12.11.1998

In praise of Stalin

Harpal Brar, member of the national executive of the Socialist Labour Party, spoke at the CPGB’s Communist University, on Sunday August 2 1998

Comrades, when I was invited to speak, I was slightly taken aback, and I spoke with your national organiser, comrade Fischer, and said: “Look, I regard Stalin as a great continuer of the Leninist tradition, and your views are just the opposite. It’s unlikely I’ll change your mind, and you won’t change mine, and where conviction is so deep, what’s the point of having a debate?” He assured me there were comrades floating between the line of the Weekly Worker and our line. So I hope there will be some floating comrades able to listen to what I say, make up your own minds, and of course come over to the viewpoint I uphold.

I have been asked to speak on the legacy of Stalin. It’s a very large topic - one cannot to do justice to it in an hour. ‘Stalinism’ is not a term which either Stalin or any of his supporters invented. It’s a term invented by Trotskyism, and it’s a term invented by the bourgeoisie, and as a result of a great deal of collaboration between the two sides, Trotskyism and the ordinary bourgeois. I regard Stalin as a great Leninist. I do not regard him as having done something very original, except that he had a genius for putting into effect the precepts of Marxism-Leninism. I think that’s where his great achievement lies. He never pretended, like a lot of Bolsheviks who shall remain unnamed, to have something new to say. He constantly referred to Lenin, and said, ‘This is what comrade Lenin said: that’s what we are going to do. It makes sense to me, and I don’t wish to disagree with other people just for the sake of disagreeing. We’ve got a job to do and that’s what we are going to get on with.’

I want to summarise in the beginning, and then substantiate, exactly what Stalin’s contribution was. I think the most significant contribution was first of all to hold the Party together by routing all the fractious elements. No doubt you’ll call it Bonapartist purges and all the rest of it. But actually to have maintained the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union in those times could not be done except on the basis of the strictest iron discipline, for which not Stalin, but Lenin was responsible through the resolution that he personally wrote for the 10th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The second thing Stalin did was lead the Party not only to defeat the opposition - he had to do this before anything positive could be done - but also convince the Party in the fashion of Lenin that it was perfectly possible that socialism could be built in the Soviet Union. Although it would have been lovely if revolution had come in Germany, Britain, France, the United States of America and the leading capitalist countries, it hadn’t come - that was the fact. And there’s no point in saying that Stalin betrayed the revolution. People who say so have a soft spot for social democracy. If anybody betrayed the revolution in Western Europe, it was social democracy, and not Stalin. Social democracy had betrayed the revolution during the time of Lenin, and it was to do so again in the period leading to World War II and subsequently. Stalin led the fight for the building of socialism, and constructed socialism. Should someone question whether socialism was constructed, I shall give them quotations from none other than Leon Davidovich Trotsky.

Building socialism wasn’t something minor. It meant pulling the Soviet Union out of its feudal and medieval integument into the modern world, and building modern socialist industry and collectivised agriculture. I come from a peasant country, where the peasantry live in miserable conditions. I believe in collectivisation - socialist collectivisation. Stalin’s was a tremendous achievement.

And the third achievement was to have built the Red Army, which was to have the glorious role of almost single-handedly smashing the fascists from Germany and their allies. And at the end of his life to have waged a struggle against people in the Party who were trying to bring in the ideas of market socialism, and to have rehabilitated Soviet production within three years of the end of the war to pre-war levels, and within three years after that to have doubled it.

These are Stalin’s significant achievements, and these are his legacy to the communist movement. I don’t care that as I speak people snigger and say, ‘These are the typical sayings of Stalinists.’ To me they are axioms. They are achievements of working class power, of which working people everywhere can be proud. If you go around the world, working people are indeed proud of the Soviet achievement, and so, notwithstanding the reversals that have taken place since the days of Krushchevite revisionism, notwithstanding what has happened in Eastern Europe, it doesn’t prove anything wrong about the pursuits of Stalin, and what he was trying to achieve. On the contrary, it shows how important it is to have revolutionary leadership, how important it is to fight revisionism and Trotskyism. The 21st century will never be what the 19th century was, such has been the effect of the October Revolution, and I must say Stalin had some part to play, no matter how modest that part may be. It was certainly far greater than we collectively have ever played or are likely to play.

On the question of holding the Party together. Time and again, it has been asserted that what Stalin was trying to do was cleverly manoeuvre to eliminate every opposition - all those brilliant Bolshevik leaders - so that he could become the sole man in charge. There is absolutely no truth in this. Stalin always believed that after the death of Lenin there was not a single leader in the Party able to step into Lenin’s shoes. It was therefore very important to have a collective leadership. Stalin worked as hard as possible with all the leaders - with Kamenev, Zinoviev, and he wanted to work with Trotsky. This was at a time when Kamenev and Zinoviev refused to speak to Trotsky. They wanted Trotsky’s expulsion from the Party. Stalin said to them: ‘You can’t do that. If you start doing that you lop off one arm today, the other tomorrow, and a leg the day after that, and what would be left of the Party?’

It wasn’t until much later on, over the question of whether socialism could be built in the Soviet Union or not by the year 1925, that they united together in hostility to the Party. Although they were known as brilliant Marxists and great theoreticians, they hadn’t a clue how to function. Stalin wanted to work with them. And when they forced the debate in the Party on whether socialism should or should not be constructed, or could or could not be constructed, there was a full debate - and let no one tell me the ‘Stalinist bureaucracy’ stopped the debate taking place. Debate raged in the Party, in the factory units, on the farms, all over the country. And when the vote took place, the Trotskyists and the new opposition, as it was called, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev, got 4,000 votes, as opposed to something like 700,000 that the Party got. That was their strength. There was nothing bureaucratic about this straightforward defeat.

I ask you, comrades: a revolution has taken place in Britain. Your theory says socialism cannot be built in a single country, unless revolution comes in a number of other countries. For reasons that are beyond your control - you haven’t betrayed the revolution: you obviously want it everywhere - it doesn’t come. What exactly do you do? It’s a practical question. There are two things. Our theory says socialism cannot be built. So that’s it. Lets shut up shop and go home. It was a one-day wonder. The proletariat simply lived to go to the barricades, win, and then be slaughtered. The other thing is - no, it hasn’t come, but we’re going to make a go of it. I can provide textual evidence - Lenin, all over the place - on the question of whether revolution is possible in several countries, let alone all over the world. And he said it’s a rarity. It is not a Stalinist invention that this is so: it is what Lenin said, as early as 1916, in the United States of Europe article - this question has caused some controversy in the SLP.

Read Lenin’s article on the military programme of the proletarian dictatorship. Read his article on cooperatives. And what does he say? Socialism can be built. It can be built, because things have changed since Marx’s day. Things have changed because old free-competition capitalism has become monopoly capitalism. When monopoly capitalism comes on the stage, the question of revolution can no longer be looked at in the old way. It’s not a question of whether in a given country the proletariat is in the majority or not. The question is that under conditions of imperialism the whole world is ripe for revolution. Where will the chain of imperialism break? Nobody can say for certain, but it is likely to break down at its weakest link, and in February, and in October/November 1917, Russia proved to be the weakest link.

The Trotskyists and the opposition suffered defeat, and a lot of people called it Stalin’s manoeuvring. The reason the Trotskyist opposition failed was because it was trying to depart from Marxism-Leninism on the question of building socialism. Stalin raised this question: he said, ‘How are we to explain the fact that, notwithstanding his oratorical skills, his will to lead and his abilities, Trotsky was thrown out of the leadership of the CPSU(B)?’ And Stalin goes on to answer, ‘The reason is that the opposition intended to replace, to “improve” Leninism with Trotskyism.’ But the Party wanted to remain true to Leninism. That’s the root cause why the Party which made three revolutions found it necessary to turn its back on Trotsky and on the opposition as a whole.

Stalin raised the same question at the 15th Congress, when he said, ‘How could it happen that the Party as a whole, and after it the working class as a whole, so thoroughly isolated the opposition?’ After all the opposition was headed by well known people, with well known names, people who know how to advertise themselves - people who were not afflicted with modesty, and were able to blow their own trumpet. It happened because the leading group of the opposition turned out to be a group of petty bourgeois intellectuals, divorced from life, divorced from the revolution and divorced from the working class. And that’s why it was defeated.

Stalin goes on to say that the opposition thinks its defeat can be explained by the personal factor, by Stalin’s rudeness. That is too cheap - an incantation, not an explanation. Trotsky had been fighting Leninism since 1904. From 1904 until the February Revolution of 1917, he hung around the Mensheviks, desperately fighting Lenin’s Party all the time. During that period Trotsky suffered a number of defeats at the hands of Lenin’s Party. Why? Perhaps Stalin’s rudeness was to blame. But Stalin was not yet general secretary of the central committee of the time. He was not abroad, but in Russia, fighting tsarism underground. Whereas the struggle between Trotsky and Lenin raged abroad. So what has Stalin’s rudeness got to do with it?

During the period from the October Revolution to 1923, Trotsky, already a member of the Bolshevik Party, made two grand sorties against Lenin and his Party. In 1918 on the question of the Brest peace, and in 1921 on the trade union question. But these sorties ended in Trotsky being defeated. Why? At that time Stalin was not yet general secretary of the central committee. The secretariat was then occupied by notorious Trotskyists. So what has Stalin’s rudeness got to do with that? Later, Trotsky made a number of fresh sorties against the Party, in 1923, 24, 26 and 27. And each sortie ended in Trotsky’s defeat. Is it not obvious that Trotsky’s fight against the Party had deep historical roots? Is it not obvious that the struggle that the Party was waging against Trotskyism was a continuation of the struggle that the Party headed by Lenin waged from 1904 onwards? Is it not obvious that the attempts of Trotskyists to replace Leninism by Trotskyism were the chief cause of the failure of the entire line of the opposition?

So, the whole idea that as soon as Lenin died, the struggle took place because Trotsky was fighting against Stalinist bureaucracy is nonsensical. As Stalin rightly described, Trotsky was the chief patriarch of bureaucrats. You could not find a more bureaucratic person than Trotsky, whose solution to every problem was militarisation. Militarisation of the trade unions, militarisation of everybody. This could not be done. Working class power could not be held in place if everybody was simply ordered. So you come to a position where you have socialist construction taking place. And Trotsky himself had to admit what exactly the achievements of socialism were.

Revolution Betrayed is a Trotsktist bible. If anyone is a Trotskyist, that’s one book that they are likely to have read. I’d actually like them to have read all of Trotsky. The best way to refute Trotskyism is to read Trotsky. He trips himself up each paragraph and contradicts the previous paragraph. Each book contradicts the previous book, and so on. I can see what the attraction of Trotsky is for the average petty bourgeois, and especially the intelligentsia. He has a terrific turn of phrase, but it doesn’t enlighten anybody. I also read Trotsky and find at times that he’s quite good. For example here, in Revolution Betrayed, he says: “Gigantic achievements in industry, enormously promising beginnings in agriculture, an extraordinary growth of old industrial cities, and the building of new ones. A rapid increase in the number of workers, a rise in cultural level and cultural demands. Such are the indubitable results of the October Revolution.” People are ‘betraying’ it, but the October Revolution is somehow working these wonderful achievements.

“Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory”. And that’s written by the gentleman who says that it’s not possible, it’s not capable of being built in a single country, and there’s got to be a world revolution. “Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not in the pages of Capital, but in an industrial arena comprising one sixth of the world’s land surface. Not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of steel, cement and electricity. A backward country has achieved in less than 10 years successes unexampled in history. That is so. This also ends the quarrel with the reformists in the workers’ movement. Can we compare for one moment their mouse-like fussing with the titanic work accomplished by this people aroused to a new life by this revolution.” Now that’s Trotsky. I hope you like it.

Then, Stalinism is supposed to be herding everybody, like cattle. Stalin raises his finger, and everyone from Khrushchev down to the factory operator dances to his tune. Not so, if we believe Trotsky. I wasn’t there, but Trotsky should know something about Russia. “To be sure,” he says, “the youth are very active in the sphere of economics. In the Soviet Union there are now 1.2 million communist youth in the collective farms. Hundreds of thousands of members of the communist youth have been mobilised in recent years for construction work, timber work, coal mining, gold production, for work in the Arctic, Sakhalin or in a mood where the new town of Komsomolsk is in the process of production. The new generation is putting out shock brigands, champion works, Stakhanov-ites, foremen, under-administrators. The youth has studied, and is studying assiduously ...” Of course Stalin said ‘study’ and they studied.

“They are as active, if not more so, in the sphere of athletics, including its most warlike forms, such as parachute jumping and marksmanship. The enterprising and audacious are going on all kinds of dangerous expeditions. The better part of our youth, said recently the well known polar explorer Schmidt, are eager to work where difficulties await them. This is undoubtedly true. It would be crude slander against the youth to portray them as controlled exclusively or even predominantly by personal interests. No, in the general mass, they’re magnanimous, responsive, enterprising. In their ranks are various unformulated tendencies grounded in heroism, and still only awaiting application. It is upon these moves in particular that the newest kind of Soviet patriotism is nurturing itself. It is undoubtedly sincere and dynamic.”

That was Trotsky, who thought that socialism could not be built, and that the leadership had betrayed the revolution. These achievements are the finest examples of the kind of ‘betrayal’ that I would like to see everywhere. I wish that we could have a leadership who would actually ‘betray’ the proletariat so much.

So you have Soviet industry being built, and there is really not a single country in the world where there was such labour heroism, where there was such an unleashing of the initiative of the masses. There was nothing that the Soviet people didn’t think that they could do, and they were right. The breathtaking audacity, and the all-encompassing, awe-inspiring achievements really are fantastic as far as the Soviet people are concerned. And it is really only because of that, that is was possible for the Soviet people to go along and defeat Nazi Germany.

But the Soviet Union could not have achieved this, had it not got rid of the fifth column. No doubt, most people sitting here consider that the Moscow trials were staged by Stalin, that Stalin acted as the judge, jury and prosecutor. Far from it. Time will not allow me to present the evidence of the Moscow trials. Any of you who are genuinely interested, rather than raising Aunt Sallies, should read the transcripts of the Moscow trials. They run into about 2,000 pages. The Moscow trials were held in front of over 1,000 foreign journalists. Foreign diplomats attended. Among them was Joseph Davy, no great communist, from the United States of America - he was the ambassador. He sent reports to his government saying, ‘These trials are correct and these people are guilty’. There is plenty of evidence. His masters wrote back to him saying, ‘This is so, but it’s not something we want the people of the world to know. We have to say these trials are rigged.’

Here are these 51 or 52 people who have been in the Bolshevik Party for a long time. They come and admit to all kinds of heinous crimes, from sabotage to wrecking, to treasonable associations with foreign powers, including Germany and Japan. If a common criminal is arrested, the moment he comes to court he says, ‘I was beaten and the police extracted this confession out of me.’ I invite you, even if you have to force yourselves, to actually read the testimony of the accused in these trials. I invite you to read Bukharin’s evidence at his trial - the same Bukharin who was denounced all the time as a rightwing revisionist. But the moment he turned against the building of socialism, he becomes a great communist and a leading member of the opposition, with whom Trotskyists have no difficulty working. Bukharin actually engages the prosecutor in philosophical discussions, and tries to actually answer the question, why was it possible, how did it come about that, from being Bolshevik revolutionaries, they became traitors to the socialist motherland? He explains the process.

No one, unless they are very crude, would say all these people entered the Bolshevik Party because they were agents of the bourgeoisie. Although that is not impossible in some cases. Was it unknown for infiltrators to get into revolutionary parties? Is any single group free from it? Is your group free from it? Of course not. Lenin was so strict about who should join the Bolshevik Party - but who did he put on the central committee? Comrade Malinovsky. Comes the revolution, and where is Malinovsky? The one time you want to be with your comrades, when you’ve won, he’s missing. The Bolsheviks seize the records of the tsarist police, the okhrana. And what do they find? He was a tsarist agent. It was on his information that so many people were sent to Siberia. So they caught him somewhere in the streets of Moscow.

Was Malinosky given a trial? No. Lenin quite rightly said that the dictatorship of the proletariat is unrestricted by law. It doesn’t first say, this is the article in the criminal code that you violated, and therefore we shall try you. No. Malinovsky said, ‘I’m sorry. I tried to be a fake Bolshevik I shall be a real one if you give me a chance.’ Lenin said, ‘Take this scoundrel out and shoot him’, and they did. Stalin did no such thing. He said, ‘Our intelligence agencies have this, that and the other evidence against these people: present it in court.’

The fact that these people were eliminated has been put out as the decapitation of the Party, and the decapitation of the Red Army. Funny ‘decapitation’. Funny that this ‘decapitated’ army, which was expected to last no more than six weeks in the face of the German onslaught, is actually the army that raised the red flag over the Reichstag.

You see, before the war started, Trotsky’s prediction was that the Soviet Union would lose. The Stalinist bureaucracy was “frightened” of the workers, the workers at home were disgruntled and the war simply could not be waged. And Trotsky said, “Can we however expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat?” To this question, frankly posed by Trotsky, we will answer as frankly:

“If the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong, and if it is not paralysed by revolution in the west, then of course imperialism would win.”

In 1940, just before another Trotskyist did him to death, Trotsky said: “We always started from the fact that the international policy of the Kremlin was determined by the ‘new aristocracy’s’ incapacity to conduct war. The ruling caste is no longer capable of thinking about tomorrow. Its formula is the same as that of all doomed regimes - after us, the deluge. The war will topple many things, and many individuals. Artifice, trickery, frame-ups, and treasons will prove of no avail in escaping its severe judgements.” This is what Trotsky said in his article, ‘Stalin, feckless quartermaster’. Lovely, isn’t it?

He then goes on to say, Stalin cannot make a war, with discontented workers and peasants, and with a “decapitated” Red Army. The level of the USSR’s productive forces forbids a major war. Involvement of the USSR in a major war before the end of this period will signify a struggle with unequal weapons. The subjective factor, not less important than the material, has changed in the last few years very sharply for the worse. Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory. Should the USSR enter the war with its “innumerable victims” (mainly Trotskyists), the “whole fraud of the official regime, its outrages and violence, will inevitably provoke a profound reaction on the part of the people, who have already carried out three revolutions in this century. The present war can crush the Kremlin bureaucracy, long before revolutionary war breaks out in some capitalist country.” That’s what Trotsky says.

And how did the average Soviet soldier fight? You see, if a regime is unpopular, decrepit and rotten, the best time to overthrow it is during a war. This is what happened to tsarist autocracy. A rotten regime can last in ordinary, peaceful times. But it cannot survive the kind of feverish changes that took place in the Soviet Union in peaceful times as well as in warlike times. It could only last because it was closely connected with the people. Because the leadership had become a representative spokesperson for the ordinary people. And the average soldier went to his death with one slogan on his lips - ‘For the motherland, and for comrade Stalin’. To them, as even a renegade like Gorbachev admits, the major part in the victory of the Soviet Union was Stalin’s leadership, and his ability to organise things and wage war in a disciplined manner. And Gorbachev hated Stalin every bit as much as did Trotsky.

I quote from a bourgeois author called Ian Grey, who has written a biography of Stalin. He said the massive setbacks and the immediate threat to Moscow - the initial 12 weeks of the war - would have unnerved most men. “But the impact on Stalin was to strengthen his determination to fight. No single factor was more important than holding the nation from disintegration at this time.” He carries on: “It was in a real sense his [that is, Stalin’s] victory.” Grey cites Isaac Deutscher - “Collectivised farming had been the peasant’s preparatory school for mechanised warfare” - and comments:

“It was his victory too because he had directed and controlled every branch of Russian operations throughout the war. The range and burden of his responsibilities were extraordinary. But day after day, without a break throughout the war, he exercised direct command of the Russian forces and control of supplies, of war industry and government policy, including foreign policy.”

Isaac Deutscher says, how “dreary”, “dull”, “bureaucratic”, etc Stalin was. The very same Stalin as he describes in these wonderful terms: “Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin during the war were astonished to see how many issues, great and small, military, political or diplomatic, Stalin personally took the final decision in. He was in effect commander in chief, his own minister of defence, his own quartermaster, his own minister of supply, his own foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocol. The Stavka, the Red Army’s general headquarters, was in his office in the Kremlin.

“From his office desk, in constant and direct touch with the commands at the fronts, he watched and directed the campaigns in the fields. From his office desk too, he managed another stupendous operation, the evacuation of 1,360 plants and factories from western Russia and the Ukraine to the Volga, the Urals and Siberia, an evacuation that involved not only machines and installations, but millions of workmen and their families. He bargained with Beaverbrook and Harriman over the quantities of aluminium or the calibre of rifles and anti-aircraft guns to be delivered to Russia by the western allies. Or he received leaders of the guerrillas from German-occupied territories, and discussed with them raids to be carried out hundreds of miles behind the enemy’s lines. Thus he went on, day after day, throughout the four years of hostilities, a prodigy of patience, tenacity and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.” For a dull, dreary, bureaucratic person, I think that’s pretty good.

He continues:

“There’s no doubt that he was their [that is, the Soviet troops’] real commander in chief. His leadership was by no means confined to taking abstract strategic decisions, at which civilian politicians may excel. The avid interest with which he studied the technical aspects of modern warfare, down to the minutest details, show him to have been anything but a dilettante. He viewed the war primarily from the angle of logistics, to secure reserves of manpower and supplies of weapons, in the right quantities and proportions, to allocate them and 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.”

And, believe it or not, Deutscher says: “It should not be imagined that the majority of the nation was hostile to the government. If that had been the case, no patriotic appeals, no prodding or coercion would have prevented Russia’s political collapse, for which Hitler was confidently hoping. The great transformation that the country had gone through before the war had strengthened the moral fibre of the nation. The majority was imbued with a strong sense of its economic and social advance, which it was grimly determined to defend against dangers from without.” Which means it was as much a victory for socialism that had been built in the Soviet Union, as it was for mere Russian patriotism.

In a speech to business managers in 1931, Stalin said: ‘We’re 50 or 100 years behind 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, recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy, brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action. Indeed a few years’ delay in the modernisation of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat.

As Jehovah’s Witnesses would say, ‘My time is up’. I’m going to end with this quotation, comrades, After the victory of the Soviet Army against the fascists, there was a victory parade in Red Square, Moscow. And Deutscher captures the scene as follows: “On June 24 1945, Stalin stood on the top of the Lenin Mausoleum, and reviewed a great military parade of the Red Army, which marked the fourth anniversary of Hitler’s attack. By Stalin’s side stood Marshal Zhukov, his deputy, the victor of Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. The troops that marched past him were led by Marshal Rokassowski. As they marched, rode and galloped across Red Square, regiments of infantry, cavalry and tanks swept the mud off its pavements with innumerable banners and standards of Hitler’s army. At the Mausoleum, they threw the banners at Stalin’s feet. The allegorical scene was strangely imaginative. The next day Stalin received the tribute of Moscow, for the defence of the city in 1941. The day after, he was acclaimed as hero of the Soviet Union, and given the title of Generalissimo.

“In these days of undreamed of glory,” continued Deutscher,

“Stalin stood in the full gaze of popular recognition and gratitude. These feelings were spontaneous, genuine - not engineered by official propagandists. Overworked slogans about the achievements of the Stalinist era now conveyed fresh meaning, not only to young people, but to sceptics and malcontents in the older generation.”

But not for sceptics in this country.