To appraise Stalin, the best way to begin is to compare the condition of the Soviet Union and the rest of the world at two times: when he came into leadership and when he died. Without such a comparison, it is impossible to measure what may have contributed or taken away from human progress. If the condition of the Soviet people was much better when he died than when he took power, he cannot have made their lives worse. The worst that can be said is that they would have progressed more without him. The same is true for the world revolution. Was it set back during the decades of his leadership, or did it advance? Once we put the questions this way, the burden of proof falls on those who deny Stalin's positive role as a revolutionary leader.
As World War I began, the Russian Empire consisted primarily of vast undeveloped lands inhabited by many different peoples speaking a variety of languages with a very low level of literacy, productivity, technology, and heallth. Feudal social relations still prevailed throughout many of these lands. Czarist secret police, officially organized bands of military terrorists, and a vast bureaucracy were deployed to keep the hungry masses of workers and peasants in line. The war brought these problems to a crisis. Millions went to their deaths wearing rags, with empty stomachs, often waiting for those in front of them to fall so they would have a rifle and a few rounds of ammunition. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the entire vast empire, including the great cities of Russia itself, was in chaos.
Before the new government could begin to govern, it was immediately set upon by the landlords, capitalists, and generals of the old regime, with all the forces they could buy and muster, together with combined military forces of Britain, France, Japan, and Poland, and additional military contingents from the U.S. and other capitalist countries. A vicious civil war raged for three years, from Siberia through Europeon Russia, from the White Sea to the Ukraine. At the end of the Civil War, in 1920, agricultural output was less that half that of the prewar povertystricken countryside. Even worse was the situation in industry. Many mines and factories had been destroyed. Transport had been torn up. Stocks of raw materials and semifinished products have been exhausted. The output of a large scale industry was about one seventh of what it had been before the war. And the fighting against foreign military intervention had to go on for two more years. Japanese and U.S. troops still held a portion of Siberia, including the key port city of Vladivostok, which was not racaptured until late 1922.
Lenin suffered his first stroke in 1922. From this point on, Stalin, who was the General Secretary of the Central Committee, began to emerge as the principal leader of the Party. Stalin's policies were being implemented at least as early as 1924, the year of Lenin's death, and by 1927 the various opposing factions had been defeated and expelled from the Party. It is the period of the early and mid-1920s that we must compare to 1953.
The Soviet Union of the early 1920s was a land of deprivation. Hunger was everywhere, and actual mass famines swept across much of the countryside. Industrial production was extremely low, and the technological level of industry was so backward that there seemed little possbility of mechanizing agriculture. Serious rebellions in the armed forces were breaking out, most notable at the Kronstadt garrisons in 1921. By 1924 large-scale peasant revolts were erupting, particularly in Georgia. There was virtually no electricity outside the large cities. Agriculture was based on tiny peasant holdings and medium sized farms seized by rural capitalists ( the kulaks ) who forced the peasants back into wage labor and tenant farming. Health care was almost non-existent in much of the country. The technical knowledge and skills needed to develop modern industry, agriculture, health, and education were concentrated in the hands of a few, mostly opposed to socialism, while the vast majority of the population were illiterate and could hardly think about education while barely mamaging to subsist. The Soviet Union was isolated in a world controlled by powerful capitalist countries, physically surrounding it, setting up economic blockades, and officially refusing to reconize its existence while outdoing each other in their pledges to wipe out this Red menace.
The counterrevolution was riding high throughout Europe, Great Britain, and even in the U.S.A., where Red threat was used as an excuse to smash labor unions. Fascism was emerging in several parts of the capitalist world, particularly in Japan and in Italy, where Mussolini took dictatorial power in 1924. Most of the world consisted of colonies and non-colonies of the Europeon powers.
When Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet Union was the second greatest industrial, scientific, and military power in the world, and showed clear signs of moving to overtake the U.S. in all these areas. This was despite the devastating losses it suffered while defeating the fascist powers of Germany, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The various peoples of the U.S.S.R. were unified. Starvation and illiteracy were unknown throughout the country. Agriculture was completely collectivized and extremely productive. Preventive health care was the finest in the world, and medical treatment of exceptionally high quality was available free to all citizens. Education at all level was free. More books were published in the U.S.S.R. than in any other country. There was no unemployment.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, not only had the main fascist powers of 1922-45 been defeated, but the forces of revolution were on the rise everywhere. The Chinese Communist Party had just led one fourth of the world's population to victory over foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism and capitalism. Half of Korea was socialist, and the U.S.-British imperialist army, having rushed to intervene in the civil war under the banner of the United Nations, was on the defensive and hopelessly demoralized. In Vietnam, a strong socialist power, which had already defeated Japanese imperialism, was administering the final blows of the beaten army of the French empire. The monarchies and fascist military dictatorships of Eastern Europe had been destroyed by a combination of partisan forces, led by local Communists, and the Soviet Army everywhere except for Greece there were now governments that supported the world revolution and at least claimed to be government of the workers and peasants. The largest political party in both France and Italy was the Communist Party. The national liberation movement among the European colonies and neocolonies was surging forward. Between 1946 and 1949 alone, at least nominal national independence was achieved by Burma, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Laos, Libyam Ceylon, Jordan, and the Philippines, countries comprising about one third of the world's population. The entire continent of Africa was stirring.
Everybody but the Trotskyites, and even some of them, would have to admit that the situation for the Communist world revolution was incomparably advanced in 1953 over what it had been in the early or mid 1920s. Of course that does not settle the Stalin question. We still have to ask whether Stalin contributed to this tremendous advance, or slowed it down, or had negligible influence on it. And we must not duck the question as to whether Stalin's theory and practice built such serious faults into revolutionary communism that its later failures, particularly in the Soviet Union, can be pinned on him. So let us look through Stalin's career, focusing particularly on its most controversial aspects.
