(Gran vídeo) Reseña histórica sobre el camarada Stalin

Echospace escribió:Me he emocionado muchísimo viendo este vídeo,

No sé si estará por el foro, si es así, pido disculpar por duplicar posts.

¡Gloria eterna al Camarada Stalin!

¡Viva el marxismo-leninismo!

Stalin: Politics and Power

The following is the text and sources to the YouTube video called "Stalin: Politics and Power." It is set up in somewhat of an essay format. The material comes from research done by the author. The main source is the book cited at the end from Cambridge University Press, which found its information by deeply examining the Soviet government archives. The rest comes from world-renowned professor Grover Furr.

In 1936 a draft for a new Soviet Constitution was approved. It called for secret ballots, contested elections, and candidates from local, non-party organizations. However, this was never put into effect. The democratic parts of the constitution were added because Stalin himself insisted on having them, but he had to give up on having them because the Central Committee refused to add them. They were worried about this because they were afraid of infiltrators who were collaborating with Japan and Germany to overthrow the USSR. Considering the hostility the Soviet Union faced throughout the early half of the 20th Century, this was not a case of baseless paranoia (Furr).

In 1935, Stalin insisted on having secret ballots. He was in disagreement with Avel' Yenukidze, who was assigned by the Politburo to write a new Constitution earlier in the year (Furr).

In a 1936 newspaper interview with American Roy Howard, Stalin said:

“We shall probably adopt our new constitution at the end of this year. As has been announced already, according to the new constitution, the suffrage will be universal, equal, direct, and secret.”

He also said:

“Evidently, candidates will be put forward not only by the Communist Party, but by all sorts of public, non-Party organizations. And we have hundreds of them.”

Speaking at the 7th Congress of Soviets on February 6, 1935 Molotov said that secret elections "will strike with great force against bureaucratic elements and provide them a useful shock" (Furr).

In 1952, during the 19th Party Congress, the position of General Secretary (Stalin’s position) was abolished, making Stalin only one of ten secretaries. All of the secretaries were in the new Presidium which also had 25 other members and 11 candidate members. Stalin followed this up by resigning from the Central Committee (Furr).

When Stalin was unconscious during his last days alive, the Presidium, essentially the old Politburo members, had a meeting and tried to annul the entire 19th Congress. Khrushchev was made the coordinator of the secretariat. Since then, information and dialogue from the 19th Party Congress has been suppressed by the Soviet and Russian governments (Furr).

Although Stalin provided security of tenure to Party secretaries, he was unable to personally select members of the Party organizations. These organizations often refused candidates proposed by the centre. These organizations were influenced more so by their own petty departmental agendas than by Stalin and the political higher ups. In the early 1930’s, many Party members who had voted for Stalin began to question whether or not Stalin was right for the job (Davies and Harris, 65).

After WWII, Stalin felt the effects of old age. He began to decrease his participation in the government, leaving many responsibilities to various committees that adopted a collective decision making process (Davies and Harris, 11). Before this, when he was younger, he never had unlimited personal power. His power was limited by others in the government who could act autonomously. Considerable influence over decision making was held by institutions and individuals that were in charge of providing information on the topic which a decision was to be made (Davies and Harris, .

When Stalin took over the Secretariat in 1922, one of his first moves was to decrease the responsibilities of the Secretariat in appointing cadres. The number of party cadre assigned from the centre was reduced from approximately 22,500 to a little over 6,000 (Davies and Harris, 70). At the Party Congress of 1925, Central Committee elections were held and 87 people voted against Stalin and 83 voted against Bukharin. The others lost a lot more votes. So if Stalin was stacking the Party with his cronies, then he certainly wasn’t doing a very good job (Davies and Harris, 79). Probably in 1922, Lenin once proposed that Politburo meetings be held without Trotsky (Davies and Harris, 85).

“I cannot and should not have to decide any and all questions that animate the Politburo… you yourselves can consider things and work them out.” - Stalin letter to Kaganovich and the Politburo, 1933 (Davies and Harris, 97)

In the August to October of 1934 the Politburo made 919 decisions without Stalin’s participation (Davies and Harris, 96).

Another claim is that Stalin wasn’t a Marxist and abandoned Marxism, but a look at Stalin’s personal collection of non-fiction books shows that most of these books were Marxist books which he studied and annoted until the end of his life. You’d think that if Stalin wasn’t a Marxist, then he wouldn’t speak like one in private. Even in his most personal and private letters to Molotov, Kaganovich, and others he continued to speak using Marxist phrases and frameworks (Davies and Harris, 12). Erik van Ree, the author of a widely proclaimed comprehensive analysis of Stalin’s political thought, states that the antecedents of Stalin’s ideas came from Marx and Engels, as well as their interpreters such as Lenin (Davies and Harris,13).

Stalin didn’t abandon internationalism, he just wanted to use the Red Army to spread socialism (Davies and Harris, 161). Stalin constantly called for the old ways of organization and thinking to be smashed (Davies and Harris, 198).

Some scholars have argued that Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in order to unify the USSR during the times of crisis and not because he was power-mad (Davies and Harris, 250). Party ideologists after 1929 used a cult around Stalin to bolster support for the Party (Davies and Harris, 251).

There was no official biography of Stalin up through the early 1930’s (Davies and Harris, 253).

“I am against the idea of a biography about me. Maksim Gorky had a plan like yours, and he asked me about it, but I have backed away from the issue. I don’t think the time has come for a Stalin biography.” - Stalin, letter to Iaroslavskii. August 1935 (Davies and Harris, 258)

In 1938, Stalin wrote a letter to Detizdat, the Children’s Publishing House, criticizing them over their biography of him called Stories of Stalin's Childhood. Stalin criticized the biographies needless praises of him and said that it was harmful to children’s minds. He also criticized the idea of a “great hero” who leads the masses (261). He repeated the same criticisms for the 1946 IMEL biography of him (Davies and Harris, 266).

“I am against them as such undertakings will lead to a strengthening of the 'cult of personalities.’” - Stalin, letter to the Society of Old Bolsheviks regarding writings about his career, 1933. (Davies and Harris, 261)

Works Cited:

Davies, Sarah, and James Harris. Stalin: A New History. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Furr, Grover. "Grover Furr: "Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform, Part One." Cultural Logic. Cultural Logic, 2005. Web. 13 Jun 2010. [Tienes que estar registrado y conectado para ver este vínculo]

Stalin and Ukraine

The following is the text to the YouTube video called "Stalin and Ukraine." The bulk of the information comes from the book cited at the end written by Douglas Tottle. Tottle wrote his book through interviewing many Ukrainian immigrants and descendants of Ukrainian immigrants. One would assume this mostly took place in Canada, where his book was published.

During the Plenum of the Party Central Committee in October 1931, regional Party secretaries insisted that grain collection quotas be decreased due to a bad harvest. In response, Stalin called a meeting of Party secretaries in the grain regions and reduced the amount of grain that was to be collected. In the May of 1932, Stalin introduced a grain collection plan that required lower amounts than the last year (Davies and Harris, 132).

“But bear in mind that an exception must be made for the districts in Ukraine which have specially suffered.” – Stalin, letter to Kaganovich and Molotov, 1932 (ibid)

Any possible natural causes of a Ukrainian famine are always ignored by anti-Soviet scholars. They never mention natural occurrences like droughts. Nor do they ever mention saboteurs within the Soviet Union. In the book A History of Ukraine by Mikhail Hrushevsky , a man who was described by Ukrainian Nationalists themselves as Ukraine’s leading historian, the author states that a drought spread throughout Ukraine. But nowhere does he mention any man-made famine-genocide in the book. However, the book was published posthumously and updated by Ukrainian anti-communist Nationalists (Tottle, 91).

University professors Nicholas Riasnovsky and Michael Florinsky both mention a drought in their writings as well as saboteurs.

What really caused the conditions that could be misconstrued to look like a famine was the fact that farming was still privatized in Ukraine as well as the use of antiquated, backwards farming methods. When the time of collectivization came, the Kulaks, the class that owned the land the peasants farmed, resisted fiercely. They slaughtered livestock and destroyed crops. Their resistance even reached Civil War proportions in some areas of Ukraine. Frederick Schuman, a professor of government at Williams College, traveled through Ukraine at this time and noted that the Kulaks were doing these things (Tottle, 93). Some Kulaks torched the collective farms and many more Kulaks refused to sow or reap their fields. All according to Schuman (Tottle, 94).

Because of the Kulak resistance and their sabotage technique of livestock slaughter, the number of horned cattle in the Soviet Union went from 70 million to only 38 million, and hogs decreased from 20 million to 12 million (Tottle, 94).

Some Nationalists even give enthusiastic descriptions of sabotage against agriculture that Kulaks and themselves carried out. Isaac Mazepa, for example, was the former Premier of a Nationalist government in Ukraine. He himself admits that sabotage by the Kulaks caused a significant portion of the so-called genocide famine.

“At first there were disturbances in the collective farms or else the communists officials and their agents were killed, but later a system of passive resistance was favored which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks’ plans for the sowing and gathering of the harvest. Whole tracts were left unsown….in many areas, especially in the south, 20, 40, even 50 percent was left in the fields, and was either not collected at all or ruined in the threshing.” - Isaac Mazepa (Tottle, 94)

Local organizations in charge of collectivization sometimes even issued incorrect instructions (Tottle, 96). This, coupled with the fact that peasants who were used to backwards farming techniques were being quickly transitioned into a newer form of farm and equipment also made things in Ukraine a little rough (Tottle, 95).

The first news of the Ukrainian famine, this supposed genocide, appeared in the press of Nazi Germany in 1933 (Tottle, 2). Hardly a reliable source given the strong anti-communist views and policies of the Hitler regime. The tales of the supposed genocide were propagated even further when Ukrainian Nationalists, who were far right-wing and even Nazi collaborators, arrived in North America (Tottle, 3).

It was Thomas Walker, a journalist employed by American media baron William Hearst, who provided the first American documentation of the so-called famine-genocide in Ukraine when he visited the USSR for thirteen days. He was hyped as a known journalist who studied Russian affairs (Tottle, 5). Louis Fischer, an American writer for the New Republic and The Nation, had also traveled to the Soviet Union. He was also interested in the Soviet Union, but he had never heard of Walker nor did he know anyone who did. Fischer did some research of his own and found out that Walker did go to the USSR, but not during the times he said he did (Tottle, 7). Walker claims to have visited the famine-suffering areas of Ukraine in late spring, but Fischer pointed out that several of Walker’s photographs of the supposed famine victims show winter and fall seasons in the background (Tottle, .

At the same time Fischer noted that Lindsay Parrott, a Hearst correspondent who also went to Ukraine, claimed he never saw any signs of a famine (Tottle, . James Casey, an American investigative writer, found that the Art department under Hearst was ordered to search the archives for old pictures from before the Ukrainian famine so that they could be touched up and relabeled as being from Soviet Ukraine. One photo was actually discovered to have been from World War I, showing an Austro-Hungarian soldier next to a dead horse (Tottle, 9). Some of the photos used by the Hearst media originally appeared in a London Daily Express article about a supposed famine in Belgorod, located in Russia proper as opposed to Ukraine (Tottle, 11).

It was later discovered that Thomas Walker was actually an escaped convict named Robert Green. Here is an excerpt from a July 16, 1935 article regarding his arrest after being discovered as a fraud. “Robert Green, a writer of syndicated articles about the conditions in Ukraine, who was indicted last Friday by a Federal grand jury on a charge of passport fraud, pleaded guilty yesterday….the judge learned that Green was a fugitive from Colorado State Prison, where he escaped after having served two years of an eight-year term for forgery.” A journalist covering Green/Walker’s trial noted that Green himself admitted that his photos of the Ukrainian famine were faked (Tottle, 11).

Hearst was known for years as “America’s Number One Fascist.” As a matter of fact, he once employed Mussolini as a writer. William Hearst visited Nazi Germany in 1934 and met with top Nazi officials (Tottle, 13).

Among the Ukrainian Nationalist writers of the book The Black Deeds of the Kremlin is Petro Pavlovich. In Pavlovich’s original account of Stalinist terror in Ukraine, titled Crimes in Vynnitsya, he praises Hitler. As a matter of fact, he collaborated with the Nazis in order to publish his account and unite Ukrainians under the banner of fascism (Tottle, 37). Another Nazi collaborator who helped write The Black Deeds of the Kremlin is former SS member and SS propagandist Oleksander Hay-Holowko (Tottle, 41). As a matter of fact, Hay-Holowko himself describes attending a 1933 New Years party in Ukraine where there was an abundance of food (Tottle, 140).

Post-war testimonies of German soldiers reveals that the unearthing of mass graves in Ukraine was simply Nazi propaganda (Tottle, 37).

According to Israel’s Yad Washem Studies, German Senior Lieutenant Erwin Bingel witnessed the SS and Ukrainian militias commit a mass execution of Ukrainian Jews in Vynnitsya Park. He said the Nazis later returned to the same park in order to examine exhumed mass graves of “Soviet murder victims.” When in reality the dead bodies were Nazi victims (Tottle, 40).

The supposed death toll for Ukraine ranges from estimates of one million up to ten million (Tottle, 45). Why should we trust academics if they can’t even get their numbers straight?

In 1934, the British Foreign Office stated, “But there is no information to support Lord Charnwood’s apparent suggestion that the Soviet government has pursued a policy of deliberate impoverishment of agricultural districts of the country, whether or not their policy is considered to have had that effect” (Tottle, 48).

Works Cited:

Davies, Sarah, and James Harris. Stalin: A New History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print.

Tottle, Douglas. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism - The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books, 1987. Print.

Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military

The following is the text to the YouTube video called "Stalin's Purge of the Soviet Military."

In May 1937, Marshal Tukhachevsky and Commanders Yakir, Uborevich, Eideman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov were arrested. They had been under suspicion since the beginning of that month. Earlier in May, the Commissar system, used during the Civil War, was restored. This reflected the fear of Bonapartist tendencies within the army.

When German officer Blomberg visited the USSR in 1928, he found that, in his own words, “Purely military points of view step more and more into the foreground; everything else is subordinated to them.”

In 1930, ten percent of the Soviet officer corps was made up of former Czarist officers. Many soldiers had come from the countryside, where Kulak (landed, upper peasant) influence was still strong. So counter-revolutionary views were pretty strong in the Soviet military.

The French Deuxieme Bureau told journalist Alexander Werth that Tukhachevsky was pro-German. Czech officials told Werth that Tukhachevsky, on a visit to Prague, got drunk and said that an agreement with Hitler was the only hope for Czechoslovakia and Russia, and then he went on to verbally abuse Stalin. In the book “The Reign of Stalin” it was stated that Tukhachevsky spoke highly of the British Army and how Britain’s soldiers and people kept themselves subordinate to the British government.

US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, said in 1937 that there was, indeed, a plot for a coup d’etat. This coup wasn’t necessarily anti-Stalin, but it was anti-political and anti-party according to Davies.

Robert Coulondre, French Ambassador to Moscow, said that the Lithuanian Minister had told him there was a plot to install a military dictatorship after the coup against Stalin.

Trotskyist author Isaac Deutscher once said, “All the non-Stalinist variants do concur the following: that the generals did indeed plan a coup d’etat.” Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, and Primakov were also in the plot according to him.

In the March 25, 1937 issue of a Paris Menshevik newspaper, the Socialist Courier, they wrote, "There is no question that the Germans have managed to have their agents in the U.S.S.R. penetrate the most responsible positions."

In his diary, Gobbels, a top Nazi official, wrote about some comments from Hitler on the case of a conspiracy in the Red Army. He basically said that Stalin had strengthened the Red Army be getting rid of defeatist and opposition currents within it. Who would know better about the strength of the Soviet Army than those who had to fight against it?

Kolkowicz, who was conducting a study for the US Army, said that, “Stalin embarked on a massive program that was intended to provide the Soviet Army with modern weapons, equipment and logistics. But he remained wary of the military’s tendency towards elitism and exclusiveness.”

Soviet General Vlasov played an important role in defending Moscow in 1941. He was captured by the Germans in 1942, and he decided to offer his services to Germany. After an interview with Himmler in 1944, he was allowed to create a pro-Nazi army in Russia called the Russian Liberation Army. Vlasov also called for an army free from Party control that was staffed with elitist professionals.

Other captured Soviet officers also stabbed the USSR in the back. To name a few, Major Generals Trukhin, Malyshkin, and Zakutny. There were many others who I didn’t name.

Then there was Soviet colonel G.A Tokaev who defected to the UK in 1948. He wrote a book called “Comrade X” where he admitted that he was part of an anti-communist organization within the military. He had joined it as early as 1933. At the head of the organization, he admits, there was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. The colonel considered the UK to be the most free and democratic country in the world!

Nazis had infiltrated many governments and militaries throughout Europe, including in France and Romania. To argue that there was no Nazi infiltration in the USSR, and that such a thing was impossible, is to ignore history and reality.

In short, the purge was justified and necessary to preserve socialism.

Source:
“Another View of Stalin” by Ludo Martens
“MIM Theory 6: The Stalin Issue” published by MIM