy of the USSR).
            It is clearly a great temptation for anyone who wishes to play to the gallery to suggest such measures, but all they could achieve would be a reckless adjustment, on paper only, of problems which in actual practice can only be solved gradually and not without a certain delay.
            It is obviously easy to brandish evidence like the kulak danger, the growth of unemployment, the shortage of housing for the workers, and the fatty degeneration of the bureaucracy.  It is also easy to say in nearly every case: "Things ought to move more quickly."  But the question is whether it is possible to move more quickly and whether the relative, not actual, slowness of progress is or is not the fault of the Party leadership, and in any case whether this is a sufficient reason to make radical alterations in its whole policy.
            Is the Party to be blamed, for instance, because it is unable to procure the vast sums of money necessary for the complete reconstruction of the workers' dwellings?  And in the great major drama of the industrialization of land (which is known to be necessary but which is being retarded both voluntarily and involuntarily), is it not putting the cart before the horse in the most ridiculous way to stifle the co-operative system of commodity distribution, which is actually in existing working order, by potential electrification?...  The question at issue is whether one ought to abandon an objective that is half reached for another--a greater one--which is not yet attainable.  The alternative one has to decide is: either to do something concrete, or to begin at the end.
            It is, in any case, notorious that many of the measures of salvation feverishly put forward by the Opposition are the very ones which the Party itself recommends and applies.  In these cases the Opposition is merely discovering America.  It is playing the part of the fly on the coach-wheel (and a tsetse fly at that!).
            Invest 500 million rubles in industry, enjoins the Opposition.  But the curve of investment in industry, continuously mounting, was already 460 million rubles in 1927 when this injunction was launched.  Some of the proposals of the Opposition--as, for instance, those relating to a better distribution of agricultural produce, to the assistance of poor presents and small contractors, to the charter of adolescent workers--are copied from resolutions already passed and put into force.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 182-185
 
LENIN ATTACKS THOSE ATTACKING THE GOVT UNDER THE GUISE OF REJECTING BUREAUCRACY
 
            Bureaucracy?  Yes, no doubt one is always right when one abuses it.  It has a deplorable tendency either to become sterile and fat, or thin to mummification.  But, all the same, the Administration has a broad back and very often one blackguards it with theatrical violence and with one's eyes shut, solely because one wants, for one reason or another, to attack the government.  More than 20 years earlier, in 1903, Lenin replied to the Mensheviks and to Trotsky: "It is obvious that outcries against the bureaucracy are only a method of showing one's dissatisfaction with the composition of the central organization.  You are a bureaucrat because you were elected by the Congress, not by my wishes, but in spite of them....  You are acting in a barberous, mechanical way because you take orders from the majority of the Congress of the Party and pay no heed to my desire to be personally consulted....  You are an autocrat because you do not wish to restore the power into the hands of the old group of your colleagues, which defends its own ideas all the more energetically because it objects to being disregarded by the Congress."  Thus Lenin expressed himself, and he was an amazingly good psychologist with a hundred piercing eyes.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 186
 
TROTSKY AND ZINOVIEV WERE GIVEN ONE LAST CHANCE TO RECANT IN 1927 BUT WOULD NOT
 
            The Plenum of the Central Committee and at the Control Commission, which met in 1927 before the 15th Congress, made a supreme effort with Trotsky & Zinoviev.  It asked Trotsky to renounce his theories on the change of government and his calumnies on the "Thermidorian" character of the central power, and to come into unconditional line with the rest of the Party.  Trotsky & Zinoviev rejected the possibility thus offered to them of definitely re-establishing peace within the Party.  In consequence, they were excluded from the Central Committee, censured, and warned that if they went on they would be expelled from the Party itself.
            Trotsky & Zinoviev (the latter being particularly influential at Leningrad where he was President of the Council of the Soviets) went on with the war.  They tried to excite the young Communists against the Party.  There were more and more secret meetings, secret printing presses and tracts: they seized meeting-places by force and, on November 7th, 1927, for instance, made demonstrations in the streets.  At the 15th Congress, a special report was presented on this intense political conspiracy against the central power.  This made it abundantly clear that Trotsky and his followers had decided to create a party with a central committee, district committees, and town committees, a technical apparatus with its own funds and its own Press.  And the same thing on the international plan, with the object of supplanting the Third International.  Orthodox members of the Central Committee were prevented by force from being present at Trotskyist meetings (this was so, for instance, in the case of Jaroslavski and some others, who were "physically" ejected from a meeting at Moscow).
            The 15th Congress attempted to clear up this deplorable and dangerous state of affairs, urged Trotsky to dissolve his organizations and, once more, to renounce his bellicose methods which not only overstepped the bounds of what a militant Bolshevik could be allowed to do, but even those of "Soviet loyalty," and finally, once for all, to put an end to his systematic hostility towards the points of view of the majority.  But the counter-proposals of the Trotskyists, signed by 121 people, so far from being conciliatory, accentuated the attacks and the split.  Trotsky and his followers were expelled from the Party.  Even this decision left a door open, namely the possibility was considered of their being individually taken back into the Party if they would alter their ideas and would adjust their behavior accordingly.  This is a long way from the Trotskyist caricature showing Comrade Jaroslavski, president of the Control Commission, as a fierce, bloodthirsty watchdog held in leash by Stalin.
            One might be tempted to say: "Has not the Opposition, in any case, been useful in drawing the special attention of the leaders to weak spots and in putting them on their guard against such & such a danger?"
            No.  In the first place, in principle, self-criticism was an infinitely more efficacious method than a duel to the death for keeping the leaders on the look out.
            Again, it is patent that the curve of the regular and gradual achievements of the Soviet State bear no trace whatever of the intervention of the Opposition.  The Opposition lost no opportunity for correction; on the contrary, it put obstacles in the way which had to be steered around; and that is one of the reasons why the great rise of the USSR dates from the moment at which the Opposition was reduced to harmlessness.  The present leaders of the USSR deserve to be given credit for the fact that since the October Revolution they have not modified their attitudes and their points of view in any particular, and that everything they have done since Lenin has been done according to Lenin, and not according to modifications and counterfeits of Leninism.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 186-187
 
            One of the reasons for the opposition's defeat was the GPU's discovery of the opposition's illegal printshop.  Those working at the shop were arrested, along with Mrachkovsky, who was in charge of it.  One of those arrested had in the past been a White Guard officer, although at the time of his arrest he was a secret agent for the GPU, as Menzhinsky himself later admitted.  The case of the underground print shop and the "White Guard officer" was used to maximum advantage to discredit Trotsky and the opposition.  A joint plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission at the end of October 1927 passed a resolution expelling Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Central Committee while allowing them to remain as party members.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 172
 
            The Central Control Commission warned Trotsky and Zinoviev of the consequences of their tactics.  The opposition leaders were playing for time, to allow their ideas to penetrate into the masses.  Again they executed a tactical retreat, and signed a paper in which they once more surrendered to the bugaboo of party unity.  In a sense, it was a legitimate move.  For they now openly aimed not at splitting the party, but at dislocating Stalin in taking over his machine.  They retreated in order to consolidate their lines and to resume the offensive in the last assault for the coveted prize of absolutist power.
Levine, Isaac Don.  Stalin.  New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, c1931, p. 266
 
STALIN WAS A CONFIDENT MAN OF ACTION AND PROGRESS
 
            I will delve, rather at a venture, into far-distant times, into the days before the Revolution, right back into the last century: Vano Sturua tells of an illicit visit paid by Stalin to the big workshops at Tiflis in 1898--not yesterday, it will be noticed: "Sosso was remarkable for his decision and firmness"; and he found violent fault with the "slackness," the "hesitation," "the irritating spirit of compromise," which he observed among many of the comrades, and the same Sosso (aged 19 at the time) already foresaw the defection of a number of intellectuals "of whom a good half actually passed over into the Menshevik camp after the Second Congress."
            That is how Stalin appeared then, and that is how he appeared, some 30 years later, when confronted with the Opposition crew.  He was the same man; the man of action, confidence, and progress, as opposed to those of theory, pessimism, and marking time.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 189
 
            Stalin became Vozhd, or leader, not only by force of personality, ability, and ruthless determination but also because he gave positive, challenging leadership.  He inspired in people the faith that their hardships and sacrifices were to be endured, because they could bring victory, security, and other rewards.  Indeed it was his own faith that anything was justified that would lead to the justice and prosperity of socialism.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 243
 
            ...Stalin was capable of charming his interlocutors.  He was unquestionably a great actor and could play the role of an affable, modest, even a common man.  In the first weeks of the war, when it seemed that the Soviet Union was about to collapse, all visiting foreign dignitaries, starting with Harry Hopkins, were pessimistic.  However, they left Moscow fully confident that the Soviet people would fight on and ultimately win.  But the situation was indeed desperate.  The enemy was relentlessly pushing eastward.  Almost every night people had to go down into bomb shelters.  So what was it that made Hopkins, Harriman, Beaverbrook, and other experienced and skeptical politicians change their minds?  Nothing else but their conversations with Stalin.  Despite the seemingly hopeless situation, he was able to create an easy and calm atmosphere.
            ...The boss was radiating benevolence as he unhurriedly conversed.  Nothing dramatic seemed to be occurring outside the walls of that room, nothing seemed to worry him.  And that was reassuring.
Berezhkov, Valentin. At Stalin's Side. Secaucus, New Jersey: Carol Pub. Group, c1994, p. 205
 
 
OPPOSITION SPREADS DOOM AND GLOOM ABOUT THE REVOLUTION’S CHANCES
 
            The Opposition did everything it could to discourage the Revolution and cast over the world (with all the force it could muster) doubt, the specter of ruin, desolation and perdition, and a shadow of decadence and of surrender.
            "Shake up our Opposition," said Stalin, "throw aside its revolutionary phraseology, and you will see that at the bottom of it lies capitulation!"
            Trotskyism, which has to some extent spread over the globe, attacking the network of the Communist International, has done everything it could to destroy the work of October.  Around Trotsky, all sorts of people from all sides, persons who have been banished, renegades, malcontents, and Anarchists carry on a campaign of systematic detraction and machine-wrecking, a struggle which is exclusively anti-Bolshevik and anti-Soviet, absolutely negative and containing every possible form of treason.  All that these turncoats wish to do is to become the grave-diggers of the Russian Revolution.
            One is quite justified in considering Trotsky as a counter-revolutionary, although that obviously does not mean that Trotsky harbors all the ideas of middle-class reactionaries against the USSR.
            Stalin once said: "The Opposition will end by hurling itself into the arms of the Whites."  Some people were inclined to think that this prophecy went too far and was the result of the fierceness of the struggle.  The bloody events of December 1934 have justified it in the most sinister way.  Will this be the only justification of it that we shall have?
            If the Opposition had won, the Party would have been split in two, and the Revolution would have been in a sorry state.  Ordjonikidze wrote: "The triumph of Trotskyism would have meant the ruin of all the constructive plans of the Soviets.  The victory of Stalin over Trotsky and over those of the Right is like a fresh success for the October Revolution."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 189-190
 
STALIN CONTINUED THE IDEAS OF LENIN AND PROTECTED THEM
 
            "The proletariat must have a clear objective (a programme) and a definite line of action (tactics)," said Stalin, who always acts according to his words.
            Since those days, Stalin has watched more jealously than ever over the unimpaired greatness of Leninism, which he had saved from intrigue at a moment when the great experiment of liberty, which had never ceased to make progress, had nevertheless not yet reached its full maturity; at a period at which the Soviet Revolutionaries and the proletariat were eagerly yet slowly giving life to the monumental new organism by a self-sacrifice comparable to a transfusion of blood.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 191
 
HOW ARE THE ADVANCEMENTS FINANCED
 
            And now for the financing of all this.  The problem presents itself here in a peculiar form of its own.  "Substantially," explains Stalin, "in capitalist countries the funds invested in big industrial schemes are obtained either by foreign loans, or by spoiliation."  (War indemnities, colonial confiscations, unfair exploitation of labor.)
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 199
 
GREAT ADVANCEMENTS AND SUCCESS OF THE FIVE YEAR PLAN
 
            Now the 1928 Five-Year Plan, supported by colossal figures, ended in four years by an achievement of 93 percent of its objectives.  As regards heavy industry, the achievement in four years amounted to 108 percent.  National production trebled between 1928 and 1934.  Pre-war production was quadrupled by the end of 1933.
            From 1928 to 1932 the number of workmen employed increased from 9,500,000 to 13,800,000 (an increase in important industries of 1,800,000, in agriculture of 1,100,000, and in commercial employees of 450,000) and, naturally, unemployment has become a thing of the past there.
            The part played by industry in total production, that is to say in relation to agricultural production, was 42 percent in 1913, 48 percent in 1928, and 70 percent in 1932.
            The part played by the socialist industry in total industry at the end of four years was 99.93%.
            The national revenue has increased during the four years by 85 percent.  At the end of the Plan, it was more than 45 billion rubles.  A year later 49 billion (1/2% being capitalist and foreign elements).
            The amount of the workers' and employees' wages rose from 8 billion to 30 billion rubles.
            The number of persons able to read and to write has risen, for the whole of the USSR, from 67 percent at the end of 1930, to 90 percent at the end of 1933.
            Pause a moment and compare these figures, which testify to a progress unique in the annals of the human race, with the virtuous prophecies which figure above--Insolvency, Deadlock, Catastrophe, Breakdown--all of which were uttered at a time when the Plan was almost realized already--in spite of universal opposition.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 194-195
 
            Listen to the great newspapers.  They have a bitter pill to swallow.
            Le Temps in its number of January 27th, 1932, says: "The Soviet Union has won the first round by industrializing itself without the aid of foreign capital."  The same paper, some months later, in April, observes: "Communism seems to have leaped in one bound over the constructive stage which in a capitalist regime has to be crossed very slowly.  To all intents and purposes, the Bolsheviks have beaten us in this respect."
            The Round Table: "The achievements of the Five-Year Plan constitute a surprising phenomenon."
            The Financial Times: "There can be no doubt about their success.  The Communists' exultation in the Press and in their speeches is by no means without foundation."
            The Neue Freie Presse (Austria): "The Five-Year Plan is a modern giant."
            The Nation (United States): "The four years of the Five-Year Plan show a really remarkable series of achievements.  The Soviet Union has devoted itself with an intense activity, more appropriate to war-time, to the construction of the foundations of a new life."
            Forward (Scotland): "What England did during the war was a mere bagatelle beside it.  The Americans recognize that even the feverish period of the most intense construction in the Western states could offer nothing comparable to it...a degree of energy unprecedented in the history of the world.  A brilliant challenge to a hostile capitalist world."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 215-216
 
            I [Medvedev] am not about to deny the major successes achieved by the Soviet Union during the first five-year plan.  In the period from 1928 to 1933 alone, 1500 big enterprises were built and the foundations were laid for branches of industry that had not existed in tsarist Russia: machine-tool production, automobile and tractor manufacturing, chemical works, airplane factories, the production of powerful turbines and generators, a high-grade steel, of ferrous alloys, of synthetic rubber, artificial fibers, nitrogen, and so on.  Construction was begun on thousands of kilometers of new railroads and canals.  Major centers of heavy industry were created in the territories of the non-Russian minorities, the former borderlands of tsarist Russia--in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Tataria, the Northern Caucasus, and Buryat Mongolia.  The eastern part of the country became a second major center for metallurgy and the oil industry.  A modern defense industry was established.  And hundreds of new cities and workers settlements were founded.  Stalin put considerable effort into the huge task of building a modern industry in the Soviet Union."
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 248
 
            In January 1933 Stalin reported that the first five-year plan had been fulfilled in four years and three months, that industrial output in 1932 had reached the goals set for 1933....  In fact, over the five-year period gross industrial output approximately doubled and heavy industry increased by 2.7 times....
            Ten million tons of pig iron were planned for the last year of the five-year plan, and in 1930 Stalin declared this goal raised to 17 million tons.  In 1932, 6.16 million tons were poured.  On the eve of the war, in 1940, 15 million tons of pig iron were poured.  Only in 1950 did the figure past 17 million....
            The transfer to the cities of millions of peasants, most of them poor, was accompanied by an improvement in their standard of living.  And of course the material position of the former unemployed was improved; now they all had work....
            It goes without saying that the difficulties in fulfilling the first five-year plan can be explained in part by the fact that it was the first five-year plan in history.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 250-253
 
            There is no need to discuss the success or failure of the Five Years Industrial Plan.  Certain facts are self-evident.  The Government is undoubtedly building as fast as it can, in the face of immense financial, economic, and physical difficulties, model factories for the people to work in and model houses for them to live in.  It is improving conditions of work and prolonging the intervals of leisure.  It is building better civil prisons and reforming prison life on modern lines.  It is beginning to establish maternity centers, and clinics for the care of child life.
            It is organizing sanatoriums for the sick and convalescent homes for jaded workers who have done good service to the State.  Within its own limited definition of what constitutes the arts it is actively encouraging them.
            It is building schools and universities and is rapidly reducing the number of illiterates.  The next generation of Russians will not be classed among the illiterates of the world;...
            Among other things the State has done is to make idleness a crime and the idle rich recognized by proletarian opinion not only as useless drones but as enemies to the hive-economy.  It has practically abolished prostitution.
            There is not a prostitute left in the streets of Moscow; any woman found soliciting would be reported by the police to her factory boss and threatened with the loss of her job and her union card.  Formal religion has been "eliminated" as an opium of the mind employed to deaden the sensitiveness of wage-slaves to the miseries of capitalist oppression.
Cummings, Arthur. The Moscow Trial (Metro-Vickers). London: Victor Gollancz, 1933, p. 280
 
            ...he [a worker named Saifuddinov] reminded me that we had just completed the First Five-Year Plan and were now on our way at full speed towards a happy, joyful life; we were creating mammoth industrial plants, we were setting up tractor stations in collective farms, we were increasing productivity, we were growing, we were flourishing--whereas in the countries of capitalism everything was going quickly downhill, the workers were starving and subjected to arbitrary rule.
            "Comrade Saifuddinov," I remember asking him during a class, "will you please take yourself as an example to illustrate the improvement in the material and domestic conditions of the working class of the USSR."
            "What is the point of taking an individual example, Comrade Instructor," he replied at once.  "I was speaking of the improvement of conditions all around, as a whole.  Like that, there is a steady improvement.  Individual cases have nothing to do with it."
            "All the same," I asked, "has your personal position improved?"
            "Of course it is improving!  Are we not building an underground railway in Moscow?  Are we not building the Moscow Volga Canal?  Of course we are, and we are building up Socialism, aren't we?"
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 230
 
            Food supplies improved so much by early 1935 that most of the rationing decreed in the late 1920s was abolished.  The tone of the press and of the leaders' speeches became considerably milder.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 2
 
            That great changes have been brought about in the Soviet Union as a result of the Five Year Plans is admitted by a friend and foe alike.  Everyone acknowledges that the Soviet Union is now in possession of scores of important industries which it did not previously possess, that a mighty technical revolution has taken place in agriculture.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 83
 
            The enormous assignment for fundamental construction in the first plan (Five-year Plan), now largely gave way to the provision of goods of consumption.  This could only be done when the main plant had been laid down; but once it was there, set going with all the force and purpose of a socialist state, the actual goods came out at a tremendous pace.  In 1931 there were hardly any cars; by 1935 I found the streets covered with them.
Pares, Bernard. Russia. Washington, New York: Infantry Journal, Penguin books, 1944, p. 156
 
            No one can deny that these achievements have been tremendous.  No other country has made similar progress in developing its productive forces in so short a period.  In speed of development Russia is far ahead of all capitalist countries.  Compared with 1913 there has been a 10-fold increase in Russia's heavy industrial production, while in the same period German production, for example, has advanced by only 50 percent.  And, in contrast with all capitalist countries, the rate of Russian advance has been almost uninterrupted.  This fact becomes even more impressive if one remembers that Russia, during this period, went through the world war, civil war, and two periods of actual famine.  As early as 1937 80% of all industrial products and 90% of all agricultural machines such as tractors and combines came from factories which had been newly built or entirely reconstructed since the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan.
            The progress in agriculture is no less impressive.  Collectivization and mechanization have resulted in a vast increase in output, although the agricultural population has been steadily declining in numbers.  In 1926 an agricultural population of 120 millions under NEP conditions could produce an extremely good harvest that was worth 14.8 million rubles.  Two years ago an agricultural population that was 6 million smaller than a 1926 could produce a good harvest that was worth 3.7 million rubles more.
            Without going beyond the framework of this book we cannot do more than merely indicate the tremendous economic progress that has been made; a progress which has also been implemented by a great cultural advance.  Illiteracy has practically disappeared.  Factories and collective farms have been equipped with up-to-date clubs, libraries, theaters, cinemas, creches, hospitals, and laboratories for the benefit of the working people.  All these things have been described in great detail in many books.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 37
 
            On the other hand, even for the whole population, the standard of living is certainly higher than that of the working population under the Tsarist Regime.
            In the light of this experience one must come to the conclusion that, in the economic sphere Russia's achievements by far outweigh the cost and sacrifice they have rendered necessary.
Socialist Clarity Group. The U. S. S. R., Its Significance for the West. London: V. Gollancz, 1942, p. 38
 
            The latest Western estimates of Soviet production in the 1930s still tell a remarkable story: steel output rose from 4.3 million tons in 1928 to 18.1 million a decade later; coal production more than trebled, from 35 million tons to 133 million; truck production, an insignificant 700 at the start of the plans, 182,000 in 1938.
Overy, R. J. Russia's War: Blood Upon the Snow. New York: TV Books, c1997, p. 36
 
STATE FARMS CHANGED INTO SOVKHOZ AND PRIVATE FARMS INTO KOLKHOZES
 
            So, whilst the large unoccupied estates were transformed into sovkhoz or pure and simple State farms, the private individual exploitations must be changed into kolkhoz, or co-operative farms.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 220
 
STALIN FAVORS THE ARTEL FORM OF KOLKHOZ RATHER THAN THE COMMUNE
 
            There are two forms of kolkhoz: the Commune and the Artel.
            In the commune, the kolkhosians own the entire concern in common, but that is all that they do possess, and they live in communities.  In the Artel, each kolkhosian has his own house, his own farmyard and, if necessary, his own cow; he retains private ownership of a very small portion of the vast area whose cultivation he shares in other respects with the others.
            The Artel form is the one which Stalin very strongly recommends.  "Concessions!  NEP!  Abandonment of socialism!" people cried, or wanted to cry.
            But wait one moment.  Socialism, contrary to the legend which those to do not wish to know the truth spread about among those who are ignorant, was not invented just to annoy people, and to pursue them perpetually with cries of "You must!" like a creditor, but, quite on the contrary, to get them out of a mess.  Its object is by no means arbitrarily to deprive every man and every woman of everything that gives them satisfaction and thus to make them pay too dearly, by personal restrictions, for the political equality, the social justice, and the security of livelihood which it brings them.  Restriction on private property is not an end in itself, but a means of arriving at the state which is much more advantageous, everything concerned, for everyone.  It is not a question of multiplying these restrictions indiscriminately, but of reducing them to the necessary minimum.  The means of production are to be socialized, so let us socialize them.  And then what?
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 223-224
 
SOCIALISM FAVORS MAXIMUM OF GOOD OVER MINIMUM OF EF­FORT
 
            Besides, the whole of Socialism itself tends strictly towards "Maximum of good with minimum of effort."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 225
 
STALIN SAYS THE APPEARANCE OF VILLAGES HAS BEEN IMPROVED GREATLY
 
            The appearance of the villages has also changed.  Stalin has said: "The old village, dominated by its church, and with the fine houses of the chief of police, the priest, and the kulak in the foreground, and its tumbledown mud huts in the background, is beginning to disappear.  In its place the new village is springing up, with its public and economic service buildings, its clubs, its wireless station, its cinema, its schools, its libraries and its nurseries; with its tractors, it's reaping-machines, its threshing-machines, and its motor-cars.  The old silhouettes of the notables, the slave-driving kulak, the blood-sucking usurer, the produce-speculator, the 'little father'--the chief of police--have all disappeared.  The notables, nowadays, are the men of the kolkhoz and of the sovkhoz, of the schools and the clubs, the foremen tractor- and reaping- machine-drivers, the chiefs of the shock-brigades for work in the fields and for breeding, the best brigandiers, male and female, of the kolkhosian village."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 229
 
SOVIET INDUSTRIAL PROJECTS ARE A GREAT SUCCESS
 
            Mr. Cooper, the American technical adviser who was engaged on Dnieprostroy, told me at the inauguration of the titanic dam there that all records and even all calculations had been beaten by the workers, in the most difficult and unexpected circumstances, and that nothing like the economy of labor that took place had ever been seen before.  Besides, 20,000 qualified workers sprang fully armed from that enterprise.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 234
 
            The terrible famine of the winter of 1932-33 had been followed by a record harvest in 1933.... The industrialization campaign had achieved outstanding results and had laid the foundations of heavy industry on which the second plan could build.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 258
 
            Yes... we proceeded confidently and vigorously along the road of industrializing and collectivizing our country.  And now we may consider that the road has been traversed.  Everybody now admits that we have achieved tremendous successes along this road.  Everybody now admits that we already have a powerful, first-class industry, a powerful mechanized agriculture, a growing and improving transport system, an organized and excellently equipped Red Army.
Stalin, Joseph. Stalin's Kampf. New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, c1940, p. 98
 
            In July 1937 the London Times devoted three articles to the situation after 20 years of Soviet Power.  Gone are the assertions of the country being a vestige of its former self, of the impending collapse of industry.  The new economic machine is obviously beginning to "deliver the goods," and so the note of criticism is transferred from the economic to the political sphere.  Stalin, it is said, is no longer carrying out Lenin's program but one of his own.  The State is not "withering away" as Lenin had proposed that it should, but is actually being strengthened in every possible way.  The writer is distinctly reproachful about the refusal of Stalin to allow the State to "wither away."
            This is typical of the general shift of criticism in relation to the Soviet Union.  A few years ago the critics, with Trotsky in the van, were shouting that the Soviet Five Year Plan would not produce the expected economic results.  Today, when the economic results aimed at have in the main been achieved, they shout in chorus: "But it is not yet Socialism.  There is no equality of income.  The State has not yet disappeared, etc."
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 128
 
            [It was new year’s, 1937] In commissariats and party bureaus the finishing touches were being put to the annual report.  And there was something to report.  During the last year, the Kharkov Machine-Building Plant had been commissioned, the Kama Cellulose Combine had been ceremonially opened, building had started on the Solikamsk magnesium factory, the Konakar hydroelectric station in Armenia had started up, the Murmansk Fish Combine had started working, alongside hundreds of other enterprises of all sizes.  All this was impressive, in quantity, if not in quality.  Even the defense industry commissariat, which had only been formed in 1936 and had not fulfilled its plan on a number of lines, sent in a report which began, 'The defense industry will be the best in the country'.  Stalin was pleased with the reports he got from commissars Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Lyubimov: rail transport, light and local industry and trade were at last yielding a small surplus.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 275
 
            Nevertheless, in an unusually short time gigantic industrial projects were completed in the Urals, the Kuznetsk basin, the Volga region, and Ukraine.  Factories were built in Moscow Leningrad, textile mills in Central Asia, and so on.  The Turkestan-Siberia Railway, built before the revolution, was extended and a branch added to Karaganda.  In all, 5,500 kilometers of rail were laid.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 230
 
            These included Roy Medvedev the first Soviet historian who, 20 years ago, had the courage to break the conspiracy of silence about Stalin, gives a figure of approximately 1500 big enterprises built, the largest power station in Europe, on the Dnieper; the Magnitogorsk and Kuznetsk metallurgical complexes; the Ural machine factory and chemical works; the Rostov agricultural machinery plant; tractor factories at Cheliabinsk, Stalingrad, and Kharkov; automobile factories in Moscow and Sormovo; the Kramator heavy machinery plant, and so on.
            New sectors of industry were established that had not existed in tsarist Russia: machine tools, automobile and tractor manufacture, airplane factories, the production of high-grade steel, ferrous alloys, synthetic rubber.  The construction was begun of thousands of kilometers of new railways and canals, and of many new cities and workers' settlements.  New centers of heavy industry were cited in the territories of the non-Russian peoples, the former borderlands of tsarist Russia--in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, Siberia, and Buriat-Mongolia.  This wider dispersal of industry created a second center of the metallurgical and oil industries in the eastern part of the country.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 279
 
            In January 1933, Stalin delivered a swaggering Bolshevik rodomontade to the Plenum: the Five-Year Plan had been a remarkable success.   The Party had delivered a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil production.   Cities had been built where none stood before.   The Dnieper River Dam and power station and the Turk-Sib railway and all been completed....
Montefiore, Sebag. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 119
 
MARXISTS HAVE SUFFERED AND DIED BY THE MILLIONS FOR THE CAUSE
 
            The Communists have shed the bright red of their blood over all the lands of the Earth.  Do people realize that the age-old martyrology of the Jews is gradually being overtaken and passed in numbers by that of the pioneer Socialists?  Count them: in the past eight years the accumulation of dead, wounded, and condemned as reached more than 6 million.
            Who knows what goes on in all the capitalist gaols of the universe, and who can give us an insight into the thousands and thousands of hellish and bestial scenes for which the guardians of class order and their sadistic genius for human suffering are responsible!
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 235
 
 
            Let the reader recall the young men he has met in the pages of this book.  They were at once dreamers and hard workers, idealists and stern realists--the flower of the Revolution, the incarnation of its dynamic spirit.  It seems incredible for the Revolution to go on without them.  But it does go on.  For they are dead.  Nearly everyone in this book is now in his grave.  Here is the way some of them died:
Volodarsky--assassinated in the general plot to kill all Soviet leaders.
Neibut--executed on the Kolchak Front.
Yanishev-- bayonetted by a White Guard on the Wrangel Front.
Tonkonogy--shot at his desk by the White Guards. 
Utkin--dragged from a motor car and shot.
Sukhanov-- led into the woods in the early morning and clubbed to death with rifle butts.
Melnikov--taken out of prison, shot, and bludgeoned.
Williams, Albert. Through the Russian Revolution. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1967, p. 237
 
 
STALIN SAYS MARXISTS ARE NOT TRYING TO EQUALIZE EVERYONE
 
            And yet, these men who are content for themselves to live a dull, often ascetic, life, are by no means fanatics on the subject of leveling, as many people think.  With us, the average man--whose brain does not yet know how to digest ideas properly and whose head is filled with a strange farrago of headings of social and political doctrines--has three great grievances against the Communist, grievances such that they transform the said Communist into an ogre.  They are that he is anti-patriotic, that he wants to deprive everyone of his possessions, and that he wants to turn society into a vast disciplined and equalized barracks, and to level everyone's intelligence like paving-stones.  But the Communist Internationalists are, on the contrary, all in favor of national expansion, on the sole condition that is not obtained by war, and is not put into the hands of so-called businessmen.  Their general theory of the suppression of private property only harms a negligible number of social parasites and profiteers, and it brings with it enormous benefit to all the other inhabitants of the Earth.  (All public evils result, beyond any question, from the moral and material chaos brought about by the general struggle to grow rich.)  As for leveling, they are its avowed enemies as soon as it goes beyond that great law of justice and of equity (the basis, in fact, of Socialism) which consist in giving each human being precisely the same political power, that is to say, in effacing the artificial and pernicious inequality on the threshold of destiny.  It would be easy to show that Socialism is, of all regimes, the one which cultivates individuality the most and the best.
            Stalin is very insistent on this point: "By equality, Marxism does not mean the leveling of personal requirements and conditions of existence, but the suppression of classes, that is to say equal enfranchisement for every worker after the overthrow and expropriation of the Capitalists....  The equal duty of everyone to work according to his capacity, and the equal right of all workers to be remunerated according to work they do (socialist society): the equal duty of everyone to work according to his capacity and the equal right of all workers to be remunerated according to their needs (communist society).  Marxism starts from the fact that the needs and taste of men can never be alike nor equal either in quality or in quantity, either in the socialist or the communist era.  Marxism has never recognized and does not now recognize any other form of equality."
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 236-237
 
            Later when I turned the conversation to the astonishing volte-face in which the communism of recent years cast all its boasted equality behind it, Stalin made a long and doctrinaire reply.  He described a perfectly Socialist society as an impossibility so long as classes existed, and so long as work was a burden for many, and pleasure for only a few.
            "Every man according to his abilities and attainments; that is the Marxist formula for the first stage of socialism.  In the final stage, every man will produce as much as he can and be paid according to his needs.  Socialism has never denied differences in tastes and needs, the extent of such differences.  Why, Marx attacks the principal of absolute equality!  In the West, people imagine that we want first to collect everything, then distribute it in a thoroughly primitive fashion.  That might do well for Cromwell, but not for our scientific socialism."
Ludwig, Emil. Three portraits: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. New York Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, c1940, p. 120
 
CRITICISM OF THE SU SHOULD FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE AS WELL AS THE NEGATIVE
 
            ...one must always give the true proportion between good and evil--which is never done, so far as the USSR is concerned, when criticism is inconsiderately leveled at it without paying the least attention to the point of view of the other side.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 239
 
NO POLITICAL PARTIES HAVE AN HONEST POLICY EXCEPT THE BOLSHEVIKS
 
            Look at the neighboring countries, and see how many Parties in power have an honest policy which they follow.  Actually there are no such Parties in the world, for they all live without perspective, wandering amidst the chaos of the world crisis and unable to see the way out of the morass.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 240
 
STALIN SAYS THE SU WILL NOT SEIZE OR YIELD LAND
 
            "We do not want one foot of anyone else's land, but we will not yield an inch of our own."  (Stalin.)
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 247
 
GOODS ARE UNEQUALLY DISTRIBUTED BECAUSE OF ECONOMIC NATIONALISM
 
            Gone, in the first quarter of the 20th century, is the time when the capitalist stomach had the Equator as its belt.
            It is not over-production that should be indicted, for, actually, the world does not produce enough for its needs, but the disorder in the distribution of produce as a result of economic nationalisms.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 251
 
THE CAPITALIST DISGUISE OF FASCISM
 
Capitalism, to continue to be Capitalism, has had to disguise its aims.  It has done so with a great deal of false modesty.  As Stalin expressly said, some time ago, Capitalism cannot emerge from the crisis with "it's head held high," it can only emerge from it "on all fours."
            Faced with the progress of socialism and the advance of their own decay, the middle classes soon pull themselves together.  They improved their program of conservative seizure (having the material means of doing so), and today they are rising to the surface again, carefully disguised.  The capitalist system is discreetly tucked away into the background, and is no longer visible in the foreground at all.
            That disguise called Fascism--which, without being a necessary adjunct to middle-class power, does in fact occur almost everywhere (and has become the new uniform of Capitalism)--has as its main objective the division of the enemy and especially the isolation of the working classes and socialism at the same stroke, by getting the workers who do not belong to the laboring classes on its side.  This scheme was very carefully prepared by continuous, intensive, very carefully prepared propaganda starting soon after the end of the war [WWI], at a period at which the ruling classes were crippled and were rapidly losing their hold over the masses.
            Discontent, resulting from all the disillusionment and all the hardships of post-war existence, has been fostered and exploited by Capitalism through a certain democratic demagogism and by certain ideas dishonestly borrowed from socialist terminology.  Capitalism has extracted from these a compound of all the bitterness, all the disillusionment and all the anger, and has diverted it and directed it against a few cock-shies set up by itself.
            One of these cock-shies (apart from socialism) is the parliamentary system which, it is declared, must be swept away, in addition to Socialism, so that the last semblance of liberty may disappear (liberty itself having already vanished).  So the parliamentary system (which really thoroughly deserves it!) is accused of all the sins of Israel, thereby cunningly shifting them from the shoulders of the middle-class system itself.
            And they have all the other scapegoats they need.  Present-day Reaction has protested louder than anyone else against the scandals, frauds, and semi-official embezzlements with which its own methods are so filled, and it has gone out of its way to incriminate with these misdeeds of the capitalist system, not indeed all capitalists, but only those who have at length grown weary of the colossal complacency of class legislation.
            And by thus playing with words (as, for instance, with the elastic word "regime"), the new-fangled Reaction has created a certain anti-Capitalism with excellent demagogic scope.  It is the only means of preserving Capitalism: suppress parliament and install in its place a dictatorial government, and prosecute the villains who have committed the crime of being found out, and Capitalism becomes unassailable.
            This activity in defense of Capitalism, with its rudiments of a superficial and negative programme, emanates from all sorts of different organizations only differing from one another by their titles, and forming a solid opposition group to the workers' movement.
            The peasant classes and the lower middle-classes are set against the workers; officials are set against manual laborers; and everyone is set against the officials.  The taxpayers, all the ex-soldiers who do not understand the situation, and the very young men, are dazzled.  The controlling idea is to gather all those who are not already organized, the floating population, in fact, into a new organization over which control can be kept, and to smother the worker in it.
            Socialism--the threadbare, mangy author of all evil--is decried at the same time as the parliamentary system, by putting it in an entirely false light.  People are horrified by being made to believe that Socialism is plotting their destruction.
            People say: "Socialists have been in power in England and in Germany.  See what they have done."  They omit to add that the people in question were perhaps socialist in name, but that they never applied the principles of Socialism.  And indeed it must be recognized that this piece of sophistry is partly reinforced by the very real disappointment which certain Social-Democratic leaders, by their actions during and after the war, gave to the workers.  All their pandering, whether disloyal or merely childish, and their actual betrayal of the workers, have to some extent discredited Socialism, and have appreciably weakened it among certain classes of workers which are not yet ripe for ruthless and uncompromising Communism.
            So we see Mr. MacDonald, a Socialist converted to the virtues of Capitalism, being exhibited with pride, "much as a reformed drunkard is exhibited by a temperance society," says Mr. Snowden.  As for the achievements of the USSR these are hidden, and stolen from the people.
            The neo- Reactionaries are particularly virulent (as is natural) against trade unionism.  We know what Mussolini thinks about it, and we also know the sentiments of those who prompt Hitler with what he has to say.  And not long ago, Monsieur Tardieu explicitly said: "To overcome the world crisis, all that is required is effective control of trade unions."  The Corporate State systems which flourish in Italy, in Germany, and (in disguise) in France, are based precisely on this principle.  It is the system of intimidation and of new militarism --which fills Herr Krupp with enthusiasm; it transforms every worker into a soldier--a machine tool or a rifle on two legs.
            But the great weapon of Fascism against Socialism is Nationalism.
            National unity and greatness, prophesies Fascism, can only be acquired if Internationalism, which is the principal element of disorder, misery, and perdition, is crushed.  So down with foreigners, naturalized aliens, and Jews!--down, above all, with Socialists and Communists.
            Nationalism is the principal driving force of Fascism.  It is a kind of chauvinistic intoxication which makes this timely re-grouping of Capitalism proceed.  It is its leaven.
            A powerful leaven, indeed--the simplest, the most terrible and the most dynamic of all.  Its passion inflames hundreds of millions of people.  The myth of national interest or national honor inflames the dullest and most apathetic of citizens--and how much more so empty-headed, loud-voiced youth!  It is the most stupid of all evil instincts because, being highly contagious, it blindly paves the way for every calamity.
            "Ourselves, ourselves alone!"  A comprehensive formula which avoids all deep reflection and foresight.  The most valuable key-formula.  One which appeals to the vital interests of the rich, of military men, and of churchmen, and at the same time to the stupidity of everyone else.
            Social preservation then, takes the form--for the final struggle--of so-called moral and national reconstruction trampling Socialism and the free citizen underfoot, and of a strong power which raises itself, with its soldiery, above any criticism.  It is the capitalist police converted into a party.
            This is the dope which Fascism has served out and is still serving out to the taxpayers--consisting of claiming to be able to put an end to the crisis and the depression by the help of the same methods that brought in about.  The various forms of Fascism differ among themselves superficially; but underneath they are all the same.
            However much it may establish a sort of farce of democracy, a sort of caricature of Socialism, and however loudly it gives expression to revolutionary sentiments and ideas of controlled economy--and even anti-Fascism--and however much it climbs up upon proletarian principles in order to raise itself higher, this so-called doctrine of popular reconstruction, which has installed itself in Italy, in Germany, in Hungary, in Poland, in the Balkan Peninsula, in Portugal, in Austria (where the liberators have met with the most frightful butchery and the most appalling tortures), and which at the present moment is recruiting adherents among the youth, the lower middle-classes and the faithful of the churches of France and of other countries, is no more democratic than it is new.  It is the old Capitalism beplumed, tin-plated and militarized, and it consists of the same enormous fundamental contradictions running through a doctrine that is so vague that ordinary people can--at first--be made to believe that they are being pushed forward when they are really being dragged back.
            It achieves nothing.  Fascism is not and never will be anything but a veneer, and the only really imaginative or original things that Fascists have ever done have been to decide upon the color of their shirts and to persuade the people that one can live on smoke.
            It still remains that form of society in which one only prospers in proportion as one ruins someone else, in which one only lives by killing other people, that form of society which invades new continents in order to steal weak countries and to make the natives pay for the very air they breathe, that abject form of society in which one cannot be honest without being a fool, where the elections violate the will of the people, where men exploit each other, assassinate each other, and the payment of all the great social debts is indefinitely postponed by illusive appearances of settlement, and the people are perpetually dancing over a concealed volcano.
            Such a system cannot possibly put an end to the crisis; it can only make it worse, because the more Nationalism develops, the more it proceeds to its own destruction.
            It produces nothing--except, perhaps, a death sentence.  The "order" proclaimed by middle-class rule is that of the cemetery.
            What can be the outcome of it all?  Only war.  And once more we shall have snout-like gas-masks, train-loads of soldiers-- hearses full of living men--masses of people rushing headlong to get themselves killed, fields turned into heaps of scrap-metal, villages into stone heaps, and whole peoples asphyxiated in subterranean prisons.
            But war is also social revolution scattered broadcast in the furrows of the trenches and over every hearth in the cities.
            In the meantime, the chances that this spectral program, the program of blundering delusion and of annihilation, has of taking root anywhere--apart from its pretense of democracy--is that it has on its side brute force, the force of the State.  Because all European and American governments are either fascist or pre-fascist. 
            Capitalism, dragged down in the landslide of statistics, in the melting away of figures, and economically ruined, is still strong politically.  Its bankrupt partisans are armed to the teeth.  They can no longer keep their feet but they possess machine guns, tanks, bombs, armies; they have crowds of policemen who would look well in an agricultural show.  They control the law courts (the prisons), the newspapers, the schools, diplomacy, and aggressive alliances.  Legality belongs to them alone and they coin laws as they do money, inflating them as they inflate their currencies.
            They have all they need in order to sweep away men of independent thought, to plunder the weak, to exploit civilization to their own evil ends, to instill national confidence to a point of wildest enthusiasm into a part of the lower middle-classes, even to death itself, to squander the efforts of the people and to maintain for a little while longer the era of decadence and destruction.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 252-258
 
            Fritz Thyssen was the first to shout "Heil Hitler" at the Dusseldorf meeting in February....  It means that big business has already decided to install the house painter in the Wilhelmstrasse.
Litvinov, Maksim Maksimovich. Notes for a Journal. New York: Morrow, 1955, p. 219
 
 
MUSSOLINI IS THE LOUD-SPEAKER OF REACTION AND FASCISM
 
            Mussolini, the loud-speaker of world Reaction,...
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 260
 
WAR IS THE ONLY RECOURSE FOR HITLER
 
            War is the only recourse for Hitler, who has no constructive program.  As soon as he feels himself sufficiently armed and sufficiently supplied with allies, he will cast off his mask.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 262
 
GANDHI’S RESTRAINT HAS SOLD OUT INDIA IN A RIVER OF BLOOD
 
            In India, where the British Government sows civilization from bombing airplanes and which makes gaps and rivers of blood with its machine-guns... the restraint imposed by Gandhi has been as good as a carnage.  Gandhi, a servile dreamer and an enemy of progress, has betrayed 350 million human beings.  The man who might have been the savior of India has done nothing.  Preserve us from those who destroy nations so as to prevent them from shedding blood!
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 266
 
GREAT BRITAIN IS THE LAST STRONGHOLD OF REACTION
 
            Great Britain will be the last stronghold of Reaction in the world.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 266
 
US AND JAPAN WILL ALWAYS BE ENEMIES
 
            ...and also against the United States, which will always be its [Japan] acknowledged enemy so long as there are not two Pacific Oceans in the world.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 267
 
NOTHING CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED EXCEPT THROUGH INTERNATIONALISM
 
            Events also show--and one must not tire of proclaiming these truths--that one must embrace Internationalism in a practical way before one can emerge from chaos, because history, whether we want it to or not, speaks to us internationally.  They show that nothing can be accomplished, even within frontiers, without disregarding frontiers.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 273
 
STALIN IS HUMBLE AND NOT DOMINATED BY PRIDE OR PERSONAL VANITY
 
            Nowadays when I read or hear somewhere that my father used to consider himself practically a god, it amazes me that people who knew him well can say such a thing.
            It's true my father wasn't especially democratic, but he never thought of himself as a god.
Alliluyeva, Svetlana. Twenty Letters to a Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 205
 
            One of his main objects seems to be never to try to shine, and never to make himself conspicuous.
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 280
 
            ...It is quite obvious that it is something else than personal vanity and the pride that he has in his name that thrusts this man to the fore and keeps him in the breach.  It is faith...  It is faith in the inherent justice of logic.  It is faith in knowledge, which Lenin expressed so deeply, when he replied to someone who spoke to him about the cowardly attack of which he had been the victim, and which shortened his days: "What can you expect?  Everyone acts according to his knowledge."  It is faith in the socialist order and in the masses in which it is incarnate, faith in work, in what Stetsky calls the stormy growth of productive forces: "Work," says Stalin, "is a question of dignity, heroism, and glory."  It is faith in the Workers' Code, the Communist Law, and it's terrific integrity....
Barbusse, Henri. Stalin. New York: The Macmillan company, 1935, p. 280
 
            Be that as it may, I attended many affairs at the Kremlin, even rowdy ones, but I never noticed any signs of vainglory in Stalin, not even when he was under the influence of alcohol; he merely became more garrulous than usual, his voice grew slightly louder though, and he laughed more readily.
Tuominen, Arvo, The Bells of the Kremlin: Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983, p. 163
 
TROTSKY TRIES TO BELITTLE STALIN’S ROLE IN THE REVOLUTION
 
            Trotsky did his best to systematically denigrate the revolutionary past of Stalin, and almost all bourgeois authors repeat these slanders.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 25 [pp. 15-16 on the NET]
 
TROTSKY DID NOT JOIN THE PARTY UNTIL AUG. 1917
 
            Trotsky was trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes, talking about `the party', because he had never belonged to the Bolshevik Party that Lenin, Zinoviev, Stalin, Sverdlov and others forged between 1901 and 1917.  Trotsky joined the Party in July 1917.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 25 [pp. 15-16 on the NET]
 
SOCIALIST INDUSTRIALIZATION WAS FAR LESS PAINFUL THAN CAPITALIST INDUSTRIALIZATION
 
            Kuromiya showed how Stalin presented industrialization as a class war of the oppressed against the old ruling classes. 
            This idea is correct. Nevertheless, through untold numbers of literary and historical works, we are told to sympathize with those who were repressed during the class wars of industrialization and collectivization. We are told that repression is `always inhuman' and that a civilized nation is not allowed to hurt a social group, even if it was exploiting. 
            What can be said against this so-called `humanist' argument?
            How was the industrialization of the `civilized world' made? How did the London and Paris bankers and industries create their industrial base? Could their industrialization have been possible without the pillage of the India? Pillage accompanied by the extermination of more than sixty million American Indians? Would it have been possible without the slave trade in Africans, that monstrous bloodbath? UNESCO experts estimate the African losses at 210 million persons, killed during raids or on ships, or sold as slaves. Could our industrialization have been possible without colonization, which made entire peoples prisoners in their own native lands?
            And those who industrialized this little corner of the world called Europe, at the cost of millions of `indigenous' deaths, tell us that the Bolshevik repression against the possessing classes was an abomination? Those who industrialized their countries by chasing peasants off the land with guns, who massacred women and children with working days of fourteen hours, who imposed slave wages, always with the threat of unemployment and famine, they dare go on at book length about the `forced' industrialization of the Soviet Union? 
            If Soviet industrialization could only take place by repressing the rich and reactionary five per cent, capitalist industrialization consisted of the terror exercised by the rich five per cent against the working masses, both in their own countries and in dominated ones.
            Industrialization was a class war against the old exploiting classes, which did everything they possibly could to prevent the success of the socialist experience. It was often accomplished through bitter struggle within the working class itself: illiterate peasants were torn out of their traditional world and hurled into modern production, bringing with them all their prejudices and their retrograde concepts.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 43 [p. 39 on the NET]
 
            We have seen the follies and the cruelties that attended Stalin's 'great change'.  They inevitably recall those of England's industrial revolution, as Karl Marx has described them in Das Kapital.  The analogies are as numerous as they are striking.  In the closing chapter of the first volume of his work, Marx depicts the 'primitive accumulation" of capital (or the 'previous accumulation', as Adam Smith called it), the first violent processes by which one social class accumulated in its hands the means of production, while other classes were being deprived of their land and means of livelihood and reduced to the status of wage-earners.  The process which, in the 30s, took place in Russia might be called the 'primitive accumulation' of socialism in one country....
            In this way the individual farmers were either compelled to join the collective farms or were virtually expropriated.  Marx recalls 'the bloody discipline' by which the free peasants of England were made into wage-laborers, 'the disgraceful action of the state which employed the police to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labor'.  His words might apply to many of the practices introduced by Stalin.  Marx sums up his picture of the English industrial revolution by saying that 'capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'.  Thus also comes into the world--socialism in one country.
            In spite of its 'blood and dirt', the English industrial revolution--Marx did not dispute this--marked a tremendous progress in the history of mankind.  It opened a new and not unhopeful epoch of civilization.  Stalin's industrial revolution can claim the same merit.  It is argued against it that it has perpetrated cruelties excusable in earlier centuries but unforgivable in this.  This is a valid argument, but only within limits.  Russia had been belated in her historical development.  In England serfdom had disappeared by the end of the 14th century.  Stalin's parents were still serfs.  By the standards of British history, the 14th and the 20th centuries have, in a sense, met in contemporary Russia....  Even in the most irrational and convulsive phase of his industrial revolution, however, Stalin could make the claim that his system was free from at least one major and cruel folly which afflicted the advanced nations of the west: 'The capitalists [these were his words spoken during the Great Depression] consider it quite normal in a time of slump to destroy the "surplus" of commodities and burn "excess" agricultural produce in order to keep up high prices and ensure high profits, while here, in the USSR, those guilty of such crimes would be sent to a lunatic asylum.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 342
 
            When one discussed these matters [peasants selling their grain] with some knowledgeable Russian, he had a simple explanation and defense:
            The capital goods that we need for creating heavy industry do not drop down from heaven; they must be obtained through the wealth that is most accessible to us, the peasants' and labor and property.  Prosperity cannot be achieved without an emphasis on heavy industry, and when it is achieved the peasants may sell their grain freely, but not before.
Tuominen, Arvo, The Bells of the Kremlin: Hanover: University Press of New England, 1983, p. 123
 
SU PROVED SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY COULD WORK
 
            Incredible rebuttal to all those educated renegades who read in scientific books that socialist construction in one country, particularly a peasant one, is not possible. The theory of the `impossibility of socialism in the USSR', spread by the Mensheviks and the Trotskyists was a mere lamentation showing the pessimism and the capitulationist spirit among the petite bourgeoisie. As the socialist cause progressed, their hatred for real socialism, that thing that should not exist, only sharpened.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 51 [p. 42 on the NET]
 
WORKING CLASS CONTROL WOULD HAVE COLLAPSED IF THE KULAKS HAD PREVAILED
 
            If the kulaks, who represented already 5 per cent of the peasantry, had succeeded in extending their economic base and definitively imposing themselves as the dominant force in the countryside, the socialist power in the cities would not have been able to maintain itself, faced with this encirclement by bourgeois forces.  Eighty-two per cent of the Soviet population was peasant.  If the Bolshevik Party had no longer succeeded in feeding the workers at relatively low prices, the very basis of working class power would have been threatened. 
            Hence it was necessary to accelerate the collectivization of certain sectors in the countryside in order to increase, on a socialist basis, the production of market wheat.  It was essential for the success of accelerated industrialization that a relatively low price for market wheat be maintained. A rising rural bourgeoisie would never have accepted such a policy.  Only the poor and middle peasants, organized in co-operatives, could support it.  And only industrialization could ensure the defence of the first socialist country....
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 65 [p. 52 on the NET]
 
WHEN COLLECTIVIZATION IS CALLED FOR GROUPS RUSH TO HELP INSTALL IT
 
            Once the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party had called for accelerating the collectization, a spontaneous movement developed, brought to the regions by activists, youth, old soldiers of the Red Army and the local apparatus of the Party.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 65 [p. 53 on the NET]
 
            A Trotskyite capitulator, an engineer of the Putilov factory, mentioned an interesting case to me in which the workers took a favorable attitude towards Stalin's policy of collectivization.  One of the 25,000 had been killed; 10 volunteers offered to replace him.  Among them was one of the oldest workers in the factory.  My informant quoted the case to prove that the mass of the workers was supporting Stalin's policy and that the Opposition should do the same.
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 111
 
POOR PEASANTS WERE THE PRIMARY IMPLIMENTERS OF COLLECTIVIZATION
 
            Numerous anti-Communist books tell us that collectivization was `imposed' by the leadership of the Party and by Stalin and implemented with terror.  This is a lie.  The essential impulse during the violent episodes of collectivization came from the most oppressed of the peasant masses.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 66 [p. 54 on the NET]
 
            Lynn Viola continued on page 216 in The Best Sons of the Fatherland:
            “The state ruled by circular, it ruled by decree, but it had neither the organizational structure nor the manpower to enforce its voice or to ensure correct implementation of its policy in the administration of the countryside....  The roots of the Stalin system in the countryside do not lie in the expansion of state controls but in the very absence of such controls and of an orderly system of administration, which, in turn, resulted as the primary instrument of rule in the countryside.”
            This conclusion, drawn from a careful observation of the real progress of collectivization, requires two comments.
            The thesis of `Communist totalitarianism' exercised by an `omnipresent Party bureaucracy' has no real bearing with the actual Soviet power under Stalin.  It is a slogan showing the bourgeoisie's hatred of real socialism.  In 1929--1933, the Soviet State did not have the technical means, the required qualified personnel, nor the sufficient Communist leadership to direct collectivization in a planned and orderly manner: to describe it as an all-powerful and totalitarian State is absurd.
            In the countryside, the essential urge for collectivization came from the most oppressed peasants.  The Party prepared and initiated the collectivization, and Communists from the cities gave it leadership, but this gigantic upheaval of peasant habits and traditions could not have succeeded if the poorest peasants had not been convinced of its necessity. Viola's judgment according to which `repression became the principal instrument of power' does not correspond to reality. The primary instrument was mobilization, consciousness raising, education and organization of the masses of peasants. This constructive work, of course, required `repression', i.e. it took place and could not have taken place except through bitter class struggle against the men and the habits of the old regime. 
            Be they fascists or Trotskyists, all anti-Communists affirm that Stalin was the representative of an all-powerful bureaucracy that suffocated the base. This is the opposite of the truth.  To apply its revolutionary line, the Bolshevik leadership often called on the revolutionary forces at the base to short-circuit parts of the bureaucratic apparatus. 
            `The revolution was not implemented through regular administrative channels; instead the state appealed directly to the party rank and file and key sectors of the working class in order to circumvent rural officialdom. The mass recruitments of workers and other urban cadres and the circumvention of the bureaucracy served as a breakthrough policy in order to lay the foundations of a new system.'
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 67 [p. 55 on the NET]
 
            To understand the Bolshevik Party's line during the collectivization, it is important to keep in mind that on the eve of 1930, the State and Party apparatus in the countryside was extremely weak---the exact opposite of the `terrible totalitarian machine' imagined by anti-Communists.  The weakness of the Communist apparatus was one of the conditions that allowed the kulaks to throw all their forces into a vicious battle against the new society.
            On January 1, 1930, there were 339,000 Communists among a rural population of about 120 million people!  Twenty-eight Communists for a region of 10,000 inhabitants.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 69 [p. 56 on the NET]
 
            The usual assumption outside the Soviet Union is that this exiling occurred through drastic action by a mystically omnipotent G.P.U..  The actual process was quite different; it was done by the village meetings of poor peasants and farmhands which listed those kulaks who "impede the collective farm by force and violence" and asked the government to deport them.  In the hot days of 1930 I attended several of these meetings.  They were harsh, ruthless discussions, analyzing one by one the "best families," which had grabbed the best lands, exploited labor by owning the tools of production, as "best families" normally and historically do, and who were now fighting the rise of the collective farms by arson, cattle-killing and murder.  Meetings of poor peasants and farmhands discussed them, questioned them, passed on them, allowing some to remain but listing others as "dangerous to our peaceful development--should be deported from our village."
            It was a harsh, bitter and by no means bloodless conflict.  I was reminded of it again in the San Joaquin Valley of California by the cotton pickers’ strike in the autumn of 1933.  The same gradations from half-starved farmhand to wealthy rancher, though the extremes in California were wider.  California local authorities permitted deportation of pickets who interfered with farming of private ranchers; Soviet authorities permitted deportation of kulaks who interfered with the collectively owned farms of poor peasants and laborers.  In both cases the central government sent investigating commissions, slightly moderating and
therewith sanctioning the local actions.  The governor's commission in California threw out a few of the most untenable cases against strikers.  In the USSR the township and provincial commissions reviewed the lists of "kulaks for exile" and greatly cut them down, guarding against local spites and excesses.  But the active winning will which could count on the backing of government was in California the will of ranchers and finance corporations; in the USSR, the will of organized farmhands.
Strong, Anna Louise. Dictatorship and Democracy in the Soviet Union. New York: International Pamphlets, 1934, p. 4-5
 
            The traditions of the rural Russian communities and the primitive collectivism of the peasants contributed mightily to the success of collectivization.  The Russian villages had never liked the capitalist peasant, the kulak, growing rich at the expense of the mir (village community).
Ciliga, Ante, The Russian Enigma. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 101
 
            The dispossession and dispersal of the 'kulaks' was, on the whole, a popular policy among proletarians and party activists, by no means something that Stalin imposed on reluctant comrades.
McNeal, Robert, Stalin: Man and Ruler. New York: New York University Press, 1988, p. 313
 
THE KULAK CLASS WAS TO BE ELIMINATED NOT THE KULAKS THEMSELVES
 
            The Soviet term, `liquidation of the kulaks as a class', indicates perfectly clearly that it is the capitalist exploitation organized by the kulaks that is to be eliminated and not the physical liquidation of the kulaks as persons.  Playing with the word `liquidation', academic hacks such as Nolte and Conquest claim that the exiled kulaks were `exterminated'.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 94 [p. 80 on the NET]
 
            In a "directive circular" Stalin declared: "One must rely entirely on the poor peasants and consolidate the alliance with the moderately prosperous peasants in order to engage in the decisive struggle to annihilate the kulaks as a social class."   Of course, to annihilate them as a social class did not mean the physical extinction of the kulaks.
Delbars, Yves. The Real Stalin. London, Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 162
 
            It is hard and horrible, for twentieth century America to hear this, but facts are facts.  Stalinism not only aims but boasts of aiming at the complete smashing of class boundaries, at the death of all distinctions save talent and State service between man and man.  Rank may replace class in the Bolshevik cosmogony to satisfy human needs, but rank based on merit, not on wealth or birth.
            But what, you may ask, becomes of “the Former People,” or the kulaks or engineers thus doomed apparently to perish?  Must all of them and their families be physically abolished?  Of course not--they must be “liquidated” or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass....
            To illustrate--they take a kulak or other type of “former” individualism--a private business man or self-seeking engineer--and send him to the northern woods or Siberian construction camps.  Sometimes his family goes too.  More generally it remains to be absorbed by poverty into the lower proletarian surroundings.
            Then they tell him:  “You outcast!  You man that was, and now is not!  You can get back your civic rights; can be reborn a proletarian; can become a free member of our ant heap by working for and with us for our communal purpose.  If you don’t, we won’t actually kill you, but you won’t eat much, won’t be happy, will remaini forever an outsider, as an enemy, as we consider it, even if ultimately you return from exile and rejoin your family....
            That reduced to its harsh essentials, is Stalinism today.  It is not lovely, nor, in the outside world, of good repute, and your correspondent has no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth.  But truth it is--ant-heap system, ant-heap morality--each for all and all for each, not each for self and the devil take the hindmost.
            Duranty, Walter.  “Stalinism Smashes Foes in Marx’s Name,” New York Times, June 24, 1931.
 
SOVIET GOVT TRIES TO SAVE FROM EPIDEMIC THE CHILDREN SENT INTO EXILE
 
            Stefan Merl, a German researcher describes the percarious conditions in which the first kulaks were sent to Siberia, during the first wave of collectivization in January-March 1930.
            “With the beginning of spring, the situation in the receiving camps aggravated.  Epidemics were widespread, leaving many victims, particularly among the children.  For this reason, all children were removed from the camps in April 1930 and sent back to their native villages.  At that time, some 400,000 persons had already been deported to the North; until th summer of 1930, probably 20,000 to 40,000 persons died.”
Merl, Stefan, “Ausrottung” der Bourgeoisie und der Kulaken in Sowjetrussland?  Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987), p. 376
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 96 [p. 80 on the NET]
 
CONQUEST’S FIGURES ARE ALL BUT WORTHLESS
 
            Conquest writes that after 1938, there were an "odd million arrests per annum."  Stubborn as I am, I insist on evidence for this claim....  Weissberg wrote that, "After January 1, 1939, the arrests fell away practically to nothing."  As my article showed, a number of survivors spoke of the bad time as only 1937 or 1937-1938.  The Poles and Ukrainians arrested beginning in September 1939 belong to a different story, in a very different context.  I would argue that early 1939 represented a sharp break with the immediately preceding period.  The idea that a system of terror continued in some fashion is contradicted by a number of accounts, while evidence for this theory presented to date is very thin indeed.
            Thurston, Robert W. "On Desk-Bound Parochialism, Commonsense Perspectives, and Lousy Evidence: A Reply to Robert Conquest." Slavic Review 45 (1986), p. 241.
 
            Conquest’s book [Harvest of Sorrow] will thus give a certain academic credibility to a theory which has not been generally accepted by non-partisan scholars outside the circles of exiled nationalities.  In today’s conservative political climate, with its “evil empire” discourse, I am sure that the book will be very popular.
            Getty, Arch.  “Starving the Ukraine.” Reviewing in The London Review of Books on January 22, 1987, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest September,1986.
 
            The most striking tales of atrocity are generally second-hand and unverifiable; they seem to compete with one another in their body-counts and depiction of savagery.
            Getty, Arch.  “Starving the Ukraine.” Reviewing in The London Review of Books on January 22, 1987, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest September,1986.
 
            ...But there is plenty of blame to go around.  It must be shared by the tens of thousands of activists and officials who carried out the policy and by the peasants who chose to slaughter animals, burn fields and boycott cultivation in protest.  Beyond fixing blame, however, the tempting conclusion of intentionality is unwarranted: the case  for a purposeful famine is weakly supported by the evidence and relies on a very strained interpretation of it....
            Yet there are reasons why the majority of scholars have so far rejected the theory [that Stalin sealed off the Ukraine’s borders to prevent flight and produce mass starvation].  First, we actually know very little about the scale of the famine.  Using census calculations of excess mortality, Conquest arrives at a figure of some five million victims of the Ukrainian famine.  Yet such respected economic and demographic experts as Wheatcroft, Anderson, and Silver have examined the same census data and have suggested that the numbers Conquest supports are much too high.  Additionally, Conquest notes that the famine varied greatly from place to place in the Ukraine.  According to post-WWII interviews with Ukrainian emigres, some places saw little or no shortage of food.  What regional or local differences could explain this?  Were grain quotas arbitrarily set by local officials?  Did high levels of peasant resistance or boycott contribute to famine?  We do not know.
            Second, Conquest has failed to establish a convincing motive for genocide.  Certainly Stalin was capable of vindictive cruelty,...but those who knew and dealt with him during the war and after, and they include many Westerners, agree that he was not insane or irrational.  Although he certainly meant to break peasant resistance to his brand of socialism, one must wonder why any national leader would deliberately imperil the country’s survival, its military strength and thus his own security, by methodically setting out to exterminate those who produced the food--and then stopping short of completing the presumed suicide....  our knowledge of the sources suggests that a genocidal Stalin is unnecessary to explain the events of the famine as we know them.  More convincing explanations can be advanced....
            Getty, Arch.  “Starving the Ukraine.” Reviewing in The London Review of Books on January 22, 1987, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine by Robert Conquest September,1986.
 
            Conquest is a major `authority' in the right wing.  But Merl noted that Conquest's writings show a `frightening lack of criticism of sources'.  Conquest `uses writings from obscure Emigres taking up information transmitted by second or third hand....  Often, what he presents as `facts' are only verified by a single questionable source.'
Merl, Stefan, “Ausrottung” der Bourgeoisie und der Kulaken in Sowjetrussland?  Geschichte und Gesellschaft 13 (1987), p. 535
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 97 [p. 81 on the NET]
 
            ...For a long time, writings by authors who are not Communists, such as Merl, allowed one to refute Conquest's gross slanders.
            But in 1990, Zemskov and Dugin, two Soviet historians, published detailed statistics of the Gulag.  Hence the exact figures are now available and they refute most of Conquest's lies.
            During the most violent period of the collectivization, in 1930--1931, the peasants expropriated 381,026 kulaks and sent their families to unplowed land to the East.  These included 1,803,392 persons.  As of 1 January 1932, there were 1,317,022 people in the new establishments.  The difference is 486,000.  The disorganization helping, many of the deported were able to escape during the trip, which often took three months or more.  (To give an idea, of the 1,317,022 settled, 207,010 were able to flee during the year 1932.)
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 97 [p. 81 on the NET]
 
            Up to now [1990], no problem.  Everything was going just fine for our anti-Communists.  Their word was taken for granted. 
            Then the USSR split up and Gorbachev's disciples were able to grab the Soviet archives.  In 1990, the Soviet historians Zemskov and Dugin published the unedited statistics for the Gulag.  They contain the arrivals and departures, right down to the last person.
            Unexpected consequence: These accounting books made it possible to remove Conquest's scientific mask.
            In 1934, Conquest counted 5 million political detainees.  In fact there were between 127,000 and 170,000.  The exact number of all detained in the work camps, political and common law combined, was 510,307.  The political prisoners formed only 25 to 35 per cent of the detainees.  To the approximately 150,000 detainees, Conquest added 4,850,000. Small detail! 
            Annually, Conquest estimated an average of 8 million detainees in the camps.  And Medvedev 12 to 13 million.  In fact, the number of political detainees oscillated between a minimum of 127,000 in 1934 and a maximum of 500,000 during the two war years, 1941 and 1942.  The real figures were therefore multiplied by a factor of between 16 and 26.  When the average number of detainees was somewhere between 236,000 and 315,000 political detainees, Conquest `invented' 7,700,000 extra!  Marginal statistical error, of course.  Our school books, our newspapers, do not give the real figure of around 272,000, but the horror of 8,000,000!
            Conquest, the fraud, claims that in 1937--1938, during the Great Purge, the camps swelled by 7 million “politicals” and there were in addition 1 million executions and 2 million other deaths.  In fact, from 1936 to 1939, the number of detained in the camps increased by 477,789 persons (passing from 839,406 to 1,317,195).   A falsification factor of 14.  In two years, there were 115,922 deaths, not 2,000,000.  For the 116,000 dead of various causes, Conquest adds 1,884,000 “victims of Stalinism.”
            Gorbachev's ideologue, Medvedev, refers to 12 to 13 million in the camps; under the liberal Khrushchev, there remained 2 million, all common law.  In fact, during Stalin's time, in 1951, the year of the greatest number of detained in the Gulag, there were 1,948,158 common law prisoners, as many as during Khrushchev's time.  The real number of political prisoners was then 579,878.  Most of these “politicals” had been Nazi collaborators: 334,538 had been convicted for treason.
            According to Conquest, between 1939 and 1953, there was, in the work camps, a 10 per cent death rate per year, some 12 million “victims of Stalinism.”  An average of 855,000 dead per year.  In fact, the real figure in peace time was 49,000.  Conquest invented a figure of 806,000 deaths per year.  During the four years of the war, when Nazi barbarity was imposing unbearable conditions on all Soviets, the average number of deaths was 194,000.  Hence, in four years, the Nazis caused an excess of 580,000 deaths, for which, of course, Stalin is responsible.  Werth, who denounces Conquest's falsifications, still does his best to maintain as much as possible the myth of Stalinist “crimes.”
            “In fourteen years (1934--1947), 1 million deaths were registered in the work camps alone.”  So Werth also blames socialism for the 580,000 extra deaths caused by the Nazis!
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 193 [p. 168-169 on the NET]
 
MANY DEPORTED PEOPLE DIED BECAUSE PARTY DIRECTIVES WERE IGNORED
 
            ...Others, whose case was reviewed, were allowed to return home.  An undetermined number, that we have estimated at 100,000, died during the travels, mainly because of epidemics.  The considerable number of deaths during displacements must be seen in the context of that epoch: a weak administration, precarious living conditions for the entire population, sometimes chaotic class struggles among the peasant population overtaken by leftism.  Of course, for each death during displacement, the Right affirms that the guilty party is the Party, is Stalin.  But in fact the contrary is true.  The Party's position is clearly stated in one of the numerous reports about this problem, this one dated 20 December 1931 by the person responsible for a work camp at Novossibirsk.
            `The high mortality observed for convoys Nos 18 to 23 coming from the North Caucasus---2,421 persons out of 10,086 upon departure---can be explained by the following reasons:
`1. A negligent, criminal approach to the selection of deported contingents, among whom were many children, aged over 65 years of age and sick people;
`2. The non-respect of directives about the right for deportees to bring with them provisions for two months of transfer.
`3. The lack of clean water, which forced the deported to drink unclean water.  Many are dead of dysentery and of other epidemics.'
            Werth, Nicolas, “Goulag: les vrais chifres’.  L’ Histoire 169 (September 1993, p. 44.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 98 [p. 81-82 on the NET]
 
            All these deaths are classed under the heading “Stalinist crimes'.  But this report shows that two of the causes of death were linked to the non-respect of Party directives and the third had to do with the deplorable sanitary conditions and habits in the entire country.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 98 [p. 82 on the NET]
 
ABORTION WAS MADE ILLEGAL TO INCREASE THE POPULATION
 
            Free abortion had also dramatically reduced the birthrate during the thirties, to the point where the government banned it in 1936 to increase the population.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 101 [p. 91 on the NET]
 
            If after years of careful experiment, it is found that abortion has an evil affect on the health of women resorting to it, that it is being used as a substitute for birth control, there is nothing in Socialism which justifies the toleration of such a state of affairs.
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 118
 
            One distinguished American doctor who examined the situation with reference to abortion, came to the following conclusions:
            "All doctors, however, agreed that repeated abortions affected the woman's health in a serious way.  Although it is impossible to give accurate statistical data about morbidity following induced abortion, yet there is no doubt that menstrual disturbances, endocrine troubles, sterility, and ectopic pregnancy were frequently observed as a result of repeated abortions."
            "Repeated abortion is harmful to the mother's health and hence should be forbidden in any society that is able (1) to guarantee a job to all its members, men and women; (2) to provide medical and social institutions to care for mother and child free of charge; (3) to give adequate financial aid to large families; (4) to give contraceptive advice to all who seek it" (H. E. Sigerist, M.D.--Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union, pp. 266 and 271).
Campbell, J. R. Soviet Policy and Its Critics. London: V. Gollancz, ltd., 1939, p. 119
 
            In 1936, in view of the rising standard of welfare of the people, the government passed a law prohibiting abortion, at the same time adopting an extensive program for the building of maternity homes, nurseries, milk centers and kindergartens.  In 1936, 2,174,000,000 rubles were assigned for these measures, as compared with 875 million rubles in 1935.  A law was passed providing for considerable grants to large families.  Grants to a total of over one billion rubles were made in 1937 under this law.
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 340
 
CONQUEST IS A PAID PROPAGANDA AGENT AND LIED ABOUT STALIN
 
            In January 1978, David Leigh published an article in the London Guardian, in which he revealed that Robert Conquest had worked for the disinformation services, officially called the Information Research Department (IRD), of the British secret service. In British embassies, the IRD head is responsible for providing `doctored' information to journalists and public figures.  The two most important targets were the Third World and the Soviet Union. Leigh claimed:
            `Robert Conquest ... frequently critical of the Soviet Union was one of those who worked for IRD.  He was in the FO [Foreign Office] until 1956.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 108 [p. 92 on the NET]
 
            The defeat of Trotsky, though not yet final, had been due to a virtually unanimous campaign by all the other leaders, his only support being the dying Lenin.  Factional fighting in the Politburo was now, however, thrown open for all.  Of the seven men elected as full members in June 1924, six would be killed by the lone survivor.
            This membership now consisted of Zinoviev and Kamenev; Stalin; Trotsky; and Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky.
[WRONG:  NO EVIDENCE STALIN KILLED TROTSKY; TOMSKY COMMITTED SUICIDE; THE OTHER 4 WERE FOUND GUILTY BY A TRIAL
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 133
 
            ...Feuchtwanger, whose book on Stalin and the USSR really deserves to be read, indeed reprinted, for the pathos of its idiocy.  [Describes Conquest]
Conquest, Robert. Stalin: Breaker of Nations. New York, New York: Viking, 1991, p. 184
 
            He [Pyatakov] had been, it was true, an oppositionist, and an important one.  But he had abandoned opposition in 1928 and had worked with complete loyalty ever since....
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 140
 
            After the pleas, the court recessed for 20 minutes.  It has been suggested that this was to give time to put a little pressure on Krestinsky.  Probably; but the recess was only five minutes longer than that at the previous trials.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 344
 
 
WHAT FAMINE THERE WAS IN THE EARLY 30’S WAS CAUSED BY THE KULAKS
 
            There was famine in the Ukraine in 1932-1933.  But it was provoked mainly by the struggle to the bitter end that the Ukrainian far-right was leading against socialism and the collectivization of agriculture. 
            During the thirties, the far-right, linked with the Hitlerites, had already fully exploited the propaganda theme of `deliberately provoked famine to exterminate the Ukrainian people'. But after the Second World War, this propaganda was `adjusted' with the main goal of covering up the barbaric crimes committed by German and Ukrainian Nazis, to protect fascism and to mobilise Western forces against Communism.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 113 [p. 96 on the NET]
 
            The peasants passive resistance, the destruction of livestock, the complete disorganization of work in the kolkhozes, and the general ruin caused by continued dekulakization and deportations all lead in 1932-33 to a famine that surpassed even the famine of 1921-22 in its geographical extent and the number of its victims.
Nekrich and Heller. Utopia in Power. New York: Summit Books, c1986, p. 238
 
            Was there or was there not a famine in the USSR in the years 1931 and 1932?
            Those who think this a simple question to answer will probably already have made up their minds, in accordance with nearly all the statements by persons hostile to Soviet Communism, that there was, of course, a famine in the USSR; and they do not hesitate to state the mortality that it caused, in precise figures--unknown to any statistician--varying from three to six and even to 10 million deaths.   On the other hand, a retired high official of the Government of India, speaking Russian, and well acquainted with czarist Russia, who had himself administered famine districts in India, and who visited in 1932 some of the localities in the USSR in which conditions were reported to be among the worst, informed the present writers at the time that he had found no evidence of there being or having been anything like what Indian officials would describe as a famine.
            Footnote: Skepticism as to statistics of total deaths from starvation, in a territory extending to 1/6 of the Earth's landmass, would anyhow be justified.   But as to the USSR there seems no limit to the wildness of exaggeration.   We quote the following interesting case related by Mr. Sherwood Eddy, an experienced American traveler in Russia: "Our party, consisting of about 20 persons, while passing through the villages heard rumors of the village of Gavrilovka, where all the men but one were said to have died of starvation.   We went at once to investigate and track down this rumor.   We divided into four parties, with four interpreters of our own choosing, and visited simultaneously the registry office of births and deaths, the village priest, the local soviet, the judge, the schoolmaster and every individual peasant we met.   We found that out of 1100 families three individuals had died of typhus.   They had immediately closed the school and the church, inoculated the entire population and stamped out the epidemic without developing another case.   We could not discover a single death from hunger or starvation, though many had felt the bitter pinch of want.   It was another instance of the ease with which wild rumors spread concerning Russia."
            Without expecting to convince the prejudiced, we give, for what it may be deemed worth, the conclusion to which our visits in 1932 and 1934, and subsequent examination of the available evidence, now lead us.   That in each of the years 1931 and 1932 there was a partial failure of crops in various parts of the huge area of the USSR is undoubtedly true.   That is true also of British India and of the United States.   It has been true also of the USSR, and of every other country at all comparable in size, in each successive year of the present century.   In countries of such vast extent, having every kind of climate, there is always a partial failure of crops somewhere.   How extensive and how serious was this partial failure of crops in the USSR of 1931 and 1932 it is impossible to ascertain with any assurance.   On the other hand, it has been asserted, by people who have seldom had any opportunity of going to the suffering districts, that throughout huge provinces there ensued a total absence of foodstuffs, so that (as in 1891 and 1921) literally several millions of people died of starvation.   On the other hand, soviet officials on the spot, in one district after another, informed the present writers that, whilst there was shortage and hunger, there was, at no time, a total lack of bread, though its qu­ality was impaired by using other ingredients than wheaten flower; and that any increase in the death-rate, due to diseases accompanying defective nutrition, occurred only in a relatively small number of villages.   What may carry more weight than this official testimony was that of various resident British and American journalists, who traveled during 1933 and 1934 through the districts reputed to have been the worst sufferers, and who declared to the present writers that they had found no reason to suppose that the trouble had been more serious than was officially represented.   Our own impression, after considering all the available evidence, is that the partial failure of crops certainly extended to only a fraction of the USSR; possibly to no more, than 1/10 of the geographical area.   We think it plain that this partial failure was not in itself sufficiently serious to cause actual starvation, except possibly, in the worst districts, relatively small in extent.   Any estimate of the total number of deaths in excess of the normal average, based on a total population supposed to have been subjected to famine conditions of 60 millions, which would mean half the entire rural population between the Baltic and the Pacific (as some have rashly asserted), or even 1/10 of such a population, appears to us to be fantastically excessive.
            On the other hand, it seems to be proved that a considerable number of peasant households, both in the spring of 1932 and in that of 1933, found themselves unprovided with a sufficient store of cereal food, and specially short of fats.   To these cases we shall return.   But we are at once reminded that in countries like India and the USSR, in China, and even in the United States, in which there is no ubiquitous system of poor relief, a certain number of people--among these huge populations even many thousands--die each year of starvation, or of the diseases endemic under these conditions; and that whenever there is even a partial failure of crops this number will certainly be considerably increased.   It cannot be supposed to have been otherwise in parts of the southern Ukraine, the Kuban district and Daghestan in the winters of 1931 and 1932.
            But before we are warranted in describing this scarcity of food in particular households of particular districts as a "famine," we must inquire how the scarcity came to exist.   We notice among the evidence the fact that the scarcity was "patchy."   In one and the same locality, under weather conditions apparently similar if not identical, there are collective farms which have in these years reaped harvests of more than average excellence, whilst others, adjoining them on the north or on the south, have experienced conditions of distress, and may sometimes have known actual starvation.   This is not to deny that there were whole districts in which drought or cold seriously reduced the yield.   But there are clearly other cases, how many we cannot pretend to estimate, in which the harvest failures were caused, not by something in the sky, but by something in the collective farm itself.   And we are soon put on the track of discovery.   As we have already mentioned, we find a leading personage in the direction of the Ukrainian revolt actually claiming that "the opposition of the Ukrainian population caused the failure of the green-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932."   He boasts of the success of the "passive resistance which aimed at a systematic frustration of the Bolshevik plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest."   He tells us plainly that, owing to the efforts of himself and his friends, "whole tracks were left unsown," and "in addition, when the crop was being gathered last year [1932], it happened that, in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40 and even 50% was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing."
            So far as the Ukraine is concerned, it is clearly not Heaven which is principally to blame for the failure of crops, but the misguided members of many of the collective farms.   What sort of "famine" is it that is due neither to the drought nor the rain, heat nor cold, rust nor fly, weeds nor locusts; but to a refusal of the agriculturists to sow ("whole tracks were left unsown"); and to gather up the wheat when it was cut ("even 50% was left in the fields")?
            Footnote: ["Ukrainia under Bolshevik Rule" by Isaac Mazepa, in Slavonic Review, January 3, 1934, pages 342-343.]   One of the Ukrainian nationalists who was brought to trial is stated to have confessed to having received explicit instructions from the leaders of the movement abroad to the effect that "it is essential that, in spite of the good harvest (of 1930), the position of the peasantry should become worse.   For this purpose it is necessary to persuade the members of the kolkhosi to harvest the grain before it has become ripe; to agitate among the kolkhosi members and to persuade them that, however hard they may work, their grain will be taken away from them by the State on one pretext or another; and to sabotage the proper calculation of the labor days put into harvesting by the members of the kolkhosi so that they may receive less than they are entitled to by their work" (Speech by Postyshev, secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, to plenum of the Central Committee, 1933).
            Footnote:   It can be definitely denied that the serious shortage of harvested grain in parts of southern Ukraine was due to climatic conditions.   "In a number of southern regions, from 30 to 40% of the crop remained on the fields.   This was not the result of the drought which was so severe in certain parts of Siberia, the Urals, in the Middle and Lower Volga regions that it reduced there the expected crops by about 50%.   No act of God was involved in the Ukraine.   The difficulties experienced in the sowing, harvesting, and grain collection campaign of 1931 were man-made" ("Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union," by W. Ladejinsky, Political Science Quarterly, New York, June 1934, page 222).
            The other district in which famine conditions are most persistently reported is that of Kuban, in the surrounding areas, chiefly inhabited by the Don Cossacks, who, as it is not irrelevant to remember, were the first to take up arms against the Bolshevik Government in 1918, and so begin the calamitous civil war.   These Don Cossacks, as we have mentioned, had enjoyed special privileges under the tsars, the loss of which under the new regime has, even today, not been forgiven.   Here there is evidence that whole groups of peasants, under hostile influences, got into such a state of apathy and despair, on being pressed into a new system of cooperative life which they could not understand and about which they heard all sorts of evil, that they ceased to care whether their fields were tilled or not, or what would happen to them in the winter if they produced no crop at all.  Whatever the reason, there were, it seems, in the Kuban, as in the Ukraine, whole villages that sullenly abstained from sowing or harvesting, usually not completely, but on all but a minute fraction of their fields, so that, when the year ended, they had no stock of seed, and in many cases actually no grain on which to live.   There are many other instances in which individual peasants made a practice, out of spite, of surreptitiously "barbering" the ripening wheat; that is, rubbing out the grain from the ear, or even cutting off the whole ear, and carrying off for individual hoarding this shameless theft of community property.
            Unfortunately it was not only in such notoriously disaffected areas as the Ukraine and Kuban that these peculiar "failures of crops" occurred.
            To any generally successful cultivation, he [Kaganovich] declared, "the anti-soviet elements of the village are offering fierce opposition.   Economically ruined, but not yet having lost their influence entirely, the kulaks, former white officers, former priests, their sons, former ruling landlords and sugar-mill owners, former Cossacks and other anti-soviet elements of the bourgeois-nationalist and also of the social-revolutionary and Petlura-supporting intelligentsia settled in the villages, are trying in every way to corrupt the collective farms, are trying to foil the measures of the Party and the Government in the realm of farming, and for these ends are making use of the backwardness of part of the collective farm members against the interests of the socialized collective farm, against the interests of the collective farm peasantry.
            Penetrating into collective farms as accountants, managers, warehouse keepers, brigadiers and so on, and frequently as leading workers on the boards of collective farms, the anti-soviet elements strive to organize sabotage, spoil machines, sow without the proper measures, steal collective farm goods, undermine labor discipline, organize the thieving of seed and secret granaries, sabotage grain collections--and sometimes they succeed in disorganizing kolkhosi.
            However much we may discount such highly colored denunciations, we cannot avoid noticing how exactly the statements as to sabotage of the harvest, made on the one hand by the Soviet Government, and on the other by the nationalist leaders of the Ukrainian recalcitrants, corroborate each other.   To quote again the Ukrainian leader, it was "the opposition of the Ukrainian population" that "caused the failure of the grain-storing plan of 1931, and still more so, that of 1932."   What on one side is made a matter for boasting is, on the other side, a ground for denunciation.   Our own inference is merely that, whilst both sides probably exaggerate, the sabotage referred to actually took place, to a greater or less extent, in various parts of the USSR, in which collective farms had been established under pressure.   The partial failure of the crops due to climatic conditions, which is to be annually expected in one locality or another, was thus aggravated, to a degree that we find no means of estimating, and rendered far more extensive in its area, not only by "barbering" the growing wheat, and stealing from the common stock, but also by deliberate failure to sow, failure to weed, failure to thresh, and failure to warehouse even all the grain that was threshed.   But that is not what it is usually called a famine.
            What the Soviet Government was faced with, from 1929 onward, was, in fact, not a famine but a widespread general strike of the peasantry, in resistance to the policy of collectivization, fomented and encouraged by the disloyal elements of the population, not without incitement from the exiles at Paris and Prague.   Beginning with the calamitous slaughter of live-stock in many areas in 1929-1930, the recalcitrant peasants defeated, during the years 1931 and 1932, all the efforts of the Soviet Government to get the land adequately cultivated.   It was in this way, much more than by the partial failure of the crops due to drought or cold, that was produced in an uncounted host of villages in many parts of the USSR a state of things in the winter of 1931-1932, and again in that of 1932-1933, in which many of the peasants found themselves with inadequate supplies of food.   But this did not always lead to starvation.   In innumerable cases, in which there was no actual lack of rubles, notably in the Ukraine, the men journeyed off to the nearest big market, and (as there was no deficiency in the country as a whole) returned after many days with the requisite sacks of flour.   In other cases, especially among the independent peasantry, the destitute family itself moved away to the cities, in search of work at wages, leaving its rude dwelling empty and desolate, to be quoted by some incautious observer as proof of death by starvation.   In an unknown number of other cases--as it seems, to be counted by the hundred thousand--the families were forcibly taken from the holding which they had failed to cultivate, and removed to distant places where they could be provided with work by which they could earn their substance.
            The Soviet Government has been severely blamed for these deportations, which inevitably caused great hardships.   The irresponsible criticism loses, however, much of its force by the inaccuracy with which the case is stated.   It is, for instance, almost invariably taken for granted that the Soviet Government heartlessly refused to afford any relief to the starving districts.   Very little investigation shows that relief was repeatedly afforded where there was reason to suppose that the shortage was not due to sabotage or deliberate failure to cultivate.   There were, to begin with, extensive remissions of payments in-kind due to the government.   But there was also a whole series of transfers of grain from the government stocks to villages found to be destitute, sometimes actually for consumption, and in other cases to replace the seed funds which had been used for food.
            Footnote: Thus: "On February 17, 1932, almost six months before the harvesting of the new crop the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party, directed that the collective farms in the eastern part of the country, which had suffered from the drought, be loaned over 6 million quintals of grain for the establishment of both seed and food funds."
            ("Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union," by W. Ladejinsky, Political Science Quarterly, New York, June 1934, page 229).
Webb, S. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation. London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1947, p. 199-205
 
ALL THE TROTS AND ZINOVIEVITES ARE EXPELLED
 
            On December 27, 1927, the Central Committee declared that the opposition had allied itself with anti-Soviet forces and that those who held its positions would be expelled from the Party. All the Trotskyist and Zinovievite leaders were expelled.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 135 [p. 116 on the NET]
 
            ... With the support of other party leaders, Stalin secured Zinoviev's removal from the Politburo in July 1926, followed by Trotsky's in the following October.  Kamenev was relieved of his duties as a candidate member.  A Central Committee plenum recognized that further work by Zinoviev in the Comintern was impossible.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 134
 
            ... After several Central Committee and Central Control Commission meetings, Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the Central Committee in October 1927, and from the party in the following month, a move ratified by the 15th Party Congress when it met in December of the same year.  Among 25 other active members of the opposition expelled from a party at the same time was Kamenev, although he and Zinoviev would later be reinstated and even make declarations of repentance at the 17th Party Congress.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 136
 
            At the next Congress, two years later (December 1927), Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were expelled from the party.
Bazhanov, Boris. Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, c1990, p. 144
 
            Only after many delays could he [Stalin], in November 1932 and January 1933, expel some of the malcontents and pronounce a new excommunication on Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were once again banished from Moscow, this time to Siberia.  During this, his second deportation, Zinoviev allegedly stated that the greatest mistake of his life, greater even than his opposition to Lenin during the days of the October Revolution, had been his decision to desert Trotsky and to capitulate to Stalin in 1927.  Soon thereafter Preobrazhensky, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky, Muralov, Ter-Vaganyan, and many other capitulators were once again expelled and imprisoned;....
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 172
 
            On 9 November, 1927, he [Stalin] requested the Politburo exclude Trotsky and Zinoviev, "guilty of serious infraction of the statutes," from the party.   On 14 November an extraordinary assembly of the Central Committee and the Central Commission of Control confirmed the decision.   In December it was ratified by the Pan-Russian Congress of the Party, which at the same time decided to apply the same measure to the active leaders of the opposition: Kamenev, Radek, Preobrazensky, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, L. Smirnov, Mdivani, Lifschitz, Smilga, Sapronov, Boguslavsky, Sarkiss, Drobnis, and V. Smirnov.   The excluded members were dismissed from their posts, and those of them who took part in a demonstration on 7 November were deported to the regions of the Volga or the Ural.
Delbars, Yves. The Real Stalin. London, Allen & Unwin, 1951, p. 152
 
            The 15th Party Congress approved the decision of the joint meeting of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission to expel Trotsky and Zinoviev from the Party and resolved on the expulsion of all active members of the bloc of Trotskyites and Zinovievites, such as Radek, Preobrazhensky, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Serebryakov, I Smirnov, Kamenev, Sarkis, Safarov, Lifshitz, Mdivani, Smilga and the whole "Democratic-Centralism" group (Sapronov, V. Smirnov, Boguslavsky, Drobnis and others).
Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.), Ed. History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks): Short Course. Moscow: FLPH, 1939, p. 289
 
ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV RECANT
 
            However, in June 1928, several Zinovievites recanted and were re-integrated, as were their leaders Zinoviev, Kamenev and Evdokimov.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 135 [p. 116 on the NET]
 
            Certain groups of oppositionists signed declarations of obedience to the decisions of the Congress and petitioned to be readmitted to membership.  Trotsky himself signed several of these petitions but to no avail.  Zinoviev and Kamenev petitioned to be readmitted and abjectly recanted, confessing that their opposition views had been antiparty and anti-Leninist.  Their conduct was pitiful.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 219
 
            He [Stalin] had no fear of Zinoviev and Kamenev.  Their nerve had failed them at the time of the Great October Revolution.  Expelled from the party, they had made abject confessions of error and had been readmitted in June 1928....
            This applied with special force to those of the left opposition who, following the change in policy, had accepted his leadership.  A number of senior members of this faction applied for readmission to the party.  It was usually granted and they received minor posts.  The first of these capitulators Boldakov, as they were called, was Pyatakov, whom Lenin in his "Testament" described as "a man of indubitably outstanding will and outstanding capacities."  In July 1929 a group, of whom Radek and Preobrazhensky were most senior, applied for readmission.
Grey, Ian. Stalin, Man of History. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979, p. 240
 
            It is clear that treatment of the opposition was variable.  Zinoviev and Kamenev were in bad odor from 1927 to 1929 but were reinstated during the First Five Year Plan.  They were arrested and exiled, however, at the end of 1932.  At the beginning of 1934 (the time of the 17th Congress) they were welcomed back.  They addressed the congress and their articles appeared in Pravda throughout 1934....  They were rearrested and imprisoned in early 1935 in connection with the assassination of Kirov, but were not charged with capital crimes until 1936.  It seems, therefore, that the regime was not following any single consistent policy regarding the opposition.  It seems safe to assume that the appearance of oppositionists at the 17th Congress represented the ascendancy of the soft line, whereas the jeers they received showed that all were not satisfied with the arrangement.
Getty, A. Origins of the Great Purges. Cambridge, N. Y.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985, p. 19
 
            Zinoviev and Kamenev had recanted publicly in the [1927 15th Party] Congress, severing all connection with the Opposition, and making unconditional submission to the majority.  That was the beginning of the double game they were to play, consisting of simultaneously denying their own convictions and plotting secretly against the authorities, which eventually it was to bring them to their deaths.
Barmine, Alexandre. Memoirs of a Soviet Diplomat. London: L. Dickson limited,1938, p. 227
 
            In the same month [May 1933], Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought back from Siberia to make another confession of error.  Pravda published a piece by Kamenev, condemning his own mistakes and calling on the oppositionists to cease any resistance.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 30
 
            Again denounced, expelled from the Party, and sent into exile in 1932, Zinoviev and Kamenev were readmitted in 1933 on similar but yet more abject self-abasement.  Zinoviev wrote to the Central Committee:
            "I ask you to believe that I am speaking the truth and nothing but the truth.  I ask you to restore me to the ranks of the Party and to give me an opportunity of working for the common cause.  I give my word as a revolutionary that I will be the most devoted member of the Party, and will do all I possibly can at least to some extent to atone for my guilt before the Party and its Central Committee."
            And soon afterward, he was allowed to publish an article in Pravda condemning the opposition and praising Stalin's victories.
Conquest, Robert. The Great Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 116
 
            And it must be remembered that Kamenev and Zinoviev had more than once in the past, when in conflict with the Central Committee of the Communist Party, "confessed their errors" and by this means succeeded in maintaining themselves in positions from which they could carry out their factional fight against the Party.
Shepherd, W. G. The Moscow Trial. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1936, p. 7
 
            In 1930, despite having no higher education he [Zinoviev] was made the Rector of Kazan University, and in December 1931 Deputy Chairman of the State Scientific Council.  But he kept alive the memory of his earlier closeness to Lenin, and always believed that sooner or later he would return to the pinnacle of power.
Volkogonov, Dmitrii. Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press, 1994, p. 282
 
            In May 1933 Zinoviev and Kamenev once again capitulated and returned from exile.  At their first capitulation, in 1927, they had surrendered to Stalinism, but had not gone, and no one expected them to go, on their knees before Stalin's person.  When this was required of them in 1932 they could not yet bring themselves to do it.  This, however, was what they did in 1933:....
Deutscher, Isaac. The Prophet Outcast. London, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963, p. 207
 
            The same month [May 1933], Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been expelled from the party a second time and deported to Siberia after the Ryutin affair, were allowed to return and purge their guilt by a further confession, calling upon former oppositionists to end their resistance.  Rakovsky, the Bulgarian veteran revolutionary, the last of the leading Trotskyites to make his peace, and Sosnovsky, another exile, were welcomed back into the fold.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Knopf, 1992, p. 299
 
            Bukharin became editor of the government’s newspaper Izvestia in 1934; Zinoviev and Kamenev returned to prominence around the same time.
Service, Robert. Stalin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2005, p. 285
 
            ... The Boss had them brought them back to Moscow.  The featherbrained coxcomb Zinoviev was given a job on the magazine Bolshevik,   
Radzinsky, Edvard.  Stalin. New York: Doubleday, c1996, p. 298
 
            These endeavors did not go unrewarded.   Kamenev, whom Gorky held in high esteem, was received by Stalin for a private talk in which he acknowledged and renounced his former oppositionism.   Subsequently he was appointed to a leading post in the Academia publishing house.   In the summer of 1933, he, Zinoviev, and number of other former oppositionists were reinstated as party members, making it possible for them to participate in the coming party congress, which was due to open at the end of January 1934.
Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power: 1929-1941. New York: Norton, 1990, p. 244
 
            Hence, early in the summer of 1933, when it became certain that the harvest would be good, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and a number of other former members of the Opposition were once again readmitted as members of the Party.  They were even permitted to choose their spheres of work, and some of them actually received invitations to the Party Congress (February, 1934).
Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite; "The letter of an Old Bolshevik." New York: Praeger, 1965, p. 34
 
            Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that in 1934, Stalin suddenly became milder, more affable, more yielding; he took pleasure in the society of writers, artists, and painters, in listening to their conversation and in stimulating them to frank discussion....
            This mood soon found its reflection in Stalin's attitude with respect to the former Oppositionists.  Particularly significant in this connection was the reinstatement of Bukharin, who had been in disfavor for some years, as editor of Izvestia.  More characteristic still was Stalin's new attitude toward Kamenev.  If I am not mistaken, Kamenev had been expelled from the Party three times and had as many times repented.  His last sideslip had occurred in the winter of 1932-33, when he was discovered "reading and not reporting" Riutin's program, a document Stalin hated with particular force.  This time it seemed as though Kamenev was in for serious and protracted struggle.  But Gorky, who greatly esteemed Kamenev, succeeded in softening Stalin's heart.  He arranged a meeting between Stalin and Kamenev at which Kamenev is said to have made some decoration of love toward Stalin....
            No one knows the details of this meeting, which took place in strictest privacy, but its outcome was received with approval in Party circles.  Stalin, as he almost publicly declared, had "come to believe Kamenev."  At the interview Kamenev is said to have spoken quite openly of his entire oppositional activity, explaining why he had formerly opposed Stalin and why he had now ceased his opposition.  It was said that Kamenev gave Stalin his "word of honor" not to engage in any more oppositional activity.  In return he was given wide powers in the management of the Academia publishing house and was promised important political work in the near future.
Nicolaevsky, Boris. Power and the Soviet Elite; "The letter of an Old Bolshevik." New York: Praeger, 1965, p. 46
 
BUKHARIN SUPPORTED THE KULAKS
 
            The next great ideological struggle was led against Bukharin's rightist deviation during the collectivization.  Bukharin put forward a social-democratic line, based on the idea of class re-conciliation.  In fact, he was protecting the development of the kulaks in the countryside and represented their interests.  He insisted on a slowing down of the industrialization of the country.  Bukharin was torn asunder by the bitterness of the class struggle in the countryside, whose `horrors' he described and denounced.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 135 [p. 116 on the NET]
 
            "Well," said Okman, "I'll tell you.  Bukharin is the leading counsel of the Kulaks; he is always on the side of any opportunist in the communist parties abroad; he is on the side of anyone who's drifting to the Right."
            This was a complete surprise to me.  Andrey [Tokaev's older brother] had taught me to believe that in the whole Olympus of Bolshevism there was not a man cleverer, better qualified, more honorable or more revolutionary than Bukharin.  Yet here he was condemned by someone who knew him personally, and who obviously himself had a considerable standing in the Party--how otherwise would he be touring the Caucasus with his own chauffeur-driven car?
            "Shall I tell you what your Bukharin is like?"  cried Okman.  "He will never come out into the open.  He will prove to you privately that Stalin wants to be the leader of an 'autarchic communism'--the communism of a Russia isolated from the rest of the world.  He detests both Stalin and Molotov, but he will never publicly oppose their views.  He wants others to fight his political battles for him, that's what he's like."
Tokaev, Grigori. Betrayal of an Ideal. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955, p. 64
 
 
BUKHARIN THE RIGHTIST UNITES WITH KAMENEV AND ZINOVIEV THE LEFTISTS
 
            During this struggle, former `Left Opposition' members made unprincipled alliances with Bukharin in order to overthrow Stalin and the Marxist-Leninist leadership.  On July 11, 1928, during the violent debates that took place before the collectivization, Bukharin held a clandestine meeting with Kamenev.  He stated that he was ready to `give up Stalin for Kamenev and Zinoviev', and hoped for `a bloc to remove Stalin'.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 135 [p. 116 on the NET]
 
ZINOVIEV AND KAMENEV EXPELLED AGAIN FOR ACCEPTING THE RYUTIN PLATFORM
 
            By that time [the period when collectivization succeeded in 1932--1933], Zinoviev and Kamenev had started up once again their struggle against the Party line, in particular by supporting the counter-revolutionary program put forward by Riutin in 1931--1932.  They were expelled a second time from the Party and exiled to Siberia.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 136 [p. 117 on the NET]
 
            In 1932 Zinoviev and Kamenev were once again expelled from the party for "contacts with the Ryutin group."  They were arrested....  After one more recantation, however, they were freed and readmitted to the party.  At the Seventeenth Party Congress (in 1934) they gave speeches confessing their sins.
Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 179
 
            Following Ryutin's arrest in September 1932 one of the top bodies of the party, the Control Commission, expelled 20 other members for belonging to a "counter-revolutionary group" led by him.  Among those ousted were the former Politburo members and oppositionists Zinoviev and Kamenev, who reportedly had received copies of one of Ryutin's works but had not informed the authorities.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 17
 
            ...During one of Yagoda's routine visits to Stalin, the master said: 'Keep an eye on Kamenev.  I think he's tied up with Ryutin.  Kamenev is not one to give in so easily.  I've known him for more than 20 years.  He's an enemy.' Yagoda did as he was told.  Kamenev was arrested in 1934, tried in 1935 and given five years.  He was tried again in the same year and this time given 10 years.  At the end of 1936, a full stop was put to his case, forever.
Volkogonov, Dmitri. Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991, p. 61
 
            In 1932 Zinoviev, Kamenev, and many others were once again expelled from the party and exiled to Siberia.  “The greatest political mistake of my life was that I deserted Trotsky in 1927,” Zinoviev now said....  A few months later, however, in May 1933, Zinoviev and Kamenev were, after a new recantation, allowed to return from exile.
Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin; A Political Biography. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967, p. 350
 
            Zinoviev and Kamenev were also acquainted with the documents, but neither of them informed the GPU or the Central Committee.  They had therefore failed in their duty as Party members to notify the Party and the GPU immediately of oppositional activity....
            On September 15, 1932, the "counterrevolutionary" group was arrested by the GPU.  Zinoviev and Kamenev were summoned by the Party Control Commission.  They were charged with knowing about the group and failing to report it.  The commission reminded Kamenev of his conversation with Bukharin and of his alliance with the Trotskyists.  The October leaders were expelled from the Party and banished --Kamenev to Minusinsk, Zinoviev to Kustanai.  Bukharin was not yet touched.
Radzinsky, Edvard.  Stalin. New York: Doubleday, c1996, p. 274
 
KIROV’S KILLING CAUSED DISARRAY IN THE PARTY WHICH THOUGHT EVERYONE WAS UNITED
 
            Kirov's assassination took place just as the Party leadership thought that the most difficult struggles were behind them and that Party unity had been re-established.  Stalin's first reaction was disorganized and reflected panic.  The leadership thought that the assassination of the number two man in the Party meant the beginning of a coup d'Etat.  A new decree was immediately published, calling for the use of summary procedures for the arrest and execution of terrorists.  This draconian measure was the result of the feeling of mortal danger for the socialist regime.  At first, the Party looked for the guilty within traditional enemy circles, the Whites.  A few of them were executed.
            Then, the police found Nikolayev's journal.  In it, there was no reference to an opposition movement that had prepared the attack.  The inquiry finally concluded that Zinoviev's group had `influenced' Nikolayev and his friends, but found no evidence of direct implication of Zinoviev, who was sent back to internal exile.
            The Party's reaction showed great disarray.  The thesis by which Stalin `prepared' the attack to implement his `diabolical plan' to exterminate the opposition is not verified by the facts.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 137 [p. 119 on the NET]
 
NEAR THE END TROTSKY UNITES WITH ALL SORTS OF ANTI-SOVIET FORCES
 
            It was clear in 1936 to anyone who was carefully analyzing the class struggle on the international scale that Trotsky had degenerated to the point where he was a pawn of all sorts of anti-Communist forces.  Full of himself, he assigned himself a planetary and historic role, more and more grandiose as the clique around him became insignificant.  All his energy focused on one thing: the destruction of the Bolshevik Party, thereby allowing Trotsky and the Trotskyists to seize power.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 138 [p. 120 on the NET]
 
            By the mid-30s the Trotskyites in all countries were serving three principal purposes for world reaction:
            (1) They acted as the main instrument by which Western reaction hoped to gain a foothold inside the land of socialism, the USSR, as a fifth column behind the lines of socialism which was to aid, and complement by espionage and sabotage inside the Soviet Union, the open war preparations made outside.
            (2) They acted as an arsenal of right-wing reactionary propaganda and slander against the Soviet Union, the Communist parties, the militant socialists and trade unions, and the anti-fascist and peace forces, an arsenal of reactionary right-wing propaganda dressed up in left-wing words.
            (3) They acted as an instrument to aid the capitalists by trying to penetrate the working-class, the popular and national liberation movements, above all the Communist parties--spying on them, confusing them, and disrupting them from inside.
Klugmann, James. From Trotsky to Tito. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1951, p. 82
 
TROTSKY USES THE ARGUMENT THAT OLD BOLSHEVIKS COULD NOT HAVE CHANGED SIDES
 
            Trotsky used the age-old bourgeois argument: `he is an old revolutionary, how could he have changed sides?'  Khrushchev would take up this slogan in his Secret Report.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 139 [p. 121 on the NET]
 
YET, MANY OLD BOLSHEVIKS HAD CHANGED EARLIER
 
            However, Kautsky, once hailed as the spiritual child of Marx and Engels, became, after the death of the founders of scientific socialism, the main Marxist renegade.  Martov was one of the Marxist pioneers in Russia and participated in the creation of the first revolutionary organizations; nevertheless, he became a Menshevik leader and fought against socialist revolution right from October 1917.  And what about the `Old Bolsheviks' Khrushchev and Mikoyan, who effectively set the Soviet Union on the path of capitalist restoration.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 141 [p. 121 on the NET]
 
TROTSKY CLAIMED COUNTER-REV COULD ONLY TAKE OVER BY A BLOODBATH NOT FROM WITHIN
 
            Trotsky claimed that counter-revolution was impossible without a bloodbath that would cost tens of million lives.  He pretended that capitalism could not be retored `from inside', by the internal political degeneration of the Party, by enemy infiltration, by bureaucratization, by the social-democratization of the Party.  However, Lenin insisted on this possibility.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 141 [p. 121 on the NET]
 
EXPLOSIONS IN MINES LED TO DEBATE OVER USING BOURGEOIS SPECIALISTS
 
            On September 23, 1936 a wave of explosions hit the Siberian mines, the second in nine months.  There were 12 dead.  Three days later, Yagoda became Commissar of Communications and Yezhov chief of the NKVD.  At least until that time, Stalin had sustained the more or less liberal policies of Yagoda.
            Investigations in Siberia led to the arrest of Pyatakov, an old Trotskyist, assistant to Ordzhonikidze, Commissar of Heavy Industry since 1932.  Close to Stalin, Ordzhonikidze had followed a policy of using and re-educating bourgeois specialists.  Hence, in February 1936, he had amnestied nine `bourgeois engineers', condemned in 1930 during a major trial on sabotage. 
            On the question of industry, there had been for several years debates and divisions within the Party.  Radicals, led by Molotov, opposed most of the bourgeois specialists, in whom they had little political trust.  They had long called for a purge.  Ordzhonikidze, on the other hand, said that they were needed and that their specialties had to be used.
            This recurring debate about old specialists with a suspect past resurfaced with the sabotage in the Siberian mines.  Inquiries revealed that Pyatakov, Ordzhonikidze's assistant, had widely used bourgeois specialists to sabotage the mines.
            In January 1937, the trial of Pyatakov, Radek and other old Trotskyists was held; they admitted their clandestine activities.  For Ordzhonikidze, the blow was so hard that he committed suicide.
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 141 [p. 125 on the NET]
 
LITTLEPAGE SHOWED THE SABOTAGE CHARGES WERE VALID & NOT ANTI-0PPONENT EXCUSES
 
            Of course, several bourgeois authors have claimed that the accusations of systematic sabotage were completely invented, that these were frameups whose sole r™le was to eliminate political opponents.  But there was a U.S. engineer who worked between 1928 and 1937 as a leading cadre in the mines of Ural and Siberia, many of which had been sabotaged.   The testimony of this apolitical technician John Littlepage is interesting on many counts. 
            Littlepage described how, as soon as he arrived in the Soviet mines in 1928, he became aware of the scope of industrial sabotage, the method of struggle preferred by enemies of the Soviet regime.  There was therefore a large base fighting against the Bolshevik leadership, and if some well-placed Party cadres were encouraging or simply protecting the saboteurs, they could seriously weaken the regime.  Here is Littlepage's description. 
Martens, Ludo.  Another View of Stalin. Antwerp, Belgium: EPO, Lange Pastoorstraat 25-27  2600, p. 141 [p. 125 on the NET]
 
            [a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor stated the following]
            ... the Soviet Government started a series of conspiracy trials in August, 1936, with prominent Communists as defendants,...
            Littlepage did not come to Moscow during this trial, and emerged from a long stay in the Soviet Far East only after the second trial, in January, 1937, when important Communists confessed that they had "wrecked" several Soviet industrial enterprises in order to discredit Stalin.
            I asked Littlepage: "What do you think?  Was the trial a frame-up or not?"
            He replied: "I don't know anything about politics.  But I know quite a lot about Soviet industry.  And I know that a large part of Soviet industry has been deliberately wrecked, and that would hardly be possible without the help of highly placed Communists.  Someone wrecked those industries, and the Communists hold all the high positions in industry.  Therefore, I figure Communists helped to wreck those industries."
            No theories for Littlepage.  But he believed what he saw....  He was unique among foreigners, so far as I knew, in the fact that he had worked intimately on close terms with Soviet organizations and at the same time had never departed, by a hair's breath, from his original American outlook....  Littlepage had been inside the system for many years, and still remained as dispassionate as when he started.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. xi
 
            He watched what went on, and was not much surprised by anything he saw.  These people had their own peculiar ways of doing things, he said, and it wasn't his business to judge them.  They had hired him to do a job of work, producing as much gold as possible for them, and he was doing it as well as he could.  He got along with them very well, because he didn't mix up in their intrigues, and didn't try to stick his nose into matters which weren't connected with mining and smelting gold.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. xii
 
            Of course, there is plenty of need for close police supervision in Soviet industry.  In the gold industry the police guard shipments of gold, which don't take up much space, and might easily be diverted.  But they are kept even busier looking out for sabotage.
            ...I knew there were people who sometimes tried to wreck plant or machinery in the United States, but I didn't know just how or why they operated.  However, I hadn't worked many weeks in Russia before I encountered questionable instances of deliberate and malicious wrecking.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 198
 
 
            One day in 1928, I went into a power station at the Kochkar gold mines.  I just happened to drop my hand on one of the main bearings of a large Diesel engine as I walked by, and felt something gritty in the oil.  I had the engine stopped immediately, and we removed from the oil reservoir about a quart of quartz sand, which could have been placed there only by design.  On several other occasions, in the new milling plants at Kochkar, we found sand inside such equipment as speed reducers, which are entirely enclosed, and can be reached only by removing the hand-hold covers.
            Such petty industrial sabotage was, and still is, so common in all branches of Soviet industry that Russian engineers can do little about it and were surprised at my own concern when I first encountered it.  There was, and still is, so much of this sort of thing that the police have had to create a whole army of professional and amateur spies to cut the amount down.  In fact, so many people in Soviet institutions are busy watching producers to see that they behave properly that I suspect there are more watchers than producers.
            Why, I have been asked, is sabotage of this description so common in Soviet Russia, and so rare in most other countries?  Do Russians have a peculiar bent for industrial wrecking?
            PEOPLE WHO ASK SUCH QUESTIONS APPARENTLY HAVEN'T REALIZED THAT THE AUTHORITIES IN RUSSIA HAVE BEEN, AND STILL ARE, FIGHTING A WHOLE SERIES OF OPEN OR DISGUISED CIVIL WARS.  In the beginning, they fought and dispossessed the old aristocracy, the bankers and landowners and merchants of the Tsarist regime.  I have described how they later fought and dispossessed the little independent farmers and the little retail merchants and the nomad herders in Asia.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 199
 
            Of course, it's all for their own good, say the Communists.  But many of these people can't see things that way, and remain bitter enemies of the Communists and their ideas, even after they have been put back to work in state industries.  From these groups have come a considerable number of disgruntled workers who dislike Communists so much that they would gladly damage any of their enterprises if they could.
            For this reason, the police have records of every industrial worker, and have traced back their careers to the time of the Revolution, so far as possible.  Those who belong to any group which has been dispossessed are given a black mark, and kept under constant watch.  When anything serious happens, such as a fire or a cave-in a mine, the police round up such people before they do anything else.  And in the case of any big political crime, such as the Kirov assassination, the round up becomes nationwide.
            However, the police assigned to Soviet industrial enterprises do not confine themselves to watching potential wreckers.  I know from my own observation that they also organize a network of labor spies.  It is a fact that any trouble-maker among the workmen, who grumbles excessively or shows any tendency to criticize the Government, is likely to disappear quietly.  The police handle such cases with great skill, and seldom raise a rumpus.  I don't mean to suggest that such workers are treated violently; they're probably shipped off to out-of-the-way enterprises, perhaps to some of those operated by the police themselves.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 200
 
            The federal police were a great deal less in evidence when I arrived in Russia in 1928 than when I left that country in 1937. It seems to me that their functions have accumulated something like a snowball.  So far as their number was concerned, it seemed to expand and contract in sympathy with the political atmosphere.  After the enormous police activity at the time of the Kirov assassination, there was a period of comparative quiet through 1935 and the early part of 1936.  Then, with the discovery of the "wrecking" conspiracy among higher Communists in 1936, and the removal of the police chief, Yagoda, the activity of the federal police became more frenzied than at any other time in my experience, and was at its height when I left.
            ...Both Soviet workers and officials often are so green, industrially speaking, that it takes a very wise man indeed to determine between so-called wrecking and plain ignorance.  There has been plenty of real wrecking in Soviet industry, as my experience has shown me.
            ...I can understand why a certain amount of police supervision is necessary in Russian industry, whereas it would not be in Alaska, for example.  There are still a lot of people in Russia who do not like the regime, and would be glad to damage it by sabotaging industry which it operates.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 203-204
 
            The Ridder lead and zinc mines in southern Kazakhstan, I was informed, were in a critical state, and I was instructed to hurry down and see what I could do about it.  I have already told how I reorganized these mines in 1932, and what I discovered there when I returned on this occasion, in 1937.  Undoubted sabotage had occurred in high quarters, and this mine, which is one of the most valuable in the world, was very nearly lost.  The business of rescuing it occupied me for several months, and was the final task of my Russian experience.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 265
 
            In some ways it was unfortunate that my last months in Russia should be spent working for the Copper-Lead Trust, some of whose managers I had never trusted, and who, in my opinion, were deliberate wreckers.
Littlepage, John D. In Search of Soviet Gold. New York: Harcourt, Brace, c1938, p. 266