50th anniversary of the death of Comrade Stalin


Fifty years ago, on March 5 1953, Joseph Stalin, the architect of socialism and the inspirer of the victory against the mighty Nazi war machine, breathed his last. Just as during his life, so in his death, he continued to be hated as no-one else by the ideologues of the imperialist bourgeoisie and its agents in the working-class movement – the social-democratic, revisionist and Trotskyist fraternity. And this for the simple reason that JV Stalin was a fearless and faithful friend of the international proletariat and a resolute defender of socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was under his leadership that the Soviet proletariat showed the whole world that the working class can not only destroy the old society, based on the exploitation and oppression of one human being by another, and one nation by another, but also build a new one, based on mutual co-operation, fraternal solidarity and devoted to “the securing of the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society through the continuous expansion and perfection of Socialist production on the basis of higher techniques” (Stalin)

As the building of such a society is anathema to the bourgeoisie, it is hardly surprising that the stupendous successes of the USSR in the field of socialist industrialisation and collectivisation, science and technology, art and culture, health and education, should evoke the utmost of hatred on the part of the exploiters of all countries, not only for the socialist system in the USSR but also for the man under whose inspiring leadership these successes were accomplished.

Thus it was that the 50th anniversary of this truly heroic Marxist-Leninist became the pretext for yet another onslaught of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois anti-communist filth directed at Stalin. Various ignoramuses, who know next to nothing about Marxism-Leninism, the USSR or Stalin, have cropped up to contribute to this anti-communist tirade. This is how it should be, for why should the bourgeoisie be expected to paint an objective and true picture of the life of someone who did so much damage to their interests.

Precisely for this reason, the proletariat and the oppressed people of the world love and revere Stalin. As a mark of admiration for the colossal achievements of the soviet proletariat, under the banner of Marxism-Leninism and the leadership of the CPSU(B), headed by Stalin, we shall be publishing a series of articles in this and the following issues, highlighting the epoch-making victories of the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s leadership of the CPSU(B).

In this issue, we reproduce a brief survey of Stalin’s life by Andrew Rothstein and Harry Pollitt’s tribute to Stalin, both of which were published on 6 March 1953 in the Daily Worker, the organ of the CPGB. It is a measure of the degeneration, which was set in train by the triumph of Khruschevite revisionism at the 20th party congress of the CPSU(B) in 1956, that the USSR is no more and the Morning Star, the successor to the Daily Worker, did not have a single word to say on the 50th anniversary of Stalin’s death.