thegreanvillepostbiasrating--2020-05-19--The Stalin controversy smoulders on

The Stalin controversy smoulders on

Billy Bob , a member of our Facebook group , recently filed an important comment on our post on debunking anti-Stalin propaganda .
( Ludo Martens : Another view of Stalin ) .
What happened next was most interesting .
We 'll let him provide the introduction to this story and its aftermath in his own words .
Following Billy Bob 's advice , here 's the article he suggested .
But before we look at it , let 's examine the `` prequel '' , the opinion piece by one Garry Maclachlan who , apparently quite influenced by Trotskyist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I continue to maintain that these Anti-Stalin views result from an acceptance of false narratives and anti-communist ruling class propaganda .
I just finished reading a superb article on this very subject and recommend it to anyone that may be interested in the topic .
I highly encourage folks read the article in its entirety . ''
What interested me the most however was the response of self identified leftists whose view of Stalin precisely mirrored the views of the rabid fascists .
The `` leftists '' were more polite of course but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and defame leftist thought by championing Stalin .
They viewed my aggrandizement of Stalin to be damaging to their leftist brand and perceived my Stalin apologism as misguided and wrongheaded .
Additionally , I started getting random messages and things posted on my wall by anti-communist fascists .
These people felt liberated by my Stalin pic to forego all standards of politeness and decency and took it as a license to utter the most vile and threatening insults .
o , an interesting thing happened when I changed my avatar to a picture @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hundreds , I started getting friend requests from folks in places like India , Pakistan , and Morocco .
Everyday after work I was accepting scores of friend requests thinking once I got to 5K , I would n't have to deal with it anymore .
I must have added at least a thousand friends this way over the past couple of weeks .
In conclusion , Stalinism is counterrevolutionary and has dampened the flame of possible revolutions in many countries .
To promote Stalin is to do the fight for a better @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a tyrant who epitomises the defeat of the Russian Revolution , was a brutal authoritarian and gives socialism a bad name .
Therefore I appeal to the well meaning poster sharing Stalinists to look for a new idol and at least try not to get one of their lackeys to ram an ice pick in my head if they get into power .
The Ruling Class of today use Stalin and his dictatorship to turn people away from socialism .
They explain that life under Stalin is what life under socialism would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over the ‘ death of millions ’ .
Their argument that Stalinism was socialist or communist is a farce but it gives us socialists a difficult time trying to convince people that a new and better world is possible .
What type of new world would the Stalin worshippers like to see ?
Marx called for the ‘ Dictatorship of the Proletariat ’ , meaning a new society where the workers who create the wealth have complete control of the means of production .
They democratically decide in their communities and workplaces the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ For the workers , by the workers .
It could be described that this type of society is controlled from the bottom up which is entirely different to Stalin ’ s top down dictatorship where he himself made the decisions and he could not be removed from his position if the ordinary people didn ’ t like it .
This wave of young social media Stalinists proudly remind us how Stalin effectively defeated the Nazis but neglect the fact that it could be argued that Stalin allowed the rise of fascism in Germany @ @ @ @ @ @ @ German Communist Party ( who were affiliated to Stalin and followed Russian orders ) did not build a rank and file , working class , antifascist movement against the rise of Hitler .
Stalinist organisations also crumbled antifascist movements in Spain against Franco and destroyed the general strike .
Many of the same socialists who idolise Stalin are also great admirers of Vladimir Lenin yet although Stalin was a close comrade of Lenin in the early 1900 ’ s , when Lenin was nearing the end of his life after a series of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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.
” I also wonder if they overlook the many Revolutionaries who Stalin had murdered , from his friend Lev Kamenev to more famously Leon Trotsky .
The Russian Revolution had crumbled due to a massive decline in the working classes through famine and war after Stalin rose to power and workers were exploited , workplaces controlled by managers and military officials and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ emerged under Stalin ’ s regime .
Workers would lose their jobs if they missed a day for whatever reason and would get the death penalty for striking .
Leon Trotsky called it a ‘ deformed worker ’ s state ’ , other international socialists call it ‘ state capitalism ’ , believing that if Trotsky were alive today would reflect and call it that himself .
Whatever the name , the U.S.S.R was not a union , it was not socialist and there were no soviets .
I felt an urge to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good intentioned socialists on social media sharing posters with quotes from the late leader of the Soviet Union , Joseph Djugashvili ( actually , Ioseb Besarionis dzе Djugashvili ) – Joseph Stalin .
But do they truly know what Stalin and Stalinism represents ?
An article by Garry Maclachlan , “ The Problem with Stalin and Stalinism “ appeared on the Solidarity Website 27 Feb 2019 .
Some discussion ensued on Facebook , but I thought it would be best to write a response here .
Why should anyone be concerned now , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seventy years ago ?
What makes it worth discussing him in a small Scottish socialist party ?
Socialist parties exist to propagate the ideas of socialism and to attempt to win political power .
The basis of their appeal has to be the political and economic programme that they advance in the here and now .
They do not impose on their members a single view of history .
We do not insist that party members have a consistent view on the causes of the First World War , Churchill ’ s policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ correctness of Gaitskill ’ s policy towards the Common Market .
If we can allow a diversity of views on history that has affected our own country , there is certainly no need for uniformity on Soviet or Turkish history .
The strengths and weaknesses of Ataturk or Stalin as leaders of their countries in the 20th century does not affect Scotland in the 21st .
Garry says he is perturbed by seeing well-intentioned socialists sharing quotations by the late Soviet leader on Facebook .
But why should this be worrying ?
Presumably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ things that most socialists can readily agree with .
It does not seem to be what the quotes say that perturbs him .
Instead , he seems to think it risky that , well after the cold war , young people forming a favourable view of the USSR .
This is because the individual person , Stalin , came to represent much more than one person .
In the terminology of Soviet propaganda , Stalin became a ‘ banner ’ ( Figure 1 ) .
His name and face became a symbol for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Imperialism , and still , within the countries of the former USSR is a symbol of the power of the working classes over the new capitalist classes ( Figure 2 ) .
For the capitalist classes in the West Stalin has become the symbol both of the peril that was defeated , and of the communist spectre that they fear may haunt them in the future .
Stalinism is the label that the press here give to the economic system the Communists established : publicly owned industry , coordination by national plans , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ plan , prohibition of the private employment of wage labour .
When the Labour Party takes timid steps back towards Clause 4 socialism , it is denounced by the liberal press as becoming ‘ stalinist ’ .
But that only works as a denunciation if ‘ stalinism ’ is seen as a very bad thing indeed .
So we have a paradox .
In Russia , the opinion of Stalin is overwhelmingly favourable .
A recent Levada poll shows that 57 % have a favourable opinion of Stalin , 18 % having a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t know or no opinion ) .
This from a population made up of people either old enough to directly remember the USSR or who hear about it from their own family .
Garry Maclachlan worries that the ruling class uses Stalin to discredit socialism .
That is certainly true in Britain , but they can only do that as the end result of a propaganda campaign running over decades .
In the West , it is enough to label a politician like Corbyn as being sympathetic to ‘ stalinism ’ to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more realistic view of Stalin , Russians or us ?
Are the Russians right to believe their own memories rather than our press ?
Turn it around .
Who will have a more realistic view of Thatcher , people in Scotland who experienced her , or Americans who only got favorable press accounts of her ?
The negative image Stalin now has in the West had to be constructed .
Back in the 1940s the popular view , including the press view , was favorable ( Figure 3 ) .
Communist ideas enjoyed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since .
CP membership peaked at 56,000 in the late 40s .
They won two MPs and over 100,000 votes in the 1945 General Election , with its candidates getting an average vote of 14.6 % .
The Party also took over half a million votes in the following year ’ s local council elections winning 215 council seats .
At this point , during Stalin ’ s lifetime , association with him did not harm socialists .
Stalin was the veritable spectre of communism and the fear this spectre instilled in our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ embark on the nearest thing to a transition to socialism that Britain has ever seen .
In due course , the powers of Old Europe entered into their holy alliance , NATO , to exorcise this spectre .
Along with military preparation went ideological warfare .
Contemporary readers will be familiar with the Integrity Initiative , which exists to covertly spread anti Russian stories through the press and internet .
We know that they directly pay stipends to reporters , including some in Scotland to ensure that they place such stories .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the efforts that the Secret Intelligence Service ( SIS ) and the CIA ran from the 50s to the 70s to disseminate stories hostile to the USSR .
This effort went to the extent of funding historians and whole University schools ( Glasgow School of Soviet Studies comes to mind ) in order to develop and spread this propaganda .
As a result , several generations grew up in the Anglo Saxon countries with anti-communism and anti-stalinism as part of their education .
For the working class who did not go to university @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tabloid stories .
For those who , with the expansion of university education , got a higher education there were the more sophisticated stories developed by paid historians like Conquest or the openly fictional works of the fascist Solzhenitsyn .
Tories were not the targets of this propaganda .
The target was the labour movement and the left .
The aim was to cultivate a ‘ responsible ’ left who would repudiate the USSR and in doing so would reject the ideas of a nationalised planned economy .
The state would then pitch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who were seen as potentially sympathetic to the communism .
From the MI6 standpoint these were a broad group which , in the 1970s ran from Harold Wilson to Arthur Scargill .
The SIS propaganda really paid dividends when Kinnock chucked nationalisation of industry and adopted the market socialist ideas developed by Prof Nove of Glasgow ( a man with a SIS background ) .
Shortly after , when Blair completely removed clause IV from the Labour constitution the work was done , and the schools of ( anti- ) Soviet Studies could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later , the capitalist press is worried that the Spectre is re-awakening .
A new generation , not exposed to the intensive propaganda of the past is expressing support for communism .
The Nov 4 2017 Washington Times ran the headline : This is understandably worrying for the capitalist press in the USA .
The last thing they want is to return to the situation of the 1940s when Stalin was widely seen as a hero .
But it is strange that a member of a small Scottish socialist party should have the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imagery on the internet goes hand in hand with increases in class polarisation and increasing support for socialism .
Far from being inversely related as Garry seems to fear , when Soviet imagery captures the imagination of youth , support for socialism rises .
We should welcome it with open arms .
The last thing we should be doing is reviving the old SIS lies about communism killing millions .
Thanks to the internet , Millennials have access to counter-narratives that were out of reach to previous generations .
Just two links for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Joseph Stalin ’ s Crime That Never Took Place and from CounterPunch The Ukrainian Famine : Only Evidence Can Disclose the Truth The Western press spreads absurd stories about 66 million deaths under Stalin .
Well in one sense , all social systems have a 100 % mortality rate .
None offer immortality .
So in a big country , there will be millions of deaths per decade .
This real issue is how many premature deaths there are and whether life expectancy is going up or down .
You can not hide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up as declining population and declining life expectancy .
When you look at the actual population figures they show the opposite of what Garry claims .
It was the deconstruction of the ‘ stalinist ’ system in the 1990s that brought about a catastrophic rise in the death rate .
Figure 4 shows the trend of the Soviet population , steadily rising , except when interrupted by the German invasion .
It is worth noting that anti-soviet sources often include deaths due to the German invasion as ‘ victims of communism ’ .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fall of communism with what happened after , the difference is dramatic ( Figure 5 ) .
As soon as capitalism is restored deaths of poverty and despair shoot up .
For Russia this amounts to some 12 million excess deaths .
They are clearly visible in the graph .
For a year by year breakdown , see Table 2 .
At a time when capitalism in the UK and in the USA is bringing about terrible rises in death rates and declining life expectancy , what is point of repeating discredited @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the USSR ?
We should unhesitatingly state that it is socialism that brings longer life expectancy and capitalism that brings poverty despair and early death ( Figure 6 ) .

Billy Bob, a member of our Facebook group, recently filed an important comment on our post on debunking anti-Stalin propaganda. ( Ludo Martens: Another view of Stalin ). What happened next was most interesting. We'll let him provide the introduction to this story and its aftermath in his own words.
Following Billy Bob's advice, here's the article he suggested. But before we look at it, let's examine the "prequel", the opinion piece by one Garry Maclachlan who, apparently quite influenced by Trotskyist arguments, started the whole exchange.
I continue to maintain that these Anti-Stalin views result from an acceptance of false narratives and anti-communist ruling class propaganda. I just finished reading a superb article on this very subject and recommend it to anyone that may be interested in the topic. I highly encourage folks read the article in its entirety."
What interested me the most however was the response of self identified leftists whose view of Stalin precisely mirrored the views of the rabid fascists. The "leftists" were more polite of course but they were appalled that I would demean and defame leftist thought by championing Stalin. They viewed my aggrandizement of Stalin to be damaging to their leftist brand and perceived my Stalin apologism as misguided and wrongheaded.
Additionally, I started getting random messages and things posted on my wall by anti-communist fascists. These people felt liberated by my Stalin pic to forego all standards of politeness and decency and took it as a license to utter the most vile and threatening insults.
o, an interesting thing happened when I changed my avatar to a picture of Stalin. Suddenly, by the hundreds, I started getting friend requests from folks in places like India, Pakistan, and Morocco. Everyday after work I was accepting scores of friend requests thinking once I got to 5K, I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore. I must have added at least a thousand friends this way over the past couple of weeks.
In conclusion, Stalinism is counterrevolutionary and has dampened the flame of possible revolutions in many countries. To promote Stalin is to do the fight for a better society a great injustice. Stalin was a tyrant who epitomises the defeat of the Russian Revolution, was a brutal authoritarian and gives socialism a bad name. Therefore I appeal to the well meaning poster sharing Stalinists to look for a new idol and at least try not to get one of their lackeys to ram an ice pick in my head if they get into power.
The Ruling Class of today use Stalin and his dictatorship to turn people away from socialism. They explain that life under Stalin is what life under socialism would be like. They highlight that he presided over the ‘death of millions’. Their argument that Stalinism was socialist or communist is a farce but it gives us socialists a difficult time trying to convince people that a new and better world is possible.
What type of new world would the Stalin worshippers like to see? Marx called for the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, meaning a new society where the workers who create the wealth have complete control of the means of production. They democratically decide in their communities and workplaces the best way forward for the society. For the workers, by the workers. It could be described that this type of society is controlled from the bottom up which is entirely different to Stalin’s top down dictatorship where he himself made the decisions and he could not be removed from his position if the ordinary people didn’t like it.
This wave of young social media Stalinists proudly remind us how Stalin effectively defeated the Nazis but neglect the fact that it could be argued that Stalin allowed the rise of fascism in Germany in the first place due to the German Communist Party (who were affiliated to Stalin and followed Russian orders) did not build a rank and file, working class, antifascist movement against the rise of Hitler. Stalinist organisations also crumbled antifascist movements in Spain against Franco and destroyed the general strike.
Many of the same socialists who idolise Stalin are also great admirers of Vladimir Lenin yet although Stalin was a close comrade of Lenin in the early 1900’s, when Lenin was nearing the end of his life after a series of strokes he warned, “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.” I also wonder if they overlook the many Revolutionaries who Stalin had murdered, from his friend Lev Kamenev to more famously Leon Trotsky.
The Russian Revolution had crumbled due to a massive decline in the working classes through famine and war after Stalin rose to power and workers were exploited, workplaces controlled by managers and military officials and a new Ruling Class of beaurocrats had emerged under Stalin’s regime. Workers would lose their jobs if they missed a day for whatever reason and would get the death penalty for striking. Leon Trotsky called it a ‘deformed worker’s state’, other international socialists call it ‘state capitalism’, believing that if Trotsky were alive today would reflect and call it that himself. Whatever the name, the U.S.S.R was not a union, it was not socialist and there were no soviets.
I felt an urge to write this short article because I see good intentioned socialists on social media sharing posters with quotes from the late leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Djugashvili (actually, Ioseb Besarionis dzе Djugashvili) – Joseph Stalin. But do they truly know what Stalin and Stalinism represents?
Before we examine
An article by Garry Maclachlan, “The Problem with Stalin and Stalinism“ appeared on the Solidarity Website 27 Feb 2019. Some discussion ensued on Facebook, but I thought it would be best to write a response here.
Why should anyone be concerned now, about a Soviet politician who died almost seventy years ago?
What makes it worth discussing him in a small Scottish socialist party?
Socialist parties exist to propagate the ideas of socialism and to attempt to win political power. The basis of their appeal has to be the political and economic programme that they advance in the here and now. They do not impose on their members a single view of history. We do not insist that party members have a consistent view on the causes of the First World War, Churchill’s policy on the Second Front, or the correctness of Gaitskill’s policy towards the Common Market. If we can allow a diversity of views on history that has affected our own country, there is certainly no need for uniformity on Soviet or Turkish history. The strengths and weaknesses of Ataturk or Stalin as leaders of their countries in the 20th century does not affect Scotland in the 21st.
Garry says he is perturbed by seeing well-intentioned socialists sharing quotations by the late Soviet leader on Facebook. But why should this be worrying?
Presumably, the quotes themselves seem to say things that most socialists can readily agree with. It does not seem to be what the quotes say that perturbs him. Instead, he seems to think it risky that, well after the cold war, young people forming a favourable view of the USSR.
This is because the individual person, Stalin, came to represent much more than one person. In the terminology of Soviet propaganda, Stalin became a ‘banner’ (Figure 1). His name and face became a symbol for the victory of Soviet Power over German Imperialism, and still, within the countries of the former USSR is a symbol of the power of the working classes over the new capitalist classes (Figure 2).
For the capitalist classes in the West Stalin has become the symbol both of the peril that was defeated, and of the communist spectre that they fear may haunt them in the future. Stalinism is the label that the press here give to the economic system the Communists established: publicly owned industry, coordination by national plans, the subordination of the market to the plan, prohibition of the private employment of wage labour.
When the Labour Party takes timid steps back towards Clause 4 socialism, it is denounced by the liberal press as becoming ‘stalinist’. But that only works as a denunciation if ‘stalinism’ is seen as a very bad thing indeed.
So we have a paradox. In Russia, the opinion of Stalin is overwhelmingly favourable. A recent Levada poll shows that 57% have a favourable opinion of Stalin, 18% having a negative view (with the rest don’t know or no opinion). This from a population made up of people either old enough to directly remember the USSR or who hear about it from their own family.
Garry Maclachlan worries that the ruling class uses Stalin to discredit socialism. That is certainly true in Britain, but they can only do that as the end result of a propaganda campaign running over decades. In the West, it is enough to label a politician like Corbyn as being sympathetic to ‘stalinism’ to discredit him.
But who has the more realistic view of Stalin, Russians or us?
Are the Russians right to believe their own memories rather than our press?
Turn it around. Who will have a more realistic view of Thatcher, people in Scotland who experienced her, or Americans who only got favorable press accounts of her?
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre
The negative image Stalin now has in the West had to be constructed. Back in the 1940s the popular view, including the press view, was favorable (Figure 3). Communist ideas enjoyed broader supporter support than at any time since. CP membership peaked at 56,000 in the late 40s. They won two MPs and over 100,000 votes in the 1945 General Election, with its candidates getting an average vote of 14.6%. The Party also took over half a million votes in the following year’s local council elections winning 215 council seats. At this point, during Stalin’s lifetime, association with him did not harm socialists. Stalin was the veritable spectre of communism and the fear this spectre instilled in our ruling classes allowed Attlee and Cripps to embark on the nearest thing to a transition to socialism that Britain has ever seen.
In due course, the powers of Old Europe entered into their holy alliance, NATO, to exorcise this spectre. Along with military preparation went ideological warfare. Contemporary readers will be familiar with the Integrity Initiative, which exists to covertly spread anti Russian stories through the press and internet. We know that they directly pay stipends to reporters, including some in Scotland to ensure that they place such stories.
But this is but a pale shadow of the efforts that the Secret Intelligence Service(SIS) and the CIA ran from the 50s to the 70s to disseminate stories hostile to the USSR. This effort went to the extent of funding historians and whole University schools (Glasgow School of Soviet Studies comes to mind) in order to develop and spread this propaganda. As a result, several generations grew up in the Anglo Saxon countries with anti-communism and anti-stalinism as part of their education. For the working class who did not go to university this came in the form of crude tabloid stories. For those who, with the expansion of university education, got a higher education there were the more sophisticated stories developed by paid historians like Conquest or the openly fictional works of the fascist Solzhenitsyn.
Tories were not the targets of this propaganda. The target was the labour movement and the left. The aim was to cultivate a ‘responsible’ left who would repudiate the USSR and in doing so would reject the ideas of a nationalised planned economy. The state would then pitch these against those in the labour movement who were seen as potentially sympathetic to the communism. From the MI6 standpoint these were a broad group which, in the 1970s ran from Harold Wilson to Arthur Scargill.
The SIS propaganda really paid dividends when Kinnock chucked nationalisation of industry and adopted the market socialist ideas developed by Prof Nove of Glasgow( a man with a SIS background). Shortly after, when Blair completely removed clause IV from the Labour constitution the work was done, and the schools of (anti-)Soviet Studies could be disbanded.
Now, 20 years later, the capitalist press is worried that the Spectre is re-awakening. A new generation, not exposed to the intensive propaganda of the past is expressing support for communism. The Nov 4 2017 Washington Times ran the headline:
Another poll reported
“One in five (23%) of Americans age 21-29 consider Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin a ‘hero’; 26% for Vladimir Lenin; 23% for Kim Jong Un,”
This is understandably worrying for the capitalist press in the USA. The last thing they want is to return to the situation of the 1940s when Stalin was widely seen as a hero. But it is strange that a member of a small Scottish socialist party should have the same worries.
A revival of Soviet imagery on the internet goes hand in hand with increases in class polarisation and increasing support for socialism. Far from being inversely related as Garry seems to fear, when Soviet imagery captures the imagination of youth, support for socialism rises. We should welcome it with open arms.
The last thing we should be doing is reviving the old SIS lies about communism killing millions. Thanks to the internet, Millennials have access to counter-narratives that were out of reach to previous generations. Just two links for now:
From Sputnik Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took Place and from CounterPunch The Ukrainian Famine: Only Evidence Can Disclose the Truth
The Western press spreads absurd stories about 66 million deaths under Stalin. Well in one sense, all social systems have a 100% mortality rate. None offer immortality. So in a big country, there will be millions of deaths per decade. This real issue is how many premature deaths there are and whether life expectancy is going up or down.
You can not hide millions of premature deaths. They show up as declining population and declining life expectancy.
When you look at the actual population figures they show the opposite of what Garry claims. It was the deconstruction of the ‘stalinist’ system in the 1990s that brought about a catastrophic rise in the death rate. Figure 4 shows the trend of the Soviet population, steadily rising, except when interrupted by the German invasion. It is worth noting that anti-soviet sources often include deaths due to the German invasion as ‘victims of communism’.
If we contrast that trend up to the fall of communism with what happened after, the difference is dramatic (Figure 5). As soon as capitalism is restored deaths of poverty and despair shoot up. For Russia this amounts to some 12 million excess deaths. They are clearly visible in the graph. For a year by year breakdown, see Table 2.
At a time when capitalism in the UK and in the USA is bringing about terrible rises in death rates and declining life expectancy, what is point of repeating discredited cold war propaganda about life expectancy in the USSR? We should unhesitatingly state that it is socialism that brings longer life expectancy and capitalism that brings poverty despair and early death (Figure 6).


thegreanvillepostbiasrating--2020-05-19--Immigrants as a weapon: A portrait of a Soviet CIA propagandist as a Nazi collaborator young man

Read about the idea behind project and subscribe .
The date is April 28 , 1953 .
The location : Lampertheim , Germany — a small town south of Frankfurt .
An American technician sitting in heavily guarded military radio facility turns on one of the most powerful radio transmitters in the world .
He checks the dials , makes a few final calibrations , and then hits play on a big magnetic tape that had just been delivered to him by train and motorcycle courier from Munich .
First there ’ s nothing but static .
Then a female @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russian : “ This is Radio Liberation speaking .
We are transmitting a statement made by a war veteran who escaped to the west in 1946.
” More static .
Then a man ’ s voice comes on — slow and speaking in an affected provincial Russian accent .
In May 1945 , Leonid was in Prague when the Red Army took the city .
A lot of his comrades from the Russian Liberation Army were captured and executed as traitors .
But many managed to get away and walked west as fast @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Hello to my fellow soldiers and officers and to those who fought in the Great Patriotic War !
” he says .
“ I can not tell you my name because I left my sisters and my mother behind .
And you know yourself how our Kremlin bosses deal with those who won ’ t submit to their will !
The man then proceeds to tell his story .
He says he had fought the Nazis in World War II , had his arm blown off in battle , and returned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impoverished cripple who could not survive on his Soviet war veteran pension .
“ You know yourself how badly invalids have it here in our socialist fatherland .
There ’ s nothing to eat and no prosthetics .
The pension ’ s not even enough to buy tobacco on .
So I adapted.
” He says he started doing a bit of odd commerce , like buying sunflower seeds on the cheap in Ukraine and taking the train to a far off city in Russia to sell them on the street for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
And day , he got caught .
“ In Odessa , police raided us invalids like a pack of dogs .
We grabbed our crutches and fought back.
” Fearful of being sent to a labor camps , he says he decided to flee west .
“ It was hard , but I got here .
Now I live in Canada .
I work in a lumber plant and the doctors here gave me amazing prosthetic .
It ’ s like they gave me a new arm !
If only our invalids @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finishes his story by congratulating listeners on the recent death of Comrade Stalin but says that Stalin ’ s death is not nearly enough .
All the Bolsheviks must go : “ While in Stalin ’ s hooligans are in the Kremlin , there will no life for anyone !
” It was a good story — а story of socialist betrayal , capitalist redemption , and hope for the future of the Soviet people .
But the whole thing was a lie .
The man on the tape wasn ’ t an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in Canada .
And he sure didn ’ t work at a lumber mill .
He was a Soviet refugee and a Nazi collaborator — a musician and comedian known for his irresistible charisma and his hard partying and womanizing .
He lived in Munich and went by the name of Leonid Pylaev .
Oh , and what else ?
That ’ s right .
He worked for the CIA .
Leonid ’ s life story is murky , but enough is known to gather a rough picture .
He was born @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smallish city north of Moscow — either in Dmitrov , Kostroma , or Pokrov .
He was a talented and charismatic guy .
He could sing , play musical instruments , and wrote his own jokes and songs .
He was also ambitious and wanted to advance in the Soviet system .
So he joined the Communist Party ’ s young wing — the Komsomol — which was like the communist equivalent of getting an MBA .
But then disaster struck .
Sometime in the mid-1930s , he ended up in a Siberian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ literature or writing songs that satirized the government .
He did his time and got out .
Then the Nazis invaded .
He was 25 years old .
In 1941 , Leonid was deployed to the defensive line being hastily thrown up around Moscow .
And that ’ s where his career as a Soviet man came to an end .
Leonid was taken prisoner — just one poor Soviet kid among millions of Red Army soldiers captured in the early blitz invasion .
His chances for survival ?
They were almost non-existent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or froze to death nearly three million Soviet prisoners in those opening months of the war .
But somehow he survived long enough to get an offer that he could not refuse : join Andrei Vlasov ’ s Russian Liberation Army , an all-Russian division being put together by the Germans to fight against the Soviet Union .
How did he manage to make in the camps ?
Well , that ’ s not entirely clear .
Luck probably had a lot to do with it .
His charisma and the fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and entertain , explains the rest .
He was a guy that everyone loved and that everyone wanted to hang out with .
These are always winning qualities — and especially in a grim place like a Nazi POW camp .
The next four years of Leonid ’ s life murky .
But from what can be cobbled together from various sources , one thing is clear : Leonid probably didn ’ t do much fighting .
In all likelihood he was assigned to do agitprop with the Russian Liberation Army .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Russian amateur historian , in 1943 he started work at The New Way , a Nazi Russian-language newspaper run out of occupied Belarus .
The paper ran was like many of papers run under Nazi occupation .
Most of its best real estate was dedicated showcasing German victories over the Red Army and blaming the war on Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies .
On the inside pages , you ’ d get soft features about how great life was in Germany , literary criticism , jokes and songs , capsules about global current events .
There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Records show that Leonid wrote for the The New Way under a pseudonym “ Vitaly Shamrov ” — publishing short stories , poems , political satire , and “ straight ” reporting .
In one of his journalism pieces , he described the incredibly humane living conditions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans .
“ People look very healthy here .
You won ’ t see a single sign of starvation here .
People in the camps get a daily ration of 600 grams of bread ( the same as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meat , 30 grams of butter , ” he wrote .
“ Today , the camp got a visit from the propaganda division , which bought its musical instruments .
There was singing , dancing , poetry readings .
The prisoners were having a great time .
I looked at their healthy faces and had no doubts .
These people believe in their future .
They have enough strength to survive this brutal time of war and they will return to their families in one piece and in good health.
” See , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t so bad !
Hand in your vintovki comrades and surrender while you still have time !
The reality of course was that if you were captured you ’ d either be either shot or die a horrible death by freezing , starvation , slave labor , and disease .
In Mauthausen , for example , the Nazis mass starvation and machine gunning operation reached such epic proportions that all the rotten blood and guts contaminated the local water supply .
But that wasn ’ t not the PR line Leonid ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to music historian Maksim E Kravchinskii , Leonid was prolific in his role as Nazi propagandist .
He even produced a book of anti-Soviet poetry , which was published under Nazi occupation and well received by the The New Way .
“ In his poetry , the poet does more than just call people to arms .
With his caustic political poetry .
he cleverly defeats the enemy while entertaining the tired soldier , ” explained the reviewer .
Leonid was not only funny , but good for Nazi collabo anti-Soviet morale !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a kind of Russian comic peasant poem , he published in his book : Roughly translated : The well was drying / in a village / Stalin is a sissy general / and shitty commander Charismatic and talented , Leonid did alright in these new and chaotic circumstances .
He was good at pretty much anything he did , and that included survival .
As one Soviet writer who ran in the same emigre circles in Munich described Leonid ’ s time as a Nazi collaborator : “ People liked him .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ energy , and a good drinking partner .
And he could always round up women who wanted to party.
” But this new good phase of his life wasn ’ t destined to last .
In May 1945 , Leonid was in Prague when the Red Army took the city .
A lot of his comrades from the Russian Liberation Army were captured and executed as traitors .
But many managed to get away and walked west as fast they could to surrender to the Americans .
That ’ s how Leonid ended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inside the American Zone in Germany .
He was 29 years old .
After World War II , Europe was a swirling mass of human misery .
There were something like 8 million homeless people wandering around a totally destroyed landscape .
They were famished , wounded , psychologically battered — a wreck .
There was no food and no shelter and the place was overrun with crime and gangsterism and cynical exploitation by the occupying powers .
It wasn ’ t a place you wanted to be if you could help it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could to get back home .
Among them were Jews who had barely survived genocide and who refused to go back home to the places that had just tried to wipe them out .
But the vast bulk of these displaced persons had more complicated trajectories .
They came from all over — Poland , Estonia , Ukraine , Hungary , Croatia , Russia — and had collaborated with the Nazis .
They volunteered in death camps , administering the occupied territories , or served in the SS and other German military formations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ European fascist movements that had their own little genocides and fought against the communists in alliance with Nazi Germany .
Lots of them were very ideological — committed fascists with plenty of throat-slitting and genocide experience .
Others , like Leonid , were more opportunistic than anything else .
They had done whatever it took to survive the war .
No matter how they arrived at collaborating with the Nazis , they knew that going back home would mean disaster — either a death sentence or a long vacation at a Siberian nature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ living in UN-run camps in Western Germany , Austria , and Italy .
These camps swirled with anti-Soviet agitation , organized crime , prostitution , intra-fascist rivalries , deportations , and assassinations — from both “ friendlies ” and Soviet agents looking for revenge .
And all of this existed in an environment of heavy recruitment by American and British spy agencies for all sorts of espionage , propaganda , and dumb guerrilla warfare schemes .
That was the world that Leonid found himself in after the war .
Cycling first through Frankfurt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ avoided being deported back to the Soviet Union and then scraped by the only way he knew how .
He worked for anti-Soviet Russian newspapers servicing the Nazi collabo communities and toured around Europe playing concerts for Russian laborers in Germany , France , and Belgium .
According to some accounts , Leonid was still very much in the Vlasov Nazi collaborator orbit and did work with various Russian “ veterans ” groups , including the National Labor Alliance — one of the earliest Russian fascist exile groups active going back to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he can play the accordion , dance , drink a liter of vodka , ” wrote Dmitry Dobrodeev , a Soviet emigre author who later hung out in Leonid ’ s circles in Munich .
“ He performs , agitates and he always finds women .
After the war , there are a lot of women — German , Czech , Hungarian.
” With his unique talents and charm and his innate capacity for survival , he did better than most .
Still , those early years after the war were tough life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Then , in 1952 , a ray of sunshine appeared in his life .
Leonid met a young American journalist who worked for a brand new radio station that was being set up in Munich .
From then on , his life would be simple and routine : pump out anti-communist propaganda , collect your laundered CIA checks , and live life to the fullest .
And that is exactly what he did .
To be continued next week with : “ Part Two : The Creation of Radio Liberation from Bolshevism.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ABOVE : Radio Liberation ’ s HQ was located in this building in Munich ’ s Oberwiesenfeld airport .
This is what it looked like in 1940 under the Nazis .

Read about the idea behind project and subscribe.
The date is April 28, 1953. The location: Lampertheim, Germany — a small town south of Frankfurt.
An American technician sitting in heavily guarded military radio facility turns on one of the most powerful radio transmitters in the world. He checks the dials, makes a few final calibrations, and then hits play on a big magnetic tape that had just been delivered to him by train and motorcycle courier from Munich.
First there’s nothing but static. Then a female voice kicks in — an announcer speaking Russian: “This is Radio Liberation speaking. We are transmitting a statement made by a war veteran who escaped to the west in 1946.”
More static. Then a man’s voice comes on — slow and speaking in an affected provincial Russian accent.
In May 1945, Leonid was in Prague when the Red Army took the city. A lot of his comrades from the Russian Liberation Army were captured and executed as traitors. But many managed to get away and walked west as fast they could to surrender to the Americans.
“Hello to my fellow soldiers and officers and to those who fought in the Great Patriotic War!” he says. “I cannot tell you my name because I left my sisters and my mother behind. And you know yourself how our Kremlin bosses deal with those who won’t submit to their will!
The man then proceeds to tell his story. He says he had fought the Nazis in World War II, had his arm blown off in battle, and returned not as a hero but as an impoverished cripple who could not survive on his Soviet war veteran pension. “You know yourself how badly invalids have it here in our socialist fatherland. There’s nothing to eat and no prosthetics. The pension’s not even enough to buy tobacco on. So I adapted.”
He says he started doing a bit of odd commerce, like buying sunflower seeds on the cheap in Ukraine and taking the train to a far off city in Russia to sell them on the street for a bit of profit. This was illegal. And day, he got caught. “In Odessa, police raided us invalids like a pack of dogs. We grabbed our crutches and fought back.”
Fearful of being sent to a labor camps, he says he decided to flee west. “It was hard, but I got here. Now I live in Canada. I work in a lumber plant and the doctors here gave me amazing prosthetic. It’s like they gave me a new arm! If only our invalids had such glorious prosthetics!”
He finishes his story by congratulating listeners on the recent death of Comrade Stalin but says that Stalin’s death is not nearly enough. All the Bolsheviks must go: “While in Stalin’s hooligans are in the Kremlin, there will no life for anyone!”
It was a good story — а story of socialist betrayal, capitalist redemption, and hope for the future of the Soviet people. But the whole thing was a lie.
The man on the tape wasn’t an armless war veteran, nor was he living in Canada. And he sure didn’t work at a lumber mill.
He was a Soviet refugee and a Nazi collaborator — a musician and comedian known for his irresistible charisma and his hard partying and womanizing. He lived in Munich and went by the name of Leonid Pylaev. Oh, and what else? That’s right. He worked for the CIA.
Leonid’s life story is murky, but enough is known to gather a rough picture.
He was born in Russia probably in 1916 in a smallish city north of Moscow — either in Dmitrov, Kostroma, or Pokrov.
He was a talented and charismatic guy. He could sing, play musical instruments, and wrote his own jokes and songs. He was also ambitious and wanted to advance in the Soviet system. So he joined the Communist Party’s young wing — the Komsomol — which was like the communist equivalent of getting an MBA. But then disaster struck.
Sometime in the mid-1930s, he ended up in a Siberian prison camp — either for possessing forbidden literature or writing songs that satirized the government.
He did his time and got out. Then the Nazis invaded.
He was 25 years old.
In 1941, Leonid was deployed to the defensive line being hastily thrown up around Moscow. And that’s where his career as a Soviet man came to an end.
Leonid was taken prisoner — just one poor Soviet kid among millions of Red Army soldiers captured in the early blitz invasion. His chances for survival? They were almost non-existent. The Nazis shot, starved, or froze to death nearly three million Soviet prisoners in those opening months of the war.
But somehow he survived long enough to get an offer that he could not refuse: join Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, an all-Russian division being put together by the Germans to fight against the Soviet Union.
How did he manage to make in the camps?
Well, that’s not entirely clear. Luck probably had a lot to do with it. His charisma and the fact that he could play music, tell jokes, and entertain, explains the rest. He was a guy that everyone loved and that everyone wanted to hang out with. These are always winning qualities — and especially in a grim place like a Nazi POW camp.
The next four years of Leonid’s life murky. But from what can be cobbled together from various sources, one thing is clear: Leonid probably didn’t do much fighting.
In all likelihood he was assigned to do agitprop with the Russian Liberation Army. Based on German records discovered by a Russian amateur historian, in 1943 he started work at The New Way, a Nazi Russian-language newspaper run out of occupied Belarus.
The paper ran was like many of papers run under Nazi occupation. Most of its best real estate was dedicated showcasing German victories over the Red Army and blaming the war on Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies. On the inside pages, you’d get soft features about how great life was in Germany, literary criticism, jokes and songs, capsules about global current events. There were even classifieds and wedding notices.
Records show that Leonid wrote for the The New Way under a pseudonym “Vitaly Shamrov” — publishing short stories, poems, political satire, and “straight” reporting.
In one of his journalism pieces, he described the incredibly humane living conditions of Red Army soldiers captured by the Germans.
“People look very healthy here. You won’t see a single sign of starvation here. People in the camps get a daily ration of 600 grams of bread (the same as a German soldier), 60 grams of meat, 30 grams of butter,” he wrote. “Today, the camp got a visit from the propaganda division, which bought its musical instruments. There was singing, dancing, poetry readings. The prisoners were having a great time. I looked at their healthy faces and had no doubts. These people believe in their future. They have enough strength to survive this brutal time of war and they will return to their families in one piece and in good health.”
See, getting captured by the Nazis isn’t so bad! Hand in your vintovki comrades and surrender while you still have time!
The reality of course was that if you were captured you’d either be either shot or die a horrible death by freezing, starvation, slave labor, and disease. In Mauthausen, for example, the Nazis mass starvation and machine gunning operation reached such epic proportions that all the rotten blood and guts contaminated the local water supply. But that wasn’t not the PR line Leonid’s new masters wanted to circulate!
According to music historian Maksim E Kravchinskii, Leonid was prolific in his role as Nazi propagandist.
He even produced a book of anti-Soviet poetry, which was published under Nazi occupation and well received by the The New Way. “In his poetry, the poet does more than just call people to arms. With his caustic political poetry. he cleverly defeats the enemy while entertaining the tired soldier,” explained the reviewer. Leonid was not only funny, but good for Nazi collabo anti-Soviet morale!
Here’s a sample a chastushka, a kind of Russian comic peasant poem, he published in his book:
Roughly translated: The well was drying / in a village / Stalin is a sissy general / and shitty commander
Charismatic and talented, Leonid did alright in these new and chaotic circumstances. He was good at pretty much anything he did, and that included survival.
As one Soviet writer who ran in the same emigre circles in Munich described Leonid’s time as a Nazi collaborator: “People liked him. He’s upbeat, full of energy, and a good drinking partner. And he could always round up women who wanted to party.”
But this new good phase of his life wasn’t destined to last.
In May 1945, Leonid was in Prague when the Red Army took the city. A lot of his comrades from the Russian Liberation Army were captured and executed as traitors. But many managed to get away and walked west as fast they could to surrender to the Americans.
That’s how Leonid ended up in the displaced persons camp system inside the American Zone in Germany.
He was 29 years old.
The New York Times. January 20, 1946.
After World War II, Europe was a swirling mass of human misery. There were something like 8 million homeless people wandering around a totally destroyed landscape. They were famished, wounded, psychologically battered — a wreck. There was no food and no shelter and the place was overrun with crime and gangsterism and cynical exploitation by the occupying powers.
It wasn’t a place you wanted to be if you could help it. So most people did whatever they could to get back home.
But a core group — about a million people — wouldn’t budge.
Among them were Jews who had barely survived genocide and who refused to go back home to the places that had just tried to wipe them out. But the vast bulk of these displaced persons had more complicated trajectories.
They came from all over — Poland, Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, Croatia, Russia — and had collaborated with the Nazis. They volunteered in death camps, administering the occupied territories, or served in the SS and other German military formations. Some had been active members of European fascist movements that had their own little genocides and fought against the communists in alliance with Nazi Germany. Lots of them were very ideological — committed fascists with plenty of throat-slitting and genocide experience. Others, like Leonid, were more opportunistic than anything else. They had done whatever it took to survive the war.
No matter how they arrived at collaborating with the Nazis, they knew that going back home would mean disaster — either a death sentence or a long vacation at a Siberian nature preserve. And so they stayed, living in UN-run camps in Western Germany, Austria, and Italy.
These camps swirled with anti-Soviet agitation, organized crime, prostitution, intra-fascist rivalries, deportations, and assassinations — from both “friendlies” and Soviet agents looking for revenge. And all of this existed in an environment of heavy recruitment by American and British spy agencies for all sorts of espionage, propaganda, and dumb guerrilla warfare schemes.
That was the world that Leonid found himself in after the war.
Cycling first through Frankfurt and then Dachau near Munich, he avoided being deported back to the Soviet Union and then scraped by the only way he knew how.
He worked for anti-Soviet Russian newspapers servicing the Nazi collabo communities and toured around Europe playing concerts for Russian laborers in Germany, France, and Belgium. According to some accounts, Leonid was still very much in the Vlasov Nazi collaborator orbit and did work with various Russian “veterans” groups, including the National Labor Alliance — one of the earliest Russian fascist exile groups active going back to the 1930s.
“Entertaining and creative, he can play the accordion, dance, drink a liter of vodka,” wrote Dmitry Dobrodeev, a Soviet emigre author who later hung out in Leonid’s circles in Munich. “He performs, agitates and he always finds women. After the war, there are a lot of women — German, Czech, Hungarian.”
With his unique talents and charm and his innate capacity for survival, he did better than most. Still, those early years after the war were tough life — chaotic and full of poverty.
Then, in 1952, a ray of sunshine appeared in his life.
Leonid met a young American journalist who worked for a brand new radio station that was being set up in Munich.
From then on, his life would be simple and routine: pump out anti-communist propaganda, collect your laundered CIA checks, and live life to the fullest.
And that is exactly what he did.
To be continued next week with: “Part Two: The Creation of Radio Liberation from Bolshevism.” Read about the project and subscribe.
ABOVE: Radio Liberation’s HQ was located in this building in Munich’s Oberwiesenfeld airport. This is what it looked like in 1940 under the Nazis.


thegreanvillepostbiasrating--2020-05-20--Truth and lies about Stalin – An exclusive interview with Grover Furr

IDC : Sixty-five years after his death , the name of Joseph Stalin remains at the epicenter of anti-communism .
The bourgeois historiography , as well as bourgeois political forces , continue the vilification of Stalin , calling him a “ dictator ” , a “ bloodthirsty tyrant ” who supposedly “ killed tens of millions of people ” .
According to your view , why anti-communists still focus their attacks on Stalin and what are the major sources of their claims ?
G.FURR : Defenders of capitalism need to depict communism as something horrible !
So , in addition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , they require a “ boogeyman ” to focus on as the epitome of the “ evil ” of communism .
Stalin was the leader of the USSR and the world communist movement during the period of its greatest triumphs , and therefore of its greatest threat to capitalism .
So Stalin would be a natural target in any case .
But there are at least two other factors .
The first is Leon Trotsky , who lied about Stalin in virtually everything he wrote from 1928 until his murder in 1940 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ first major source of lies and slander against Stalin and the USSR .
The second is Nikita Khrushchev .
His “ Secret Speech ” of February 25 , 1956 to the XX Party Congress was a devastating blow to the world communist movement .
And it was an invaluable gift to the anticommunists of the world !
After the XXII Party Congress in October , 1961 , when Khrushchev and his people attacked Stalin even more viciously , with even more lies , Khrushchev and the CPSU sponsored hundreds of books and articles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Lavrentii Beria , whose murder Khrushchev organized on June 26 , 1953 .
Beria is not as significant a figure in Soviet history as is Stalin .
But Khrushchev and his men slandered Beria at least as viciously , if not more viciously , as they did Stalin .
And those who had been closest to Stalin – Molotov , Malenkov , Kaganovich – supported Khrushchev in this unprincipled attack upon and murder of Beria .
As a direct result of Khrushchev @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of all communists in the world outside the socialist bloc quit their parties .
Some of them literally walked across the street and joined the Trotskyist parties !
Concerning Khrushchev ’ s lies about Stalin and Soviet history , we must remember that very few people at the time recognized them as lies .
And nobody could prove that they were lies because Khrushchev never published any evidence .
Nor did Khrushchev , or his successors , allow even Party historians to see any primary documents in the archives .
The lies by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eagerly picked up by Western anticommunists and became the major source of anti-Stalin lies for all the anticommunist writers and “ scholars ” that followed him , right up to the present .
Some of these Khrushchev-era Soviet anticommunist works were published in the West and widely publicized by the capitalists .
Such writers include Alexander Solzhenitsyn , Roy Medvedev , and Alexander Nekrich .
Many works of Western “ experts ” on the USSR relied heavily on these Khrushchev-era falsehoods .
Important examples are Robert Conquest ’ s works and the biography @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Under Brezhnev and his successors , Andropov and Chernenko , anti-Stalin books and articles were almost eliminated .
Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders saw the great harm that Khrushchev and the Khrushchev-inspired works were doing to the Soviet Union and to the world communist movement .
But it is important to point out that these post-Khrushchev leaders never repudiated Khrushchev ’ s lies about Stalin and the Stalin period .
They could have done so .
They and their researchers had access to all the evidence , all the archival documents , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , much more .
They knew , of course , that “ Khrushchev lied ” ( the title of my first book ) .
But they never corrected any of the Khrushchev-era lies .
This raises the question : Why did Khrushchev do what he did ?
Among the reasons , certainly , was the fact that Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet Party leadership had abandoned any interest in communism .
They were nationalists , in that they wanted a Soviet Union that was powerful economically , militarily , and politically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move the USSR in the direction of a more egalitarian , truly communist society .
And Stalin did !
Moving to the next stage towards communism was the theme of the 19th Party Congress in 1952 .
This is the ONLY Party Congress in the history of the USSR whose transcript was never published .
There is much more to say about Stalin ’ s promotion of communism , as well as his failed attempts to make the Soviet Union more democratic , but there is no time or space to discuss these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or so of becoming General Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev began a campaign of lies and slander about Stalin , and about Soviet history generally , that made even Khrushchev ’ s 1962-64 campaign look mild !
Once again , hundreds of books and thousands of articles were written , attacking Stalin and the Stalin-era USSR as the site of monstrous crimes with Stalin as the chief criminal .
Once again , there was no evidence , only repetition of Khrushchev-era lies and the invention of even more lies .
This anti-Stalin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way ideologically for the return to predatory capitalism .
And to the dismantling of the Soviet Union .
Because , once you have abandoned proletarian internationalism , who needs a multi-national , multi-ethnic state like the USSR ?
Khrushchev-era and Gorbachev-era lies about Stalin and the Stalin-era USSR remain the main source of anticommunist propaganda the world over .
These lies are very useful for capitalists and anticommunists to slander the idea of communism .
So useful , that it is impossible for any historian to hold a job as a professor of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gorbachev-era , and post-Gorbachev anticommunist lies , as the truth .
For example , it is forbidden to recognize that “ Khrushchev lied ” in the “ Secret Speech , ” although scholars of Soviet history know very well that Khrushchev did lie .
But to admit that , and then to go on to admit that Khrushchev ’ s people all lied , and that Gorbachev and his people also lied , would be to dismantle , to tear down , to reject all the anticommunist historiography of at least 3 generations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forbidden .
These lies have been , and continue to be , far too useful to the anticommunists and capitalists to abandon them just because they are false !
Trotsky lied too , of course .
Few people paid any attention to him until Khrushchev ’ s “ Secret Speech.
” Then Trotsky seemed like a “ prophet ” , like “ the only true communist , ” as he and his followers had always claimed .
Only after Khrushchev ’ s speech was Trotskyism reborn .
Trotskyism can only continue to exist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ So today Trotskyists push all the anti-Stalin lies – those of Trotsky , of Khrushchev , of the Khrushchev-era writers , of the Western anticommunists like Conquest , Robert Tucker , and so many others , of Gorbachev and the Gorby-era writers , and of the post-Gorby post-Soviet anticommunist liars like Oleg Khlevniuk , Jörg Baberowski , Nicolas Werth , Andrea Graziosi , and Timothy Snyder , to name a few that are well-known in Europe .
I have written about Khrushchev ’ s lies ( Khrushchev Lied ) , about Trotsky ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amalgams ’ ) , about the lies of anticommunists like Timothy Snyder ( Blood Lies ) , about the lies of Western anticommunists like , for example , Stephen Cohen ( article on my web page ) .
In early 2019 I will publish a book on the lies in Stephen Kotkin ’ s Stalin .
Waiting for Hitler , 1929-1941 , a prize-winning book of 1140+ pages published in October , 2017 .
Kotkin , a professor at Princeton University and fellow of the Hoover Institution , has spent his entire professional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And everything he says about Stalin and the events of the 1930s in the USSR is demonstrably , provably , false !
Trotskyism has some credibility among persons who look towards Marxism and communism for liberation from capitalism but who have deeply imbibed the anti-Stalin lies that have been promoted everywhere since 1956 .
So Trotskyism is an important force .
But Trotskyism is based solely upon falsehoods .
And Trotskyism is a true “ cult.
” No criticism of the “ great leader ” is permitted .
One obvious conclusion is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the more learned , most recent anticommunist “ experts , ” can identify a single genuine crime that Stalin committed .
There weren ’ t any !
We can say that with confidence because , if there were any such crimes , these devoted anticommunist scholars certainly would have uncovered them and shouted them to the world .
But they haven ’ t found any real crimes !
So they have to lie , fabricate , falsify.. Late in 2019 I will publish my third book on Trotsky and his lies .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trotsky ’ s collaboration with the Nazis and the Japanese fascists .
This will provide more evidence to add to the evidence in my 2017 book Leon Trotsky 's Collaboration with Germany and Japan .
IDC : One of the frequent arguments used against Stalin is that he “ formed an alliance with Hitler 's Germany ” , referring to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed on August 23 , 1939 .
This claim consists one of the pillars of the reactionary theory of the “ two extremes ” which tries to equate communism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the historical truth behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact ?
The USSR tried to form an alliance – a mutual defense treaty against Nazi Germany – with Great Britain , France , and Poland .
Negotiations came to a head in August , 1939 , when British and French representatives went to Moscow for talks .
But the British and French representatives had no authority to sign any agreement .
The Polish government refused to even consider permitting Soviet forces on Polish soil – the only way the Red Army could have attacked Germany .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Great Britain and France did not really want a treaty of collective security that would bind them all to attack Nazi Germany if Germany attacked any of them ( Poland being the most obvious German target ) .
Britain and France were using the talks to put pressure on Germany , with which they really wanted some agreement .
This was consistent with their diplomacy during the previous several years , especially the Munich Agreement , in which Britain and France gave part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler without even asking the Czech @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to encourage Hitler to attack the USSR .
But that meant allowing Germany to defeat Poland , since Germany had no border with the USSR .
And that is in fact what Great Britain and France did .
They signed a mutual defense treaty with Poland , but refused to attack Germany even when Poland was being soundly defeated in the first few days after the German invasion .
When the Polish state collapsed the Red Army occupied Eastern Poland .
But “ eastern Poland ” had been part of Soviet Russia – @ @ @ @ @ @ @ -- until the imperialist Polish government took it by force in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1921 .
Poles were never a majority of the population .
Even the reactionary post-Soviet Polish regime does not claim these lands today .
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not an “ alliance.
” It was a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany .
It contained a secret clause in which Hitler recognized a Soviet sphere of influence in the Eastern part of Poland , the Baltic states , and Finland .
This kept the German army hundreds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When Hitler did invade the USSR , this extra distance that the German army had to travel saved Moscow and Leningrad from being captured and destroyed .
IDC : It is known that you have extensively researched the case of the “ Katyn massacre ” which according to bourgeois historiography was a crime committed by the Soviet Union .
In an official statement issued in April 1990 , Gorbachev 's administration expressed “ profound regret over the Katyn tragedy , ” calling it “ one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ state documents ” have been presented as evidence of Stalin 's supposed guilt over the Katyn mass murders .
Summarizing your research findings , who is the real culprit of the Katyn massacre and what are the key points of the whole story ?
G.FURR : The Germans killed the Poles .
The evidence simply will not permit any other conclusion .
In late 1991 Gorbachev handed over to Yeltsin the documents you mention , from what is called “ Closed Packet No .
1.
” These documents , if genuine , would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But in 2010 Viktor Iliukhin , a Duma ( = Russian parliament ) member from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation , presented to the public strong evidence that the “ Closed Packet No .
1 ” documents were forgeries .
In 2012 a report by a Polish archeologist , summarizing the results of a joint Polish-Ukrainian excavation at a mass murder site in Volodymyr-Volyns ’ kiy , Ukraine , stated that the badge of a Polish policeman had been found in the mass grave .
This policeman is one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Soviets in the spring of 1940 and buried near Tver ’ ( formerly Kalinin ) , hundreds of kilometers away .
The year before this report was issued the badge of another Polish policeman , also supposedly killed by the Soviets at Tver ’ in the spring of 1940 , had also been discovered in the same mass grave .
The Polish and Ukrainian media discussed this , though that discovery was kept out of the Polish archeologist ’ s report .
The Polish report also stated that the victims in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by the Germans in 1941 .
But the Ukrainian archeologist ’ s report did not mention either the badges of the supposed Katyn victims that had been found , or the evidence that the persons shot there had been killed by the Germans , not the Soviets .
One Ukrainian archeologist even said that it was a mistake for the Polish archeologist to mention these things , since doing so could “ cast doubt ” on the Katyn massacre .
In 2013 I wrote and published an article about these discoveries .
By @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soviet guilt at Katyn .
But I knew that I would have to do more .
Between 2015 and 2018 I did a full-scale research project on Katyn .
I decided to approach Katyn as a mystery – without any preconceived idea about which side , the Germans or the Soviets , is guilty .
In my book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre : The Evidence , The Solution , published in July , 2018 , I identify and study all the evidence that can not possibly have been faked .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surprising .
ALL of the evidence that is of unquestionable validity – the evidence that can not possibly have been faked -- points to German guilt .
NONE of it points to Soviet guilt .
Naturally , this conclusion is “ unacceptable , ” “ taboo.
” I have already received a good deal of harassment from Polish nationalists , as well as from academic experts in the field of Soviet history .
It is simply unacceptable to conclude that the Soviets were not guilty – and to hell with the evidence !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ crime of Stalin.
” And it is a lie !
IDC : The “ Moscow trials ” are regarded by bourgeois historians as frame-ups of innocent defendants and that Stalin had fabricated the charges .
What is the truth ?
Were the defendants ( Trotskyites , Zinovievites , “ Bloc of Rights , ” etc . )
actually innocent ?
G.FURR : There has never been any evidence that the Moscow Trials , plus the Tukhachevsky Affair trial of June , 1937 , were “ frame-ups , ” the defendants tortured , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confessions .
In the first 12 chapters of my book Trotsky ’ s ‘ Amalgams ’ ( 2015 ) .
I check – verify , to prove or disprove – as many of the statements made by the defendants at the Moscow trials as I could .
Earlier in 2018 I published an updated version of this research as a separate book , The Moscow Trials As Evidence .
We have overwhelming evidence that the defendants in the Moscow Trials were indeed guilty of at least those crimes to which they confessed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ e.g .
that of Nikolai Bukharin – we now know that the defendants were guilty of crimes to which they never confessed .
We also have a lot of evidence now that confirms that Leon Trotsky was indeed collaborating with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan , as accused in the Moscow Trials .
IDC : The late Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo wrote that “ there were two turning points that have determined the contemporary view of Stalin : the outbreak of the Cold War in 1947 and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU @ @ @ @ @ @ @ statement and if so , why these two points are significant in shaping the world 's view on Stalin ?
G.FURR : I agree with Professor Losurdo , whose death is a great loss for those of us who search for the truth about world history and the history of the communist movement of the 20th century .
Looking back on it , the Cold War was inevitable .
However , it did not seem inevitable to many in the communist movement .
Once it began , all the anti-Stalin , anticommunist propaganda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soviet socialism did not evolved steadily in the direction of communism , even though that is precisely what Stalin wanted and what he believed would happen .
Instead , at the time of his death on March 5 , 1953 , Stalin was politically isolated in the leadership of the CPSU .
The march towards communism was abandoned .
Khrushchev replaced the idea that violent revolution was needed to get rid of capitalism , with the false notion of “ victory in peaceful competition with capitalism.
” Elections , rather than revolution , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meant turning away from the working class as the essential leading force of history , for there were never enough workers to win elections , though the working class was , and still is , able to shut down capitalist production and , if organized by a revolutionary party , make a revolution , overthrow capitalism , and seize state power .
Under Stalin ’ s leadership the Soviet Union brought Lenin ’ s concept of socialism into being .
That means that Lenin ’ s , and Stalin ’ s , concept @ @ @ @ @ @ @ research strongly suggests that the Lenin-Stalin concept of socialism retained far too much of the concept of socialism that was developed by the Second International before World War I .
That concept of socialism was a confused one .
On the one hand , “ socialism ” meant capitalism with a strong working-class movement , based in trade unions , politically powerful enough to force capitalist governments to grant very significant reforms to make the lives of workers more bearable : higher wages and the whole range of social welfare benefits .
On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came to mean a fully industrialized society in which capitalism had been overthrown and political power was held by the working class through the mediation of a communist party .
Private property in the means of production would be abolished .
A mechanism – the Councils ( in Russian , soviety ) would run the society in the interest of the working class .
Workers and peasants , not the capitalists , would be privileged .
This is the Leninist idea of socialism .
But in this concept of socialism , the relations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they had been under capitalism .
Money – income – still determined the distribution of goods and services .
It was not possible to amass private wealth , and workers and peasants still enjoyed vastly more social welfare benefits than in any capitalist state .
However , capitalist relations of production , the continued differential between city and country , manual and mental labor , and men and women , persisted .
These forces proved more powerful than the political will to push towards more and more egalitarianism , towards the realization of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Soviet Union during Stalin ’ s time is a vast storehouse of lessons , a “ book ” that we can and must study , in order to learn the lessons , both positive and – in the end – negative , of the world communist movement of the 20th century .
We must learn to imitate what the Soviets and , under their leadership , the Comintern forces did that was correct , heroic , pointing towards a communist future .
And we must learn to distinguish what they did that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turned the Soviet Union and the world communist movement away from the development towards communism and back towards predatory capitalism .
Thanks to the world-shaking efforts of the communists of the 20th century , especially during the period of Stalin ’ s leadership , we have this magnificent legacy to study .
We can be “ dwarves sitting on the shoulders of giants , ” able to see farther than they did , thanks to their experience , though we are very far from being their equal in dedication and efforts towards that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to which all humankind is striving .

On the ocassion of the 140th birth anniversary of Joseph Stalin we asked Professor Grover Furr to share with us his thoughts on some issues surrounding Stalin and the period of his leadership. Grover Furr, a Professor of medieval english literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey, is well-known for his research and writings on a vast range of issues about Soviet history. Some of his most famous books include " Khrushchev Lied ", " The Moscow Trials as Evidence ", Trotsky’s "Amalgams" , " The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, The Solution " and others. The name of Grover Furr is included in the list of the "101 most dangerous academics in America".
* * *
IDC: Sixty-five years after his death, the name of Joseph Stalin remains at the epicenter of anti-communism. The bourgeois historiography, as well as bourgeois political forces, continue the vilification of Stalin, calling him a “dictator”, a “bloodthirsty tyrant” who supposedly “killed tens of millions of people”. According to your view, why anti-communists still focus their attacks on Stalin and what are the major sources of their claims?
G.FURR: Defenders of capitalism need to depict communism as something horrible! So, in addition to hiding the horrors of capitalism-imperialism, they require a “boogeyman” to focus on as the epitome of the “evil” of communism. Stalin was the leader of the USSR and the world communist movement during the period of its greatest triumphs, and therefore of its greatest threat to capitalism. So Stalin would be a natural target in any case.
But there are at least two other factors. The first is Leon Trotsky, who lied about Stalin in virtually everything he wrote from 1928 until his murder in 1940. Trotsky’s post-1929 writings were the first major source of lies and slander against Stalin and the USSR. The second is Nikita Khrushchev. His “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956 to the XX Party Congress was a devastating blow to the world communist movement. And it was an invaluable gift to the anticommunists of the world!
Some of these Khrushchev-era Soviet anticommunist works were published in the West and widely publicized by the capitalists. Such writers include Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, and Alexander Nekrich. Many works of Western “experts” on the USSR relied heavily on these Khrushchev-era falsehoods. Important examples are Robert Conquest’s works and the biography of Bukharin by American historian Stephen Cohen..."
" Some of these Khrushchev-era Soviet anticommunist works were published in the West and widely publicized by the capitalists. Such writers include Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, and Alexander Nekrich. Many works of Western “experts” on the USSR relied heavily on these Khrushchev-era falsehoods. Important examples are Robert Conquest’s works and the biography of Bukharin by American historian Stephen Cohen..."
After the XXII Party Congress in October, 1961, when Khrushchev and his people attacked Stalin even more viciously, with even more lies, Khrushchev and the CPSU sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Stalin. Khrushchev also sponsored hundreds of books and articles attacking and lying about Lavrentii Beria, whose murder Khrushchev organized on June 26, 1953. Beria is not as significant a figure in Soviet history as is Stalin. But Khrushchev and his men slandered Beria at least as viciously, if not more viciously, as they did Stalin. And those who had been closest to Stalin – Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich – supported Khrushchev in this unprincipled attack upon and murder of Beria.
As a direct result of Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign, approximately one-half of all communists in the world outside the socialist bloc quit their parties. Some of them literally walked across the street and joined the Trotskyist parties!
Concerning Khrushchev’s lies about Stalin and Soviet history, we must remember that very few people at the time recognized them as lies. And nobody could prove that they were lies because Khrushchev never published any evidence. Nor did Khrushchev, or his successors, allow even Party historians to see any primary documents in the archives. The lies by Khrushchev and his hundreds of writers were eagerly picked up by Western anticommunists and became the major source of anti-Stalin lies for all the anticommunist writers and “scholars” that followed him, right up to the present.
Some of these Khrushchev-era Soviet anticommunist works were published in the West and widely publicized by the capitalists. Such writers include Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, and Alexander Nekrich. Many works of Western “experts” on the USSR relied heavily on these Khrushchev-era falsehoods. Important examples are Robert Conquest’s works and the biography of Bukharin by American historian Stephen Cohen.
Under Brezhnev and his successors, Andropov and Chernenko, anti-Stalin books and articles were almost eliminated. Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders saw the great harm that Khrushchev and the Khrushchev-inspired works were doing to the Soviet Union and to the world communist movement. But it is important to point out that these post-Khrushchev leaders never repudiated Khrushchev’s lies about Stalin and the Stalin period. They could have done so. They and their researchers had access to all the evidence, all the archival documents that we have today, plus much, much more. They knew, of course, that “Khrushchev lied” (the title of my first book). But they never corrected any of the Khrushchev-era lies.
This raises the question: Why did Khrushchev do what he did? Among the reasons, certainly, was the fact that Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet Party leadership had abandoned any interest in communism. They were nationalists, in that they wanted a Soviet Union that was powerful economically, militarily, and politically. But they did not want to move the USSR in the direction of a more egalitarian, truly communist society. And Stalin did! Moving to the next stage towards communism was the theme of the 19th Party Congress in 1952. This is the ONLY Party Congress in the history of the USSR whose transcript was never published. There is much more to say about Stalin’s promotion of communism, as well as his failed attempts to make the Soviet Union more democratic, but there is no time or space to discuss these important issues now.
Within a year or so of becoming General Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev began a campaign of lies and slander about Stalin, and about Soviet history generally, that made even Khrushchev’s 1962-64 campaign look mild! Once again, hundreds of books and thousands of articles were written, attacking Stalin and the Stalin-era USSR as the site of monstrous crimes with Stalin as the chief criminal.
Once again, there was no evidence, only repetition of Khrushchev-era lies and the invention of even more lies. This anti-Stalin, anticommunist attack helped to prepare the way ideologically for the return to predatory capitalism . And to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Because, once you have abandoned proletarian internationalism, who needs a multi-national, multi-ethnic state like the USSR?
Khrushchev-era and Gorbachev-era lies about Stalin and the Stalin-era USSR remain the main source of anticommunist propaganda the world over. These lies are very useful for capitalists and anticommunists to slander the idea of communism. So useful, that it is impossible for any historian to hold a job as a professor of Soviet history unless they accept Khrushchev-era, Gorbachev-era, and post-Gorbachev anticommunist lies, as the truth.
For example, it is forbidden to recognize that “Khrushchev lied” in the “Secret Speech,” although scholars of Soviet history know very well that Khrushchev did lie. But to admit that, and then to go on to admit that Khrushchev’s people all lied, and that Gorbachev and his people also lied, would be to dismantle, to tear down, to reject all the anticommunist historiography of at least 3 generations of “scholars.” And that is forbidden. These lies have been, and continue to be, far too useful to the anticommunists and capitalists to abandon them just because they are false!
Trotsky lied too, of course. Few people paid any attention to him until Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.” Then Trotsky seemed like a “prophet”, like “the only true communist,” as he and his followers had always claimed. Only after Khrushchev’s speech was Trotskyism reborn. Trotskyism can only continue to exist by promoting anti-Stalin and anti-communist lies! So today Trotskyists push all the anti-Stalin lies – those of Trotsky, of Khrushchev, of the Khrushchev-era writers, of the Western anticommunists like Conquest, Robert Tucker, and so many others, of Gorbachev and the Gorby-era writers, and of the post-Gorby post-Soviet anticommunist liars like Oleg Khlevniuk, Jörg Baberowski, Nicolas Werth, Andrea Graziosi, and Timothy Snyder, to name a few that are well-known in Europe. I have written about Khrushchev’s lies (Khrushchev Lied), about Trotsky’s lies (Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’), about the lies of anticommunists like Timothy Snyder (Blood Lies), about the lies of Western anticommunists like, for example, Stephen Cohen (article on my web page). In early 2019 I will publish a book on the lies in Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin. Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, a prize-winning book of 1140+ pages published in October, 2017. Kotkin, a professor at Princeton University and fellow of the Hoover Institution, has spent his entire professional life studying the Stalin-era Soviet Union. And everything he says about Stalin and the events of the 1930s in the USSR is demonstrably, provably, false! Trotskyism has some credibility among persons who look towards Marxism and communism for liberation from capitalism but who have deeply imbibed the anti-Stalin lies that have been promoted everywhere since 1956. So Trotskyism is an important force. But Trotskyism is based solely upon falsehoods. And Trotskyism is a true “cult.” No criticism of the “great leader” is permitted. One obvious conclusion is that no anti-communist, from Trotsky to Khrushchev to the more learned, most recent anti-communist “experts,” can identify a single genuine crime that Stalin committed. There weren’t any! We can say that with confidence because, if there were any such crimes, these devoted anti-communist scholars certainly would have uncovered them and shouted them to the world. But they haven’t found any real crimes! So they have to lie, fabricate, falsify.. Late in 2019 I will publish my third book on Trotsky and his lies. I will also have more evidence about Trotsky’s collaboration with the Nazis and the Japanese fascists. This will provide more evidence to add to the evidence in my 2017 book Leon Trotsky's Collaboration with Germany and Japan.
IDC: One of the frequent arguments used against Stalin is that he “formed an alliance with Hitler's Germany”, referring to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact signed on August 23, 1939. This claim consists one of the pillars of the reactionary theory of the “two extremes” which tries to equate communism with Nazism and fascism. What is the historical truth behind the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
G.FURR: I discuss all this in detail, with all documentation, in Chapters 7 and 8 of my book Blood Lies. I also discuss it in considerable detail in my online article “Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939? NO!” which is available at I discuss all this in detail, with all documentation, in Chapters 7 and 8 of my book Blood Lies. I also discuss it in considerable detail in my online article “Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939? NO!” which is available at https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html
The USSR tried to form an alliance – a mutual defense treaty against Nazi Germany – with Great Britain, France, and Poland. Negotiations came to a head in August, 1939, when British and French representatives went to Moscow for talks. But the British and French representatives had no authority to sign any agreement. The Polish government refused to even consider permitting Soviet forces on Polish soil – the only way the Red Army could have attacked Germany.
So it was clear to the Soviets that Great Britain and France did not really want a treaty of collective security that would bind them all to attack Nazi Germany if Germany attacked any of them (Poland being the most obvious German target). Britain and France were using the talks to put pressure on Germany, with which they really wanted some agreement. This was consistent with their diplomacy during the previous several years, especially the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France gave part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler without even asking the Czech government.
The British and French wanted to encourage Hitler to attack the USSR. But that meant allowing Germany to defeat Poland, since Germany had no border with the USSR. And that is in fact what Great Britain and France did. They signed a mutual defense treaty with Poland, but refused to attack Germany even when Poland was being soundly defeated in the first few days after the German invasion.
When the Polish state collapsed the Red Army occupied Eastern Poland. But “eastern Poland” had been part of Soviet Russia – the western halves of Belorussia and Ukraine -- until the imperialist Polish government took it by force in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-1921. Poles were never a majority of the population. Even the reactionary post-Soviet Polish regime does not claim these lands today.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was not an “alliance.” It was a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Germany. It contained a secret clause in which Hitler recognized a Soviet sphere of influence in the Eastern part of Poland, the Baltic states, and Finland. This kept the German army hundreds of kilometers away from the Soviet frontier. When Hitler did invade the USSR, this extra distance that the German army had to travel saved Moscow and Leningrad from being captured and destroyed.
IDC: It is known that you have extensively researched the case of the “Katyn massacre” which according to bourgeois historiography was a crime committed by the Soviet Union. In an official statement issued in April 1990, Gorbachev's administration expressed “profound regret over the Katyn tragedy,” calling it “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism”. A number of Russian declassified “state documents” have been presented as evidence of Stalin's supposed guilt over the Katyn mass murders. Summarizing your research findings, who is the real culprit of the Katyn massacre and what are the key points of the whole story?
G.FURR: The Germans killed the Poles. The evidence simply will not permit any other conclusion.
In late 1991 Gorbachev handed over to Yeltsin the documents you mention, from what is called “Closed Packet No. 1.” These documents, if genuine, would prove Soviet guilt in the Katyn massacre. But in 2010 Viktor Iliukhin, a Duma (= Russian parliament) member from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, presented to the public strong evidence that the “Closed Packet No. 1” documents were forgeries.
In 2012 a report by a Polish archeologist, summarizing the results of a joint Polish-Ukrainian excavation at a mass murder site in Volodymyr-Volyns’kiy, Ukraine, stated that the badge of a Polish policeman had been found in the mass grave. This policeman is one of those Poles said to have been killed by the Soviets in the spring of 1940 and buried near Tver’ (formerly Kalinin), hundreds of kilometers away. The year before this report was issued the badge of another Polish policeman, also supposedly killed by the Soviets at Tver’ in the spring of 1940, had also been discovered in the same mass grave. The Polish and Ukrainian media discussed this, though that discovery was kept out of the Polish archeologist’s report. The Polish report also stated that the victims in this mass grave had unquestionably been killed by the Germans in 1941.
But the Ukrainian archeologist’s report did not mention either the badges of the supposed Katyn victims that had been found, or the evidence that the persons shot there had been killed by the Germans, not the Soviets. One Ukrainian archeologist even said that it was a mistake for the Polish archeologist to mention these things, since doing so could “cast doubt” on the Katyn massacre.
In 2013 I wrote and published an article about these discoveries. By themselves they cast the strongest doubt on Soviet guilt at Katyn. But I knew that I would have to do more. Between 2015 and 2018 I did a full-scale research project on Katyn. I decided to approach Katyn as a mystery – without any preconceived idea about which side, the Germans or the Soviets, is guilty. In my book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, The Solution, published in July, 2018, I identify and study all the evidence that cannot possibly have been faked. The result is as unmistakable as it is surprising. ALL of the evidence that is of unquestionable validity – the evidence that cannot possibly have been faked -- points to German guilt. NONE of it points to Soviet guilt.
Naturally, this conclusion is “unacceptable,” “taboo.” I have already received a good deal of harassment from Polish nationalists, as well as from academic experts in the field of Soviet history. It is simply unacceptable to conclude that the Soviets were not guilty – and to hell with the evidence!
The Katyn Massacre is the best documented “crime of Stalin.” And it is a lie!
IDC: The “Moscow trials” are regarded by bourgeois historians as frame-ups of innocent defendants and that Stalin had fabricated the charges. What is the truth? Were the defendants (Trotskyites, Zinovievites, “Bloc of Rights,” etc.) actually innocent?
G.FURR: There has never been any evidence that the Moscow Trials, plus the Tukhachevsky Affair trial of June, 1937, were “frame-ups,” the defendants tortured, threatened, etc., to make false confessions.
In the first 12 chapters of my book Trotsky’s ‘Amalgams’ (2015). I check – verify, to prove or disprove – as many of the statements made by the defendants at the Moscow trials as I could. Earlier in 2018 I published an updated version of this research as a separate book, The Moscow Trials As Evidence. We have overwhelming evidence that the defendants in the Moscow Trials were indeed guilty of at least those crimes to which they confessed. In fact, in some cases – e.g. that of Nikolai Bukharin – we now know that the defendants were guilty of crimes to which they never confessed.
We also have a lot of evidence now that confirms that Leon Trotsky was indeed collaborating with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan, as accused in the Moscow Trials.
IDC: The late Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo wrote that “there were two turning points that have determined the contemporary view of Stalin: the outbreak of the Cold War in 1947 and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU”. Do you agree with this statement and if so, why these two points are significant in shaping the world's view on Stalin?
G.FURR: I agree with Professor Losurdo, whose death is a great loss for those of us who search for the truth about world history and the history of the communist movement of the 20th century.
Looking back on it, the Cold War was inevitable. However, it did not seem inevitable to many in the communist movement. Once it began, all the anti-Stalin, anticommunist propaganda got under way very quickly.
IDC: How would you evaluate Joseph Stalin's overall contribution to the construction of Socialism in the Soviet Union?
G.FURR: Under Stalin’s leadership the Soviet Union built a socialist society. Fascism was defeated. The international communist movement spread the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and of communism all over the world. Imperialism was dealt a death blow, often under the leadership of communist parties, always with their dedicated help.
But Soviet socialism did not evolve steadily in the direction of communism, even though that is precisely what Stalin wanted and what he believed would happen. Instead, at the time of his death on March 5, 1953, Stalin was politically isolated in the leadership of the CPSU.
The march towards communism was abandoned. Khrushchev replaced the idea that violent revolution was needed to get rid of capitalism, with the false notion of “victory in peaceful competition with capitalism.” Elections, rather than revolution, were to bring communist victories. This meant turning away from the working class as the essential leading force of history, for there were never enough workers to win elections, though the working class was, and still is, able to shut down capitalist production and, if organized by a revolutionary party, make a revolution, overthrow capitalism, and seize state power.