Mazdak - You're gonna love this.

[Hayduke]

" The most common examples of photograph alteration and falsification come from communist Russia. Unwanted persons, so-called "enemies of the people" were not only killed, but also removed from photographs where their presence was unwanted. Photographs were altered with the intent of changing the past. "

Looks like Stalin didnt like to take the blame for being involved
in the Moscow frame trials. So instead he faded out all the evidence of contact between him and Nikolai Yezhov.

"Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the Soviet secret police, suffered a fate similar to that of Trotsky. For some time he was close to Stalin, staging the infamous Moscow frame-trials, where innocent people were forced to confess crimes against Stalin and the Soviet Union, and were consequently executed. In the photograph below, he can be seen walking together with Stalin."
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/yezhov-orig.jpg

"In the modified photograph below, it is as though he had never existed"

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hick0088/classes/csci_2101/yezhov-alt.jpg

Stalin let him dothe dirty work, and then goes destroying evidence of any contact.

Damn what a great leader .

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/avatars/personal/Mazdak.gif


(Edited by D DAY at 2:28 pm on Aug. 31, 2002)

[anti machine]

Great thread D DAy. Cant wait for Mazdak's reply.

[maoist3]

I'm not going to say anything precisely for Mazdak, but I will say this. If this were the late 1700s, I don't think we would be seeing the American Revolutionaries print many photos of Benedict Arnold and George Washington together. If we were in the 1860s, I don't think you'd see a lot of photos of Abraham Lincoln and southern generals together. If we lived in the 1980s in Nicaragua, I don't think you would find in the Sandinista newspaper pictures of their former comrades who later became contras equated with Sandinistas. They would be pictured alone as enemies or put in group photos only to be pointed out as enemies.

Finally, if George Bush Sr. ever met with Saddam Hussein previous to the Gulf War, I doubt you will ever see a picture of them shaking hands in Republican Party campaign literature.

So why is it that Stalin and the Soviet people have to be apolitical?

(Edited by maoist3 at 10:47 pm on Aug. 31, 2002)

[Mazdak]

Finally i have been expecting this. I saw the book with all the falsifications of pictures. Like the one of lenin and stalin sitting together.

I seriously must question such anti stalin material, but Yezhov went mad. He was said to have made patper airplanes and doodled during important meetings when Beria took his place.

I don't think it is the smartest idea to keep sucha person around. He, as far as i have read, did NOT murder his wife. He was dedicated to the marxist cause and that is why i to some extent have sympathy for him and to some extent even admire him.

And as maoist said, you wouldn't see pictures of people like, lets say Stalin and Trotsky together when the troskyist threat was rampant.

[Turnoviseous]

Great post!

Finally, if George Bush Sr. ever met with Saddam Hussein previous to the Gulf War, I doubt you will ever see a picture of them shaking hands in Republican Party campaign literature.

Maybe not, but you be still allowed to print out the picture or publish it in newspaper.

I seriously must question such anti stalin material

Anti Stalin? LOL. So on all pictures Stalin disappears? LOL

[American Kid]

I hate to give D Day dabs, but.........ouch, dude. Round one goes to you.

-AK

[maoist3]

Even a guy like Yezhov should have a more honored place in history than all these dissident supporters on Che-lives, mostly people who cannot tell the difference between words and action. Yezhov joined the Party knowing it was his duty to give his life to the cause if need be.

The party in control of the economy and the state should not be a bunch of dissidents. That's not the point anymore once the party has power. The point is to advance the conditions of the people especially in the interests of the proletariat. It should not be open to just any two-bit black marketeer claiming to be a dissident with such profoundly different political views.

When people see the party members getting executed, they know the party is not a place to join for the sake of advancing a career or doing black market activities. It's too risky. All that stopped with Khruschev who repressed the proletarian pole and not the party profiteers.

[Turnoviseous]

When people see the party members getting executed, they know the party is not a place to join for the sake of advancing a career or doing black market activities. It's too risky. All that stopped with Khruschev who repressed the proletarian pole and not the party profiteers.

What if party itself is advancing career and doing a black market? And if members are killed because they do not support that? That was the case all the way from Lenin´s death on.

[guerrillaradio]

Once again, fact triumphs over fiction. Congrats D Day, another round to the liberals!!! :biggrin:

[Mazdak]

Oh yes and people in the soviet union had become dishearted by the Purges. They blamed Yezhov for them. So to have Yezhov and stalin together would not be a great idea since everyone would start associating Stalin with "Yezhovschina"

[vox]

When the facts are uncomfortable, change them. It's perfect 1984 logic.

I suppose the photos came from the Ministry of Truth.

vox

(Edited by vox at 1:05 pm on Sep. 1, 2002)

[Marxman]

Let me tell you how Stalin was nuts. When he was in the triumvirate that consisted Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, he killed Zinoviev and Kamenev and got his throne. He killed and arrested all the Bolsheviks and in the time of WWII he suddenly released the RED ARMY generals who fought besides Trotsky in the October revolution. Why? Because all the new generals were lacking of experience and demoralised by the failure that Stalin brought to Russia. Did you all know that Stalin knew the Germans are preparing a full-scale assault on him and were parked right outside Russia and Stalin didn't even move with his finger? Did you know that the Germans were already destroying airfields in Russia and Stalin did nothing? Did you know that Stalin smashed the largest defense wall in Russia right before Germans attacked him? Did you know that Stalin gave a million ton of wheat to Hitler? I can even quote from a book called "Russia:from revolution to counter-revolution" the devious deeds that Stalin did if you are all interested.

[Cassius Clay]

Quote: from Marxman on 7:00 pm on Sep. 1, 2002
Let me tell you how Stalin was nuts.
Yes please do.

When he was in the triumvirate that consisted Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, he killed Zinoviev and Kamenev and got his throne.

Stalin did not kill Zinoviev and Kamenev, they were executed after a public trial in a court of law that found them guilty of terriorism and assaination. If Stalin wanted to kill them why did he wait 12 years from 1924 to 1936? You forget to mention that they were expelled from the party and then let back in numerous times, even after they had served a few months in prison in 1934 for their role ('Morally and Ideologically' responsible) in the murder of Kirov. Surely then would of been the perfect time to do away with them if that is what he had wanted. Of course 20 months later it was realised that they had played a far bigger role and were bought to justice.

He killed and arrested all the Bolsheviks and in the time of WWII he suddenly released the RED ARMY generals who fought besides Trotsky in the October revolution.

And what Red Army Generals would they be? Vlasov, who it turns out was a Nazi. Any others, well Budyenny the leader of the Red Cossacks didn't spend any time in prison.

Why? Because all the new generals were lacking of experience and demoralised by the failure that Stalin brought to Russia. Did you all know that Stalin knew the Germans are preparing a full-scale assault on him and were parked right outside Russia and Stalin didn't even move with his finger? Did you know that the Germans were already destroying airfields in Russia and Stalin did nothing?

Zhukov and Konev anyone. Who happened to be just average private soldiers in 1919. Well I never knew Stalin could predict the future. Yes everybody (including Stalin) could pretty much guess the Germans were going to attack, but the question was when. And don't cry about British Intelliegence, first of all what right minded Soviet would trust MI6? and MI6 had given a warning that the Nazis would attack in May when that didn't happen Stalin (although he was wrong) with some good reason suspected that this was just a plot to get the Soviets into the war. So when MI6 then starts screaming about 'JUNE 22nd' do you expect the NKVD not to be a bit suspicious. And as for your final point, read the memoirs of Molotov and various Red Army Generals (including Zhukov) who say Stalin worked for 20 hours that first day.

Did you know that Stalin smashed the largest defense wall in Russia right before Germans attacked him? Did you know that Stalin gave a million ton of wheat to Hitler?

The originall military defenses were based in the east of the Ukraine and yes they were destroyed. But that was in October 1939 not 'Right before the Germans attacked him'. The new defenses (in Poland) were in the proccess of being finished in June 1941 when the Germans attacked.

I can even quote from a book called "Russia:from revolution to counter-revolution" the devious deeds that Stalin did if you are all interested.

Yes please tell me more stories of Bloodthirsty Stalin and of his 100 million innocent victims. Who happened to be just innocent workers, peasants and REAL Bolsheviks.

[Turnoviseous]

Maybe you haven´t noticed, Cassius Clay, but there is no need for Marxman to post what I have had already...

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...pic=898&start=0 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=22&topic=898&start=0)

[man in the red suit]

that picture didn't even look real. How do you know that the picture of that guy wasn't just placed into the same picture with stalin. I mean look at the picture, it doesn't even look like a real person. I don't even know what to make of that...

[maoist3]

Quote: from Turnoviseous on 4:46 am on Sep. 1, 2002

[maoist3 says:]
When people see the party members getting executed, they know the party is not a place to join for the sake of advancing a career or doing black market activities. It's too risky. All that stopped with Khruschev who repressed the proletarian pole and not the party profiteers.
[Turno says:]
What if party itself is advancing career and doing a black market? And if members are killed because they do not support that? That was the case all the way from Lenin´s death on.


maoist3 replies for MIM:
That's not what was happening until Khruschev. There was some under Stalin but not in the main.

The proof is the mortality rates going down faster than ever before in history, improvements in the status of wimmin, victory over the Germans who held their own against BOTH France and Russia just one generation earlier. Thanks to Stalin's line, the Soviet Union beat the Nazis almost on their own. Those kinds of achievements are not possible with your run-of-the-mill black marketeering party running the government seen in countless countries at countless times in history.

Also I'd apperciate it if you would put my name in front of quotes from me and yours in front of quotes from you.

(Edited by maoist3 at 9:43 pm on Sep. 1, 2002)

[Turnoviseous]

Quote: from maoist3 on 9:41 pm on Sep. 1, 2002

Quote: from Turnoviseous on 4:46 am on Sep. 1, 2002
When people see the party members getting executed, they know the party is not a place to join for the sake of advancing a career or doing black market activities. It's too risky. All that stopped with Khruschev who repressed the proletarian pole and not the party profiteers.

What if party itself is advancing career and doing a black market? And if members are killed because they do not support that? That was the case all the way from Lenin´s death on.


maoist3 replies for MIM:
That's not what was happening until Khruschev. There was some under Stalin but not in the main.

The proof is the mortality rates going down faster than ever before in history, improvements in the status of wimmin, victory over the Germans who held their own against BOTH France and Russia just one generation earlier. Thanks to Stalin's line, the Soviet Union beat the Nazis almost on their own. Those kinds of achievements are not possible with your run-of-the-mill black marketeering party running the government seen in countless countries at countless times in history.


Anyway, maoist3, USSR and its economy was best in times of Khruschev, when he said "We will crush you" they almost reached American rates for oil and other things, but anyway agriculture was always worst part of Soviet economy. Consequences of Stalin´s forced collectivization are showing even today...

I am sorry maoist3, but have I ever said that I support Khruschev? He was same sun of a ***** as Stalin!

Thanx to Stalin´s line 20 million of people were killed. If there was not for international policies of Stalin there would be no WW2 maybe. And, maoist3, I suggest that you read that article too....

(Edited by Turnoviseous at 9:53 pm on Sep. 1, 2002)

[Mazdak]

Quote: from man in the red suit on 9:26 pm on Sep. 1, 2002
that picture didn't even look real. How do you know that the picture of that guy wasn't just placed into the same picture with stalin. I mean look at the picture, it doesn't even look like a real person. I don't even know what to make of that...


Well, he does look rather small, but he was known as the "bloody dwarf" to the people who hated him. He was only about 5'0 feet high.

[Guest]

Yeah I was noticing that too, Stalin wasn't that tall either and this guy was short next to stalin.

[Cassius Clay]

Quote: from Turnoviseous on 8:45 pm on Sep. 1, 2002
Maybe you haven´t noticed, Cassius Clay, but there is no need for Marxman to post what I have had already...

http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/top...pic=898&start=0 (http://www.che-lives.com/cgi/community/topic.pl?forum=22&topic=898&start=0)




Oh but I would really like to hear more fantastic stories from this legendary book.

[Marxman]

I see, so now it's time for excuses. You still don't admit Stalin was a basket-case. Oh, okay. Go on and fool yourselves but you will be in a dead-end sooner or later if you are going to read more and understand more history.

[Mazdak]

The best way to read is to read in between the lines.

[Cassius Clay]

Quote: from Marxman on 11:05 pm on Sep. 2, 2002
I see, so now it's time for excuses. You still don't admit Stalin was a basket-case. Oh, okay. Go on and fool yourselves but you will be in a dead-end sooner or later if you are going to read more and understand more history.


No excuses, just the facts. And no I'm not ready to believe that Stalin was a 'Basket case'. It is precisly by reading history that I now know that Stalin and the Soviet Union were nothing like my western text books describe.

[Marxman]

Western books describe him as a communist and that is what I hate. They don't describe him as marxists books do. Marxist books describe him as the great asshole who quenched the revolutionary fire of socialism, which is exactly what he was. Even Lenin described him as a bueracrat when he realised what he relly was. But if you want a perfect description of Stalin, pick up books by Trotsky.

[Mazdak]

They describe him as a communist..... and they describe hitler as a nazi, congratulations, you've gotten far marxman.

Stalin was a communist, but like the famous "Fidel eats babies" propoganda, was demonized and made into a figurehead to evil. When people think of communism, they automatically think of people thrown in prison for nothing. It is propoganda, nothing more.

[Smoking Frog II]

Although I agree with D-Day, It should be pointed out
that at the start of the Cold war [which incidently thje US won, heh heh.] Both Stalin AND the current US president had spies in each other's domain. Stalin's evil had been equalled, but why was there no 'big deal'?
Well, I'll tell ya why:
BECAUSE DEMOCRACY rules the papers.

---------------------------------------
Celebrate communism's 10 year anniversary of non existence.

[Cassius Clay]

Yes Western books do describe him as a Communist, which he was. However they paint this image of the Antichrist who killed tens of millions and thus are able to portray Communism as all evil. By 'Revolutionary fire of socialism' I presume you mean the theory of permanant revolution. Well if spreading world revolution by the sword is the whole point Trotskyism, then it is in a permanant state of war and if it is in a permanant state of war then it must be ruled by the military. Which guess what resembles both Imperialism and Fascism.

To my knowledge (provide a source if it's not to much trouble) Lenin never described Stalin as a bueracrat. Even if he did what does that mean? History proves that he wasn't. Yes they had a argument but that stemmed from the fact that Stalin and Lenin's wife had had a big fight over something personal.

And I would still like a list of all these Generals who were realeased in 1941 who also fought besides Trotsky in the Civil War.

[Cassius Clay]

Still no answer then.

[Mazdak]

They cant give you one. They have fled to their little elf village. When they realize that stalin wasnt a satanist baby eater who kiled people in gladiator arenas for no reason. But, they, like fundamentalists, are seemingly immune to logic and facts.

[Felicia]

How do you know the first photograph isn't the modified one?

(ftr, I think those photos are totally creepy)

[Marxman]

Okay, Revolution Hero. You wanted proof, here it is and there's more where this came from. You wanted proof that Lenin wanted Stalin out of the socialist picture, here it is.

Letter to the Congress

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I
I would urge strongly that at this Congress a number of changes be made in our political structure.

I want to tell you of the considerations to which I attach most importance.

At the head of the list I set an increase in the number of Central Committee members to a few dozen or even a hundred. It is my opinion that without this reform our Central Committee would be in great danger if the course of events were not quite favourable for us (and that is something we cannot count on).

Then, I intend to propose that the Congress should on certain conditions invest the decisions of the State Planning Commission with legislative force, meeting, in this respect, the wishes of Comrade Trotsky- to a certain extent and on certain conditions.

As for the first point, i.e., increasing the number of C.C. members, I think it must be done in order to raise the prestige of the Central Committee, to do a thorough job of improving our administrative machinery and to prevent conflicts between small sections of the C.C. from acquiring excessive importance for the future of the Party.

It seems to me that our Party has every right to demand from the working class 50 to 100 C.C. members, and that it could get them from it without unduly taxing the resources of that class.

Such a reform would considerably increase the stability of our Party and ease its struggle in the encirclement of hostile states, which, in my opinion, is likely to, and must, become much more acute in the next few years. I think that the stability of our Party would gain a thousand-fold by such measure.

Lenin

December 23, 1922
Taken down by M.V.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

II
Continuation of the notes.
December 24, 1922

By stability of the Central Committee, of which I spoke above, I mean measure against a split, as far as such measures can at all be taken. For, of course, the whiteguard in Russkaya Mysl (it seems to have been S.S. Oldenburg) was right when, first, in the whiteguards' game against Soviet Russia he banked on a split in our Party, and when, secondly, he banked on grave differences in our Party to cause that split.

Our Party relies on two classes and therefore its instability would be possible and its downfall inevitable if there were no agreement between those two classes. In that event this or that measure, and generally all talk about the stability of our C.C., would be futile. No measure of any kind could prevent a split in such a case. But I hope that this is too remote a future and too improbable an event to talk about.

I have in mind stability as a guarantee against a split in the immediate future, and I intend to deal here with a few ideas concerning personal qualities.

I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split, which could be avoided, and this purpose, in my opinion, would be served, among other things, by increasing the number of C.C. members to 50 or 100.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

These two qualities of the two outstanding leaders of the present C.C. can inadvertently lead to a split, and if our Party does not take steps to avert this, the split may come unexpectedly.

I shall not give any further appraisals of the personal qualities of other members of the C.C. I shall just recall that the October episode with Zinoviev and Kamenev [See Vol. 26, pp. 216-19] was, of course, no accident, but neither can the blame for it be laid upon them personally, any more than non-Bolshevism can upon Trotsky.

Speaking of the young C.C. members, I wish to say a few words about Bukharin and Pyatakov. They are, in my opinion, the most outstanding figures (among the youngest ones), and the following must be borne in mind about them: Bukharin is not only a most valuable and major theorist of the Party; he is also rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party, but his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him (he has never made a study of the dialectics, and, I think, never fully understood it).

December 25. As for Pyatakov, he is unquestionably a man of outstanding will and outstanding ability, but shows too much zeal for administrating and the administrative side of the work to be relied upon in a serious political matter.

Both of these remarks, of course, are made only for the present, on the assumption that both these outstanding and devoted Party workers fail to find an occasion to enhance their knowledge and amend their one-sidedness.

Lenin

December 25, 1922
Taken down by M.V.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Addition to the above letter
Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

Lenin

Taken down by L.F.
January 4, 1923





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

III
Continuation of the notes.
December 26, 1922

The increase in the number of C.C. members to 50 or even 100 must, in my opinion serve a double or even a treble purpose: the more members there are in the C.C., the more men will be trained in C.C. work and the less danger there will be of a split due to some indiscretion. The enlistment of many workers to the C.C. will help the workers to improve our administrative machinery, which is pretty bad. We inherited it, in effect, for the old regime, for it was absolutely impossible to reorganise it in such a short time, especially in conditions of war, famine, etc. That is why those "critics" who point to the defects of our administrative machinery out of mockery or malice may be calmly answered that they do not in the least understand the conditions of the revolution today. It is altogether impossible in five years to reorganise the machinery adequately, especially in the conditions in which our revolution took place. It is enough that in five years we have created a new type of state in which the workers are leading the peasants against the bourgeoisie; and in a hostile international environment this in itself is a gigantic achievement. But knowledge of this must on no account blind us to the fact that, in effect we took over the old machinery of state from the tsar and the bourgeoisie and that now, with the onset of peace and the satisfaction of the minimum requirements against famine, all our work must be directed towards improving the administrative machinery.

I think that a few dozen workers, being members of the C.C., can deal better than anybody else with checking, improving and remodeling our state apparatus. The Workers' and Peasants' Inspection on whom this function devolved at the beginning proved unable to cope with it and can be used only as an 'appendage' or, on certain conditions, as an assistant to these members of the C.C. In my opinion, the workers admitted to the Central Committee should come preferably not form among those who have had long service in Soviet bodies (in this part of my letter the term workers everywhere includes peasants), because those workers have already acquired the very traditions and the very prejudices which it is desirable to combat.

The working-class members of the C.C. must be mainly workers of a lower stratum than those promoted in the last five years to work in Soviet bodies; they must be people closer to being rank-and-file workers and peasants, who, however, do not fall into the category of direct or indirect exploiters. I think that by attending all sittings of the C.C. and all sittings of the Political Bureau, and by reading all the documents of the C.C., such workers can form a staff of devoted supporters of the Soviet system, able, first, to give stability to the C.C. itself, and second, to work effectively on the renewal and improvement of the state apparatus.

Lenin

Taken down by L.F.
December 26, 1922





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

VII
Continuation of the notes.
December 29, 1922

In increasing the number of its members, the C.C., I think, must also, and perhaps mainly, devote attention to checking and improving our administrative machinery, which is no good at all. For this we must enlist the services of highly qualified specialists, and the task of supplying those specialists must devolve upon the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection.

How are we to combine these checking specialists, people with adequate knowledge, and the new members of the C.C.? This problem must be resolved in practice.
It seems to me that the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (as a result of its development and of our perplexity about its development) has led all in all to what we now observe, namely, to an intermediate position between a special People's Commissariat and a special function of the members of the C.C.; between an institution that inspects anything and everything and an aggregate of not very numerous but first-class inspectors, who must be well paid (this is especially indispensble in our age when every thing must be paid for and inspectors are directly employed by the institutions that pay them better).

If the number of C.C. members is increased in the appropriate way, and they go through a course of state management year after year with the help of highly qualified specialists and of members of the Workers' and Peasants Inspection who are highly authoritative in every branch- then, I think, we shall successfully solve this problem which we have not managed to do for such a long time.

To sum up, 100 members of the C.C. at the most and not more than 400-500 assistants, members of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, engaged in inspecting under their direction.

Lenin

December 29, 1922
Taken down by M.V.


This is by the way, taken from Lenin's testament, which was brutally hidden by Stalin.

[Cassius Clay]

Okay no where in all that does Lenin call Stalin a 'Bueracrat'. As for the continuation of notes December 24th part, it is full of criticism of generally everybody not just Stalin. And the 'Addition to the above letter', well all it sais is that Lenin thought 'Stalin was to rude' baring in mind that Stalin had just had a row with Lenin's wife. So naturally Lenin was pretty pissed of with Stalin when he wrote that. Stalin also offered to resign because of that, but the party refused to accept the resignation.

'I suggest the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead'. Well guess what the party didn't remove Stalin from his post because he was doing a good job. Even if Lenin did fanatically hate Stalin (which is not true) the party which was made up of the people chose Stalin as General Secretary not Trotsky or anyone else.

Finally all of that didn't answer the questions I had asked. For example please explain how Stalin was nuts, how he killed Kamenev and Zionoviev (when he didn't but let be guess it was a 'Show' trial) and provide a list of all these Red Army Generals.

BTW I think you got my name wrong. I am not Revolution Hero. So eagerly awaiting your reply, love Cassius Clay.

[Marxman]

I've told you, there's more where that came from.

Chapter 5
THE SOVIET THERMIDOR

1.Why Stalin triumphed
2.The degeneration of the Bolshevik Party
3.The social roots of Thermidor


1.
Why Stalin Triumphed

The historians of the Soviet Union cannot fail to conclude that the policy of the ruling bureaucracy upon great questions has
been a series of contradictory zigzags. The attempt to explain or justify them "by changing circumstances" obviously won't hold
water. To guide means at least in some degree to exercise foresight. The Stalin faction have not in the slightest degree foreseen
the inevitable results of the development; they have been caught napping every time. They have reacted with mere administrative
reflexes. The theory of each successive turn has been created after the fact, and with small regard for what they were teaching
yesterday. On the basis of the same irrefutable facts and documents, the historian will be compelled to conclude that the
so-called "Left Opposition" offered an immeasurably more correct analysis of the processes taking place in the country, and far
more truly foresaw their further development.

This assertion is contradicted at first glance by the simple fact that the fiction which could not see ahead was steadily victorious,
while the more penetrating group suffered defeat after defeat. That kind of objection, which comes automatically to mind, is
convincing, however, only for those who think rationalistically, and see in politics a logical argument or a chess match. A political struggle is in its essence a struggle of interests and forces, not of arguments. The quality of the leadership is, of course, far from a matter of indifference for the outcome of the conflict, but it is not the only factor, and in the last analysis is not decisive. Each of the struggling camps moreover demands leaders in its own image.

The February revolution raised Kerensky and Tsereteli to power, not because they were "cleverer" or "more astute" than the
ruling tzarist clique, but because they represented, at least temporarily, the revolutionary masses of the people in their revolt
against the old regime. Kerensky was able to drive Lenin underground and imprison other Bolshevik leaders, not because he
excelled them in personal qualifications, but because the majority of the workers and soldiers in those days were still following
the patriotic petty bourgeoisie. The personal "superiority" of Kerensky, if it is suitable to employ such a word in this connection,
consisted in the fact that he did not see farther than the overwhelming majority. The Bolsheviks in their turn conquered the petty
bourgeois democrats, not through the personal superiority of their leaders, but through a new correlation of social forces. The
proletariat had succeeded at last in leading the discontented peasantry against the bourgeoisie.

The consecutive stages of the great French Revolution, during its rise and fall alike, demonstrate no less convincingly that the
strength of the "leaders" and "heroes" that replaced each other consisted primarily in their correspondence to the character of
those classes and strata which supported them. Only this correspondence, and not any irrelevant superiorities whatever,
permitted each of them to place the impress of his personality upon a certain historic period. In the successive supremacy of
Mirabeau, Brissot, Robespierre, Barras and Bonaparte, there is an obedience to objective law incomparably more effective
than the special traits of the historic protagonists themselves.

It is sufficiently well known that every revolution up to this time has been followed by a reaction, or even a counterrevolution.
This, to be sure, has never thrown the nation all the way back to its starting point, but it has always taken from the people the
lion's share of their conquests. The victims of the first revolutionary wave have been, as a general rule, those pioneers, initiators,
and instigators who stood at the head of the masses in the period of the revolutionary offensive. In their stead people of the
second line, in league with the former enemies of the revolution, have been advanced to the front. Beneath this dramatic duel of
"coryphees" on the open political scene, shifts have taken place in the relations between classes, and, no less important,
profound changes in the psychology of the recently revolutionary masses.

Answering the bewildered questions of many comrades as to what has become of the activity of the Bolshevik party and the
working class -- where is its revolutionary initiative, its spirit of self-sacrifice and plebian pride -- why, in place of all this, has
appeared so much vileness, cowardice, pusillanimity and careerism -- Rakovsky referred to the life story of the French
revolution of the 18th century, and offered the example of Babuef, who on emerging from the Abbaye prison likewise wondered
what had become of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. A revolution of the heroic people of the Parisian suburbs. A
revolution is a mighty devourer of human energy, both individual and collective. The nerves give way. Consciousness is shaken
and characters are worn out. Events unfold too swiftly for the flow of fresh forces to replace the loss. Hunger, unemployment,
the death of the revolutionary cadres, the removal of the masses from administration, all this led to such a physical and moral
impoverishment of the Parisian suburbs that they required three decades before they were ready for a new insurrection.

The axiomatic assertions of the Soviet literature, to the effect that the laws of bourgeois revolutions are "inapplicable" to a
proletarian revolution, have no scientific content whatever. The proletarian character of the October revolution was determined
by the world situation and by a special correlation of internal forces. But the classes themselves were formed in the barbarous
circumstances of tzarism and backward capitalism, and were anything but made to order for the demands of a socialist
revolution. The exact opposite is true. It is for the very reason that a proletariat still backward in many respects achieved in the
space of a few months the unprecedented leap from a semi-feudal monarchy to a socialist dictatorship, that the reaction in its
ranks was inevitable. This reaction has developed in a series of consecutive waves. External conditions and events have vied
with each other in nourishing it. Intervention followed intervention. The revolution got no direct help from the west. Instead of
the expected prosperity of the country an ominous destitution reigned for long. Moreover, the outstanding representatives of the
working class either died in the civil war, or rose a few steps higher and broke away from the masses. And thus after an
unexampled tension of forces, hopes and illusions, there came a long period of weariness, decline and sheer disappointment in
the results of the revolution. The ebb of the "plebian pride" made room for a flood of pusillanimity and careerism. The new
commanding caste rose to its place upon this wave.

The demobilization of the Red Army of five million played no small role in the formation of the bureaucracy. The victorious
commanders assumed leading posts in the local Soviets, in economy, in education, and they persistently introduced everywhere
that regime which had ensured success in the civil war. Thus on all sides the masses were pushed away gradually from actual
participation in the leadership of the country.

The reaction within the proletariat caused an extraordinary flush of hope and confidence in the petty bourgeois strata of town
and country, aroused as they were to new life by the NEP, and growing bolder and bolder. The young bureaucracy, which had
arisen at first as an agent of the proletariat, began ow to feel itself a court of arbitration between classes. Its independence
increased from mouth to mouth.

The international situation was pushing with mighty forces in the same direction. The Soviet bureaucracy became more
self-confident, the heavier blows dealt to the working class. Between these two facts there was not only a chronological, but a
causal connection, and one which worked in two directions. The leaders of the bureaucracy promoted the proletarian defeats;
the defeats promoted the rise of the bureaucracy. The crushing of the Bulgarian insurrection in 1924, the treacherous liquidation
of the General Strike in England and the unworthy conduct of the Polish workers' party at the installation of Pilsudski in 1926,
the terrible massacre of the Chinese revolution in 1927, and, finally, the still more ominous recent defeats in Germany and
Austria -- these are the historic catastrophes which killed the faith of the Soviet masses in world revolution, and permitted the
bureaucracy to rise higher and higher as the sole light of salvation.

As to the causes of the defeat of the world proletariat during the last thirteen years, the author must refer to his other works,
where he has tried to expose the ruinous part played by the leadership in the Kremlin, isolated from the masses and profoundly
conservative as it is, in the revolutionary movement of all countries. Here we are concerned primarily with the irrefutable and
instructive fact that the continual defeats of the revolution in Europe and Asia, while weakening the international position of the
Soviet Union, have vastly strengthened the Soviet bureaucracy. Two dates are especially significant in this historic series. In the
second half of 1923, the attention of the Soviet workers was passionately fixed upon Germany, where the proletariat, it seemed,
had stretched out its hand to power. The panicky retreat of the German Communist Party was the heaviest possible
disappointment to the working masses of the Soviet Union. The Soviet bureaucracy straightway opened a campaign against the
theory of "permanent revolution", and dealt the Left Opposition its first cruel blow. During the years 1926 and 1927 the
population of the Soviet Union experienced a new tide of hope. All eyes were now directed to the East where the drama of the
Chinese revolution was unfolding. The Left Opposition had recovered from the previous blows and was recruiting a phalanx of
new adherents. At the end of 1927 the Chinese revolution was massacred by the hangman, Chiang-kai-shek, into whose hands
the Communist International had literally betrayed the Chinese workers and peasants. A cold wave of disappointment swept
over the masses of the Soviet Union. After an unbridled baiting in the press and at meetings, the bureaucracy finally, in 1928,
ventured upon mass arrests among the Left Opposition.

To be sure, tens of thousands of revolutionary fighters gathered around the banner of the Bolshevik-Leninists. The advanced
workers were indubitably sympathetic to the Opposition, but that sympathy remained passive. The masses lacked faith that the
situation could be seriously changed by a new struggle. Meantime the bureaucracy asserted:

"For the sake of an international revolution, the Opposition proposes to drag us into a revolutionary war. Enough of
shake-ups! We have earned the right to rest. We will build the socialist society at home. Rely upon us, your leaders!"

This gospel of repose firmly consolidated the apparatchiki and the military and state officials and indubitably found an echo
among the weary workers, and still more the peasant masses. Can it be, they asked themselves, that the Opposition is actually
ready to sacrifice the interests of the Soviet Union for the idea of "permanent revolution"? In reality, the struggle had been about
the life interests of the Soviet state. The false policy of the International in Germany resulted ten years later in the victory of
Hitler -- that is, in a threatening war danger from the West. And the no less false policy in China reinforced Japanese
imperialism and brought very much nearer the danger in the East. But periods of reaction are characterized above all by a lack
of courageous thinking.

The Opposition was isolated. The bureaucracy struck while the iron was hot, exploiting the bewilderment and passivity of the
workers, setting their more backward strata against the advanced, and relying more and more boldly upon the kulak and the
petty bourgeois ally in general. In the course of a few years, the bureaucracy thus shattered the revolutionary vanguard of the
proletariat.

It would be naive to imagine that Stalin, previously unknown to the masses, suddenly issued from the wings full armed with a
complete strategical plan. No indeed. Before he felt out his own course, the bureaucracy felt out Stalin himself. He brought it all
the necessary guarantees: the prestige of an old Bolshevik, a strong character, narrow vision, and close bonds with the political
machine as the sole source of his influence. The success which fell upon him was a surprise at first to Stalin himself. It was the
friendly welcome of the new ruling group, trying to free itself from the old principles and from the control of the masses, and
having need of a reliable arbiter in its inner affairs. A secondary figure before the masses and in the events of the revolution,
Stalin revealed himself as the indubitable leader of the Thermidorian bureaucracy, as first in its midst.

The new ruling caste soon revealed soon revealed its own ideas, feelings and, more important, its interests. The overwhelming
majority of the older generation of the present bureaucracy had stood on the other side of the barricades during the October
revolution. (Take, for example, the Soviet ambassadors only: Troyanovsky, Maisky, Potemkin, Suritz, Khinchuk, etc.) Or at
best they had stood aside from the struggle. Those of the present bureaucrats who were in the Bolshevik camp in the October
dys played in the majority of cases no considerable role. As for the young bureaucrats, they have been chosen and educated by
the elders, frequently from among their own offspring. These people could not have achieved the October revolution, but they
were perfectly suited to exploit it.

Personal incidents in the interval between these two historic chapters were not, of course, without influence. Thus the sickness
and death of Lenin undoubtedly hastened the denouement. Had Lenin lived longer, the pressure of the bureaucratic power
would have developed, at least during the first years, more slowly. But as early as 1926 Krupskaya said, of Left Oppositionists:
"If Ilych were alive, he would probably already be in prison." The fears and alarming prophecies of Lenin himself were then still
fresh in her memory, and she cherished no illusions as to his personal omnipotence against opposing historic winds and currents.

The bureaucracy conquered something more than the Left Opposition. It conquered the Bolshevik party. It defeated the
program of Lenin, who had seen the chief danger in the conversion of the organs of the state "from servants of society to lords
over society". It defeated all these enemies, the Opposition, the party and Lenin, not with ideas and arguments, but with its own
social weight. The leaden rump of bureaucracy outweighed the head of the revolution. That is the secret of the Soviet's
Thermidor.

2.
The Degeneration of the Bolshevik Party

The Bolshevik party prepared and insured the October victory. It also created the Soviet state, supplying it with a sturdy
skeleton. The degeneration of the party became both cause and consequence of the bureaucratization of the state. It is
necessary to show at at least briefly how this happened.

The inner regime of the Bolshevik party was characterized by the method of democratic centralism. The combination of these
two concepts, democracy and centralism, is not in the least contradictory. The party took watchful care not only that its
boundaries should always be strictly defined, but also that all those who entered these boundaries should enjoy the actual right
to define the direction of the party policy. Freedom of criticism and intellectual struggle was an irrevocable content of the party
democracy. The present doctrine that Bolshevism does not tolerate factions is a myth of epoch decline. In reality the history of
Bolshevism is a history of the struggle of factions. And, indeed, how could a genuinely revolutionary organization, setting itself
the task of overthrowing the world and uniting under its banner the most audacious iconoclasts, fighters and insurgents, live and
develop without intellectual conflicts, without groupings and temporary factional formations? The farsightedness of the Bolshevik
leadership often made it possible to soften conflicts and shorten the duration of factional struggle, but no more than that. The
Central Committee relied upon this seething democratic support. From this it derived the audacity to make decisions and give
orders. The obvious correctness of the leadership at all critical stages gave it that high authority which is the priceless moral
capital of centralism.

The regime of the Bolshevik party, especially before it came to power, stood thus in complete contradiction to the regime of the
present sections of the Communist International, with their "leaders" appointed from above, making complete changes of policy
at a word of command, with their uncontrolled apparatus, haughty in its attitude to the rank and file, servile in its attitude to the
Kremlin. But in the first years after the conquest of power also, even when the administrative rust was already visible on the
party, every Bolshevik, not excluding Stalin, would have denounced as a malicious slanderer anyone who should have shown
him on a screen the image of the party ten or fifteen years later.

The very center of Lenin's attention and that of his colleagues was occupied by a continual concern to protect the Bolshevik
ranks from the vices of those in power. However, the extraordinary closeness and at times actual merging of the party with the
state apparatus had already in those first years done indubitable harm to the freedom and elasticity of the party regime.
Democracy had been narrowed in proportion as difficulties increased. In the beginning, the party had wished and hoped to
preserve freedom of political struggle within the framework of the Soviets. The civil war introduced stern amendments into this
calculation. The opposition parties were forbidden one after the other. This measure, obviously in conflict with the spirit of
Soviet democracy, the leaders of Bolshevism regarded not as a principle, but as an episodic act of self-defense.

The swift growth of the ruling party, with the novelty and immensity of its tasks, inevitably gave rise to inner disagreements. The
underground oppositional currents in the country exerted a pressure through various channels upon the sole legal political
organization, increasing the acuteness of the factional struggle. At the moment of completion of the civil war, this struggle took
such sharp forms as to threaten to unsettle the state power. In March 1921, in the days of the Kronstadt revolt, which attracted
into its ranks no small number of Bolsheviks, the 10th Congress of the party thought it necessary to resort to a prohibition of
factions -- that is, to transfer the political regime prevailing in the state to the inner life of the ruling party. This forbidding of
factions was again regarded as an exceptional measure to be abandoned at the first serious improvement in the situation. At the
same time, the Central Committee was extremely cautious in applying the new law, concerning itself most of all lest it lead to a
strangling of the inner life of the party.

However, what was in its original design merely a necessary concession to a difficult situation, proved perfectly suited to the
taste of the bureaucracy, which had then begun to approach the inner life of the party exclusively from the viewpoint of
convenience in administration. Already in 1922, during a brief improvement in his health, Lenin, horrified at the threatening
growth of bureaucratism, was preparing a struggle against the faction of Stalin, which had made itself the axis of the party
machine as a first step toward capturing the machinery of state. A second stroke and then death prevented him from measuring
forces with this internal reaction.

The entire effort of Stalin, with whom at that time Zinoviev and Kamenev were working hand in hand, was thenceforth directed
to freeing the party machine from the control of the rank-and-file members of the party. In this struggle for "stability" of the
Central Committee, Stalin proved the most consistent and reliable among his colleagues. He had no need to tear himself away
from international problems; he had never been concerned with them. The petty bourgeois outlook of the new ruling stratum
was his own outlook. He profoundly believed that the task of creating socialism was national and administrative in its nature. He
looked upon the Communist International as a necessary evil would should be used so far as possible for the purposes of
foreign policy. His own party kept a value in his eyes merely as a submissive support for the machine.

Together with the theory of socialism in one country, there was put into circulation by the bureaucracy a theory that in
Bolshevism the Central Committee is everything and the party nothing. This second theory was in any case realized with more
success than the first. Availing itself of the death of Lenin, the ruling group announced a "Leninist levy". The gates of the party,
always carefully guarded, were now thrown wide open. Workers, clerks, petty officials, flocked through in crowds. The
political aim of this maneuver was to dissolve the revolutionary vanguard in raw human material, without experience, without
independence, and yet with the old habit of submitting to the authorities. The scheme was successful. By freeing the bureaucracy
from the control of the proletarian vanguard, the "Leninist levy" dealt a death blow to the party of Lenin. The machine had won
the necessary independence. Democratic centralism gave place to bureaucratic centralism. In the party apparatus itself there
now took place a radical reshuffling of personnel from top to bottom. The chief merit of a Bolshevik was declared to be
obedience. Under the guise of a struggle with the opposition, there occurred a sweeping replacement of revolutionists with
chinovniks [professional governmental functionaries]. The history of the Bolshevik party became a history of its rapid
degeneration.

The political meaning of the developing struggle was darkened for many by the circumstances that the leaders of all three
groupings, Left, Center and Right, belonged to one and the same staff in the Kremlin, the Politburo. To superficial minds it
seemed to be a mere matter of personal rivalry, a struggle for the "heritage" of Lenin. But in the conditions of iron dictatorship
social antagonisms could not show themselves at first except through the institutions of the ruling party. Many Thermidorians
emerged in their day from the circle of the Jacobins. Bonaparte himself belonged to that circle in his early years, and
subsequently it was from among former Jacobins that the First Consul and Emperor of France selected his most faithful
servants. Times change and the Jacobins with them, not excluding the Jacobins of the twentieth century.

Of the Politburo of Lenin's epoch there now remains only Stalin. Two of its members, Zinoviev and Kamenev, collaborators of
Lenin throughout many years as emigres, are enduring then-year prison terms for a crime which they did not commit. Three
other members, Rykov, Bukharin and Tomsky, are completely removed from the leadership, but as a reward for submission
occupy secondary posts.

[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed in August 1936 for alleged complicity in a
"terrible plot" against Stalin; Tomsky committed suicide or was shot in connection with the same case; Rykov
was removed from his post in connection with the plot; Bukharin, although suspected, is still at liberty.]

And, finally, the author of these lines is in exile. The widow of Lenin, Krupskaya, is also under the ban, having proved unable
with all her efforts to adjust herself completely to the Thermidor.

The members of the present Politburo occupied secondary posts throughout the history of the Bolshevik party. If anybody in the first years of the revolution had predicted their future elevation, they would have been the first in surprise, and there would have been no false modesty in their surprise. For this very reason, the rule is more stern at present that the Politburo is always right, and in any case that no man can be right against Stalin, who is unable to make mistakes and consequently cannot be right against himself.

Demands for party democracy were through all this time the slogans of all the oppositional groups, as insistent as they were
hopeless. The above-mentioned platform of the Left Opposition demanded in 1927 that a special law be written into the
Criminal Code "punishing as a serious state crime every direct or indirect persecution of a worker for criticism". Instead of this,
there was introduced into the Criminal Code an article against the Left Opposition itself.

Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the memory of the older generation. And together with it had
disappeared the democracy of the soviets, the trade unions, the co-operatives, the cultural and athletic organizations. Above
each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party secretaries. The regime had become "totalitarian" in
character several years before this word arrived from Germany.

"By means of demoralizing methods, which convert thinking communists into machines, destroying will, character and
human dignity," wrote Rakovsky in 1928, "the ruling circles have succeeded in converting themselves into an
unremovable and inviolate oligarchy, which replaces the class and the party."

Since these indignant lines were written,the degeneration of the regime has gone immeasurably farther. The GPU has become
the decisive factor in the inner life of the party. If Molotov in March 1936 was able to boast to a French journalist that the ruling
party no longer contains any factional struggle, it is only because disagreements are now settled by the automatic intervention of
the political police. The old Bolshevik party is dead and no force will resurrect it.

* * *

Parallel with the political degeneration of the party, there occurred a moral decay of the uncontrolled apparatus. The word
"sovbour" -- soviet bourgeois -- as applied to a privileged dignitary appeared very early in the workers' vocabulary. With the
transfer to the NEP bourgeois tendencies received a more copious field of action. At the 11th Congress of the party, in March
1922, Lenin gave warning of the danger of a degeneration of the ruling stratum. It has occurred more than once in history, he
said, that the conqueror took over the culture of the conquered, when the latter stood on a higher level. The culture of the
Russian bourgeoisie and the old bureaucracy was, to be sure, miserable, but alas the new ruling stratum must often take off its
hat to that culture. "Four thousand seven hundred responsible communists" in Moscow administer the state machine. "Who is
leading whom? I doubt very much whether you can say that the communists are in the lead..." In subsequent congresses, Lenin
could not speak. But all his thoughts in the last months of his active life were of warning and arming the workers against the
oppression, caprice and decay of the bureaucracy. He, however, saw only the first symptoms of the disease.

Christian Rakovsky, former president of the soviet of People's Commissars of the Ukraine, and later Soviet Ambassador in
London and Paris, sent to his friends in 1928, when already in exile, a brief inquiry into the Soviet bureaucracy, which we have
quoted above several times, for it still remains the best that has been written on this subject.

"In the mind of Lenin, and in all our minds," says Rakovsky, "the task of the party leadership was to protect both the
party and the working class from the corrupting action of privilege, place and patronage on the part of those in power,
from rapprochement with the relics of the old nobility and burgherdom, from the corrupting influence of the NEP, from
the temptation of bourgeois morals and ideologies.... We must say frankly, definitely and loudly that the party apparatus
has not fulfilled this task, that it has revealed a complete incapacity for its double role of protector and educator. It has
failed. It is bankrupt."

It is true that Rakovsky himself, broken by the bureaucratic repressions, subsequently repudiated his own critical judgments. But
the 70-year-old Galileo too, caught in the vise of the Holy Inquisition, found himself compelled to repudiate the system of
Copernicus -- which did not prevent the earth from continuing to revolve around the sun. We do not believe in the recantation
of the 60-year-old Rakovsky, for he himself has more than once made a withering analysis of such recantations. As to his
political criticisms, they have found in the facts of the objective development a far more reliable support than in the subjective
stout-heartedness of their author.

The conquest of power changes not only the relations of the proletariat to other classes, but also its own inner structure. The
wielding of power becomes the speciality of a definite social group, which is the more impatient to solve its own "social
problem", the higher its opinion of the own mission.

"In a proletarian state, where capitalist accumulation is forbidden to the members of the ruling party, the differentiation is
at first functional, but afterward becomes social. I do not say it becomes a class differentiation, but a social one..."

Rakovsky further explains:

"The social situation of the communist who has at his disposition an automobile, a good apartment, regular vacations, and
receives the party maximum of salary, differs from the situation of the communist who works in the coal mines, where he
receives from 50 to 60 rubles a month."

Counting over the causes of the degeneration of the Jacobins when in power -- the chase after wealth, participation in
government contracts, supplies, etc., Rakovsky cites a curious remark of Babeuf to the effect that the degeneration of the new
ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the former young ladies of the aristocracy toward whom the Jacobins were very
friendly. "What are you doing, small-hearted plebians?" cries Babeuf. "Today they are embracing you and tomorrow they will
strangle you." A census of the wives of the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar picture. The well-known
Soviet journalist, Sosnovsky, pointed out the special role played by the "automobile-harem factor" in forming the morals of the
Soviet bureaucracy. It is true that Sosnovsky, too, following Rakovsky, recanted and was returned from Siberia. But that did
not improve the morals of the bureaucracy. On the contrary, that very recantation is proof of a progressing demoralization.

The old articles of Sosnovsky, passed about in manuscript from hand to hand, were sprinkled with unforgettable episodes from
the life of the new ruling stratum, plainly showing to what vast degree the conquerors have assimilated the morals of the
conquered. Not to return, however, to past years -- for Sosnovsky finally exchanged his whip for a lyre in 1934 -- we will
confine ourselves to wholly fresh examples from the Soviet press. And we will not select the abuses and co-called "excesses",
either, but everyday phenomena realized by official social opinion.

The director of a Moscow factory, a prominent communist, boasts in Pravda of the cultural growth of the enterprise directed by
him. "A mechanic telephones: 'What is your order, sir, check the furnace immediately or wait?' I answer: 'Wait.'"
[TRANSLATOR: It is impossible to convey the flavor of this dialogue in English. The second person singular is used either with
intimates in token of affection, or with children, servants and animals in token of superiority.] The mechanic addresses the
director with extreme respect, using the second person plural, while the director answers him in the second person singular. And
this disgraceful dialogue, impossible in any cultures capitalist country, is related by the director himself on the pages of Pravda as
something entirely normal! The editor does not object because he does not notice it. The readers do not object because they
are accustomed to it. We are also not surprised, for at solemn sessions in the Kremlin, the "leaders" and People's Commissars
address in the second person singular directors of factories subordinate to them, presidents of collective farms, shop foremen
and working women, especially invited to receive decorations. How can they fail to remember that one of the most popular
revolutionary slogans in tzarist Russia was the demand for the abolition of the use of the second person singular by bosses in
addressing their subordinates!

These Kremlin dialogues of the authorities with "the people", astonishing in their lordly ungraciousness, unmistakably testify that,
in spite of the October Revolution, the nationalization of the means of production, collectivization, and "the liquidation of the
kulaks as a class", the relations among men, and that at the very heights of the Soviet pyramid, have not only not yet risen to
socialism, but in many respects are still lagging behind a cultured capitalism. In recent years enormous backward steps have
been taken in this very important sphere. And the source of this revival of genuine Russian barbarism is indubitably the Soviet
Thermidor, which has given complete independence nd freedom from control to a bureaucracy possessing little culture, and has
given to the masses the well-known gospel of obedience and silence.

We are far from intending to contrast the abstraction of dictatorship with the abstraction of democracy, and weight their merits
on the scales of pure reason. Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures. The dictatorship of the Bolshevik
party proved one of the most powerful instruments of progress in history. But here too, in the words of the poet, "Reason
becomes unreason, kindness a pest." The prohibition of oppositional parties brought after it the prohibition of factions. The
prohibition of factions ended in a prohibition to think otherwise than the infallible leaders. The police-manufactured monolithism
of the party resulted in a bureaucratic impunity which has become the sources of all kinds of wantonness and corruption.

3.
The Social Roots of Thermidor

We have defined the Soviet Thermidor as a triumph of the bureaucracy over the masses. We have tried to disclose the historic
conditions of this triumph. The revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat was in part devoured by the administrative apparatus
and gradually demoralized, in part annihilated in the civil war, and in part thrown out and crushed. The tired and disappointed
masses were indifferent to what was happening on the summits. These conditions, however, are inadequate to explain why the
bureaucracy succeeded in raising itself above society and getting its fate firmly into its own hands. Its own will to this would in
any case be inadequate; the arising of a new ruling stratum must have deep social causes.

The victory of the Thermidorians over the Jacobins in the 18th century was also aided by the weariness of the masses and the
demoralization of the leading cadres, but beneath these essentially incidental phenomena a deep organic process was taking
place. The Jacobins rested upon the lower petty bourgeoisie lifted by the great wave. The revolution of the 18th century,
however, corresponding to the course of development of the productive forces, could not but bring the great bourgeoisie to
political ascendancy in the long run. The Thermidor was only one of the stages in this inevitable process. What similar social
necessity found expression in the Soviet Thermidor? We have tried already in one of the preceding chapters to make a
preliminary answer to the question why the gendarme triumphed. We must now prolong out analysis of the conditions of the
transition from capitalism to socialism, and the role of the state in this process. Let us again compare theoretic prophecy with
reality.

"It is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and its resistance," wrote Lenin in 1917, speaking of the period which
should begin immediately after the conquest of power, "but the organ of suppression here is now the majority of the
population, and not the minority as had heretofore always been the case.... In that sense the state is beginning to die
away."

In what does this dying away express itself? Primarily in the fact that "in place of special institutions of a privileged minority
(privileged officials, commanders of a standing army), the majority itself can directly carry out" the functions of suppression.
Lenin follows this with a statement axiomatic and unanswerable:

"The more universal becomes the very fulfillment of the functions of the state power, the less need is there of this power."

The annulment of private property in the means of production removes the principal task of the historic state -- defense of the
proprietary privileges of the minority against the overwhelming majority.

The dying away of the state begins, then, according to Lenin, on the very day after the expropriation of the expropriators -- that
is, before the new regime has had time to take up its economic and cultural problems. Every success in the solution of these
problems mens a further step in the liquidation of the state, its dissolution in the socialist society. The degree of this dissolution is
the best index of the depth and efficacy of the socialist structure. We may lay down approximately this sociological theorem:
The strength of the compulsion exercised by the masses in a workers' state is directly proportional to the strength of the
exploitive tendencies, or the danger of a restoration of capitalism, and inversely proportional to the strength of the social
solidarity and the general loyalty to the new regime. Thus the bureaucracy -- that is, the "privileged officials and commanders of
the standing army" -- represents a special kind of compulsion which the masses cannot or do not wish to exercise, and which,
one way or another, is directed against the masses themselves.

If the diplomatic soviets had preserved to this day their original strength and independence, and yet were compelled to resort to
repressions and compulsions on the scale of the first years, this circumstance might of itself give rise to serious anxiety. How
much greater must be the alarm in view of the fact that the mass soviet have entirely disappeared from the scene, having turned
over the function of compulsion to Stalin, Yagoda and company. And what forms of compulsion! First of all we must ask
ourselves: What social cause stands behind its policification The importance of this question is obvious. In dependence upon the
answer, we must either radically revise out traditional views of the socialist society in general, or as radically reject the official
estimates of the Soviet Union.

Let us now take from the latest number of a Moscow newspaper a stereotyped characterization of the present Soviet regime,
one of those which are repeated throughout the country from day to day and which school children learn by heart:

"In the Soviet Union the parasitical classes of capitalists, landlords and kulaks are completely liquidated, and thus is
forever ended the exploitation of man by man. The whole national economy has become socialistic, and the growing
Stakhanov movement is preparing the conditions for a transition from socialism to communism."

The world press of the Communist International, it goes without saying, has no other thing to say on
this subject. But if exploitation is "ended forever", if the country is really now on the road from
socialism, that is, the lowest stage of communism, to its higher stage, then there remains nothing for society to do but throw off
at last the straightjacket of the state. In place of this -- it is hard even to grasp this contrast with the mind! -- the Soviet state has
acquired a totalitarian-bureaucratic character.

The same fatal contradiction finds illustration in the fate of the party. Here the problem may be formulated approximately thus:
Why, from 1917 to 1921, when the old ruling classes were still fighting with weapons in the hands, when they were actively
supported by the imperialists of the whole world, when the kulaks in arms were sabotaging the army and food supplies of the
country, -- why was it possible to dispute openly and fearlessly in the party about the most critical questions of policy? Why
now, after the cessation of intervention, after the shattering of the exploiting classes, after the indubitable successes of
industrialization, after the collectivization of the overwhelming majority of the peasants, is it impossible to permit the slightest
word of criticism of the unremovable leaders? Why is it that any Bolshevik who should demand a calling of the congress of the
party in accordance with its constitution would be immediately expelled, any citizen who expressed out loud a doubt of the
infallibility of Stalin would be tried and convicted almost as though a participant in a terrorist plot? Whence this terrible,
monstrous and unbearable intensity of repression and of the police apparatus?

Theory is not a note which you can present at any moment to reality for payment. If a theory proves mistaken we must revise it
or fill out its gaps. We must find out those real social forces which have given rise to the contrast between Soviet reality and the
traditional Marxian conception. In any case we must not wander in the dark, repeating ritual phrases, useful for the prestige of
the leaders, but which nevertheless slap the living reality in the face. We shall now see a convincing example of this.

In a speech at a session of the Central Executive Committee in January 1936, Molotov, the president of the Council of People's
Commissars, declared:

"The national economy of the country has become socialistic. (applause) In that sense [?] we have solved the problem of
the liquidation of classes." (applause) However, there still remain from the past "elements in their nature hostile to us,"
fragments of the former ruling classes. Moreover, among the collectivized farmers, state employees and sometimes also
the workers, spekulantiki ["petty speculators"] are discovered, "grafters in relation to the collective and state wealth,
anti-Soviets gossip, etc." And hence results the necessity of a further reinforcement of the dictatorship. In opposition to
Engels, the workers' state must not "fall asleep", but on the contrary become more and more vigilant.

The picture drawn by the head of the Soviet government would be reassuring in the highest degree, were it not murderously
self-contradictory. Socialism completely reigns in the country: "In that sense" classes are abolished. (If they are abolished in that
sense, they they are in every other.) To be sure, the social harmony is broken here and there by fragments and remnants of the
past, but it is impossible to think that scattered dreamers of a restoration of capitalism, deprived of power and property,
together with "petty speculators" (not even speculators!) and "gossips" are capable of overthrowing the classless society.
Everything is getting along, it seems, the very best you can imagine. But what is the use then of the iron dictatorship of the
bureaucracy>

Those reactionary dreamers, we must believe, will gradually die out. The "petty speculators" and "gossips" might be disposed of
with a laugh by the super-democratic Soviets.

"We are not Utopians," responded Lenin in 1917 to the bourgeois and reformist theoreticians of the bureaucratic state,
and "by no means deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, and likewise the
necessity for suppressing such excesses. But... for this there is no need of a special machine, a special apparatus of
repression. This will be done by the armed people themselves, with the same simplicity and ease with which any crowd of
civilized people even in contemporary society separate a couple of fighters or stop an act of violence against a woman."

Those words sound as though the author has especially foreseen the remarks of one of his successors at the head of the
government. Lenin is taught in the public schools of the Soviet Union, but apparently not in the COuncil of People's
Commissars. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain Molotov's daring to resort without reflection to the very construction
against which Lenin directed his well-sharpened weapons. The flagrant contradictions between the founder and his epigones is
before us! Whereas Lenin judged that even the liquidation of the exploiting classes might be accomplished without a
bureaucratic apparatus, Molotov, in explaining why after the liquidation of classes the bureaucratic machine has strangled the
independence of the people, finds no better pretext than a reference to the "remnants" of the liquidated classes.

To live on these "remnants" becomes, however, rather difficult since, according to the confession of authoritative representatives
of the bureaucracy itself, yesterday's class enemies are being successfully assimilated by the Soviet society. Thus Postyshev, one
of the secretaries of the Central Committee of the party, said in April 1936, at a congress of the League of Communist Youth:

"Many of the sabotagers... have sincerely repented and joined the ranks of the Soviet people." In view of the successful
carrying out of collectivization, "the children of kulaks are not to be held responsible for their parents." And yet more:
"The kulak himself now hardly believes in the possibility of a return to his former position of exploiter in the village."

Not without reason did the government annul the limitations connected with social origins! But if Postyshev's assertion, wholly
agreed to by Molotov, makes any sense it is only this: Not only has the bureaucracy become a monstrous anachronism, but
state compulsion in general has nothing whatever to do in the land of the Soviets. However, neither Molotov nor Postyshev
agrees with that immutable inference. They prefer to hold the power even at the price of self-contradiction.

In reality, too, they cannot reject the power. Or, to translate this into objective language: The present Soviet society cannot get
along without a state, nor even -- within limits -- without a bureaucracy. But the case of this is by no means the pitiful remnants
of the past, but the mighty forces and tendencies of the present. The justification for the existence of a Soviet state as an
apparatus of compulsion lies in the fact that the present transitional structure is still full of social contradictions, which in the
sphere of consumption -- most close nd sensitively felt by all -- are extremely tense, nd forever threaten to break over into the
sphere of production. The triumph of socialism cannot be called either final or irrevocable.

The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of each against all.
When there is enough goods in a store, the purchasers can come whenever they want to. When there is little goods, the
purchasers are compelled to stand in line. When the lines are very long, it is necessary to appoint a policeman to keep order.
Such is the starting point of the power of the Soviet bureaucracy. It "knows" who is to get something and how has to wait.

A raising of the material and cultural level ought, at first glance, to lessen the necessity of privileges, narrow the sphere of
application of "bourgeois law", and thereby undermine the standing ground of its defenders, the bureaucracy. In reality the
opposite thing has happened: the growth of the productive forces has been so far accompanied by an extreme development of
all forms of inequality, privilege and advantage, and therewith of bureaucratism. That too is not accidental.

In its first period, the Soviet regime was undoubtedly far more equalitarian and less bureaucratic than now. But that was an
equality of general poverty. The resources of the country were so scant that there was no opportunity to separate out from the
masses of the population any broad privileged strata. At the same time the "equalizing" character of wages, destroying personal
interestedness, became a brake upon the development of the productive forces. Soviet economy had to lift itself from its
poverty to a somewhat higher level before fat deposits of privilege became possible. The present state of production is still far
from guaranteeing all necessities to everybody. But it is already adequate to give significant privileges to a minority, and convert
inequality into a whip for the spurring on of the majority. That is the first reason why the growth of production has so far
strengthened not the socialist, but the bourgeois features of the state.

But that is not the sole reason. Alongside the economic factor dictating capitalist methods of payment at the present stage, there
operates a parallel political factor in the person of the bureaucracy itself. In its very essence it is the planter and protector of
inequality. It arose in the beginning as the bourgeois organ of a workers' state. In establishing and defending the advantages of a
minority, it of course draws off the cream for its own use. Nobody who has wealth to distribute ever omits himself. Thus out of
a social necessity there has developed an organ which has far outgrown its socially necessary function, and become an
independent factor and therewith the source of great danger for the whole social organism.

The social meaning of the Soviet Thermidor now begins to take form before us. The poverty and cultural backwardness of the
masses has again become incarnate in the malignant figure of the ruler with a great club in his hand. The deposed and abused
bureaucracy, from being a servant of society, has again become its lord. On this road it has attained such a degree of social and
moral alienation from the popular masses, that it cannot now permit any control over wither its activities or its income.

The bureaucracy's seemingly mystic fear of "petty speculators, grafters, and gossips" thus finds a wholly natural explanation. Not
yet able to satisfy the elementary needs of the population, the Soviet economy creates and resurrects at every step tendencies to
graft and speculation. On the other side, the privileges of the new aristocracy awaken in the masses of the population a tendency
to listen to anti-Soviet "gossips" -- that is, to anyone who, albeit in a whisper, criticizes the greedy and capricious bosses. It is a
question, therefore, not of spectres of the past, not of the remnants of what no longer exists, not, in short, of the snows of
yesteryear, but of new, mighty, and continually reborn tendencies to personal accumulation. The first still very meager wave of
prosperity in the country, just because of its meagerness, has not weakened, but strengthened, these centrifugal tendencies. On
the other hand, there has developed simultaneously a desire of the unprivileged to slap the grasping hands of the new gentry.
The social struggle again grows sharp. Such are the sources of the power of the bureaucracy. But from those same sources
comes also a threat to its power.

...

Lenin didn't actually know that stalin will degenerate the whole of Russia nd turn it into a stalinist state. How could he? When Lenin was on his deathbed, suffering from heart strokes, Stalin deliberately kept secrets from Lenin under the farce that 'Lenin is a poor man with a weak heart, he mustn't be excited.' Lenin knew nothing whatsoever of Stalin's misdeeds. He died not knowing what Stalin will eventually do. But he knew that Trotksy is fitted to be the next to run the apparatus of socialism and knew that Stalin is incapable of doing that. Lenin also knew the degeneration of the apparatus under Stalin. Before the October revolution, Stalin tried to unite the right-wing Mensheviks. He tried that in September! Luckily Lenin came from Switzerland in time to solve this Stalin's crazy misdeeds. Maybe this will clear out some things about Lenin vs. Stalin.

Lenin's struggle against Stalin

As early as 1920, Trotsky criticised the workings of Rabkrin, which from a tool in the struggle against bureaucracy was becoming itself a hotbed of bureaucracy. Initially, Lenin defended Rabkrin against Trotsky's criticisms. Later he came around to Trotsky's view: "This idea was suggested by Comrade Trotsky, it seems, quite a long time ago. I was against it at the timeÉ But after closer consideration of the matter, I find that in substance there is a sound idea in itÉ" At first Lenin's illness prevented him from appreciating what was going on behind his back in the state and Party. In 1922, the situation became clear to him. "Bureaucracy is throttling us," he complained. He saw that the problem arose from the country's economic and cultural backwardness.

So how was this state of affairs going to be combated? Lenin stressed the importance of the workers' organisation in keeping the bureaucratic menace in check: "Our Party Programme - a document which the author of the ABC of Communism [Nikolai Bukharin] knows very well - shows that ours is a workers' state with a bureaucratic twist to itÉ We now have a state under which it is the business of the massively organised proletariat to protect itself, while we, for our part, must use these workers' organisations to protect the workers from their state, and to get them to protect our stateÉ" (LCW, Vol. 32, pp. 24-5.)

Lenin argued, dialectically, that the trade unions in a workers' state must be independent, in order that the working class can defend itself against the state, and in turn defend the workers' state itself. Lenin was emphatic on this point because he saw the danger of the state raising itself above the class and separating itself from it. The workers, by themselves through their organisations, could exercise a check on the state apparatus and on the bureaucracy. However, with the atomisation of the working class by the end of the civil war, it was unable to effectively combat the growth of the bureaucratism of the state. The growing bureaucratic menace preoccupied Lenin's attention throughout that year. At the 11th Party Congress in March-April 1922 - the last Congress in which he was able to participate - his main preoccupation was bureaucratism. At the Congress Lenin dealt firstly with the economic relations of the workers' state as a form of "state capitalism". That is the economic relations on which the NEP was based. Market relations were allowed, while the key sectors of the economy remained in state hands. Lenin said that traditionally state capitalism applied to a minority nationalised sector in a capitalist state. But he now used it differently to describe the NEP:

"That is why very many people are misled by the term state capitalism. To avoid this we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism but has not yet got on to new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say 'state' we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state." He then explains that this capitalism which exists alongside the workers' state is essential "to satisfy the needs of the peasantryÉ [and] without it existence is impossible".

Lenin then goes on to deal with the crux of the problem: "Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted in the past year? No. But we refuse to admit that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of a private capitalist, or of both. Be that as it may, the car is not going quite in the direction the man at the wheel imagines, and often it goes in an altogether different direction." (LCW, Vol. 33, p. 179.)

"Then what is lacking?" asked Lenin. "ÉIf we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take the huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can be truthfully said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed." (Ibid., p. 288.)

Far from being the "semi-state" envisaged by Lenin in his book State and Revolution, the state apparatus was bureaucratically deformed and deeply infected by the alien class outlook of the old regime. At the same Congress Lenin explained, in a very clear and unambiguous language, the possibility of the degeneration of the revolution as a result of the pressures of alien classes. Lenin compared the relationship of the Soviet workers to the bureaucracy and the pro-capitalist elements to that of a conquering and conquered nation. History has shown repeatedly that for one nation to defeat another by force of arms is not, of itself, a sufficient guarantee of victory. Given the low level of culture of the weak Soviet working class, surrounded by a sea of small property owners, the pressures were enormous. They reflected themselves not only in the state, but inevitably in the Party itself, which became the centre of struggle of conflicting class interests.

"Sometimes one nation conquers another, the nation that conquers is the conqueror and the nation that is vanquished is the conquered nation. This is simple and intelligible to all. But what happens to the culture of these nations? Here things are not so simple," stated Lenin. "If the conquering nation is more cultured than the vanquished nation, the former imposes its culture upon the latter; but if the opposite is the case, the vanquished nation imposes its culture upon the conqueror. Has not something like this happened in the capital of the RSFSR (1)? Have the 4,700 Communists (nearly a whole army division, and all of them the very best) come under the influence of an alien culture?" Lenin then asks pointedly: "Will the responsible Communists of the RSFSR and of the Russian Communist Party realise that they cannot administer; that they only imagine they are directing, but are actually being directed?"

Already by this time, the most far-sighted sections of the émigré bourgeoisie, the Smena Vekh (Change of Signposts) group of Ustryalov, were openly placing their hopes upon the bureaucratic-bourgeois tendencies manifesting themselves in Soviet society, as a step in the direction of capitalist restoration. The same group was later to applaud and encourage the Stalinists in their struggle against Trotskyism. The Smena Vekh group, which Lenin gave credit for its class insight, correctly understood the struggle of Stalin against Trotsky, not in terms of "personalities" but as a class question, as a step back from the revolutionary traditions of October.

"The machine no longer obeyed the driver" - the state was no longer under the control of the Communists, of the workers, but was increasingly raising itself above society. Referring to the views of Smena Vekh, Lenin said: "We must say frankly that the things Ustryalov speaks about are possible, history knows all sorts of transformations. Relying on firmness of convictions, loyalty, and other splendid moral qualities is anything but a serious attitude in politics. A few people may be endowed with splendid moral qualities, but historical issues are decided by vast masses, which, if the few do not suit them, may at times treat them none too politely." (LCW, Vol. 33, p. 287.) In other words, the state power was slipping out of the hands of the Communists, not because of their personal failings or psychological peculiarities, but because of the enormous pressures of backwardness, of bureaucracy, of alien class forces which weighed down upon the tiny handful of advanced, socialist workers and crushed them.

Lenin's correspondence and writings of this period, when illness was increasingly preventing him from intervening in the struggle, clearly indicate his alarm at the encroachment of the Soviet bureaucracy, the insolent parvenus in every corner of the state apparatus. Lenin was aware of the dangers of the degeneration of the workers' state encircled by capitalism. After the 11th Party Congress in 1922, Lenin's health deteriorated and in May of that year he suffered his first stroke. He recovered and was back on his feet by July and officially returned to work in October. On his return he was deeply shocked by the growing bureaucratic tumour that was gnawing away at the state and Party. "Our bureaucratism is something monstrous," Lenin commented to Trotsky. "I was appalled when I came back to workÉ" It was at this time that he offered to form a bloc with Trotsky against bureaucracy in general and against the Organisationa

[Cassius Clay]

Once again you have not answered the questions I asked merely posted some article that is obviously biased and written by a Trotskyite source. I can post articles all day if I want to, but what would that prove?

In your first post on this thread you went on a typhical anti-Stalinist rant. Saying that Stalin had killed all the Bolsheviks and murdered all the Red Army and then was by himself responsible for the German victories of 1941. So answer the following questions that I had asked 2 pages ago.

1= How was Stalin 'Nuts'

2= Why does Stalin wait 12 years to kill of Kamenev and Zionviev from 1924 to the trial in 1936 if that is what he intended to do. While all the evidence (A court of law found them guilty, but that doesn't mean anything since it was obviously a 'Show trial') points to the fact that they were guilty of terriorism and the assaination of Kirov.

3= I am still at a mystery as to all these Generals who fought with Trotsky in the civil war and then purged, imprisoned and then realeased by Stalin in 1941. So if you could provide some names that would be helpful.

And if you answer that maybe you could answer this.

Why if life was so bad under Stalin then the majority of the electorate in the current Russia who vote for the Communists happen to of grown up during the 1930's, 40's and 50's? They cant all of been Bueracrates.

[Marxman]

The votes of a bueracrat was 20 votes of a normal man. Stalin made 99.6 percetn of votes! What honesty :)
Anyway, here are answers but now, please read, at least one of them. Only an idiot can answer the question of 20000 words in one sentence.

German Revolution 1923

The world war had not solved any of the problems of world capitalism. In fact it had aggravated them. Capitalism had broken at its weakest link. The attempts to destroy the young Soviet Republic by the wars of intervention had completely failed. German capitalism, the mightiest in Europe, found itself stripped of its assets and resources, part of its territory, burdened with staggering reparations payments, and generally placed in an impossible position. British and French imperialists, the "victors" in the war, were in a fundamentally not much better position. Encouraged by the Russian Revolution, the colonial and semi-colonial masses were stirring and preparing to revolt. The masses at home were restless and uneasy and the economic position of Anglo-French imperialism had worsened considerably in comparison with that of Japanese and American capitalism. It was against this international background that the crisis broke out in Germany in 1923. Germany, with her high productive capacity, was crippled by the restrictions imposed by Versailles and had now become the weakest link in the chain of world capitalism. The failure of Germany to pay the instalments on the reparations resulted in the French capitalists marching into the Ruhr. This helped to complete the collapse of the German economy, and the German bourgeoisie endeavoured to unload the burdens onto the shoulders of the working and middle classes. This produced an acute crisis and a growing revolutionary situation throughout the country.

The success of revolution does not depend exclusively upon the objective conditions which exist in a country at a given time. It also depends crucially on the existence of what Marxists call the subjective factor - a mass revolutionary party with a clear-sighted and determined leadership. Old Engels long ago explained that, at times, a single day can seem like 20 years, whereas at other times, the history of 20 years can be summed up in 24 hours. That is to say, it can take decades for a revolutionary situation to develop, but the opportunity can be lost in a few days, unless the revolutionary leadership is prepared to take advantage of the moment. If they fail, the revolutionary opportunity may take decades to return. There are good reasons for this, which are evident for anyone who thinks about them for a moment. How does it come about that a tiny handful of exploiters can impose its rule over millions of men and women? The capitalist system does not usually have to resort to violence to maintain itself (although it will use the most brutal means if necessary). The secret consists in the tremendous force of habit and routine which predominates in "normal" periods. The masses become habituated to the life of slavery and submission to their "betters" from the moment they become conscious. This "normality" is sanctioned by religion, morality, law and custom, and is not questioned by the overwhelming majority, who regard it as something eternal and natural. Only in certain critical moments, when great events shake the masses out of their torpor, do they begin to free themselves from the dead hand of custom and begin to seek a way out along new and untried paths. Such periods are exceptional by their very nature.

For this reason, it is necessary to prepare the revolutionary party in advance. It is not possible to improvise it on the spur of the moment. This, in essence, is the message of Trotsky's book Lessons of October, written in 1924, with the aim of acquainting the cadres of the young Communist Parties, especially the German party, with the real experience of Bolshevism in 1917. The Russian Revolution was not an exception. True, like every revolution, it had certain concrete peculiarities. True, it took place in a backward country, very unlike industrialised Germany or Britain. But there are many features that are common to all revolutions, and this means that parallels can be drawn and lessons learned. If the Russian Revolution demonstrates the correctness of Bolshevism positively, the German events of 1923 demonstrate the same thing, only negatively. In both cases the leadership played the decisive role. But whereas the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky led the Russian workers to victory, the German CP leaders, acting on advice from Stalin and Zinoviev, led the revolution to defeat.

In 1923, the collapse of the Mark and the seizure of the Rhineland by the armies of French imperialism gave rise to a revolutionary situation in Germany. Had Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht not been murdered in 1919, there is little doubt that they would have provided the necessary leadership to ensure the victory of the working class. This assertion may seem paradoxical, given the fact that Rosa Luxemburg always insisted on the central role of the spontaneous self-movement of the proletariat in the revolution. In reality, there is no contradiction. Even the stormiest mass movement requires organisation and leadership in order to overcome the power of the bourgeois state and transform society. The events of 1923 are the clearest proof of this. In the absence of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, there was a crisis of leadership in the German party. The subsequent chopping and changing, in which the Communist International under Zinoviev's inspiration played a most harmful role, effectively beheaded the party. The policy of removing leaders who were out of favour with Moscow set a very bad precedent, which was later used to Stalinise the Communist International and, ultimately, destroy it. It was entirely alien to the methods of Bolshevism. The workers had no possibility of learning by experience, of debating the issues, and deciding for themselves which leaders were right and which wrong. This process is necessarily slow. It takes years and decades to develop cadres and allow a genuine revolutionary leadership to emerge. But there is no other way. This was just how the Bolshevik Party developed over a long preparatory period before 1917. They also made all kinds of mistakes. But through mistakes - provided they are honestly admitted and evaluated - one learns and develops. By bureaucratic manoeuvres and the attempt to establish the infallibility of the leadership, it will not be possible to build a genuine revolutionary party even in a thousand years.

By these means, Zinoviev and his supporters completely undermined the German leadership. The result was that, when the revolutionary wave broke in 1923, they were disoriented. Brandler went to Moscow to seek advise on what to do. Here accident played a role. Both Lenin and Trotsky were ill, and unable to see him. He was met instead by Stalin and Zinoviev, who gave him completely wrong advice. Repeating his error of October 1917, when he and Kamenev opposed the insurrection, Zinoviev expressed his open scepticism about revolutionary prospects in Germany. As always, the verbal radicalism of people with bureaucratic tendencies is only the reverse side of their innate conservatism and distrust of the masses. Zinoviev urged caution, and, in effect, advised the Germans to do nothing. Stalin was even more crudely opportunist. He differed from Zinoviev only in that he was not even interested in the problems of the German Revolution, which was only a distraction from his manoeuvres in the apparatus. Narrow minded and parochial, he had a deep-seated contempt for the workers of Western Europe, who he believed would never make a revolution. With his organic opportunism, Stalin urged the German party not to take any action. His advice to the German leaders was astonishing - "Let the fascists try first!"

The leadership of the International and the German party failed to stand up to the test and take advantage of the opportunity. Success in Germany would inevitably have led to victory throughout Europe. But as in Russia in 1917, so in Germany of 1923, sections of the leadership vacillated. Brandler and the German leadership were in effect restrained by Stalin, Radek and Zinoviev. They dismissed Trotsky's proposal for a schedule for an insurrection and blundered into a belated and botched attempt to take power that turned into a fiasco. Because of this, the opportunity was allowed to slip, and the German Revolution was aborted. Alarmed and scandalised, Trotsky wrote The Lessons of October in an attempt to get the leaders of the Communist Parties to draw the necessary conclusions from the German events. But the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev clique, which, behind the scenes, was jockeying for power, could not accept an honest discussion of the German events which would damage its prestige. Trotsky's work was taken as the signal for a furious onslaught against so-called Trotskyism, and its central message was buried under a mountain of slander and abuse. The methods of Lenin were already being substituted for the alien methods of a commanding bureaucracy which demands uncritical acceptance of its "all-seeing" leadership and Papal infallibility.

The Purge trials

"The First Five-Year Plan and the great rumblings in Germany which preceded Hitler's rise (1931-33) once again threatened the bureaucracy's domination," stated Trotsky. "Finally, can we doubt for an instant that if the Spanish Revolution had been victorious and if the French workers had been able to develop their May-June offensive of 1936 to its conclusion, the Russian proletariat would have recovered its courage and its combativity and overthrown the Thermidorians with a minimum of effort?" (Trotsky, Writings 1937-38, pp. 39-40.)

The growing Soviet working class, enthused by the successes of the Five-Year Plan, began to sense again the dramatic effects of world revolution and to resist the bureaucratic encroachments. Stalin was terrified that a new revolutionary wave in the West would stir the revolutionary feelings of the Soviet masses. That was why the Stalinist terror was unleashed to entrench the totalitarian state.

The Purge trials were organised as a result of panic at the effects of the Spanish Revolution on the Russian working class, and even in the Russian Communist Party. The spontaneous movement towards socialist revolution in Spain began to rekindle the flame of international revolution in the hearts of the Soviet working class. Fearing the success and spread of the Spanish Revolution, and looking to a deal with the Western "democracies", Stalin deliberately strangled the Spanish Revolution. This was not the case in either Germany in 1930-33 or China in 1925-27. It is true that Stalin's policies led to defeat in these cases also. But this was not the intention. On the contrary. Stalin wanted successes on the international stage at that time. But by 1936, the new ruling caste had been consolidated, and was anxious to defend its privileges against any real or perceived threat. The Spanish Revolution was seen as a very real threat by the leading clique. Stalin felt that a successful revolution would give rise to a new opposition within the Communist Party around those figures that still had direct links with the October Revolution. He therefore set out to eliminate such a threat by framing Old Bolsheviks on charges of counter-revolution and having them shot.

These were the biggest frame-up trials in history. The initial excuse for the trials was the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad Party boss, by a young Communist on the 1st December 1934. This was a provocation organised by Stalin himself. Evidently there were grumblings in the leading clique against Stalin at this time, and Kirov, a leading Stalinist, was seen as a possible replacement. After the Kirov assassination frame-up, a series of ghastly trials and confessions was staged. The fact that this assassination was the work of Stalin and had been prepared at a high level was exposed by Khrushchev in his reports at the 20th and 22nd Congresses:

"The mass reprisals began after the assassination of Kirov. Great efforts are still needed to find out who really was to blame for this death. The deeper we study the materials connected with Kirov's death the more questions arise. Noteworthy is the fact that Kirov's killer had twice before been detained by Chekists (security men) near the Smolny and that arms had been found on him. But he was released both times on someone's instructions. And the next thing this man was in the Smolny, armed, in the corridor through which Kirov usually passed. And for some reason or other at the moment of assassination Kirov's chief bodyguard was far behind him, although his instructions did not authorise him to be such a distance away from Kirov.

"Equally strange is the following fact: When Kirov's chief bodyguard was being escorted for questioning - and he was to be questioned by Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov - the vehicle, as the driver said afterwards, was deliberately involved in an accident by those who were taking the man for interrogation. They said that he had died as a result of the accident, although he was in fact killed by those who were escorting him.

"In this way, the man who guarded Kirov was killed. Later, those who had killed him were shot. This was no accident, apparently, but a carefully planned crime. Who could have done this? A thorough inquiry is now being made into the circumstances of this complicated case." (The Road to Communism - Report of the22nd Congress of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union, p. 111.)

The Moscow trials were described by Trotsky as a "one-sided civil war" against the working class vanguard. In August 1936, he stated that "the present purge draws between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood. The annihilation of the entire old generation of Bolsheviks, an important part of the middle generation, which participated in the civil war, and that part of the youth which took seriously the Bolshevik traditions, shows not only a political but a thoroughly physical incompatibility between Bolshevism and Stalinism". (Trotsky, Writings 1936-37, p. 423.)

An entire generation of Old Bolsheviks was wiped out. The old Tsarist state machine, which Lenin had repeatedly warned against, asserted its supremacy through the Purges, which aimed at exterminating the revolutionaries and obliterating the whole heritage of Bolshevism. The link with October became, in effect, a death warrant. This applied to anyone, not just Trotskyists, although they were the first and principal victims. But the followers of Bukharin soon joined them in the camps, followed by anyone else who provided a link to the past, including many Stalinists. This was a one-sided civil war against Bolshevism, which was launched by the ruling elite for two main purposes.

Firstly, in order to consolidate the rule of the Leader (the Vozhd in Russian, which, incidentally, is an exact translation of "Führer" or "Duce"), Stalin wanted to cover up the fact that the role he had played in the revolution was quite insignificant, a fact which was well known in Party circles. Even members of his own leading faction, such as Sergo Orzhonikidze, could not take seriously the idea of Stalin as the great Leader and Teacher, for which crime, either they were murdered or driven to suicide. Stalin did not want any uncomfortable witnesses. Already at this time, Stalin was showing signs of megalomania. But it would be wrong to see this as a personal or psychological phenomenon. Psychological deviations cannot explain a massacre on such an immense scale, which disrupted the economy, caused tremendous social upheaval, and even put the existence of the USSR in jeopardy, especially when it spread to the army.

The peculiar nature of the bureaucracy as an usurping ruling caste gave rise to all sorts of contradictions. The bureaucracy, which had politically expropriated the working class, nevertheless based itself on the nationalised property forms established by the revolution. It was compelled to speak in the name of Bolshevism, while systematically trampling underfoot all the traditions of Bolshevism. This is not the first time that such things have happened. After 1794, the leaders of the Thermidorian reaction in France still continued to speak in the name of the Revolution, while persecuting the Jacobins and restoring the customs and privileges of the old regime. To silence all criticism, it was essential to eliminate all those who could point an accusing finger and remind the masses - or even the bureaucrats themselves - of how things used to be.

The usurpatory character of the ruling caste, the illegitimate nature of its perks and privileges, the evident contradiction between the "socialist" proclamations and the growing inequality, all meant that the upstart bureaucrats felt insecure. Their insecurity and fear of the masses meant that they sought safety in the shade of a Strong Man who would silence all opposition. The Strong Man (the Vozhd) was not to be questioned, for to question the Leader was to question the bureaucracy itself. The physical wiping out of all opposition, actual or potential, and the implantation of a totalitarian regime, was thus the prior condition for the consolidation of the ruling bureaucracy. Stalin's psychological peculiarities, his psychopathic cruelty and megalomania can explain the grotesque monstrous character which he imparted to the Purges, but not the phenomenon itself.

Old Bolsheviks exterminated

"We thank thee, Stalin!
Sixteen scoundrels,
Sixteen butchers of the Fatherland
Have been gathered to their ancestors!
Today the sky looks blue,
Thou hast repaid us for the sorrows of many years!
But why only sixteen?
Give us forty,
Give us hundreds,
Thousands;
Make a bridge across the Moscow river,
A bridge without towers or beams,
A bridge of Soviet carrion -
And add thy carcass to the rest!"

The above lines were published in the Paris White Guard paper Vozrozhdenye on the 29th August 1938, following the announcement of the executions after the first trial. The enemies of October had good reason to rejoice. All the main defendants in the Trials were close associates of Lenin before, during and after the October Revolution. The defendants were originally charged with attempting to restore capitalism in Russia, which was then discarded in the 1936 trial, and replaced by "lust for power" and pursuing a terrorist plan to exterminate Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

One of the foulest slanders which is now aimed at Lenin and Trotsky is that Stalin's Purges were only the continuation of the Red Terror waged by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution. Apart from the fact that it is impossible to compare the monstrous methods used by Stalin with those employed by the embattled workers' government to defend itself against powerful and ruthless enemies, this argument overlooks the most important question: against whom was the terror waged and for what purpose? In the same hypocritical way, the Pharisees throw up their hands in horror at the Terror of the French Revolution. But unfortunately all history shows that a ruling class or caste does not normally give up its power and privileges without a fight.

From a revolutionary point of view, it is impossible to consider the question of violence in the abstract. Of course, every sane person abhors violence and will attempt to avoid it. But when one is attacked and in danger of being murdered, most people will fight to defend themselves. The revolutionary Terror, both in France and Russia, was a response to the violence of the reaction. Without the most energetic measures of self-defence the revolution in both cases would have been smothered in its own blood. How can one seriously condemn such measures of self defence of the revolution against those who wish to destroy it? The case is completely different with the violence of the counter-revolution. After Thermidor, terrible violence was directed against the Jacobins, but very little is said about this. The Pharisees pass over it in silence, or read us hypocritical morality lessons about the "Revolution devouring its own children" and so on. But the violence of the French Revolution in the period of its ascent was directed against the counter-revolution - aristocrats, priests, speculators and the like. The Thermidorian and Bonapartist terror was directed against the revolutionaries. There is a qualitative difference between the two. Not to see this is to understand nothing.

In 1922 the leaders of the SRs were put on trial charged with acts of terrorism against the leaders of the Soviet state. But there was absolutely nothing in common between this and Stalin's frame-ups. The first difference is that the SRs were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. They not only admitted them, but proudly proclaimed their actions. That is not surprising. Unlike the Russian Marxists who were always implacably opposed to individual terror, the SRs (both the Right and Left) were the inheritors of the traditions of the Narodnaya Volya party which openly espoused the method of terrorism. There was not the slightest doubt that they were responsible for the assassination of Bolshevik leaders like Uritsky and Volodarsky and the attempted assassination of Lenin. They did not have to be forced to confess, since they regarded their actions as correct and legitimate. In Tsarist times, they frequently handed themselves over to the authorities after perpetrating an assassination. There was yet another fundamental difference. Not only were the SR leaders allowed a legal defence, but they were able to employ lawyers from abroad, specifically the Belgian Social Democratic leader Emile Vandervelde, who was also a prominent lawyer. The crimes were punishable by death, but the sentences were suspended. None of the accused was executed (although some were later to be shot by Stalin). They were not required to renounce their views, let alone slander themselves in court.

In the Purge trials things were different. The accused were compelled to confess to the most monstrous crimes which they did not commit, and before they were delivered to the executioner, forced to pour dirt over their own heads. Only one of the defendants, Krestinsky, attempted to repudiate his confession in court. He was sent back to the GPU torturers and when he returned 24 hours later confessed to everything. Bukharin attempted to fend off the most atrocious accusations, such as the fantastic charge that he had attempted to assassinate Lenin. He was helped by the courageous stand of an SR, Boris Kamkov, who was called as a prosecution witness but refused to substantiate the charge, although he had nothing to lose since he was already a prisoner of the GPU and Bukharin was a political opponent. He undoubtedly paid a terrible price for his defiance. Bukharin left his defence to posterity, making his wife, Anna Larina, learn his last letter by heart to pass on to future generations. She repeated it every day for 20 years "like a prayer" in Stalin's concentration camps, which she survived by a miracle.

In this letter, Bukharin points out the fundamental difference between the old revolutionary Cheka under Dzerzhinsky and Stalin's GPU:

"TO A FUTURE GENERATION OF PARTY LEADERS

"I am leaving life. I bow my head, but not before the proletarian scythe, which is properly merciless but also chaste. I am helpless, instead, before an infernal machine that seems to use medieval methods, yet possesses gigantic power, fabricates organised slander, acts boldly and confidently.

"Dzerzhinsky [head of the secret police, or Cheka, under Lenin] is no more; the wonderful traditions of the Cheka have gradually receded into the past, those traditions by which the revolutionary idea governed all its actions, justified cruelty toward enemies, safeguarded the state against any counter-revolution. For this reason, the organs of the Cheka won a special trust, a special honour, an authority and respect. At the present time, the so-called organs of the GPU are in the main a degenerate organisation of unprincipled, dissolute, well-kept functionaries who, enjoying the former authority of the Cheka, seeking to satisfy the pathological suspiciousness of Stalin (I fear to say more), pursuing rank and glory, perform their foul deeds without, incidentally, understanding that they are simultaneously destroying themselves: history does not tolerate the witnesses to dirty deeds!

"These 'wonder-working' organs can grind any member of the Central Committee, any member of the Party, into dust, turn him into a traitor-terrorist, saboteur, spy. If Stalin doubted in himself, confirmation would follow in an instant.

"Storm clouds hang over the Party. My death alone, guilty of nothing, will implicate thousands more of the innocent. For, after all, an organisation must be created, a 'Bukharinist organisation,' that in reality not only does not exist now, when I am in my seventh year without a shadow of disagreement with the Party, but did not exist then, in the years of the Right Opposition. I knew nothing about the secret organisations of Ryutin and Uglanov. Together with Rykov and Tomsky, I expounded my views openly.

"Since the age of 18, I have been in the Party, and always the goal of my life has been the struggle for the interests of the working class, for the victory of socialism. These days the newspaper with the hallowed name Pravda prints the most contemptible lie that I, Nikolai Bukharin, wanted to destroy the achievement of October, to restore capitalism. That is an unheard-of obscenity. This is a lie that in its obscenity could only be matched by the story that [Tsar] Nikolai Romanov devoted his whole life to the struggle against capitalism and the monarchy, to the struggle for the realisation of the proletarian revolution." (Quoted in Anna Larina, This I cannot forget, pp. 343-4.)

Let us recall when reading these lines that the man who wrote them was described by Lenin as "the Party's favourite", and one of its main theoreticians. True, Bukharin made many mistakes, some of them serious, but he was an honest revolutionary unlike those who murdered him. The main purpose of the Purges was to draw a line of blood between the bureaucracy and the real traditions of Marxism-Leninism. It was necessary to break the knot of history, to destroy utterly the old traditions of workers' democracy and internationalism, to leave nothing behind that could remind future generations of the real meaning of October. Thus, it was not enough to torture and murder the Old Bolsheviks. They had to be made to cover themselves in filth, to publicly renounce their "crimes", and to sing the praises of Stalin. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Radek, Rakovsky and a number of other revolutionaries confessed to being life-long imperialist agents. Their accuser, the chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky was an old Menshevik lawyer who had collaborated with the White counter-revolution.

Practically the entire Bolshevik Old Guard was exterminated. Among the victims was A. V. Shotman, an old Party member who was put in charge of protecting Lenin's life when he was forced underground after the July days in 1917. In 1918, Lenin wrote: "Shotman is an old Party comrade whom I know quite well. He deserves absolute trust." Yet he was arrested and died in 1939. A large number of foreign Communists perished. Fritz Platten, the Swiss revolutionary who had collaborated with Lenin and organised the famous sealed train which took him from Switzerland to Russia in 1917, survived Tsarist, Swiss, German and Rumanian prisons but died in one of Stalin's camps. The entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party was liquidated, including I.S. Ganetsky, whom Lenin had personally recommended for membership of the Russian Party.

The Purges effectively liquidated what was left of the Soviet Communist Party. Between 1939 and 1952 there was not a single Party Congress, although even during the most difficult period of the civil war this supreme body had met annually. By the beginning of 1939, out of the 139 members elected at the 17th Party Congress, where Stalin celebrated his victory over the Opposition, 110 had been arrested. Out of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of October 1917, only two survived: Alexandra Kollontai, who was sent away to be ambassador to Sweden, and Joseph Stalin. Among the entire Party membership, only a few of Stalin's hand-picked protégés and hatchet men were left - the Molotovs, Kaganoviches, Mikoyans and Voroshilovs.

The history of the Party was rewritten. The notorious History of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) Short Course, reduced it to a series of lies and legends, designed to glorify the role of Stalin. John Reed's Ten Days That Shook The World, which Lenin praised as a truthful account of the Revolution, was banned. Not only was the name of Trotsky erased, and his image removed from photographs, but even such figures as Krassin, Nogin, Chicherin and Lunacharsky were blotted out. The transformation of the Party from the vanguard of the revolutionary workers to a lever in the bureaucratic apparatus was at last complete. This is the final answer to all the slanderers of Lenin and Trotsky. Those who try to prove that Bolshevism and Stalinism are one and the same phenomenon have yet to explain how it comes about that, in order to triumph, the bureaucratic totalitarian regime was obliged to annihilate the Bolshevik Party, to uproot every vestige of Leninism, to rewrite history and to bury the old traditions of workers' democracy and internationalism under a mountain of corpses. Surely, if Leninism and Stalinism were all the same, it ought to have been possible to arrive at a compromise? This would have been not only rational, but infinitely more economical. The enemies of October have no answer to this, other than the usual stale clichés about "Revolutions devouring their children" which explain nothing at all. Yet the answer is clear and undeniable to any genuinely objective observer: Bolshevism and Stalinism are as incompatible as Revolution and counter-revolution. To those who are incapable of distinguishing between these things we have really nothing more to say.

Families wiped out

So deep was the gulf between Stalinism and Bolshevism, so great Stalin's need to eliminate all vestiges of the past and all witnesses that the slaughter extended far beyond the ranks of active Oppositionists. In this long and bloody nightmare, not only politically active people were affected. Stalin extracted his spiteful revenge on the families of his victims, their wives, children and grandchildren, even their neighbours. The children of arrested Oppositionists were taken from them and put in special orphanages from which most of them disappeared. In the concentration camps, the prisoners were not even allowed to keep photographs of their children. The son of Bukharin's wife, Anna Larina, was taken from her when he was only one year old and she did not see him again until 20 years later. At least she survived and was eventually reunited with her son. But this was the exception.

Sverdlov escaped the executioner by dying a natural death in 1919, but his brother was killed. Sergo Ordzhonikidze had been a close companion of Stalin for years, but although a close ally of the general secretary, was horrified by the Purges and attempted to shield some of the victims. He committed suicide in 1937, driven to this act by Stalin: "An older brother, Papuliia, was arrested and shot after terrible tortures, and a falsified record of the interrogation was sent to Ordzhonikidze. Some of Ordzhonikidze's closest friends and associates were shot, while many executives in heavy industry, appointed by Ordzhonikidze, were arrested. Stalin sent him the false depositions extracted from the prisoners by torture, with the comment 'Comrade Sergo, look what they're writing about you." (R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, p. 193). Ordzhonikidze knew too much about Stalin. Like the other victims, his crime was that he was a reminder of the past. Many other Stalinists perished for the same reason.

In the whole history of the world labour movement, there is nothing similar to the persecution suffered by Trotsky and his followers. Trotsky's entire family was wiped out in this murderous terror. His two sons-in-law, Platon Volkov and Nevilson were arrested as Oppositionists in the 1920s. After Trotsky's deportation to Alma-Ata, his two daughters, Nina and Zinaida were deprived of all help, although Nina was seriously ill with tuberculosis. The persecution of her father and the imprisonment of her husband hastened her death at the age of 26 in June 1928. Both Nina's and Zinaida's husbands were later shot. Nina's daughter Volina, born in 1925, was looked after by her grandmother, Trotsky's first wife Alexandra Sokolovskaya. However, when Sokolovskaya was arrested, the child was taken into custody and disappeared without trace. Trotsky's elder daughter Zinaida, who was also ill with tuberculosis and deeply depressed at the arrest of her husband and the death of her sister, applied for permission to join her father in Prinkipo, together with her small son, Vsievolod Volkov who was ill. This was granted, but when she was abroad, Stalin's government treacherously revoked her citizenship. This blow, which cut her off from all prospects of ever seeing her husband and daughter again, finally unbalanced the mind of this unhappy woman who was already under treatment for deep depression. Zinaida committed suicide.

Her daughter Alexandra, whom she had left behind in the USSR, was sent to a concentration camp as soon as she was old enough. The fate of her mother Sokolovskaya was particularly tragic. Despite all the terrible suffering and adversity, she remained steadfast in her revolutionary activity, and paid the price. Exiled to Siberia in 1935, where the average life expectancy was two to three years, she died, having previously lost not only her children but her grandchildren also. By a miracle, Alexandra survived many years in the camps, although with her health undermined, and died in 1989. Only Vsievolod Volkov remains alive in Mexico, having survived one assassination attempt. Trotsky's eldest son Leon Sedov, who played a crucial role in the International Left Opposition, was murdered by Stalin's agents in Paris, while recovering from an operation in February 1938, on the eve of the trial of Bukharin. But the bitterest blow to Trotsky was the arrest of his younger son Sergei, who was not politically active and had stayed behind in the USSR when his father was exiled. Although not himself an active Oppositionist, Sergei conducted himself courageously. He refused to condemn his father, and was shot in 1937, although nobody knew about it at the time.

Trotsky had two sisters. One died a natural death in 1924. The other, Olga Kamenova, the wife of Kamenev, was first exiled after Kamenev's arrest, then arrested again in 1935 and sent to prison and then a concentration camp. Together with thousands of other Oppositionists she was shot on Stalin's orders in 1941. The persecution of the Trotsky family did not stop there. His nephews Boris Bronstein, and Yuri and Alexander Kamenev were all shot. His elder brother Alexander was another one of Stalin's victims. Dimitri Volkogonov's relatively recent biography of Trotsky is written from a blatantly anti-revolutionary point of view, and is generally of little value. However, he has had access to material from the KGB archives and other sources not previously available which serves to confirm everything Trotsky and the Left Opposition wrote about the Purges at the time. It is worth quoting what he says in this context:

"Trotsky's elder brother Alexander worked during the 1920s and 1930s as an agronomist in the Novokislyaevsk sugar mill in the province of Voronezh. As I was told by an inhabitant of the district, A.K. Mironov, Alexander was a learned expert who enjoyed the respect of the villagers. He apparently rode in a beautiful phaeton drawn by two fine horses. When Trotsky came under attack, Alexander was expelled from the Party, exiled, and made publicly to repudiate his brother. He underwent a marked change, shrinking into himself as if from the pangs of conscience. The recantation did not help him, however, and in the summer of 1936 he was suddenly arrested at night and the following year shot in Kursk prison as 'an active, un-disarmed Trotskyist.' Stalin's long arm had reached them all, except the main target himself, his wife and his two sons.

"After the deaths of Nina and Zina there was real fear for the safety of Trotsky's sons, especially Sergei. He had not wanted to leave the country with his father, preferring to devote himself to his scientific interests. Uninterested in politics, Sergei had first wanted to be a circus performer, but then became interested in technology, completed polytechnic and became a teacher there. He was a professor before he reached the age of 30. He married twice and his daughter from his second marriage, Julia, is still alive in the USA. His first wife, Olga Grebner, a lively and intelligent elderly woman when I spoke to her in 1989, naturally endured Stalinist camp and exile. She recalled Sergei only fragmentarily: he had been a mischievous boy, and an amusing and talented man. Plainly, in the family it was the elder boy, Lev, who was the favourite. Olga and Sergei had married when he was 20 and she was 19.

"'When the family was kicked out of the Kremlin to Granovsky Street,' she recalled, 'we had nowhere to live. We took shelter in any corner we could find. Lev Davidovich was always welcoming. I was especially impressed by his lively, clever blue eyes. Outwardly, Natalya Ivanovna was not an interesting woman. She was short, fat and unattractive. But it was obvious how much they meant to each other. As I said, Sergei was talented, whatever he turned his hand to, he succeeded. When Trotsky was deported, Natalya Ivanovna said to me: 'Look after Seryozha.' He was arrested on the 4th March 1935. It seemed like a tragic play. Five of them arrived. The search took several hours. They took Sergei's books and a portrait of his father. My husband was taken to the Lubyanka. He was there two or three months. They told him the charges: espionage, aiding and abetting his father, wrecking. Anyway, they sent him to Siberia. He was doomed.'

"In January 1937, Pravda published an article under the heading 'Trotsky's Son, Sergei Sedov, Tries to Poison Workers With Exhaust Gas.' At a meeting at the Krasnoyarsk Engineering Works, a foreman called Lebedev declared: 'We have working here as an engineer the son of Trotsky, Sergei Sedov. This worthy offspring of a father who has sold himself to Fascism attempted to poison a large number of workers at this factory with gas.' The meeting also discussed Zinoviev's nephew Zaks and the factory manager Subbotin, who was alleged to be protecting him and Sergei. All three were doomed. 'Sergei was soon sentenced,' Olga Grebner recalled. 'Some time that summer I received a postcard which he had somehow managed to send. It said: 'They're taking me to the North. For a long time. Goodbye. I embrace you.' There were rumours that he was shot in 1941 somewhere in Kolyma, but Olga Grebner was not sure. In fact, he had been executed on the 29th October 1937." (D. Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 354-5.)

The slaughter of the general staff

Every murder had to be covered up with ten more. The Stalinist police butchers Yagoda and Yezhov were themselves purged. For every economic bungle, and they were inevitable without the democratic control of the workers, scapegoats had to be found. Every day another group of officials branded themselves as paid counter-revolutionaries. Bolshevik workers and light-fingered bureaucrats perished alike in the bloodbath. Beloved figures like the writer Maxim Gorky, whose constant pleading for victims of the Purges were inconvenient for Stalin, disappeared mysteriously. Since people were later accused of poisoning him, we may safely assume that his death was not natural. Literature (and especially drama in conditions of mass illiteracy) which had played an important role in mass communication since the revolution, was brutally suppressed. Anybody who had even the most tenuous connections with October was liquidated, even some of Stalin's aides and accomplices, as was the case with Ordzhonikidze.

Denunciations and informers were encouraged and every friend or relative of any suspected malcontent was imprisoned. In the mass paranoia, every zealous policeman found as many victims as could be manufactured, to avoid denunciation himself. Children were encouraged to denounce their parents. General Petro G. Grigorenko recalls how he was almost denounced by his own wife. The scope of the repression was vast. No one can say how many perished. According to one estimate, one person in five in Leningrad was either killed, imprisoned or exiled. Not a single genuine letter, not a single document, not a single impeccable piece of evidence was presented at the trials. The only "evidence" was the self confessions of the defendants - extracted under torture. Kamenev and Zinoviev, already morally broken by capitulation, actually demanded their own execution, having been promised that they would be spared. But Stalin betrayed them. They were the first to be shot.

Not since the witchcraft trials and the Spanish Inquisition had such methods been used to break people and force them to admit to the most appalling crimes of which they were entirely innocent. In his autobiography, the former Soviet general and dissident Petro G. Grigorenko details the kind of tortures used on those who fell into the hands of the GPU, as witnessed by his own brother:

"He talked about trumped-up sabotage, terrorism, and espionage charges, the biographies the 'enemies' were forced to write, and the tortures used - beatings, crushed fingers and sex organs, cigarette burns on the face and body, standing tortures, and torture by bright lights and with thirst."

And again:

"Standing torture consisted of forcing a man to stand for a very long time in a special small locked closet in which he could not turn or change his position. Gradually, from a lack of air and from fatigue the prisoner would lose consciousness and sink downward. Then he would be taken out of the closet, aroused, and once again locked in. From standing up for so long the circulation in his legs would be interrupted and they would swell with stagnant blood. This man had those horribly swollen legs. He spoke in a whisper. 'Do not be afraid of people here. I know what you are thinking: «They are all fascists, enemies of the people, and I got here by accident, by mistake» ÉI thought that too. But now I know: there are no enemies here. Someone is compelling us to call ourselves «enemies of the people».' He told Ivan about his interrogation. He was an engineer from the Zaporozhe Steel Works; subsequently he signed a confession saying that he had been planning to bomb the factory. After subsequent interrogation the man said to Ivan, 'They are not yet torturing you. That means you may be released. They need that for some reason, too. If they let you out, try not to forget anything you've seen here'." (P.G. Grigorenko, Memoirs, p. 96.)

The methods used by Stalin in these and later trials, according to Khrushchev at the 20th Congress was as follows: "Stalin personally called the investigative judge, gave him instructions, advised him on which investigative methods should be used; these methods were simple - beat, beat and, once again, beat." He continued: "Confessions of guilt of many arrested and charged with enemy activity were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures." In his report to the 22nd Congress, he refers to the methods used to extract confessions from the leaders of the Red Army:

"Many excellent commanders and political workers in the Red Army were destroyed. There are comrades among the delegates here - I don't want to give their names so as not to cause them pain - who have spent many years in prison. They were 'persuaded,' persuaded in certain ways, that they were German, British or some other spies. And some of them 'confessed.' Even when they were told that the charges of espionage against them had been withdrawn, they themselves insisted on their earlier depositions as they felt that it would be better to abide by their false statements in order to have done with the torture, to die the quicker." (The Road to Communism - Report of the 22nd Congress CPSU, p. 113.)

The Purges, which touched every level of life, served to create havoc as leading Party cadres, army officers, technicians, statisticians, planners, managers and workers were swept away. A frenzy was unleashed against what Stalin termed the "enemies of the people". After the initial successes of the Five-Year Plans, the 17th Party Congress in January 1934 was called the "Congress of Victors", and where Stalin sought to consolidate his power. Years later Khrushchev, in his famous "secret speech", pointed out that out of the 1,966 delegates to this Congress, no less than 1,108 were later charged with counter-revolutionary crimes! In the words of Khrushchev, Stalin "chose the path of repression and physical annihilation".

Just before the war, the whole of the General Staff was arrested and brilliant military strategists like Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Gamarnik, from the civil war days, were executed by Stalin who evidently feared a coup d'état. Hundreds of thousands were shot and millions sent to concentration camps, while Stalin solemnly condemned them all as spies, assassins and wreckers - and worst of all "Trotsky-Fascists".

The Purges decimated the Red Army. Between 1937 and 1938, 20,000 to 35,000 Red Army officers were liquidated. Ninety per cent of the generals and 80 per cent of all colonels were murdered by the GPU. Three marshals, 13 commanders, 57 corps commanders, 110 divisional commanders, 220 brigade commanders, and all the commandants of the Military Districts were executed by GPU firing squads. The number of arrests carried out at this time included three out of five marshals; three out of four of the first-rank army commanders; 60 of the 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders, and 221 of 397 brigade commanders; both first-rank fleet admirals (flagman), both second-rank fleet admirals, all six first-rank admirals, nine of the 15 second-rank admirals, both first-rank army commissars, all 15 second-rank army commissars, 25 of the 28 corps commissars, 79 of the 97 division commissars, and 34 of the 36 brigade commissars.

Of this Roy Medvedev says:

"There were also huge losses among the field-grade and junior officers. The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in this time of peace.

"Years of training cadres came to nothing. The Party stratum in the army was drastically reduced. In 1940 the autumn report of the Inspector General of Infantry showed that, of 225 regimental commanders on active duty that summer, not one had been educated in a military academy, 25 had finished a military school, and the remaining 200 had only completed the courses for junior lieutenants. At the beginning of 1940 more than 70 per cent of the division commanders, about 70 per cent of regimental commanders, and 60 per cent of military commissars and heads of political divisions had occupied these positions for a year only. And all this happened just before the worst war in history." (Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 213-4.1976 edition.)

Countless people disappeared without trace in the prisons of the GPU, having died under torture or been shot. In fact, many more died without confessing than those who were broken by torture. Millions more perished in Stalin's camps, where they were starved or worked to death, froze, or were shot. The food ration in the camps was always close to starvation level, in some cases as low as 400 grams of bread a day, and not every day. On such rations, the prisoners were put to work on heavy construction and mining, in freezing Arctic conditions. The following is a description of one of the camps:

"I will not repeat all the things I heard but did not see myself. I will tell only about how people died before my eyes, every day, by the dozens, sent 'over the hill,' dying in the tents, freezing and crowding around the iron stoves, dropping from hunger and cold, from dysentery and malnutritionÉ

"The high rate of illness and death at Adak was caused by the fact that when the people from Vorkuta arrived, not only were the tents not ready - so that people caught cold from sleeping on the frozen ground under the open sky - but also no food had been provided and there was no kitchen, bakery, or bathhouse. Out of desperation the starving people pounced on frost-bitten potatoes that were rotting out in the open. Because they were rotten, they caused dysentery and diarrhoea to all who ate them, after which the weaker ones began dying like flies. In kettles over open fires, a kind of foul-smelling codfish, some that had gotten frozen and some that had frozen and thawed, was boiled and then served in this boiled form right into people's dirty hands. There was no bread. Instead they boiled lumps of dough in the same kettles over open fires. One of these, half-wet and boiling hot, would be doled out to each person to last the whole day. The starving people would bolt these down greedily and the next moment be clutching at their stomachs in pain." (George Saunders (editor) Samizdat: Memoirs of a Bolshevik-Leninist, p. 170.)

Even in these hellish places, the Trotskyists maintained their organisation and revolutionary faith. They held political discussions, and attempted to follow events in the Soviet Union and internationally. Finally, under intolerable pressure, they organised a hunger strike, something without a precedent in Stalin's labour camps. In October 1936, the prisoners declared themselves on strike. In the barracks occupied by the Trotskyists, the strike was 100 per cent solid. Even the orderlies struck. About one thousand prisoners participated in the strike in the Vorkuta mines which lasted more than four months, and only ended in March 1937 when the strikers received a radiogram from the headquarters of the GPU conceding all their demands. But later the prison regime got worse. Finally, in March 1938, the Trotskyists of Vorkuta were taken out into the tundra in groups and shot:

"The executions in the tundra lasted the whole month of April and part of May. Usually one day out of two, or one day out of three, thirty to forty prisoners were called. It is characteristic to note that each time, some common criminals, repeaters, were included. In order to terrorise the prisoners, the GPU, from time to time, made publicly known by means of local radio, the list of those shot. Usually broadcasts began as follows: 'For counter-revolutionary agitation, sabotage, brigandage in the camps, refusal to work, attempts to escape, the following have been shotÉ' followed by a list of names of some political prisoners mixed with a group of common criminals.

"One time, a group of nearly a hundred, composed mainly of Trotskyists, was led away to be shot. As they marched away, the condemned sang the Internationale, joined by the voices of hundreds of prisoners remaining in camp.

"At the beginning of May, a group of women were shot. Among them were the Ukrainian Communist, Chumskaya, the wife of I.N. Smirnov, a Bolshevik since 1898 and ex-peoples' commissar; (Olga, the daughter of Smirnov, a young girl, apolitical, passionately fond of music, had been shot a year before in Moscow); the wives of Kossior, of Melnais, etc. É one of these women had to walk on crutches. At the time of execution of a male prisoner, his imprisoned wife was automatically liable to capital punishment; and when it was a question of well-known members of the Opposition, this applied equally to any of his children over the age of twelve." (Ibid., pp. 215-6.)

Now, at least read one of these chapters because they're vital for your understanding how Stalin was nuts.

[Cassius Clay]

LOL wouldn't you of been better of telling me to read all the chapters (which I did) at the beggining of the thread rather than the end. Well I found it funny.

The Show Trials.

None of that provides any evidence that those trials were not fair. Just the usual accusations that it was all a fit up and that they were tortured into confessing. The NKVD Archives which are now open reveal no use of torture on any of the accussed. The American Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time who was present at the trials thought they were perfectly fair, as did one English writer (whose I completly forget sorry) who thought that the prosecution were not nearly as horrible as they were in English courts. And were given the right to defend themselves and were not interffered by the prosecution when doing so. Even your sources admit that Bakurin defended himself vigourously (minor note Stalin publicly stated he did not want Bakurin executed).

As for Kirov, even Khrushchev does not accuse Stalin of responsibility. In 1990 the deeply anti-Stalin KGB carried out it's own investingation and they did not find Stalin guilty in any way (eg absoulutly no evidence). The facts are that Nikolaev (Kirov was screwing his wife so there's the motive) was recruited by Kamenev and co to kill Kirov, the reason they were only found 'Morally and Ideollogy' responsible, was because Nikolaev had done it on the spare of the moment, he new Kirov was there (the Party headquarters) and decided to do it there and then. If Stalin had wanted to kill Kirov he sure as hell wouldn't of done it that day because Kirov had phoned in sick in the morning and turned up to work unannounced and unexpected. Which also explains the lack of his usual bodyguard.

As for the military, well the numbers you quoted are like something out of a Robert Conquest book. The archives now show that 8500 officers were purged. By purge I mean demoted, sacked, imprisoned/arrested, sentenced to be executed and those that were actually executed. Alot of those who were purged were purged because they were incompetent military commanders (see WW1) or were of old aristocrat origin and could not be trusted (the Nazis are gonna invade).

As for Tukhachevsky and co, yes he was a brilliant military commader (like Trotsky who incidently I credit with saving Petrograd in 1919). His trial was a military tribunal so the archive has yet to of been realeased. Suffice to say he would not been executed without good reason. President Benes of Czechslovakia first became suspicious of Tukhachevsky in early 1938 when the General visited the country to discuss how the Red Army could help the Czechs against Hitler (what's that Stalin calling for a fight against the Nazis it can't be true). The fact that old Tukachevsky suggested that the Czechs allow Hitler to take the Sundentland and made other rather bizare comments for a RED army General who was supposed to be helping the Czechs probably didn't help.

Also it was a former SA man (so he probably has no love for Hitler) who defected to the Soviet Union and said that Tukhachevsky and co was in contact with the Gestapo. I'm sure these aren't the only reasons he was arrested, but I guess we will have to wait till the archive is realeased. Heydrich who is reconised as a extremely intelliegent person by most historians said that 'If it weren't for the purge of the army and intelliegent services then the Red Army would of never of got through 1941'.

BTW please don't scream that I am now a Nazi just because I quoted a very evil but intelliegent one. Also that group of sources does quote Khruschev alot. I believe it was Robert Conquest (or some other right wing author) who said 'Not even the most anti-Stalinists have accussed Stalin of the crimes his successor did that night'. Not to mention the fact that he was practically shouted down by the party.

You (or rather the source you have used) as good as say Stalin was responsible for the death of Maxim Gorky. Without no evidence, yes Gorky did criticise Stalin but he also criticised Lenin alot to so don't try and pin that one on him. Oh yes the millions who died in 'Concentration camps' the archives, opened by Yelstin and Gorby clearly state that 800,000 (I cannot remember the precise number, so I have just rounded up, sorry) died in the Soviet prison system between 1934 and 1953. 600,000 (rounded up again) died between 1937 and 1945 when the Soviet State was facing it's greatest threat. These deaths are for all reason such as old age, discease, suicide, murder by other prisoners and finally execution.

Yes there were innocents killed and that is a tragedy, but remember the circumstances of the day. And that source also forgets to mention that 120,000 (precise number) prisoners were realeased when there cases were reviewed again. Also the vast majority of those who wen't to prison were sentenced to less than 5 years. The rest were usually criminalls, murderers, rapists, eg not very nice folk.

Sorry If I have forgotten anything (fucking long post), looking eagerly forward to your reply. BTW what does that first part about the Bueracrat mean? A joke!. Oh yes please tell me why if life was so bad under Bloodthirsty Stalin then why are the vast majority of the electorate who vote for the Communists in Russia grow up in the 193-'s, 40's and 50's?

[Storman Normin]

'Lenin began to dictate a proposition that Stalin should be removed from his post...'

[Storman Normin]

lenin died...before he could launch his attack on Stalin

[Marxman]

All anweres are there. But if you wish to expand your views, then read more marxist books. Here, allow me to paste "The Moscow trials" taken from www.trotsky.net

The Moscow Trials
Part One: The Moscow Frame-Up Trials: 'Shoot the mad dogs!'

The ideas of Trotsky - which represent the continuation of Marxist thought since Lenin's death - are without question the most slandered set of ideas in history.

Together with Marx and Lenin, Trotsky has been subjected to a continual onslaught from capitalist commentators and academics, including the Russian 'democrats' of the Volkogonov type, for his alleged totalitarianism and subversive ideas. In reality, it is the revolutionary message of Marxism which poses a threat to their system - and they must attempt to discredit these ideas at every opportunity.

Added to this orchestrated bourgeois campaign of vilification has been the vitriolic attacks of the Stalinists on Trotsky. Before his death, Lenin formed a block with Trotsky to remove Stalin from office. Unfortunately, a series of strokes removed Lenin from political life until his death in 1924. From then on Trotsky led the struggle against Stalin and the emerging bureaucracy within the USSR. With the failure of revolution abroad, Stalin used his support within the apparatus to isolate and expel Trotsky from the Soviet Union.

Once Stalin had defeated Trotsky's Left Opposition, he turned on all his opponents, including his allies on the Right. The victory of the apparatus was to culminate in the infamous Moscow Trials of 1936-38 where the 'Old Bolsheviks', including Trotsky, who led the October Revolution, were accused of counter-revolutionary activity, sabotage, murder, and collaboration with fascism.

Most of the accused were subsequently broken by the secret police, the NKVD, forced to give to give false confessions about themselves and others, and then shot. By 1940, out of the members of Lenin's Central Committee of 1917, only Stalin remained. Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in August 1940.

In the course of these Show Trials, Stalin attempted to mobilise world opinion against the accused. An international campaign was organised through the Communist Parties and their press to discredit and slander Trotsky and the other leaders of the Revolution. Trotsky was officially accused of being connected with the German Intelligence Service since 1921, and with British intelligence since 1926!

In the Indictment of the trial of the Old Bolsheviks Pyatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov, Serebriakov, Muralov and others, it states:

'The investigation has established that LD Trotsky entered into negotiations with one of the leaders of the German National Socialist Party with a view to waging a joint struggle against the Soviet Union...

The principles of this agreement, as Trotsky related, were finally elaborated and adopted during Trotsky's meeting with Hitler's deputy, Hess...'

(International Press Correspondence, p. 128, no 6, February 1937)

While the Moscow Frame up Trials unfolded, very few were to openly question their authenticity. While the charges appeared fantastic, the confessions seemed so clear and emphatic. In the West, a handful of Trotskyists fought bravely to mobilise opposition to the Stalinist machine. In 1937, an impartial Commission of Enquiry was established, made up of liberal-democratic people, under Prof. John Dewey to examine the charges made against Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov - the two principal defendants of the Moscow Trials. After a thorough investigation the Commission returned a verdict of not guilty and that the trials were a frame-up.

It was only in 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, did Khrushchev finally reveal that the Trials were in fact fame-ups. This was done to place the blame for the crimes of Stalinism on Stalin himself. It was all down to him! The fact that Khrushchev and the others directly participated in the frame-ups while Stalin was alive was not mentioned. Neither Trotsky nor his son were rehabilitated. Despite the so-called de-Stalinisation, research into the Great Terror was taboo right up until the end of the 1980s.

With the collapse of Stalinism, and the opening up of the archives of the CPSU, new evidence has emerged about the Moscow Trials. One of the latest books to appear which analyses the new archive material from a Marxist perspective is '1937: Stalin's Year of Terror' by the Russian historian Vadim Z. Rogovin. This excellent book provides a graphic picture of the horrific preparation of the Trials.

The Great Purge and Terror were launched by Stalin not because he was insane. On the contrary, it was a conscious, well-prepared course of action to safe-guard the rule of the bureaucracy. Stalin arrived at the decision to destroy the 'Old Bolsheviks' not later than the summer of 1934, and then began to prepare his operation - beginning with the murder of Kirov in December of that year.

Trotsky explained Stalin's actions:

'It is time, my listeners, it is high time, to recognise, finally, that a new aristocracy has been formed in the Soviet Union. The October Revolution proceeded under the banner of equality. The bureaucracy is the embodiment of monstrous inequality. The revolution destroyed the nobility. The bureaucracy creates a new gentry. The revolution destroyed titles and decorations. The new aristocracy produces marshals and generals. The new aristocracy absorbs an enormous part of the national income. Its position before the people is deceitful and false. Its leaders are forced to hide the reality, to deceive the masses, to cloak themselves, calling black white. The whole policy of the new aristocracy is a frame-up.'

The situation by 1934 was giving rise for alarm amongst the Stalinist bureaucracy. There was profound discontent throughout the country after the debacle of forced collectivisation and the adventure of the first Five Year Plan. Opposition moods were wide-spread. Stalin feared that the Old Bolsheviks - although forced to repeatedly capitulate to Stalin - would become a focal point for opposition. Some had in fact made contact with Trotsky in exile.

Stalin used the assassination of Kirov to launch his plans. Originally the perpetrators of the murder were declared to be a group of 13 'Zinovievists', shot in December 1934. The former oppositionists Zinoviev and Kamenev - who had had earlier broken with Trotsky and capitulated - were then convicted in January 1935 with 'objectively' inflaming terrorist moods amongst their supporters. But this was only the beginning.

Stalin now realised his mistake in exiling Trotsky in 1928, which allowed him to freely criticise the Stalinist regime from abroad. Trotsky was the most important focal point of opposition to Stalin. He was a revolutionary leader that would not be broken. From then on Stalin prepared his assassination. Consequently, Stalin set about the fame-up of Trotsky and his supporters on charges of terrorism.

This job was given to the NKVD under Yagoda and then Yezhov, both Stalinist hangmen. They had to 'prove' the existence of an underground terrorist Zinoviev organisation which collaborated with secret Trotskyist network. In early 1935 a directive was given to the NKVD which demanded the 'total liquidation of the entire Trotsky-Zinoviev underground'. Arrests took place of suspected oppositionists and former-oppositionists. Then followed the interrogations and first 'confessions' - receiving terrorist orders from Trotsky.

After a year and a half in prison, Zinoviev and Kamenev were brought to Moscow for their interrogation. They had been repeatedly broken - morally crushed - by this time. As was Stalin's method, he had managed to sow mutual discord between the two men. Zinoviev wrote Stalin grovelling letters from his cell: 'My soul burns with one desire: to prove to you that I am no longer an enemy. There is no demand which I would not fullfil in order to prove this... ' (Rogovin, p. 5)

Kamenev bore himself with particular courage. He told his interrogator: 'You are now observing Thermidor in a pure form. The French Revolution taught us a good lesson, but we weren't able to put it to use. We don't know how to protect our revolution from Thermidor. That is our greatest mistake, and history will condemn us for it.'

Yezhov was ordered to prepare them for a public trial, and that they should slander themselves and Trotsky - for the sake of the revolution! Threats were made against their families, a number of whom were held by the NKVD. They were incarcerated and subjected to humiliating procedures. Zinoviev was the first to break, who then persuaded Kamenev to follow suite in return for their lives and those of their families and supporters. They were then brought before Stalin and Voroshilov. Zinoviev pleaded with them: 'You want to depict members of Lenin's Politburo and Lenin's personal friends to be unprincipled bandits, and present the party as a snake's nest of intrigue, treachery and murderers.' To this Stalin replied that the Trial was not aimed at them, but against Trotsky, 'the sworn enemy of the Party.'

Their pleas for their lives were met with Stalin's vow that all this 'goes without saying.' Stalin betrayed them, as he would betray the rest. It was in reality a betrayal of the Revolution in the interests of the ruling bureaucracy at whose head was Stalin.

Smirnov and Mrachkovsky both stubbornly refused to give confessions to the interrogators. According to the chief prosecutor, Vyshinsky, Smirnov's entire interrogation on 20 May consisted of his words: 'I deny this. I deny it once again. I deny it.' Mrachkovsky was taken before Stalin personally, but rejected his advances. He was then handed over to Slutsky, head of the NKVD's foreign department. According to him, he interrogated Mrachkovsky non-stop for almost four days. Mrachkovsky told Slutsky: 'You can tell Stalin that I hate him. He is a traitor. They took me to Molotov, who also wanted to buy me off. I pit in his face.' During the interrogation every two hours the phone rang from Stalin's secretary to ask whether he had managed to 'break' Mrachkovsky. After a lengthy interrogation he finally broke down in tears 'concluding everything was lost.' For a long time he refused to smear Trotsky with terrorist activity.

The first show Trial - the Trial of the Sixteen - sought to destroy the mythical Trotsky-Zinoviev Centre. Vyshinsky did not provide a shred of evidence against the accused - not one document, not a scrap of paper - only the confessions of the accused. The weakness of the prosecutor's case was demonstrated by the inconsistencies and falsehoods in the testimonies given at the trial. Goltsmam, for instance, testified he met Trotsky and Sedov in Copenhagen at the Hotel Bristol. Unbeknown to the prosecutors, the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917! The Stalinist investigators had not done their homework.

At the conclusion of the Trial, Vyshinsky for the prosecution declared: 'I demand that we shoot the mad dogs - every single one of them!' Despite the pleas for mercy submitted by the Sixteen - which they were led to believe would be honoured - within a matter of hours they were taken out and shot.

Those who grovelled before the Stalinist dictatorship - throwing all kinds of slanders against their former comrades - could never satisfy Stalin. They would be eliminated after their allotted role was complete. New amalgams were being prepared. New Witch Trials would take place. As Leon Sedov explained: 'Stalin needs Trotsky's head - this is his main goal. To achieve it he will launch the most extreme and even more insidious cases.'

With the collapse of Hitler Germany in 1945 and the Nuremberg Trials, which laid bare the Nazi regime and their collaborators, not one word or document was found to prove the slightest connection between Trotsky and the Gestapo. It was not Trotsky who had an agreement with Hitler. It was Stalin who signed a Pact with Hitler in August 1939.

It is fitting to end this article by a quote from Leopold Trepper, the leader of the famous anti-Nazi spy network in Western Europe:

'But who did protest at the time? Who rose up to voice his outrage? The Trotskyites can lay claim to this honour. Following the example of their leader, who was rewarded for his obstinacy with the end of an ice-axe, they fought Stalinism to the death, and they were the only ones who did.

'Today, the Trotskyites have a right to accuse those who once howled along with the wolves. Let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism. They had something to cling to in the midst of their profound distress at seeing the revolution betrayed. They did not 'confess', for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.'

Part Two: The Moscow Trials - the greatest frame-up in history

"Why does Moscow so fear the voice of a single man? Only because I know the truth, the whole truth. Only because I have nothing to hide. Only because I am ready to appear before a public and impartial commission of inquiry with documents, facts, and testimonies in my hands, and to disclose the truth to the very end. I declare: if this commission decides that I am guilty in the slightest degree of the crimes which Stalin imputes to me, I pledge in advance to place myself voluntarily in the hands of the executioners of the G.P.U. That, I hope, is clear. Have you all heard? I make this declaration before the entire world. I ask the press to publish my words in the farthest corners of the planet. But if the commission establishes - do you hear me? - that the Moscow Trials are a conscious and premeditated frame-up, constructed with the bones and nerves of human beings, I will not ask my accusers to place themselves voluntarily before a firing squad. No, the eternal disgrace in the memory of human generations will be sufficient for them! Do the accusers of the Kremlin hear me? I throw my defiance in their faces. And I await their reply!"

From Trotsky's summary speech before the Dewey Commission, April 1937.

In August 1936, the Old Bolsheviks Kamenev, Zinoviev, Smirnov, Mrachkovsky and twelve others were framed by Stalin, forced to confess to crimes they had not committed, and shot. In January 1937, other leading Bolsheviks, including Piatakov, Radek, Sokolnikov and Muralov, were also framed and either shot or murdered. In June 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky and a group of the highest-ranking Red Army generals were executed. Finally, in March 1938, Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, and others were also convicted of counter-revolution and shot. The men in the dock were all members of Lenin's Political Bureau, except for Stalin. Trotsky, though absent, was the chief defendant. They were all accused for plotting to assassinate Stalin and the other Soviet leaders, to wreck the country, and conspiring with the espionage services of Britain, France, Japan and Germany. They were also accused of entering into secret pacts with Hitler and the Mikado to annex vast slices of Soviet territory.

The frame-up trials were accompanied by a prolonged purge running into millions. Many victims were executed without trial because they refused to bear false witness. The forced confessions of the defendants in the public trials were the only basis for the proceedings and verdicts. Trotsky alone was beyond Stalin's reach and could not be silenced. At every turn, he denounced the monstrous actions of the Stalinist regime.

At the same time, the Communist Parties everywhere churned out propaganda against Trotsky and in favour of the trials. It was especially taken up with zeal by the British Stalinists. R. Page Arnot wrote in Labour Monthly: "Trotskyism is now revealed as an ancillary of fascism." Walter Holmes in the Daily Worker (4/9/36) wrote: "What are you worrying about? Everybody in our party has got enough sense to know they ought to be shot." John Gollan wrote a pamphlet entitled The Development of Trotskyism from Menshevism to Alliance with Fascism and Counter-revolution. The pro-Stalinist D. N. Pritt, KC wrote: "Once again, the more faint-hearted socialists are beset with doubts and anxieties," but "once again we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battle-field of controversy it will be realised that the charge was true, the confessions correct, and the prosecution fairly conducted."

Meanwhile in Russia, the Stalinist regime was trampling over the corpses of the Old Bolsheviks. On 10 August 1936, Yezhov, a leading figure in the secret police, showed Piatakov the testimony given against him, pushing him to a nervous breakdown. Attempting to defend himself, Piatakov blamed the 'Trotskyists' for spreading slanders about him. Calling himself guilty of "not paying attention to counter-revolutionary work of his former wife, and of being indifferent to meetings with her acquaintances", Piatakov said he should be punished more severely, and asked "that he be granted any form of rehabilitation." With this in mind, he asked the CC "allow him personally to shoot all those sentenced to be shot in the (forthcoming) trial, including his former wife." He requested that a statement about this be published in the press.

"In reporting these events at the December Plenum of the Central Committee in 1936", writes Vadim Rogovin in his excellent book, 1937 - Stain's Year of Terror, "Stalin stated that Piatakov had prepared 'with pleasure' to play the role of prosecutor. 'But when we thought things over and decided that this wouldn't work. What would it mean to present him as public prosecutor? He would say one thing, and the accused would object by saying: "Look where you've managed to crawl, into the prosecutor's chair. But didn't you used to work with us?!" And what would that lead to? It would turn the trial into a comedy and disrupt the trial.'" (Rogovin, p. 69)

On the one hand, this showed how broken Piatakov had become, desperate to escape his inevitable end. He prostrated himself before Stalin. His plea to be allowed to become prosecutor was even cynically considered by Stalin but then rejected, fearing it would bring the trial into disrepute.

Stalin then coolly considered Piatakov's request to personally shoot the defendants, including his former wife, but then thought it unwise: "If we announce it, no one would believe that we hadn't forced him to do it. We said that this wouldn't work, no one would believe that you voluntarily decided to do this, without being coerced. Yes, and besides, we never have announced the names of the people who carry out sentences." (Quoted in Rogovin, p. 70).

When Tomsky's name was mentioned in Pravda, connected to the "Trotsky-Zinoviev Gang", he shot himself. He left a note to Stalin: "I never joined any conspiracy against the party." The interrogation of Radek, Skolnikov and Piatakov served to blacken their names. They admitted to the existence of the mythical 'centre' that Trotsky was supposed to have used to organise terrorism inside the USSR. At their trial they were found guilty. Piatakov was shot, and Radek and Skolnikov were imprisoned - and finally murdered in 1939 by other prisoners, apparently on the orders from the security organs.

At the beginning of 1935, Trotsky's son Sergei Sedov was arrested and sent into exile to the Vorkuta camps. New charges were brought against him for allegedly poisoning workers. He was sentenced to be shot on 29 October 1937. All of Trotsky's family - at least those the authorities could discover - were subsequently arrested. "The very sound of his name - Trotsky! - aroused a mystical horror in the hearts of the contemporaries of the Great Purge," notes Runin, the brother-in-law of Sergei. "And the fact that my sister had some kind of relation to that name automatically turned not only her, but our entire family, into state criminals, 'collaborators', 'spies', 'accomplices', in short, into 'agents of the greatest villain of modern times, into the most vicious opponent of Soviet power.'" (Quoted by Rogovin, pp. 152-53).

While there were those who confessed to crimes they did not commit under lengthy interrogation, there were many who did not. Most were shot. Some survived, such as D. B. Dobrushkin, an engineer in Moscow. He passed through a two-year investigation, during which he lost the sight in one eye. He was finally released in Beria's 'reverse flood'.

The witch-hunt atmosphere affected everyone, even the most fervent Stalinists. Ordzhonikidze, for example, committed suicide in early 1937, after constant harrassment from Beria of the G.P.U. In February-March, at the Plenum of the CC, a case was constructed again Bukharin and Rykov. They were forced to grovel before their tormentors. When Bukharin apologised for his political short-sightedness, Stalin interrupted "That's not enough, that's not enough!" He then begged the "CC once again to forgive me." After four days of interrogation, both Bukharin and Rykov were in a state of extreme exhaustion and despair. In the course of their speeches they were constantly interrupted and barracked. After Bukharin had spoken, there were shouts from the audience: "He should have been put in prison long ago!" Stalin urged them to "cleanse themselves" by testifying against themselves and others.

Stalin's agents were also busy internationally exposing Trotskyist "counter-revolutionaries." In Spain the G.P.U. under Alexander Orlov carried out reprisals and assassinations of Trotskyists and the anti-Stalinlists of the POUM. This included Trotsky's secretary in Norway, Erwin Wolf, and the POUM leader Nin, who was mercilessly tortured and his body secretly disposed of. In 1937, Ignace Reiss, a G.P.U. agent, publically broke from the Stalin and came over to Trotsky. He was hunted down and murdered. In 1938, Trotsky's son, Leon Sedov, was also murdered in Paris. In the same year, the decapitated body of Rudolf Klement - the movement's international secretary - was found in the river Seine. The net was closing in.

Trotsky knew his life was in constant danger. Trotsky would tell Natalia, "We have been spared another day." It was Trotsky's hope to be granted sufficient time to allow him to develop and educate a new cadre for the revolutionary events that would unfold during and after the war. Trotsky embodied the genuine traditions of revolutionary Marxism. For this reason, he was a deadly threat to Stalin. The discontent within the USSR, together with the revolutionary events in Spain, threatened to revive opposition within the country. That is why he launched the Purge trials. All potential opposition had to be eliminated.

Trotsky himself was assassinated by a Stalinist agent on 20th August 1940. But to kill a man, is not to kill his ideas. Stalinism has collapsed in the ex-Soviet Union. The Stalinist bureaucracy has gone over - as Trotsky had predicted - to the capitalist counter-revolution. The ranks of the Communist Parties internationally are in ferment. They have never been so open to Trotsky's ideas. The development of powerful Marxist currents world-wide now falls on the new generation of workers and youth. Trotsky has bequeathed a treasure house of ideas, which can help us in our task. A new period opens up before us of revolution and counter-revolution. On the basis of events, the traditional organisations of the working class will be transformed and re-transformed and open the way for the creation of mass Marxist tendencies internationally.

Trotsky was to defend his honour and faith in the socialist future of humankind to the bitter end. It was essential to maintain the spotless banner of revolutionary socialism.

"We will not hand this banner to the masters of falsification", stated Trotsky. "If our generation has proven to be too weak to establish socialism on this earth, we will give its unstained banner to our children. The struggle which looms ahead by far supersedes the significance of individual people, factions and parties. It is a struggle for the future of all humanity. It will be severe. It will be long. Whoever seeks physical repose and spiritual comfort - let him step aside. During times of reaction it is easier to lean on the bureaucracy than on the truth. But for all those for whom socialism is not an empty phrase but the content of their moral life - forward! Neither threats, nor persecution, nor violence will stop us. Perhaps it will be on our bones, but the truth will triumph. We are paving the way for it, and the truth will be victorious. Under the terrible blows of fate I will feel as happy as during the best days of my youth if I can join you in facilitating its victory. For, my friends, the highest human happiness lies not in the exploitation of the present, but in the preparation of the future."

Rob Sewell
London March 2000
(this two-part article appeared first in Socialist Appeal)

[Cassius Clay]

That source proves absoulutly nothing. Infact it relies on lies, not even Khrushchev said that those trials were fake. Also it clings to this beleive that Stalin had Kirov murdered, which is complete rubbish (did you read the previous post?). Even in what is written above it admits that Zinoviev and Kamenev spent a year in prison before being realeased and actually being allowed back into the party. If Stalin's whole plan was to kill them surely he would of had his excuse there and then? It provides no fanastic new evidence, it just relies on the usaual rants about torture and forced confessions. It is like what Goebbells once said 'If you repeat a lie enough times it becomes a truth'.

And why have you started another thread on this?

[Chasovoy]

What is this book with the picture falsifications called?