The history of the first workers’ state, the USSR, during its heroic period,
when it was led by Joseph Stalin – that history is withheld from us. It is
smothered by lies from dishonest and very influential sources.
How do we know this is so? What is the situation? Who are the liars? Why is this
important?
Finally, what should we do about it? The future of the world’s working class and
the fight for an egalitarian world of what Marxist researcher Charles Andrews
has called “No Rich, No Poor,” depends on what we do.
I began to discuss this question in an earlier article titled
“Marxists Behaving
Badly” which you can download from
my Home Page. However, that was a very
partial discussion of this enormous challenge to all of us. In my talk today I
intend to confront this crisis more directly.
__________
The Anti-Stalin Paradigm (ASP)
What I call the ASP is a special case of the anticommunist paradigm of history
(ACP). In its basic formulation, the ACP frames the history of the last century
upside down. The Western, imperialist countries are, supposedly, “democratic,”
“free,” stand for “human rights.” The former socialist bloc countries,
especially the Stalin-era Soviet Union, were “dictatorships,” “totalitarian,” “unfree,”
“against human rights.” In reality, the opposite is the case.
According to the ASP Stalin was a bloodthirsty dictator who killed millions of
Soviet citizens, engineered frameups against many communists, and committed
innumerable “crimes.” This is all false.
This paradigm is strictly enforced in the academic field of Soviet history and
through it into the intellectual and semi-popular media, and then into the
popular mass media. According to the ASP, it is considered illegitimate— outside
the limits of respectable discussion – to disprove any crime of which Stalin has
been accused.
One example of this is an article by Professor Matthew Lenoe, “Did Stalin Kill
Kirov and Does It Matter?”, Journal of Modern History 74 (2), 2002. Lenoe
insists that it “doesn’t matter” because, even though Stalin did not kill Kirov,
Stalin was so evil that the fact that he was not guilty of killing this one man,
Sergei Kirov, was insignificant.
In his 2010 book The Kirov Murder and Soviet History Lenoe spends almost a page
and a half assuring his readers that, although he himself has concluded that
Stalin did not murder Kirov he, Lenoe, loves freedom and democracy, and hates
dictatorship, so much that no one should think for a minute that he, Lenoe, is
“pro-Stalin” – something Lenoe is clearly afraid of, since he is violating the
unwritten but universally understood ASP by stating that Stalin did not commit
this particular crime.
My Own Path to Soviet History
I want to explain briefly how I came to do research on the Stalin era in the
USSR. My story illustrates a number of important issues that I’ll discuss in
more detail later: the influence of anticommunism; the need for objectivity in
the search for the truth, the utter bankruptcy of the profession of Soviet
history – a corruption that even the best historians of this field cannot
entirely escape.
In 1967, while I was watching a demonstration against the Vietnam War in
Manhattan, a friend of mine remarked to me that he and I should be marching with
the contingent that was passing by carrying the flag of the “Viet Cong.” At that
moment another onlooker told us that we should not oppose the US war in Vietnam.
We asked him: Why not? He replied: “Because the NLF is led and controlled by the
Vietnamese Communist Party; the VCP is led by Ho Chi Minh, Ho had been trained
by Joseph Stalin, and Stalin had killed 20 million people.”
This claim stuck in my mind. I did not “believe” it. I also did not “disbelieve”
it. Instead, I resolved that someday, when I had completed my doctoral
dissertation in Medieval comparative literature and had a job, I would look into
the questions about Joseph Stalin.
Robert Conquest, The Great
Terror
A couple of years later I bought and studied a copy of Robert Conquest’s 1968
book The Great Terror. Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. I was shaken by what I
read there – page after page of accusations that Stalin had committed mass
murder and other terrible crimes. So I decided that this is where I would begin
to look into the accusations against Stalin and, by extension, against the USSR
of his time.
I made a card file of every footnote in Conquest’s mammoth book. Over a period
of three years I spent my spare time taking the bus from my apartment in New
Jersey to the
New York Public Library, with its magnificent Slavic collection. There I checked
Conquest’s footnotes.
What I found was this:
* Conquest had NO primary source evidence. He took any anti-Stalin fact-claims
from Khrushchev-era Soviet sources, and from many other anticommunist sources.
But none of these contained any evidence.
* Conquest simply “believed” – that is, he proposed that his readers believe –
that any statement made by virtually any writer, as long as it was hostile to
Stalin, should be accepted as truthful. Not incidentally, Conquest used Leon
Trotsky’s autobiography, My Life, as one of his sources, and also Isaac Deutscher’s flattering and dishonest biography of Trotsky.
* Conquest’s book has more than 1000 footnotes. But many of these were to
anticommunist books that were reviewed critically, even negatively, by
anticommunist reviewers at the time. And NONE of them contained ANY evidence
either.
I came to understand that all of the professional scholars of Soviet history who
reviewed Conquest’s book positively were either deceiving themselves or each
other, or were genuinely ignorant of what primary source evidence was.
At that time I did not understand that the ASP existed. I was first introduced
to it in 1985. I had met a young scholar – you would recognize his name – who
was one of the editors of Russian History, a scholarly journal still published
today. At his suggestion, I drafted
an article on the Tukhachevsky Affair and
sent it to him. (The Tukhachevsky Affair is the conspiracy of high-ranking
Soviet military commanders against the Soviet government and in collaboration
with the German High Command). In that article I reviewed all the evidence that
this was a frameup by Stalin and concluded there was no evidence to support that
conclusion.
The young reviewer made me rewrite the article several times, and also had it
vetted by other young scholars whom he knew. At length, he told me that it was
ready for publication.
At this point the publisher of Russian History, Charles Schlacks, rejected the
article. But Schlacks did not reject my article on academic grounds. Rather, he
objected to it on the grounds that “it made Stalin look good.” Of course, my
article did no such thing. The real reason he rejected it was that it failed to
conclude that Stalin had “framed” Tukhachevsky and the rest. My article
concluded that based on the evidence that was available in the early 1980s, it
was impossible to claim that Tukhachevsky was innocent. So I concluded that “we
just do not know.”
To his credit, the young scholar who had vetted my article insisted that it be
published. He even threatened to resign from the editorial collective if the
publisher did not publish it, because it had gone through the appropriate
scholarly review.
So my article was published – but in a strange way. The issue in which it
appeared contains an introduction with a commentary paragraph about each article
in that issue – except for my article. The introduction simply does not mention
my article at all. This introduction was written by the same young scholar!
Evidently, this omission reflected the fact that the publisher did not wish to
publish my article, and certainly did not want to draw attention to it.
Ironically, the fact that only my article has no commentary paragraph has the
effect of drawing attention to something important – the Anti-Stalin Paradigm.
This was my first introduction to what I now call the Anti-Stalin Paradigm, or
ASP.
For my second encounter with the ASP we must fast forward to the year 2005. In
that year I published a two-part article in the online peer-reviewed journal
Cultural Logic
titled “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform.” You can download it
here:
Part One;
Part Two.
When it was published a prominent American Trotskyite scholar and
therefore strongly biased against Stalin, resigned in protest from the editorial
board of Cultural Logic, telling the other editors that my article should never
have been published. The editors offered to publish a refutation or criticism by
him of my article. But he refused to write one, and simply repeated that my
article should never have been published.
My third encounter with the ASP occurred in 2018, when I published my book on
the Katyn massacre. In that book I show, from primary source evidence, that the
Soviet Union could not possibly have shot the Polish POWs in this massacre. I
also expose the dishonesty of the only two major academic studies of Katyn.
For some years I had been a member of the H-Poland mailing list, one of the
100-plus academic mailing lists run by the University of Michigan and known as
the H-Net lists. This list has a monthly post listing new books related to
Polish history. I submitted my book to be included in this list. As a result,
the moderator of the list expelled me from the list without explanation or
appeal. This was in violation of the H-Net guidelines. But the H-Net managers
refused to reinstate me on the list.
Khrushchev Lied
My first book, Khrushchev Lied (2012), gives the evidence for my discovery that in Nikita
Khrushchev’s infamous “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress of the CPSU on
February 25, 1956, every allegation of crime against Stalin (and against Lavrentii Beria) is demonstrably false. It had been published in Russian in
December, 2007. Although it sold 13,000 copies, it attracted very little
attention outside of Russia. The English language edition was published in
February, 2011.
At that time I did not fully understand the implications of the fact
that Khrushchev had told nothing but lies about Stalin in that world-shaking
“Secret Speech.” It took me some time to ask myself: “Why had Khrushchev told
nothing but lies in that speech? Why had he not sprinkled some true “crimes of
Stalin” in with the lies?
The answer is clear to me today. Khrushchev knew of no genuine “crimes of
Stalin.” Khrushchev’s researchers could not find any evidence of even a single
“crime of Stalin!” For if they had, Khrushchev would certainly have included
them in his “Secret Speech.”
In October, 1961, Khrushchev presided over the XXII Party Congress of the CPSU.
Khrushchev’s supporters attacked Stalin ferociously. Once again, those
accusations – the ones I could check up on thanks to documents from formerly
secret Soviet archives – are all false.
After the XXII Party Congress, Khrushchev and his men did two things. First,
they sponsored a flood of pseudo-historical articles and books about “Stalin’s
crimes.” I have checked many of these books and articles. NONE of them contain
ANY primary-source evidence.
But why didn’t these books contain any primary-source evidence? Here is the
reason why.
In 1962 the Khrushchev regime held a conference for Party historians –
historians of the CPSU. There Piotr Pospelov, one of Khrushchev’s cronies,
explicitly told them that access to documents in the Central Party Archive was
forbidden to them. (Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie, 298). Pospelov told the assembled
Party historians that instead of access to the Party archives, they would have
to refer to the Khrushchev-era textbook of Party history and to the proceedings
of the XXII Party Congress.
I gradually came to realize that the archives must not contain any evidence to
support the Khrushchev-era accusations against Stalin. In fact, they must
contain evidence to disprove Khrushchev’s charges of “crimes” against Stalin –
or why would Khrushchev forbid these trusted Party historians any access to
those archives?
The second thing Khrushchev did was to create a blue-ribbon commission, under
the chairmanship of Nikolai Shvernik, an old Bolshevik, to find evidence that
the Tukhachevsky Affair defendants, and the Moscow Trials defendants, were
innocent. This commission wrote two lengthy documents known today as the “Shvernik
Reports,” one in 1962-3, the other in 1964. Neither was published until 1994,
after the end of the USSR.
In these reports the researchers tried hard to find evidence that the military
commanders and Moscow Trials defendant had been “framed,” that they were
“innocent victims of Stalin.” But they were unable to do so. In fact, they found
evidence of the contrary!
In 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev, then the First Secretary of the CPSU, launched yet
another sustained attack on Stalin. Like Khrushchev’s, it was accompanied by a
flood of pseudo-historical articles and books, often published in hundreds of
thousands of copies. Gorbachev also drew upon materials from the Khrushchev era.
I have studied many of the works sponsored by Gorbachev. NONE of them contain
primary-source evidence to support charges that Stalin committed any “crimes.”
Here is one example:
In 1988 the Soviet Supreme Court ruled that Nikolai Bukharin and a few other
defendants in the Third Moscow Trial of March, 1938 were innocent. The document
containing the Supreme Court’s ruling still remains classified in Russia today,
in 2024.
In 2007 I discovered the full text of this Soviet Supreme Court ruling in the “Volkogonov
Archive” – documents from Soviet archives that had been exported from Russia in
the early 1990s by General Dmitri Volkogonov, a ferocious enemy of Stalin and of
communism and a very close associate of Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
In 2010 my Moscow-based colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov and I published, in
Russian, an article showing that the Soviet Supreme Court had DELIBERATELY LIED
in their decision. In it, the Supreme Court judges quote from a 1939 confession
by Mikhail Frinovsky. Frinovsky was Nikolai Yezhov’s vice-commissar, his
right-hand man, in the NKVD.
In 1988 Frinovsky’s confession was still secret. No one could see it. When it
was finally published in 2006, we could see that in reality Frinovsky had
testified that Bukharin was not innocent, but guilty!
I have now published 16 books in English exposing lies about Joseph Stalin. I
would like to tell you briefly about the last three.
* In
The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin’ (2022) I showed that those documents
written by Lenin between the end of December 1922 and March 1923 that are
critical of Stalin are forgeries.
* In
Stalin Exonerated. Fact-Checking the Death of Solomon Mikhoels (2023)
Vladimir Bobrov and I show that the story – accepted by all bourgeois scholars
and of course by Trotskyites – that Stalin ordered the murder of Yiddish theater
director Solomon Mikhoels in January 1948 is another case of forgery.
* In
Trotsky’s Comintern Conspiracy (2024) Vladimir and I show that the Comintern was riddled with Trotskyite conspirators, including Osip Pyatnitsky,
the former leader of the Comintern.
In these as in all my other books I rely on primary-source evidence.
What Is Evidence?
This raises the question: What Is Evidence?
Many people, including many who consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninists, do
not care about evidence. What they want is material that reinforces whatever
their preconceived ideas and biases already are. This is the logical fallacy
called “Confirmation Bias.” Persons who think like this are NOT interested in
the truth.
So, what is evidence? Primary-source evidence – usually, though not always,
documents – is the ONLY valid evidence.
What, then, is “primary source evidence?” It is evidence that is as close to the
matter that you are investigating as you can get. Such evidence will be biased –
since, like all evidence, it is created by human beings, and we all have biases.
But it will only reflect the biases of its own time and place, as close to the
matter under investigation as possible.
Once you begin insisting on primary-source evidence, it changes the way you
think about everything.
Primary source evidence does not have the biases of later periods. So, for
example, primary-source evidence produced in the 1930s is close to the Moscow
Trials.
But statements, confessions, etc., about the Moscow Trials produced during
Nikita Khrushchev’s time, 1956 to 1964, is NOT primary source evidence, because
those statements will inevitably reflect the biases of Khrushchev’s time. And,
in fact, we know that Khrushchev was soliciting false testimony against Stalin,
just as Gorbachev did again later.
Let me put this plainly, with an example.
For many years, the only primary source evidence we had about the Moscow Trials
of 1936-1938 was the trial transcripts themselves. All the evidence in these
transcripts points towards the guilt of the accused.
Many people at that time and since then denied that the accused were guilty. But
they had NO EVIDENCE that the Moscow Trials were frameups. The ONLY
primary-source evidence available was that of the trial transcripts.
Therefore, since the only primary source evidence pointed unequivocally towards
the guilt of the defendants, NO ONE – either at that time or since -- was or is
justified in drawing any other conclusion except this: ON THE EVIDENCE, the
Moscow Trials defendants were guilty.
Consider the accusation that Leon Trotsky collaborated with the Nazis.
* We have a great deal of evidence that Trotsky collaborated with the Nazis and
the Japanese, and engaged in other crimes.
* We have NO evidence that this evidence against Trotsky was "fabricated" or
faked.
Therefore: an OBJECTIVE assessment must be this:
"In light of the fact that ALL the evidence we now have points to Trotsky's
guilt, objectivity demands that we conclude that Trotsky was guilty.
If, in future, more primary-source evidence is discovered that goes against this
conclusion, we must be ready to revise our judgement or even to reverse it –
that is, assuming we are interested in the truth.”
Trotsky, of course, denied his guilt. But to a serious seeker for historical
truth, Trotsky’s denials are of no interest. Why? Because we expect that both
the guilty and the innocent will claim that they are innocent.
There has NEVER been ANY evidence that the Moscow Trials were frame-ups. On the
contrary: ALL the primary source evidence points towards their guilt. And now,
from the former Soviet archives, we have an enormous amount of MORE
primary-source evidence of the guilt of the Moscow Trials defendants.
So there can be no doubt of it: the Moscow Trials defendants were guilty of at
least those crimes to which they confessed themselves guilty. Leon Trotsky did
indeed collaborate with the Nazis (among other serious crimes).
Yet a great many people “believe” that the Moscow Trials defendants were
innocent, “framed” by Stalin and the prosecution. They believe this in defiance
of ALL the primary-source evidence.
They are accustomed to accepting the word of the academic experts in many
fields, so why not accept the word of academic experts on Soviet history? Also,
they believe this because they do not understand what evidence is, or how to use
it.
Confessions as Evidence
Many people, including historians who should know better, assume that
confessions are dubious or even invalid as evidence because they might have been
obtained by violence or threats against either the prisoner or his relatives.
Such people dismiss the evidence contained in confessions. Their reasoning goes
something like this:
“As there is often no ‘material’ evidence – for example, documents where the
conspirators outline their conspiracy, perhaps even in the handwriting of the
conspirators themselves, found in their homes, containing their signatures, etc.
– this means that there is no evidence against the accused except for
confessions by the accused or accusations in the confessions of other prisoners.
But confessions can be faked, and we know that many were faked by the NKVD.
Consequently, the accused must be considered innocent and the trial a farce.”
Indeed, anticommunists frequently use the word “farce” in order to dismiss, for
example, the three Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938. Those who use the word
“farce” are evidently unaware that they are thereby admitting, perhaps
unconsciously, that they have no evidence that the trials were fabrications.
They just assume that they were.
This reasoning is, of course, faulty. ALL evidence – documents, material objects
such as books and photographs, testimony of any kind – can be faked. It is at
least as difficult – and perhaps even more difficult -- to convince experienced
revolutionaries to falsely confess than to fabricate false documents, complete
with forged handwriting and signatures, or to create phony photographs. Any
modern state, in the 1930s as well as today, possesses the technical means to
create any kind of fake evidence that can be exposed as fake – if at all – only
by destructive means of examination, which are never permitted.
Confessions are no more or less subject to fakery than any other kind of
evidence. What the historian must do in the case of confessions, as with any
kind of evidence, is to study it carefully and compare it to the other evidence
that exists, in order to search for similarities and differences, contradictions
and consistencies.
In fact, the Soviet prosecution did provide “material” evidence at the Moscow
Trials. At the first Moscow Trial of August 1936 a passport (English transcript p. 89); at the
second Moscow Trial of January 1937, a notebook (English transcript p. 272). But anticommunists and
Trotskyites simply ignore these facts. They know that very few people will read
the more than 1500 pages of trial transcripts and discover that, yes, in fact
there was indeed “material evidence” against the defendants
So how can we tell if a defendant was falsely convicted? The answer is: we need
to locate and study the EVIDENCE that the Soviet prosecution had at the
defendant’s trial.
Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s men “rehabilitated” the Moscow Trials defendants
and many others who had been executed during the 1930s and 1940s. Vladimir
Bobrov and I have obtained and studied all the Khrushchev-era and Gorbachev-era
“rehabilitation” reports we can find. We have never found even one that provided
evidence. Yet they are taken as “proof of innocence” by anticommunists and by
Trotskyites.
When it comes to historical evidence there is no such thing as “credibility.”
All evidence must be subjected to doubt and carefully studied.
But there are other barriers to discovering the truth.
Objectivity
Historian Michael Schudson has called objectivity “an ideology of the distrust
of the self.” (Discovering
the News, 71) In order to put it into effect, to “operationalize”
objectivity, therefore, we must take special pains to make a sincere,
determined, diligent attempt to minimize our own pre-existing biases and
preconceived ideas. We must “look with extra skepticism” at any evidence, or any
account, that tends to support our own bias. At the same time, we must “give
especially generous, sympathetic consideration” to any evidence that tends to
contradict our own bias.
If we fail to do this, we will inevitably fall prey to “Confirmation bias” – the
tendency to regard with sympathy materials that support our own bias, and to
regard skeptically, or even reject, evidence that tends to disprove our bias. If
we do this – and this is by far the normal practice in the field of Soviet
history of the Stalin period – not only will we never discover the truth, being
blinded by our own bias. We will not even recognize the truth if, by chance, we
happen to run across it!
Bias can be overt or hidden (covert). The former is relatively easy to
recognize. Most historiography of the Stalin period (to say nothing of media
accounts) reeks of overt bias. When you are confronted by overt bias, you can
safely ignore what is being said (or what you are reading). There is NO CHANCE
that it will be a truthful account, because the author has not practiced
objectivity. This disqualifies all the most famous academic “experts” so-called
on Soviet history – all of them.
It also disqualifies anything published by, for example, the Hoover Institution,
as well as any book or article published by a “fellow” of the Hoover, like
Robert Conquest was or Stephen Kotkin is. Why? Because the Hoover is the largest
and best-funded anticommunist research institution in the world. It never, ever
publishes anything that could be construed as “pro-communist” or “pro-Stalin.”
Therefore, there is NO chance that it will publish the truth.
By the same token, you should also discount anything published by an avowed
Trotskyite. A Trotskyite historian has no incentive to tell the truth. He or she
is constrained to come to anti-Stalin conclusions, and support pro-Trotsky
accounts, and so is NOT interested in questioning his own bias – that is, in
being objective.
Insofar as a person is a Trotskyite, that person is NOT a Marxist. Why? Because
Marxists are materialists. Materialists judge the truth or falsehood of
fact-claims – statements – on the basis of evidence, not of faith or belief. But
Trotskyites have chosen to “believe” Trotsky and whatever he wrote, regardless
of the evidence. Therefore, a Trotskyite historian can never come to truthful
conclusions concerning the Stalin-era Soviet Union.
The Use of Soviet Evidence
You sometimes hear the claim that “Soviet evidence is tainted evidence.” But
this is false. Soviet primary sources are as useful as evidence as any other
sources. Moreover, anti-Stalin and pro-Trotsky writers use Soviet evidence all
the time! The late Vadim Z. Rogovin, the most famous Trotskyite historian of the
Stalin period, used Soviet sources hundreds of times in his numerous books. It
is fallacious to argue that Soviet evidence is invalid when it tends, for
example, to show that Trotsky was guilty of serious crimes and conspiracies, but
valid when it tends to show that Stalin was guilty of this or that crime.
It is also invalid to argue, as many Trotskyites and anticommunists do, that
“Trotsky must be innocent of collaborating with the Germans because no evidence
of this collaboration has turned up in the captured German archives.”
I have discussed this argument in detail in several of my books, and in at least
three of my Podcasts recorded here. See, for example, my book
New Evidence of
Trotsky’s Conspiracy (2020), pages 22-24, for an extended discussion of this
point.
The bottom line is this: It is invalid to declare that Trotsky was innocent of
collaboration with the Nazis because of evidence that is LACKING, while ignoring
that large amount of evidence of Trotsky’s guilt that EXISTS. A scientific
principle states that “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” We must
work with the evidence we have, and in the case of Trotsky’s collaboration, we
have a great deal of it.
Many dishonest writers rely on the fact that most of their readers do not know
what evidence is or how to understand it.
This is not surprising. Most people do not work with historical evidence and do
not do historical research. So, why would we expect that they should know what
evidence is, what it is not, and how to use it? Sure enough, they don’t know.
But many college-educated people, and especially people with advanced degrees
assume that, somehow, they DO know how to use historical evidence. Even though
they have never given this question any serious thought, and have never been
trained in using it! Such persons are especially easy to fool with fallacious
arguments.
Ignorance of Logical Fallacies
One aspect of the general ignorance about how to identify and use evidence –
remember, primary-source evidence is the ONLY valid evidence – is the general
ignorance of logical fallacies – that is, errors in “informal logic” (There are
good Wikipedia pages on these issues: “Informal Fallacy;” “List of Fallacies;”
“Informal Logic.”)
Here are some of the most common fallacies that I see all the time in persons
who write me, as well as in persons who wish to criticize my work, and also in
the work of anticommunist historians.
*
Confirmation bias
*
Ad hominem argument – e.g. “name-calling”
*
Appeal to authority
*
Begging the question – that is, assuming that which is to be proven.
*
Argument from incredulity – “I can’t believe that, therefore it isn’t true – or,
therefore it is less likely to be true.”
*
Argument from Repetition – you hear a fact-claim so often, from so many
different sources, that you feel there must be at least some truth to it.
*
Association fallacy – “Grover Furr is a Stalinist” [also an example of ad
hominem argument, ‘name-calling’], so there’s no need to read his research
because Stalinists are wrong.” “Guilt by Association” is another version of
this.
*Argument from Motive – “Furr wants to find Stalin blameless of any crime,
therefore you can dismiss whatever he writes.”
*
“Bandwagon” – “all the experts say it (Appeal to authority) so we can be pretty
sure it’s true.
*
Red Herring. In the First Moscow Trial, defendant Gol’tsman claimed that in
November 1932 he met Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov in a Copenhagen hotel and then
went to visit Trotsky. The “red herring” is the evidence that he could not have
met Sedov since Sedov was not there. But that doesn’t mean that he didn’t meet
Trotsky.
*
Shifting the Burden of Proof: It’s up to Furr (or whoever) to explain why
there’s no evidence of Trotsky’s conspiracy with the Germans and Japanese in the
German and Japanese archives, instead of dealing with the mounds of Soviet
evidence that Trotsky did collaborate.
*
Argument from Consequences – If Furr is correct that Trotsky collaborated with
the Germans and Japanese, then the whole Trotskyite movement for the past 90
years is a delusion. That is unacceptable because – to Trotskyites and to
anticommunists -- that would be so terrible that it just can’t be true.
Why Do Many People Think Stalin Was a Criminal?
The short answer is: for the same reason that many think communism is bad and
the communist movement was bad – anticommunist, anti-Stalin propaganda.
After the Russian Revolution the field of “Soviet Studies” was established to
provide ammunition in the form of academic-sounding falsehoods to political
anticommunism. It was never primarily about discovering the truth about the
USSR.
Leon Trotsky’s lies about Stalin – and they are lies, as I have shown in several
of my books – had a limited, though important, circulation on the non-communist
and anticommunist Left. The “Cold War” caused an increase in anticommunist
propaganda.
But Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress in
February, 1956, was a body blow to the world communist movement from which it
never recovered. In it Khrushchev described Stalin as a criminal much as Trotsky
had done. In fact, it appears that Khrushchev may have taken some his lies from
Trotsky’s writings, though of course without attributing them to Trotsky.
Under Khrushchev, the XXII Party Congress in October, 1961, witnessed an orgy of
anti-Stalin lies and accusations. Afterwards, Khrushchev sponsored a flood of
articles and books accusing Stalin of all manner of heinous crimes. NONE of
these works contained ANY EVIDENCE – for, remember, only primary sources are
valid evidence.
I have already mentioned the fact that in 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev launched an
attack on Stalin and the Stalin era even larger and more vicious than that of
Khrushchev, some of whose lies Gorbachev recycled. In the post-Soviet period,
scholars of Soviet history continue to repeat the lies of the Khrushchev and
Gorbachev periods – NONE of which are supported by primary-source evidence – and
to invent even more “crimes,” equally without evidence to support these
accusations.
“The Big Lie”
This is the background for what is called, after Adolf Hitler, “The Big Lie.”
Here are two quotations from Hitler’s autobiography My Struggle (“Mein Kampf”):
“The aim of propaganda is not to try to pass judgment on conflicting rights,
giving each its due, but exclusively to emphasize the right which we are
asserting.
Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is
favourable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of
justice … it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favourable to
its own side. (I, Ch. VI)
.. All this was inspired by the principle -- which is quite true in itself --
that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility. … This is
because they themselves [ the broad masses ] often tell small lies in little
matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never
come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths. Therefore, they would not
believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has
been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to
all who conspire together in the art of lying.”
Hitler was writing about “the broad masses” and about mass propaganda. But the
same principle works with more educated persons, as long as the “big lies” are
wrapped in academic packaging.
Many, if not most, educated persons are simply unwilling to believe that so many
professional, famous, respected academic historians could possibly be promoting
falsehoods – claims of crimes by Stalin or the Soviet Union of the Stalin period
which cannot be supported by evidence. They are much more likely to think that
the person – myself, for example – who tells them this, is lying.
Such a belief is comforting, because it suggests that he – Furr – can be
ignored. Whereas if the former were taken seriously, the consequences for our
whole way of understanding Soviet history during Stalin’s time, and in fact
world history, would be shaken or even dismantled. This is the fallacy called
“argument from consequences” – the consequences of learning, and accepting, that
Soviet history has been so completely falsified appear to be so serious, that it
is far easier – because non-threatening -- to dismiss anyone who shows this to
be true.
That, then, is “The Big Lie” and how it works. And it works very well.
Propaganda works!
Hitler was commenting on the effectiveness of Allied propaganda, which he
recognized had used the “Big Lie” technique well while Imperial Germany should
have used it far more than Hitler thought it did. Western journalists too
commented on the extent of lying by the Allied mass media during the war.
The Importance of These Facts
The question of Stalin is the most important question facing workers, students,
and intellectuals worldwide who are striving to get rid of capitalism.
The “Big Lie” is that Joseph Stalin was a mass murderer who framed on false
charges and killed a great many loyal communists and millions of Soviet
citizens.
This “Big Lie” is not only “taken for granted” as true. It is “taboo” to
question it, first in the academic field of Soviet history itself, and then in
the semi-popular, popular, and mass media.
The “experts” all claim that Stalin was a mass murderer. The media cannot and do
not do independent research on their own – they are not equipped to do it. So
they repeat what the experts say.
The Trotskyite cult around the world echoes these lies. In this way they are
smuggled directly into the “left” movements, socialist and communist, worldwide.
THIS is the ASP.
Anti-Stalinism is the main form that anticommunism takes in the world today.
Anti-Stalinism is employed to discredit anyone who struggles for a better world.
As an example of this I cite a debate that I participated in in October, 2012,
against a “conservative” and a “libertarian.” The “libertarian” was a Soviet
émigré who had left the USSR in the late 1980s and was teaching at Hillsdale
College, a private, right-wing college in the Midwest.
In my presentation, I told the student audience that they should have free
higher education. The “libertarian” replied that ANY involvement of the
government in your lives puts you on the slippery slope to communism, and
“Stalin killed 40 million people.”
This is the kind of stuff we are all facing. Republicans call mild
social-democrats and even mainstream members of the Democratic Party
“communists.” Forget about social reforms of any sort – these billionaires and
their hired flunkies want to make us completely dependent on private employers.
What a bonanza for the capitalists!
It is important that WE – YOU – face the facts. ALL OF US are under attack by
the lies against Stalin.
What Should We – Must We – Do About This?
It’s up to us to do whatever we can to counter, and then to roll back, this
avalanche of lies about Stalin, the USSR, and the communist movement during his
time.
Here is one outline of a program of action that every one of us here can
participate in.
1. Study.
We must educate ourselves. Study to understand what primary source evidence is.
Study in order to recognize logical fallacies. Study what we know about the
Stalin period now.
My books are a good place to do this. That’s why I am here, speaking to you
today. Time prevents me from even a brief discussion of all my books and
articles in which I, with my colleagues, examine and disprove the allegations of
“crimes” against Joseph Stalin. You may find a list of my books and links to my
articles on my Home Page.
2. Spread the word.
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Social media
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Post on mailing lists
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Talk to your political comrades and colleagues
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Participate in study groups, debates, discussions.
3. Challenge anti-Stalin, anticommunist lies wherever you encounter them.
Write a Letter to the Editor every time you see a lie about Stalin in some
article.
Write for newspapers, journals, and web pages. Write reviews – especially
reviews of my books.
Remember: the world’s greatest expert on Stalin and the USSR during his time,
Stephen Kotkin of Princeton University and the Hoover Institution, wrote a book
in which every single allegation of crime or even minor misdeed by Stalin is
provably, demonstrably false. Every single one! I demonstrate this thoroughly in
my book Stalin Waiting for … the Truth.
If Kotkin could not find even a single, real, provable “crime of Stalin” it has
to be because like Khrushchev, like Gorbachev, he couldn’t find evidence of even
one of them. So, in order not to violate the ASP, he had to falsify and lie.
4. Never be afraid to say: “I don’t know.”
Nobody can know everything. And it’s important to be honest, first of all with
yourself, and with each other.
Whenever you hear some allegation of a “crime of Stalin,” you should check my
books and articles to learn whether that allegation has been disproven. If it
has not, then say this:
“I don’t know! But there is no reason to ‘believe’ anticommunists or
Trotskyites, because they have no incentive to tell the truth and every reason
to ignore the truth and to lie.”
And you should recommend my research, and study it yourself.
The Most Important Reason
Yes, it’s vitally important to establish the truth about Stalin and the first
workers’ state, the Soviet Union, in order to refute the anticommunist lie that
“communism leads to massive crimes and mass murder.”
But there is another reason. We need to understand why the Soviet Union did not
build socialism, and then go on to develop in a more and more egalitarian,
democratic manner towards communism. This was certainly the goal of Lenin and
Stalin, of millions of working people in the Soviet Union, and of hundreds of
millions of working people around the world who looked to the Soviet Union with
hope.
I have already mentioned the fact that in 2005 I published a two-part article
titled “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform.”
Now we have, from the former Soviet archives, the text of a draft of the
proposed Party program of 1947, which calls for much more democratic control by
the population and much less reliance on compulsion of all kinds. This
fascinating document has only been available for a few years, and has not been
discussed in the field of Soviet studies. I hope to talk about it at a future
time.
We can never learn the lessons that the history of this, the first workers’
state, has to teach us, if we are blinded by lies. The only way we can learn
what the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin did that was right, correct, and
what they did that turned out to be wrong, incorrect, leading not towards
communism but back towards capitalism – the only way we can hope to learn these
lessons is if we are in possession of the TRUTH about Soviet history.
The capitalists, of course, have already drawn THEIR lessons from their false
history of the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The lesson they want us to believe is
that the overthrow of capitalism through communist revolution will lead to
dictatorship, mass murder, and a worse world even than the capitalist world.
This is all false. So, first, we must prove to ourselves and to each other that
it is false. Then, we must convince others that it is false.
But we can’t stop there. We have to go on, to study both what it is that the
Bolsheviks did that we should imitate, and what errors the Bolsheviks committed
that led them off the road to communism, and that the communist movements of the
future must learn from and avoid.
Therefore it is vital that we study the Soviet experience! If we fail to do
this, at best we run the danger of making the same errors that the Soviets did,
and ending up back at capitalism.
In his book The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Karl Marx wrote:
"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages
appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the
second time as farce."
The international communist movement of the 20th century during the time of
Lenin and Stalin won many world-shaking triumphs. The tragedy of the
international communist movement of the 20th century was that, ultimately, it
failed.
Unless we figure out where they went wrong — ALL of these figures — then we are
doomed to be the “farce. ” And that would be a crime — OUR crime.
So we have to look with a critical eye at ALL of our legacy.
Karl Marx’s favorite saying was:
“De omnibus dubitandum” — Question everything.
Marx would be the last person in the world to exclude himself from this
questioning.
Thank you!