28.01.1999

Harpal Brar, Stalinism and the SLP: The gravedigger’s apprentice

‘Delphi’, a prominent member of the SLP, writes for the Weekly Worker

In the Weekly Worker dated November 12 1998 the Communist Party of Great Britain published an article entitled ‘In praise of Stalin’. Its author, Harpal Brar, was described as a “member of the national executive of the Socialist Labour Party”, implying that it was in this capacity that Brar made the speech of which the article was a transcript. The speech was delivered to the CPGB’s ‘Communist University’ on August 2. It was not printed for over three months. The November 12 issue, which carried it as a centre page spread, appeared two days before the SLP’s special congress in Manchester, outside the doors of which Weekly Worker sellers were doing brisk business to convince delegates that Mr Brar was the guru of the SLP.

Now, Brar is not a naive man though he considers, mistakenly, the CPGB to be ‘”Trotskyist”. (It in fact describes itself as “Leninist” and in practice advocates a version of Bolshevism and party organisation closer to Stalinism than Brar would like to acknowledge!) Therefore his use of an event organised by the CPGB, which he accuses of attempting to destroy the party of which he is an executive member, in order to propound his own factionalist view, must have been a calculated decision. One which in his eyes must have paid off handsomely, as he was rewarded with a prominent place in the Weekly Worker to reinforce his coveted role as the main ideologue of the SLP - a position which is now challenged by the unexpected rise to prominence of another Stalin cultist, a former Trotsky cultist fired with the zeal of the convert, Royston Bull. Intent on keeping the pot boiling, the Weekly Worker published a rejoinder (December 3) purporting to criticise Brar’s analysis from a predominantly philosophical, rather than historical, standpoint. Using unnecessarily obscure terminology the article traces Stalin’s actions and Brar’s support for them to “subjective idealism”. This term gives undue philosophical significance to what in fact lies behind Brar’s adulation of Stalin. A much simpler and accurate term would be ‘self-delusion’.

I do not believe that Brar is a wilful liar. Nor does he appear to be a cruel and callous man, who would be unmoved by the full horror of his hero’s deeds. Therefore Brar must actually believe the falsehoods he perpetuates and be in a state of genuine denial of the reality of Stalin’s crimes against humanity. This intensity of belief is not simply “subjective idealism”. It constitutes a quasi-religious fervour which is impervious to facts or reason. It imparts to Stalin and his version of socialism an ethical superiority which justifies any means, including mass murder. Stalin is the defender of the faith with the stature of an infallible pope, grand inquisitor and crusader warlord of socialism rolled into one.

The more pathological Stalinists anathematise anyone who does not bow before socialism incarnate, and the holy Soviet Union, as a servant of imperialism, condemning them as ‘Trotskyist’, ‘revisionist’, ‘social democrat’ and numerous other inaccurate terms plucked from the left thesaurus of political abuse. But Brar presents his eulogy of Stalin without resorting to such crudity. His lecture is conducted with characteristic humour, charm and wit, and almost disarming ingenuousness. This mode of presentation makes his views even more dangerous in the SLP, where political education has, for many reasons, not been a priority and remains at an abysmal level. There is an urgent need for the history of the world socialist movement to be discussed critically and objectively. Clearly Brar does not contribute to that. But it is insufficient just to dismiss Brar as self-deluded on an assumption that his skewed view of history has been exposed by events and any politically aware socialist will see through it. Unfortunately, there are still too many people in the party looking nostalgically to the past and not with vision to the future. This is not merely a question of history. Brar’s view of Stalin totally colours his view of the present-day and what he is trying to achieve in the SLP. It is therefore necessary that ‘In Praise of Stalin’ is refuted point by point.

Brar begins as he means to go on - with a fatuous statement of such apparent simplicity and innocence it obscures, at a stroke, the real significance of fundamental historical events. “‘Stalinism’” he tells us, “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.”What is this banal generality supposed to mean? Of course movements named after individuals are often initially dubbed so by their opponents. Marx specifically said he was not a ‘Marxist’. Lenin never called himself a Leninist. ‘Trotskyist’ was also a term, initially pejorative, coined by Trotsky’s opponents. Arthur Scargill did not invent the term ‘Scargillite’ which first appeared in the hostile press! But once these terms become current they are adopted, often as a badge of pride, by those who support the ideas of the living or dead leader. Why does Brar not accept the handle ‘Stalinist’? Firstly by linking Trotskyism and the bourgeoisie as the joint concocters of the word ‘Stalinism’, he not only asserts the existence of a conspiracy but also attributes the whole ‘Stalinist’ phenomenon to a fabrication on their part. By dismissing the term in this way Brar does not have to face up to the acknowledgement that the term ‘Stalinist’ is one of opprobrium which even Stalin’s most sycophantic supporters are reluctant to adopt.

Brar’s rationalisation of the reason Stalinists don’t call themselves ‘Stalinists’ is very revealing: “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 effects the precepts of Marxism-Leninism. He never pretended, like a lot of Bolsheviks who shall remain unnamed, to have something new to say.” So that is why there is no such thing as Stalinism. Stalin did not do “something very original” or have “something new to say”. The development of Marxist theory stopped, not with Stalin in 1953, but with the death of Lenin in 1924! And the “genius” of Marxism-Leninism lies not in developing Marxist philosophy and analysis, but “putting into effect precepts”. Brar’s brand of Stalinism - sorry, Marxism-Leninism - as applied to the work of the SLP in the 21st century, consequently consists of putting into effect precepts established before 1924. Like Stalin, who “constantly referred to Lenin” we should unquestioningly follow “what comrade Lenin said.”

Those “unnamed” Bolsheviks, including Trotsky (whose theories of uneven and combined development and of permanent revolution were vindicated by events in 1917) and Bukharin (who Lenin described as the “most valuable theoretician in the party” - if not entirely Marxist), the economist Preobrazhensky, as well as many non-Bolshevik Marxists, frequently did have “something new to say” which influenced Lenin’s thought. Lenin did not consider himself infallible or dismiss other people’s ideas with the frivolity of Brar. He certainly did not regard Marxism as a set of precepts to be put into effect. In what way then did the genius Stalin implement Lenin’s ideas?

Stalin’s “most significant contribution,”says Brar, “was first of all to hold the party together by routing all the fractious elements”.Now perhaps Brar is fantasising here about what he would like to do in the SLP and perhaps the analogy is not that far off the mark. Stalin in the Bolshevik party, like Brar’s group in the SLP, in fact constituted one of those ‘fractious elements’. His rise to power was not some altruistic attempt “to hold the party together”but the result of the victory of the Stalin faction.

‘Unity’ has often been the watchword of dictators. Unity of the nation, or of the party, or in Stalin’s case of both. Stalin’s aim, Brar admits, was to impose the “strictest iron discipline”in order to maintain “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, based on the banning of factions introduced by Lenin at the 10th Congress in 1921. This ignores the fact that this occurred against the background of strikes, the Kronstadt mutiny and widespread resistance in the countryside to ‘war communism’ - factors which did not exist when Stalin began to consolidate his grip on the party after Lenin’s death. By then the political supremacy of the Communist Party was unchallenged and there was urgent need for open debate about where the revolution was going. This is only one of the many historical sleights of hand Brar, who has no grasp whatsoever of historical method and selects and bends the facts in a way which makes mediaeval hagiography appear scientific!

Brar’s explanation of the struggle within the CP is simplistic in the extreme, even allowing for the time constraints under which the lecture was delivered. Stalin, we are told, wanted collective leadership, but Trotsky, and the Trotskyists (that is the label applied to anathematise all Marxist critics of Stalin), waged a struggle within the party from 1918, which was a continuation of the pre-Bolshevik Trotsky’s earlier struggle against the party from the outside. Because the Trotskyists were not Marxist-Leninists, particularly on the question of building socialism in one country, they were inevitably defeated. Not only was the opposition not Marxist-Leninist - they were “petty bourgeois intellectuals” for good measure, “divorced from life, divorced from the revolution and divorced from the working class. And that’s why it was defeated,”Brar concludes smugly. QED.

In such a fashion the complex discussions and shifting alliances in the CP, in which, until early 1923, Lenin himself was involved, are reduced to a doomed attempt to replace Leninism by ‘Trotskyism’. The fact that on numerous key issues, not least the October rising, Lenin and Trotsky agreed is not even hinted at. Was Lenin therefore a Trotskyist? Or was Trotsky a Leninist? What is sure is that Lenin too was a “petty bourgeois intellectual” and like the other party leaders by 1923, he was divorced from the real life of the working class, not least by his illness as well as by social position.

Trotsky is accused of two “key sorties against Lenin and his Party” in the period from the October Revolution until 1923. No mention of little things he did for the party, such as organising the insurrection as head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, or building the Red Army as commissar for war.

Brar goes on to flippantly (and for those who don’t know the context, cryptically) refer three times to Stalin’s denial that his “rudeness” was a factor in defeating the opposition. This is a reference to an accusation which Stalin found extremely embarrassing and which his acolytes have trouble facing up to today. It was none other than Lenin who attempted to draw the party’s attention to this character flaw of Stalin in the ‘Testament’ written shortly before his death. Lenin considered it such a serious impediment in a general secretary (his wife Krupskaya had been at the sharp end of it), that he believed it grounds for Stalin’s removal. Stalin was unable to suppress the testament and consequently tried to minimise its impact by making light of the issue. This was not Lenin’s only criticism of Stalin. On several major issues he was in full agreement with Trotsky, whom he charged, when he was ill, with responsibility for making his views known.

One of the most serious issues was the question of small nationalities. Despite Stalin being a Georgian and the author, under Lenin’s guidance, of Marxism and the nationalities in 1913 and the drafter of the Bolshevik declaration on the nationalities in 1918 - both documents asserting the right of self-determination even so far as secession from Russia - he used his position as commissar of nationalities to foster the growth of Greater Russian chauvinism. This reached a crisis with his moves to steamroll the republics into a Russian-dominated federation and Georgia in particular into a Transcaucasian federation against the wishes of the Georgian party. Lenin proposed that this issue would be “a bombshell” under Stalin at the 13th Congress, but he was too ill to attend and Trotsky, in the interest of party unity, worked out a compromise with Stalin. The Georgians were left high and dry and Stalin’s hold on the party was further compromised. This incident illustrates how Trotsky, far from projecting himself into the dying Lenin’s position as the rightful heir, in fact tried to play a mediating role and remain aloof from intrigue - with tragic consequences.

Stalinist views on the right to self-determination remain current in the SLP. Not only in the context of the former ‘socialist’ states but also capitalist India, we are told that the right of nations to secede threatens the “balkanisation” of a “mighty” state. The consequence of this in regard to policy on the former Yugoslavia means that Greater Serb nationalism is supported as some manifestation of the “partisan spirit”, rather than the reactionary, racist Chetnik ideology it is. Slobodan Milosevic’s undoing of Tito’s project (which tried to balance the contending nationalisms), symptomised by the removal of Kosova’s autonomous status and increased repression of the Albanian majority, is sickeningly presented as some form of anti-imperialism. Genuine anti-imperialism opposes the intervention of major powers, but it also asserts the rights of all small nations to freedom. The bloodbath which accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia and the USSR in Chechnya, Ossetia, Ngorno-Karabakh, etc resulted not from the exercise of the right of national self-determination, but from the denial of that right. The omission of the national question from Brar’s panegyrics, when it was a treatise on this issue which first made Stalin widely known in the Bolshevik Party, is quite significant and reflects the low priority it holds for the Stalinists today. For Stalinists the right of self-determination has never been a principle. The criterion for supporting national independence was not how anti-imperialist it was, but whether it served the strategic interests of the Soviet Union and its allies. Support for the Ethiopian military junta, dressed as a ‘socialist’ movement, against the Eritreans and Tigrayans exemplifies this.

The defeat of the “opposition”, according to Brar, was the first great success of Stalin. The second was the building of socialism in the Soviet Union. The third was the building of the Red Army and the defeat of German fascism. He tells us: “These are Stalin’s significant achievements and these are his legacy to the communist movement … to me they are axioms.”As axioms, or self-evident statements, they therefore do not need any evidence to substantiate them. It is sufficient that enough “working people everywhere” believe them “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.”Here poor comrade Brar is in such a delusional state of denial of historical reality that it becomes almost impossible to continue to take him seriously. Even the verdict of history - the monumental collapse of the Soviet Union - pales into insignificance compared with Stalin’s great achievement of socialism in one country. What then was this fantastic socialist miracle which, within a generation of its creator’s death, was itself in ruins?

Bizarrely, perhaps because he thought he was speaking to a Trotskyist audience, Brar calls Trotsky as his main witness to the success of socialism under Stalin, quoting from his Revolution betrayed, with the claim that the best way to refute Trotskyism is to read Trotsky. He adds patronisingly: “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 he doesn’t enlighten anybody.”Compared to the mind-numbingly turgid formulae of Stalin’s Problems of Leninism which appears to be Brar’s main literary diet, even Enid Blighton would appear to have a terrific turn of phrase. But the fact Brar does not feel enlightened is a result of his own lack of comprehension, not lack of clarity on Trotsky’s part. Except when actually engaged in textual criticism, it is always a feeble device to try and ‘prove’ a point with chunks of quotation. It is not only feeble, but dubious when isolated quotes are culled from an author who produced a vast body of work dissecting the very thesis you are trying to establish! But it is not necessary to consult any other of Trotsky’s writings to answer Brar’s claims. The actual quotations he uses, when cited in full, demolish the very argument he is making. We therefore reprint Brar’s ‘evidence’ below with the omitted sections emphasised.

“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 … 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. Even if the Soviet Union, as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes of the leadership, were to collapse - which we firmly hope will not happen - there would remain this indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution 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?”

What Brar dismisses as Trotsky tripping himself up with contradictory paragraphs is in fact the fundamental contradiction in the situation itself, a process which Brar cannot, or will not, grasp. Trotsky contrasts the actual and potential developments based on the gains of the revolution - particularly, state ownership of the means of production - with the deadening effect of the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy which was engaged in betraying the revolution. In this prophetic sentence Trotsky also explicitly denies the main charge against him - that he wanted to see the defeat of the Soviet Union and its replacement by capitalism.

The reality of state oppression which Brar denies is spelt out vividly by Trotsky in the section excised from the next quote, which is used by Brar to illustrate enthusiasm for Stalin’s achievements.

“To be sure 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 brigades, champion workers, Stakhanovites, foremen, under-administrators. The youth has studied, and is studying assiduously …

“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. But in all spheres the post-revolutionary generation is still under guardianship. They are told from above what to do and how to do it. Politics as the highest form of command remains wholly in the hands of the so-called ‘old guard’, and in all the ardent and frequently flattering speeches they address to the youth the old boys are vigilantly defending their own monopoly. Not conceiving of the development of a socialist society without the dying away of the state - that is, without the replacement of all kinds of police oppression by the self-administration of educated producers and consumers - Engels laid the accomplishment of this task upon the younger generation, ‘who will grow up in new, free social conditions, and will be in a position to cast away all this rubbish of state-ism’. Lenin adds on his part: ‘ ... every kind of state-ism, the democratic-republican included’. The prospect of the construction of a socialist society stood, then, in the minds of Engels and Lenin approximately thus: the generation which conquered power, the ‘old guard’, will begin the work of liquidating the state; the next generation will complete it. How do things stand in reality …A big half of the population of the country knows nothing by personal recollection of any regime except that of the soviets. But it is just this new generation which is forming itself, not in ‘free social conditions’ as Engels conceived it , but under intolerable and constantly increasing oppression from the ruling stratum composed of those same ones who - according to the official fiction - achieved the great revolution. In the factory, the collective farm, the barracks, the university, the schoolroom, even in the kindergarten, if not in the crèche, the chief glory of man is declared to be: personal loyalty to the leader and unconditional obedience. Many pedagogical aphorisms and maxims of recent times might seem to have been copied from Goebbels, if he himself had not copied them in good part from the collaborators of Stalin.”

Having ignored this vital passage, Brar goes on to use Trotsky to describe youthful devotion to Soviet patriotism - ie, Stalin - again missing out Trotsky’s vital qualification, expanded over several pages of chapter seven, part 2 of Revolution betrayed, significantly entitled ‘The struggle against the youth’:

“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. But in this patriotism too, there is a rift which separates the young from the old.”

And so the intended quotation-broadside backfires on Brar, demolishing the whole edifice of the myth he attempts to prop up - of happy and heroic Soviet workers devoted to their great leader, Stalin. Trotsky, who, Brar comments without apparent irony, “should know something about Russia”, quite unambiguously describes the police-state atmosphere behind the propaganda image swallowed, then as now, by those who knew little about the reality. The use of Trotsky’s writing in this manner is at the best cynical and dishonest, but perhaps it is merely that Brar’s mental block is so acute, his brain just cannot take in any criticism of his super-hero. He really believes that Stalin was building socialism.

What then are the characteristics of this socialism adored by Brar, and what part was played by its ideological justification - ‘building socialism in one country’? Brar says the opposition was democratically defeated in 1925 in an open debate about the feasibility of socialism in one country and so it became party policy. The choice, given the failure of revolutions in Europe, was either to build socialism in Russia alone, or to “shut up shop and go home”. The opposition, Brar says, in effect advocated the last option.

This simplistic counterposing of two ‘either or’ alternatives again shows Brar’s utter inability to grasp basic Marxist concepts. The problem, as it was regarded by Lenin, the opposition and Marxists since, was in what way could socialism be built, given the actual domestic conditions in Russia and how was this interdependent on the progress of revolution in the rest of the world? The opposition did not say that socialism should not be built and in fact Trotsky, Preobrazhensky and others proposed industrialisation plans which were opposed at the time by Stalin. But the opposition, and Lenin, believed that the ultimate attainment and survival of socialism in the Soviet Union depended on the success of the world revolution.

Stalin’s option, by seeing the problem in terms of ‘either or’, became a source of wish-fulfilment. World revolution became a low priority, subordinated to the diplomatic interests of the USSR. Comintern policy was dictated by the twists and turns of internal CPSU politics. In turn the resulting failure of revolutionary movements, the expansion of fascism and the tightening grip of imperialist encirclement increased the isolation of the USSR and reinforced the belief in the necessity of socialism in one country, the survival of which transcended the world revolution itself. And so the supreme ‘Leninist’ stood his mentor’s fundamental theory of imperialism on its head.

As Germany had been regarded as the key to the European revolution which would come to the aid of the infant Soviet republic, the impact of Stalin’s disastrous policy in Germany spelt the final death-knell of socialism in the USSR and almost destroyed the macabre parody of socialism which Stalin had constructed in its place. In line with the fight against the rightist deviationists, which provided the ideological cloak for the offensive against the kulaks, the ‘rich peasants’, within the USSR, the Comintern was instructed in 1929 also to take a left line. The ‘third period’ heralded the opening of new revolutionary offensives. The main enemy holding back the working class were the social democrats, now stigmatised as ‘social-fascists’. As much fire and venom was directed at social-democrats and socialists as against the Nazis, totally destroying any hope of a united working class front against the rise of fascism, particularly in Germany and Austria. By this ultra-leftist sectarian policy and the zigzag towards popular frontism in 1934, which subordinated the struggle for socialism to alliances with the western democracies, Stalin’s policies led to the destruction of the organised working class of Europe and the triumph of Nazism. The people of the USSR were to pay the terrible price for this error which arose from the socialism in one country delusion.

What form did building this ‘socialism’ which Brar so admires take?

“It meant pulling the Soviet Union out of its feudal and medieval integument into the modern world and building modern socialist industry and collective 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”.

As usual Brar invokes Lenin to back up Stalin, recommending “his article on cooperatives”.If by this he means Lenin’s ‘On cooperation’ written in January 1923, only a few weeks before his final debilitating stroke, this is what he actually says:

“If the whole of the peasantry had been organised in cooperatives we would by now have been standing with both feet on the soil of socialism. But the organisation of the entire peasantry in cooperative societies presupposes a standard of culture among the peasantry … that cannot in fact be achieved without a cultural revolution.”

Where in the article, which this quote summarises, is there mention of “collectivisation”, and specifically forced collectivisation? Lenin envisaged by “cultural revolution” a patient process of education and the organisation of peasant producer co-ops. No mention here of herding peasants into cattle trucks for deportation to Siberia, no lynchings of those with a few more acres and cows than the rest, no Red Army firing squads against those resisting expropriation of their land and produce - in fact no mention of terror at all from Lenin, who was not squeamish to invoke it when he believed it necessary.

Stalin, who had attacked the opposition for being anti-peasant when they spoke of primitive socialist accumulation to build industry, put their policies into effect with a brutality they never imagined. This was not the construction of socialism in the countryside by the peasantry working out their own destiny and liberation. This was revolution (or, more accurately in socialist terms, counterrevolution) from above, using all the force of the state to cram into a decade changes which the agricultural revolutions in capitalist countries had taken generations to achieve. The immense suffering caused by the enclosures of common land, clearances of peasants, famines and the displacement of labourers by machinery, which had been spread over 200 years, were compressed into a five-year plan.

A “tremendous achievement”, Mr Brar - but was it socialism? Similarly was the forced labour in industry, the crude propaganda Stakhanovite stunts to increase workers’ productivity, the massive toll in industrial illnesses and accidents? Was this vast heaving ant-hill which was the USSR a vision of the socialist future. Those like the Webbs who viewed socialism in terms of production, order, bureaucracy and efficiency certainly thought so. And so does Brar, who hails it as “labour heroism … unleashing the initiative of the masses”.

But this is not the socialism of Marx or even the pragmatic Lenin. Stalin’s practical policies, irrespective of any pronouncements he might have made, elevated technology and the development of the productive forces, as the dynamo of historical change. Not human beings, not the class struggle for a better society and a new level of human culture, not the ending of exploitation and the alienation of the individual from the product of his or her creative activity. Proletarian democracy or political freedom plays no part in Brar’s socialism: only abstract freedom, abstract socialism for an abstract ‘proletariat’. Instead the veneration of technology, the incessant drive for production.

Even the basic socialist concept of ‘equality’ or equitable distribution of the wealth produced does not get a look in. In fact growing inequalities, wage differentials, perks for party members, along with the trappings, badges of rank in the army, better consumer goods for the elite, limousines and dachas. All these were integral to Stalin’s ‘socialist’ achievement, along with a more reactionary social policy, a more draconian criminal code and that other great achievement praised by Brar, the terror against the real or imaginary political opposition.

It is at this stage in Mr Brar’s transcript that the patience and tolerance of the reader becomes most taxed, as he presents a blasé apologia for the elimination of the opposition, or the “fifth column”, as he refers to them. Perhaps millions of kulaks can be dismissed as counterrevolutionaries in Mr Brar’s make-believe world, but it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that Brar can be so naive as actually to believe the obscene slanders he perpetuates about the communists arraigned as traitors, saboteurs and fascist agents. Not a jot of concern is shown for the millions who went through the GPU/NKVD gaols, the torture chambers and prison camps. The “innumerable victims” are dismissed in parentheses as “mainly Trotskyists”. He concentrates on the “51 or 52 people” condemned by their own testimony at the Moscow trials.

Brar shows even less comprehension of human psychology than he does the historical process. The defendants pleaded guilty - therefore they must be. Presumably Brar also believes that witches flew on broomsticks and copulated with demons. No analysis of the situation, no allowance for physical or psychological torture, threats to family and friends, offers of rehabilitation. No insight into the minds of men who believed, as Trotsky did, even after his banishment, that the party is always right; men who had dedicated their lives to the party and the revolution and could not envisage life outside; men who could be threatened or induced to believe that this one last sacrifice was a service to that party and revolution, even if it meant ‘confessing’ to such a fantastic conspiracy that no one who knew of their devotion to socialism could possibly believe it.

But Brar believes it, even after the passage of more than 60 years and the revelations of the 20th Congress of the CPSU and afterwards. The fragility of his case is underlined by the absurd comparison he makes between the show trial victims and Roman Malinovsky. Malinovsky, head of the Bolshevik group in the duma and central committee member, was, after the revolution, revealed to be an agent of the okhrana (the tsarist secret police) and shot. He was a state agent who was being used to infiltrate a subversive, revolutionary party. But the Moscow trials took place 20 years after the CP seized power when the party was politically unassailable and it was running the secret police. The reason they were not summarily shot like Malinovsky was not because of Stalin’s respect for the judicial process. It was because he wanted to destroy the potential and actual alternative leadership politically, by discrediting them before the world in an act of public self-abasement. The idea that many of its oldest leading members, who had played important roles in the revolutionary movement, became, or were from the beginning, hostile to the party and revolution which was their life could only be accepted by a society and individuals reduced to a state of pathological fear, suspicion and uncritical subservience to authority. That they could be linked with Trotsky who they had either always opposed, or repeatedly renounced, also defies rational belief. And to tie Trotsky to some international fascist conspiracy, when his life was devoted to socialism, accusing him of wrecking, sabotage and assassination, when he even opposed terroristic methods in the fight against capitalism - let alone against a workers’ state, as he still considered the USSR to be - is a fabrication of fantastic proportions, rivalled in the 20th century only by the big lie of the international Jewish conspiracy.

Brar rounds off his calumnies about Trotsky by the off-hand reference that “another Trotskyist did him to death”. This attempt to discredit Trotsky even in his last moments of agony is currently doing its rounds in the SLP in the form of a leaflet claiming, on the basis of the ‘confession’ of Trotsky’s assassin that he was not Ramon Mercader, the NKVD agent, but Jackson, the disillusioned Trotskyist, distraught at being told to call off his affair with the secretary, Sylvia Ageloff. Almost 60 years after his death, Stalinist lies and smears continue to pursue the ‘old man’ beyond the grave.

While the ‘Trotskyists’ were being accused as fascist agents, Molotov and Ribbentrop were working out the ‘non-aggression pact’, a collaboration to partition Poland and sell out the working class of Europe. This vital background to the Great Patriotic War is not mentioned by Brar, although an examination of this period is essential to appraising Stalin’s ability as a socialist leader. Was the alliance with the Nazis a cunning plot to gain time, as Stalinists claim ? Or was it a cynical move to expand Russian national boundaries, which betrayed anti-fascists in the west and trampled on the national rights of neighbouring peoples? The flaw in the claim that it was a necessary strategy to allow the USSR to prepare lies in the fact that it also allowed Nazi Germany to grow stronger. The pact with Stalin covered the Nazis’ flank while they invaded the Low Countries and France. Russia actually provided a base for the attack on Norway. Essential to the Nazis war effort were the vast amounts of raw materials - oil, cotton, grain, minerals - supplied by Russia or via Russia. The truth is, Stalin embraced the alliance with Germany with enthusiasm, even to the handing over of exiled German communists to the Gestapo. How could this be justifiable as being in defence of the USSR?

Eager to sing the praises of the victorious Red Army as another glorious creation of Stalin, Brar, at pains to prove it was not affected by the ‘decapitation’ in the purges, does not mention the near disastrous Russian imperialist offensive against Finland, which revealed poor leadership and lack of preparation. Nor does he mention that Stalin was so confident of his pact with Hitler that he failed to heed warnings about the Nazi blitzkrieg attack in July 1941, leading to the loss of massive amounts of equipment, troops and territory.

Brar claims that Stalin’s “modernisation” of Russia was necessary to prepare for this inevitable attack by an imperialist power. Again a dominantly economic and technological solution is prescribed instead of the Marxist method of defending the revolution - winning the support of the world’s working class and oppressed peoples, instead of politically disarming them in the face of fascism, as the Stalinists did in Germany and Spain. The dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 is even passed over without mention.

For Brar only the heroic face of war is apparent, since it demonstrated Stalin’s great abilities as a leader and his popularity. This is proved by the assertion that “The average soldier went to his death with one slogan on his lips: ‘For the motherland, and for comrade Stalin’.” It is significant that he does not query why the slogan was not ‘For socialism and for international revolution’. The fight of the people of the USSR was for survival: they had no choice but to resist, this does not mean they endorsed all of Stalin’s actions or that they were fighting for his version of ‘socialism’. He became a figurehead, as Churchill did in Britain. If the ability to motivate people to fight and resist tenaciously is in itself a mark of popularity, then tsar Alexander who defeated Napoleon and Hitler himself must also have been a popular leaders. Stalin’s ability to rally the Soviet people and organise a counter-offensive might make him a great nationalist and war leader - but not a Marxist or a socialist.

Even the undoubted heroism of the Soviet people was not universal. There were hundreds of thousands of defections, especially among national minorities, for whom Stalin’s rule was an extension of Russian imperialism, and there would probably have been more but for the Nazis’ ruthless racist policies which classified all Slavs and, of course, orientals and Jews, as untermenschen - subhumans. Also Stalin, whose own son was captured, decreed that Soviet soldiers must not surrender and if they did their families would be penalised. NKVD units were behind the front to make sure that deserting soldiers were summarily shot.

There is also the other dark side of Stalin’s glorious war which Brar does not mention - the massacre of 20,000 officers captured during the occupation of Poland: the failure to assist the Warsaw uprising; the revenge inflicted on German civilians including systematic rape of women; the persecution of returned POWs. All perhaps small crimes excusable in a great, ruthless military conqueror, an Alexander or a Tamerlane - but in an international socialist leader?

Stalin’s post-war years receive scant mention apart from restoring production to above pre-war levels (no mention of the ‘reparations’ plundered to make this possible, or of the slave labour) and the struggle against “people in the party who were trying to bring in the ideas of market socialism” - a code for the relaunching of the domestic terror. There is no examination of how the liberation of Eastern Europe was reinforced by the hangmen and firing squads as ‘communism’ was imposed on the working classes. The overtones of anti-semitism in the post-war terror are naturally ignored. Nor is there mention of attempts to bring to heel the Yugoslavs, who had resisted the Nazis almost unaided and carried out their own revolution.

Brar closes with an eulogy of generalissimo Stalin’s triumphal parade, drawn from the “Trotskyist” Isaac Deutscher. Again the quotation is doctored. The restored sentence reveals that it was far from Deutscher’s intention to give Stalin’s victory an uncritical endorsement:

“These were days of undreamed of glory. Yet rarely had triumph and frustration been as close neighbours as they were in Russia in 1945: and never perhaps had any victory been so chequered with grandeur and misery as was this one. Stalin stood in the full gaze of popular recognition and gratitude. These feelings were spontaneous, genuine - not engineered by official propagandists.”

The price of the victory over fascism was over 20 million dead. There is no homage to these workers and peasants in the conclusion of Brar’s oration, which ends transfixed by the glory of the Great Leader. No doubts are expressed as to how many of these deaths resulted from Stalin’s lack of political and military preparation, how many from his policies of internal repression. But, as Brar claims in conclusion, those who do not share his pride in Stalin’s great achievements, are merely “sceptics”.

Is this colossal delusion the sort of vision of socialism we in the SLP wish to be putting across to workers? Is this glorification of enforced socialism from above as “labour heroism”, of war, of the great leader, a recipe for winning people at the dawn of the 21st century to socialism? The mirage of idealised Stalinism which had deceived many well-intentioned socialists was dispelled in 1956. The concrete basis of that mirage itself dissolved with the collapse of the USSR. The rapidity of that disintegration provided the ultimate confirmation that, whatever system existed in the USSR and Eastern Europe, it was not socialism; it was not a workers’ state. There was no bloody counterrevolution apart from that already carried out by Stalin. Instead workers were either actively involved in attempting to overthrow the communist political system, or stood by with approval or apathy whilst it happened.

What occurred was basically the self-reform (with varying degrees of external pressure) of a ruling class based on the collective control of production and the state apparatus into a ruling class based on state and private ownership - a process apparent in China now. As individuals, some were losers and some gainers. Some like Shevardnadze ended up running their own fiefdoms; others ended up advertising pizza. There was no counterrevolution violently destroying the machinery of a ‘workers’ state’, not even in Romania. The ease with which the state and economy of the GDR was integrated into a united Germany reveals the absence of any fundamental opposition to capitalism. The state was instead adapted by the reformed ruling class of Eastern Europe and the former USSR to maintain the social stability and legal framework for the free-market economy they are attempting to build.

Stalinists, despite all their condemnations of ‘revisionism’ and imperialist agents responsible for destroying Stalin’s legacy, are at a loss to explain the process. Trotskyists too have been incapacitated by the need to maintain the myth of the ‘workers’ state’, a problem they inherited from their founder who, despite Stalinist claims, only reluctantly broke with the CPSU. The whole Bolshevik tradition in fact has played a stultifying role on the development of Marxism in particular, but also socialism as a whole, and lingering illusions about the USSR continue to undermine critical analysis of the revolutionary movement in the 20th century.

It is clear that Brar and his co-thinkers cannot hide behind the term ‘Marxist-Leninist’ and believe that by denying the term ‘Stalinism’ they are exorcising all the crimes of Stalin. Stalin represents a break with the ideas of Marx and Lenin, a warping of their philosophy and socialist aims. Marx and Lenin are prostituted to serve Stalin in his final destruction of the gains of the October Revolution and the establishment of a new system of political repression and economic exploitation. Stalin represented the dominance of a new class: not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but of a privileged class based on party apparatchiks, with little experience or allegiance to the revolution and even less to Marxist internationalism, and on bureaucrats and technocrats for whom the administration of the machinery of the state and the economy was the prime interest. All the ideals of two generation of Marxists and other leftists were drowned in blood and fear by the Stalin regime. He acted, as Trotsky said, as “the gravedigger of the revolution”.

Harpal Brar stands by with his spade of dogma and pick of sectarianism to perform the same role on the SLP. Under the leadership of Brar, Bull and the other Stalinoid fossils the SLP will not live to adulthood, let alone create a revolution.