The Sovjet Story

[TheGodlessUtopian]

I was on the internet archive searching for videos on marxism and found a most disturbing video documentary on the Soviet Union.Among other things it claims marx was openly arguing for genocide and how Hitlerism (Nazism) is only slightly different from communism.

http://www.archive.org/details/TheSovjetStory.flv

Anyone care to explain,debunk,or justify the chronicled actions?

[Thirsty Crow]

I was on the internet archive searching for videos on marxism and found a most disturbing video documentary on the Soviet Union.Among other things it claims marx was openly arguing for genocide and how Hitlerism (Nazism) is only slightly different from communism.

If someone claims that Marx was openly arguing for genocide - let them prove it by providing us feeble minded commies with a direct quote.

EDIT: Wait a minute, you are making a reference to a documentary which inadvertently emphasizes the Jewish origin of some historical figures and refers to the "hidden hand of the Illuminati"?
Are you a troll?

[Muzk]

The Russian population was angry with the Jews because they knew it was the Jewish leadership that had set up all the public violence in order to overthrow the government......

Credibility lost at the first line


Wow, the rest is even worse... here, for shits and giggles:



Vladimir Lenin was also half Jewish and half Russian. He was a Marxists/Socialist that worked for the Jewish world leaders. He was arrested a few times and sentence to exile in Siberia where he married his Jewish wife. After he served his sentence, they lived in Germany, Belgium, England, Poland, and Switzerland before returning to Russia. He was never employed but lived a life of luxury in Europe. He was a member of the French freemasons Art et Travai.



Leon Trotskyâs real name was Leiba Bronstein. He was under the training of Alexander Parvus (whose real name was Israel Gelfand) during high school. Parvus was a Russian Jewish freemason. He not only taught Trotsky in the Talmud but he also introduced him to the Kabala, Zionism and Marxism/Socialism. Trotsky became a member of the freemasons and the Bânai Bârth.



The Russian revolution was in reality a Jewish takeover of Russia in the midst of WWI, in preparation for the formation of the state of Israel and the coming Jewish Messiah.

SERIOUSLY.

THIS MUST BE SARCASM

BLOODY SARCASM

MASSIVE TROLLING

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Yeah the descrption was weird (to put it lightly) and even someone as naive as me could tell the descrption was obvious crap.

But ,anyway,my post wasn't meant as trolling (whatever that is) rather about the subject matter detailed within,meaning the supposed relationship between communism and national socialism.

As far as I could tell the descrption didn't have much to do with the actual video contents (unless I somehow missed it).

[Dimentio]

The actual video is a Lithuanian documentary about the evils of the Soviet Union.

[TheGodlessUtopian]

The actual video is a Lithuanian documentary about the evils of the Soviet Union.

How many marxists debate these evils.Is the video accurate or heavily false?

[Muzk]

How many marxists debate these evils.Is the video accurate or heavily false?

It's a whole hour you don't seriously expect anyone to watch that?

[Red Commissar]

Like Dimentio said this film was made by a Lithuanian director as a "documentary" on the Soviet Union.

Its claims are mostly recycled anti-Communist propaganda that are, but not limited to the following

-The Bolsheviks interrupted "good" reform in Russia
-VIOLENT REVOLUTION
-The "engineered" famine
-Focus on the Soviet and German "collaboration" in the non-aggression pact

From there it attempts to link national socialism to Marxist-Leninist principles as it was implemented in the Soviet Union by rather idiotic concepts, both by stating it and what misconceptions the viewer already has. This is based on superficial and childish observations such as,

-ZOMG STALIN AND HITLER KILLED A LOT OF PEOPLE
-INDIVIDUALISM WAS STAMPED OUT!!11!
-TOTALITARIANISM
-*insert stupid quote*
-It was the national SOCIALIST party!
-NO FREE MARKET!!!11!
-GULAGS!

Yet like many before them, they refuse to actually look below the surface and analyze the theory, the socioeconomic principles in the countries, industrial relations, and social policy. They just hope the viewer will take their poor arguments at face value because they got some snazzy footage and stupid quotes to go along with it. It has very little different with something that Glenn Beck would do.

More importantly most of the time when people try to link nazism with socialist thought, it is usually in the manner of a cheap smear, rather than an actual look. This is not surprising because any one who looks at political thought beyond hackneyed conceptions of "liberty" can tell you there's a world of difference between Nazism and Marxism. And laying the blame for what occurred under Stalin at the feet of Marx and Engels is childish too.

It's also important to note that this video is underlined with a lot of anti-Russian sentiment that a number of people in the Baltics and Eastern Europe have, which carried into "anti-Communist" thought in the same populations.

Moving on to claims of Marx advocating genocide, they come from the same thought that misinterpreted and sometimes outstraight fabricated quotes of his that also were used by people to claim that Marx was antisemitic, mostly from his work On the Jewish Question.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

I was on the internet archive searching for videos on marxism and found a most disturbing video documentary on the Soviet Union.Among other things it claims marx was openly arguing for genocide and how Hitlerism (Nazism) is only slightly different from communism.

http://www.archive.org/details/TheSovjetStory.flv

Anyone care to explain,debunk,or justify the chronicled actions?

The prevailing point of view among the Russians and the leftists I've discussed this with is that The Soviet Story is a vicious propaganda film.

I didn't see the film, having read in multiple sources that it featured a British radical liberal named George Watson -- a literary scholar, and not a professor of history -- claiming that Marx and Engels advocated genocide. Watson's contribution to political thought largely consists of trying to tie Karl Marx and European socialism to the Nazis' Holocaust in World War II.

Now, I have never been a real fan of Stalin's rule (or the remaining Soviet history after Stalin), but pseudohistories like that don't rub me right. (Besides, I turn down offers for free movies that I see online for fear of getting infected with malware, and I won't transform my money into Edvins Snore's film royalties.)

The Russian historian Alexander Dyukov -- professionally trained in Soviet history -- wrote an entire book debunking the history shown in the film, and actually had it published by the Russian state publishing agency IA Regnum (http://common.regnum.ru/documents/The_Soviet_Story.pdf). I could just translate it for you, but 88 pages is a lot to translate.

Which sections of the The Soviet Story narrative did you desire to see explained, debunked, or justified?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

The questions I wanted explained,justified or debunked have already been addressed (Nazism-marxism link,Marx and genocide).However I would like to know as to why the soviets killed so many of their own people.Also why exactly did they co-operate with hitler?

[mosfeld]

However I would like to know as to why the soviets killed so many of their own people.

To maintain proletarian class rule, of course. You don't think that everyones happy about socialist revolution, do you? Counter-revolutionaries and class enemies were murdered by revolutionaries in the Soviet Union.

However, the numbers are generally heavily exaggerated by the bourgeoisie in their attempt to redirect workers to capitalism. Communism is a direct threat to the bourgeoisie, so, of course, in order to maintain their class rule they'll discredit it.

I'll leave you with a few links which might interest you and give you a different view of the Soviet Union during the Stalin era.

Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union By Mario Sousa (http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm)
Revolutionary Democracy Stalin Archive (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/Stalin/index.htm)
Grover Furr's Homepage (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/)
The Stalin Society (http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/)
Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martens (a bit outdated according to some) (http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/index.html)

[Red Commissar]

However I would like to know as to why the soviets killed so many of their own people.

That is because of their own conditions- revolutions are not all roses and cutesy, particularly one that radically tried to alter the social relations.

However the documentary and other sources tend to exaggerate what had occurred, but the issue is they try to paint the situation one that can be laid at the heels of Karl Marx. Should one blame Edmund Burke for conservatism's actions in Iraq? Adam Smith for the current ills of capitalism?


Also why exactly did they co-operate with hitler?

There was no "cooperation" with Hitler- the video and other sources like to show pictures of soviet and German soldiers together, but the meaning of those have little bearing, any more than American soldiers with Soviet soldiers in Germany.

What the Soviets did was made a pragmatic decision when faced with the best way to preserve itself. The non-aggression pact was done after Soviet attempts to make an agreement with France, the United Kingdom, and other countries to contain Nazi Germany failed, so the USSR tried to make an attempt to stay out of the war and acheive certain goals. Namely, areas they had laid claims on (Baltics, eastern Poland, Bessarabia, Finland).

The part of the non-aggression pact that made some people uncomfortable was the prospect of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany essentially creating their spheres of influence and demanding the other would respect those claims. So to some it appeared the Soviet Union had thrown out internationalism in favor of national goals.

Even though the two had a common policy on Poland, manifested when the two nations invaded and divided the country, it was no secret the two despised one another. While they toned down or eliminated hostilities in the public's eyes, they both continued actions against one another. Germany took advantage of the Winter War to further its long term aims and played to anti-Communist sentiment to prepare for a showdown with the Soviet Union.

It comes to a question of what the Soviets hoped to achieve with the non-aggression pact- were they hoping the Nazis and western nations would obliterate one another in the process? Were they buying more time to mobilize? Was the USSR genuinely thinking they could stay out of the inevitable war? That's up to who ever you ask, but again, how does this have any bearing on Communism as an ideology?

[AK]

-Focus on the Soviet and German "collaboration" in the non-aggression pact
Ha. I find it funny how the "documentary" emphasises that the Bolsheviks had some Jewish connections but they also temporarily collaborated with the Nazis. Classic.

[Thirsty Crow]

To maintain proletarian class rule, of course. You don't think that everyones happy about socialist revolution, do you? Counter-revolutionaries and class enemies were murdered by revolutionaries in the Soviet Union.

Yeah, the whole Party was teeming with class traitors and opportunists.
The persistence of Cold War mentality is truly amazing.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

However I would like to know as to why the soviets killed so many of their own people.

Why were people killed in the USSR? Because of various factors particular to the time and place. The USSR was effectively at war with anti-communism right from the establishment of Lenin's Bolshevik Russia in 1917: right after the 1917 uprising, the Russian monarchist sympathizers and other reactionary and anti-Bolshevik forces mobilized into a so-called White Army and began a terror campaign against the population, known as a the White Terror. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror#Russian_White_Terror) These reactionary Whites secured support from various western powers and imperial Japan (Imperial Russia's allies of World War I), who intervened in the Russian Civil War and even occupied various parts of Russia's territory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War).

The early Bolshevik state thus stood on the brink of destruction, and the early Soviet government responded to particularly harsh circumstances with equally harsh measures. Reactionaries were thrown in jail and often executed. This was not indiscriminate: the executions and repression were wartime measures and were specifically designed to target the monarchists, aristocrats, reactionaries, and rebels. They were not used to snuff out ordinary people.

The later mass repressions carried out by the Soviet regime under Stalin -- the killings occured mostly in the 1930s -- were unjustifiable, but their extent is often extremely exaggerated by a history of biased Western scholarship, which to a great extent, has passed into popular history (though contradicted by later scholarship, these claims still circulate in popular accounts today).

Among the most high-profile victims of the Stalin period were dissident Marxists -- a significant number of whom were even prominent members of the Communist Party. These people, and their supporters among the general population, had supported the revolution, esteemed the Soviet Union, and would have been left alone under Lenin, who was tolerant enough of dissent to even bring non-Bolsheviks (like the Left SRs) into the Soviet government during his day. These genuinely leftist dissidents were brutally repressed on account of their hostility to the ruling bureaucratic clique and its methods in the 1930s, and were certainly not expunged on account of some necessary ideological continuity between the purges and the ideas and principles of Marx or Lenin. (The quite shallow theoretical basis for the Stalinist killings was the novel idea of the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism" -- an idea rejected by all of the non-Stalinist left.)

Both political opponents (real and suspected) and common criminals (e.g., violent criminals and repeat offenders that were condemned to serve unusually long sentences) were sent to labor camps known as the GULAGs, in which conditions were pretty harsh. A number of these prisoners died, although the greatest spike in the labor camps' mortality occured during the Soviet war against the Nazis, when conditions for society as a whole were pretty bad and the entire non-military population relied on rationed-out food and had to make do with the wartime poverty and scarcity. The poorly implemented policy of rapidly collectivizing the agricultural sector during the early 1930s prompted large-scale peasant resistance to it, and culminated in the peasants' rebellious choice to slaughter their livestock and destroy their crops rather than collectivize this private property. Since agriculture was being used to feed the cities and develop industry through export, this led to mass starvation in the agricultural areas of the Soviet Union -- most notably in the Ukraine, where several million died. Of course, the policies of the time bore partial responsibility for this fiasco -- but the disaster was hardly something that was originally intended to affect millions of people, and the idea that Stalin was deliberately targeting the Ukrainian people, first popularized by Ukrainian nationalists in the West, has no empirical basis in support of it.

Mainstream American and British historians and Sovietologists working during the Cold War were not only people who were generally unsympathetic to the political left, but also people who did not have access to authentic records relevant to the history of the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union. Many of these scholars posited that the Stalin regime deliberately executed tens of millions of people; the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s revealed that these tolls were grossly exaggerated: during the bloodiest period of repression, the Great Purge of the 1930s, there were just under 700,000 executions according to official documents compiled from Soviet archives (see Barry McLoughlin & Kevin McDermott. Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, p. 141: http://books.google.com/books?id=8yorTJl1QEoC&pg=PA141&dq=stalin%27s+terror+700,000&ei=R05ZR9bZDoiUtgOr6pjBAw&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=08u7x3Z4UWcEB5mE40uQ4mmllhs#v=onepage&q&f=false).

700,000 executed people in a more-or-less systematic campaign of repression certainly is a very large and unjustifiable number, but certainly nothing like the common exaggerations found in the common anti-communist ideological accounts of "history" of the period. By way of comparison, the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Cold War General Suharto in Indonesia is estimated to have executed between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Indonesian communists in the 1960s (see Robert Gellately & Ben Kiernan: The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, p. 46: http://books.google.com/books?id=Ay76mYBLU3sC&pg=PA46&dq=Suharto+genocide+million&hl=en&ei=enCHTM3JN8f_nAee5MWwDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Suharto%20genocide%20million&f=false), and there were numerous other victims -- including victims of general repression and ethnic cleansing. But notice the stark discrepancy already apparent in American and Western outrage as far as Stalin's and Suharto's rather comparable crimes.


Also why exactly did they co-operate with hitler?

They briefly cooperated with Hitler for geopolitical reasons of national self-interest (Realpolitik), and did so as a last resort. Stalin agreed to Hitler's idea to divide eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence after it was apparent that Hitler, a staunch anti-communist and sworn enemy of the Soviet Union, was not going to back down from his aggressive claims against Poland anyway. The agreement negotiated by Molotov with German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop allowed the Soviet Union to take back the predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian eastern territories of interwar Poland that the Poles had seized from the Soviets in the course of the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921). It also permitted the Soviet Union to fully exploit its military and diplomatic leverage in the hitherto German-leaning Baltic states, which were pressured into allowing Soviet troops to establish bases on their territory. This gave the USSR even stronger leverage, and Stalin was able to engineer an overthrow of the governments of the three rightist Baltic dictators and help install pro-Soviet governments, which soon asked to become part of the Soviet Union. The USSR was also able to force the Romanian government to cede the small region of Bessarabia and Bukovina (now known as Moldova), a long-disputed territory that had been seized by the Romanians from Russia during the Russians' Civil War.

As evident from all this, the USSR was exclusively motivated by the national interest of the state when it "cooperated" with the Germans in 1939-40; the Western allies were driven by the same concerns when they actively "cooperated" with the Germans at the Munich Conference, in which the French, British, and Poles agreed to carve up independent Czechoslovakia and to give Hitler control of Prague. The Polish government, possibly reassured by the not-so-famous German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934, even sezied a small part of Czechoslovakia in the process (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-Polish_Non-Aggression_Pact, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaolzie).

Prior to 1939, the Soviets were hardly known for dealing with the Germans. The USSR pushed for political Popular Fronts to combat rising fascism in Europe in 1934-1939; it sent advisers, volunteers, and materiel to aid the Spanish Republic against the combined forces of Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini after the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Although some German communists deemed politically unreliable would be turned over to Hitler in 1940-1941, between 1933 and 1939 the Soviet regime accepted many communist and Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazism in Hitler's Germany. Its party leaders issued stark warnings about Nazism (http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=kQwpAAAAIBAJ&sjid=hWkDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1591,1928884&dq=nazis+flayed&hl=en). The Soviet Union's political propaganda and cinema industry churned out anti-Nazi propaganda. Soviet artists, cartoonists, and newspaper caricaturists mocked Hitler and Mussolini with their art. The Soviet film director Herbert Rappaport, an Austrian-Jewish immigrant, was officially invited to the Soviet Union by the Soviet government in 1936, in order to make the first production of the epic anti-Nazi film Professor Mamlock (1938), which focused on the persecution of a Jewish scientist by the Nazi authorities. Although it was later recognized in the West as a genuine masterwork of anti-fascist cinema and has been remade several times, the original film was banned in isolationist America as "anti-German propaganda" after its worldwide release. (http://www.umass.edu/defa/filmtour/sjprofmamlock.shtml)

Unlike the appeasing Western powers in 1933-1939, prior to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets were pushing the idea of negotiating a grand alliance between Britain, France, Poland, and the USSR to contain the threat emanating from Nazi Germany. The Polish government, long hostile to Russia, flatly rejected the Soviet plan, and the pace of the negotiations with Britain and France were continuously stalled by the British and French governments, so that by August 1939, the USSR still had no ally to fight the Germans with. Stalin, worried that the stalling Western powers would simply encourage Hitler to go further east and sic him on the USSR in the event of Germany's conquest of Poland, was by then evidently convinced that dealing with the Germans would be the saner and safer bet.

The Soviet acquisition of land to the east of their August 1939 borders also created a strategic buffer zone between the Nazis and the centers of Soviet power in Moscow (and Leningrad). The very likely fact that Stalin was still preparing for war with Hitler at some point despite the signing of the pact strongly suggests that the 1939 redrawing of borders was part of a plan to give the Soviets some "breathing room" in the even of war. (The Soviets had not spent the previous decade sitting quietly and idly against the backrop of the German threat, but were actively preparing for a serious war: the idea that a major conflagration could easily break out across Europe was common idea after the sight of Hitler's ascent to power, and the Soviet armaments industry began to massively expand during the massive industrialization in the 1930s. And while Stalin's signing of the German-Soviet Pact falsely reassured him that the likely war would not break out in 1941 -- some historians write that he expected a war in 1942 or 1943 -- this constant preparation for a major war was not entirely displaced by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: in 1940-1941, the Soviet armed forces were, in fact, still being expanded, re-equipped, and reorganized.)