Joseph Stalin reigned when blind and often silly anti-communist propaganda was sweeping the United States. No leader could’ve come out of the tirade of Western denunciations looking like a good guy. That being said, let us acknowledge that there are legitimate criticisms of Joseph Stalin that come not only from the capitalist world but from communists as well. This article will not be focused on these mistakes or crimes Stalin may have committed, but to pointing out the lies, manipulations, and exaggerations that the bourgeois world has perpetuated against him.

Why do countries repress?

It’s important to note that during almost all of Stalin’s leadership (1922-1953) the USSR experienced either warfare, foreign infiltration, blockade, threats, imminent invasion or intense internal class struggle. It had no allies or even friends around the world. Almost every force in the world was aligned against it, and it was near miraculous that the Bolshevik government survived the civil war from 1917 to 1921. There are few comparable situations in which any country faced as much hostility as did the USSR during Stalin’s era. If you put any country with any leader in the circumstances that the USSR faced, there’s a high chance they would’ve committed repression out of necessity (or perhaps paranoia) as well, the only real question being the extent to which it would be committed. We can draw parallels with present-day North Korea, as it is facing similar circumstances. It is economically sanctioned, politically and militarily isolated, and is threatened by the US and South Korea regularly. This is likely why it now sees itself as forced to utilize repressive actions: to protect its mere survival as a state. Repression is usually not an ideology that certain governments or leaders believe in. It is a strategy that all states use to protect their existence when they feel threatened. It just so happened that Stalin, and he was correct, felt that the USSR was very threatened.

Overall statistics on Stalin’s period

Information about a country is often acquired through examination of that country’s records after they have been released. When Nazi Germany fell, records of the crimes committed during the Holocaust were recovered by the Allies. Observing the official statistics and documentation taken by the Nazis, historians have arrived at the famous numbers of “6 million Jews” and “13 million total” killed in the Holocaust. However, historians in the West, for some reason, did not believe the official documentation Soviet officials had taken on occurrences in their own country. Before the release of Soviet records, many well-known Western historians, such as Robert Conquest, had been claiming that Stalin killed at least 20 million people. Some estimates were just implausibly high, such as 60 million. Beginning in the 1990’s, the release of Soviet records taken during Stalin’s period were authorized by Russian officials like Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin had a hostile approach to the USSR, it’s past leaders, and communism. If anything, he had quite the incentive to defame Stalin’s era and reveal incriminating evidence against him. But the records did not corroborate the estimates of Western historians. They showed that actually 800,000 people had been sentenced to death in the USSR, and many were for collaboration with the Nazis, collaboration with the White Armies, or sabotage. In other words, not only were Western estimates abysmally off, many of those that were executed were charged with treason and murder, crimes that many countries would execute for. The actual number of those executed was also probably significantly lower as the records did not account for convicted persons who had their terms shortened or cancelled.

However, rather than admit they may have exaggerated, and possibly change their line on the USSR and Stalin, bourgeois scholars instead chose to wholly ignore historic archives taken during the time and continue to preach the same multi-million-death “estimates” they always had been. Why are Nazi records believed as truthful and accurate while Soviet archives, which contain no evidence of having been tampered with, are disregarded? The answer may be that the archives simply did not show them what they wanted to see.

The Great Purge (1936-1939)

The majority of the 800,000 listed as executed received their sentences during the “Great Purge”, a three-year period (1936-1939) that marked the climax of paranoia and repression in the Soviet government under Stalin.

During the Cold War, Western academia accepted nearly any statistic or historian that served an anti-communist agenda, no matter how ridiculous their claims were. A classic example is that of Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, a historian whom Western audiences granted unequivocal credibility because he had spent time in Stalin’s infamous labor camps. He had claimed (and his number was indeed accepted) that 19 million people were killed just during the 1936-1939 purge in the USSR based on little more than mere speculation. Recently the generally accepted number of victims of the purge has been revised down to 600,000-700,000, based on newly available evidence (this purge absorbing the bulk of the total “800,000” sentenced to execution). Ironically, Antonov-Ovseyenko declared that “it is the duty of every honest person to write the truth about Stalin,” something he failed miserably at doing. The obituaries of his death in 2013 from major news sources sugarcoat his wild misrepresentations of the era. One from The Nation reads “Anton made some factual errors, which today’s historians must certainly understand and forgive.” Forgiving a historian’s lies is not something academia and media are keen toward doing — except, apparently, if they were lies about a communist leader.

1932-1933 Ukranian Famine

Another line Western scholars generally agree on is that Stalin “committed” a famine in 1932. They say that, due to Ukrainian nationalism being a threat to the Soviet state, Stalin deliberately manufactured an artificial famine in Ukraine to soften this threat. The Ukrainian famine occurred when Soviet leadership was pursuing a policy of agricultural collectivization as a response to food shortages created by remnants of the New Economic Policy, which allowed a more-or-less free market in grain distribution and the continued polarized status of classes in the countryside. In other words, grain production was allowed to continue through capitalistic means and was causing shortages. Strangely, bourgeois historians also tend to acknowledge that the kulak class in Ukraine, or wealthier farmers, were deliberately hoarding food, burning their crops, and slaughtering tens of millions of livestock in protest of collectivization. Most of them imply that these were just innocent acts of political opposition. Rarely do they acknowledge that if you destroy food en masse, it might create a famine. They also acknowledge that numerous peasant uprisings against collectivization took place at the encouragement of the kulaks. They, however, do not acknowledge that uprisings will result in many deaths. Rather than recognize these actions of the wealthier peasants and the right of the Soviet leadership to pursue policies to relieve food shortages, the entire famine and resulting deaths are simply blamed on Stalin.

Capitalist governments have issued many statements condemning the role of the Soviet government in the famine. The US House of Representatives claims: “people in the government were aware of what was going on, but did not do anything to help the starving,” apparently ignorant to the fact that this statement perfectly describes the US government’s response to the Great Depression (or that of any capitalist government when people are starving) or that collectivization efforts in the USSR were meant to reduce food shortages.

What’s probably most important to recognize about famines is that they are not uncommon phenomena in human history, especially a hundred years ago. They’ve occurred on every continent and in countless countries, in some recurring as a regular event. But their acknowledgment is only used as a political tool when they occur in a communist-led state, in which scenario Westerners label it “deliberate mass murder.” As historian William Blum has said, “more people certainly died in India in the 20th century from famines than in the Soviet Union, but no one accuses India of the mass murder of its own citizens.”

Gulags

The gulags, often called “death camps” by some historians, were not political prisons nor death camps, but mostly labor camps for general criminals. In fact, released archives show that only 12% to 33% of those interned were political prisoners, while they were predominantly filled with petty criminals, but also included thieves, food hoarders, murderers, rapists, smugglers, traitors, and the like. 20% to 40% of inmates were released every year, and gulags never held more than 1% of the Soviet population. Most of those that died in gulags (about 600,000) were not deliberately put to death, but died likely due to food shortages during the World War II years of 1941-1945, a time when all of Soviet society was facing dire circumstances. Needless to say, diverting already strained and limited resources to gulags rather than to ordinary citizens was not a priority for the Soviet government. Gulag inmates were “killed” more so by Hitler than by Stalin, as the former was the one that instigated the devastating war against the Soviet Union. In the worst of gulags, work weeks were about 80 hours, something anti-communists, correctly, use as evidence of brutality. Ironically, they prefer to denounce the actions of a state thousands of miles away rather than the economic practices of their own country, which, if they live in the United States, involved making children work 100-hour-weeks in similarly dangerous factory conditions during the early 1900s– around the same time gulags existed.

“But they have Ph.D’s!”

Many may argue: “these ‘Western historians’ you speak of have dedicated their lives to studying these subjects. They probably know what they’re talking about.” This claim makes the naive mistake of assuming that all individuals with doctorate degrees have neutral outlooks on the world, and have been given neutral educations. Unfortunately, politicization of academic spaces is a widely recognized and discussed fact, and likely exists in all countries to some degree. Western historians obtained their education in a hostile anti-communist environment, and American politics and culture are some of the most anti-communist in the world. It is not a coincidence that America produces the most anti-communist historians. Scholars are not immune to resisting what their society’s media, government, culture, literature, and overall surroundings pressure them to believe (as is the case with most Americans and anti-communism). For example, while American historians almost unanimously disapprove of Stalin, 49% of actual Russians see him in a positive light, with only 32% seeing him as negative (this is even after he’s been harshly denounced by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization period, and by Russia’s now-capitalist education and political system).

While two historians may view the same event, they may have very different opinions on what happened, and this is influenced by a society’s political orientation. Michael Parenti, one of the few American historians to recognize this, demonstrates the distorting effects anti-communism has had on the academic field of history:

“…the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.”

For over 70 years, the Red Scare-style propaganda that spewed from governments, media, and critics practically disallowed any discussion about communism that wasn’t negative. Anyone who was deemed even sympathetic to communism was blacklisted, ostracized from society, and even stalked by US intelligence agencies. In that kind of atmosphere, anyone with any background could throw around lies and distortions about communist leaders, because, after all, who would be there to correct them? The shadow of this hysteria doubtlessly lingers to this day.

Let’s not pretend that anyone in the US, including those with Ph.D’s, have had a neutral education on Joseph Stalin, or any other historic figure for that matter. Many of the founding fathers were slave-owning white supremacists that committed genocide on Native Americans. Why have supposed American historians not buried their names in denunciations as they have the name of Joseph Stalin? Similarly, British leaders still adored to this day were responsible for the murder of tens of millions of Indians and Africans. While the US congress obsesses itself with passing numerous resolutions condemning the crimes of other countries, concerning events that took place thousands of miles away, will they ever apologize for the horrific actions that they themselves ordered? Will they recognize the millions of Iraqis that have been maimed, starved, paralyzed, or killed by their own hand? Or the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese infants born with birth defects because of American use of chemicals on their land and people? As a Russian historian has said, “the ultimate compassion and justice felt by American congressmen is hardly believable – just try to find at least one Congress resolution (one, not three), where genocide of Native Americans would honestly be called genocide, or at least ‘mass annihilation.'” The simple truth is that most Western analysts and scholars, knowingly or unknowingly, tend to arrogantly criticize only that which they’ve been told to criticize by a pro-Western, anti-communist and ultimately bourgeoisie-serving agenda. Hopefully now what is meant by “bourgeois historian” is more clear.