Refutation of bourgeois attempts at falsification of the glorious achievements of Soviet communism
Over the past few years, the
imperialist bourgeoisie has intensified its efforts to falsify history by
maligning the achievements of communism, while at the same time hiding the
crimes committed by imperialism. In particular, an attempt is being made to
equate communism with fascism. The so-called Prague Declaration, recently
circulated in the European Parliament under the title European Conscience
and Communism is precisely such an example of the attempts to equate Soviet
communism with Hitlerite fascism in an echo of the reactionary writings of
George Orwell and Robert Conquest. The recent release of the film Katyn
by Andrzej Wadja regarding the alleged massacre of Polish officers by the Red
Army in 1940 is in the same vein. In an outrageous misinterpretation of
history, it is repeatedly asserted that the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact
of 23 August 1939 was nothing short of Soviet collusion with Hitler. “The
Kremlin should admit that Stalin was Hitler’s accomplice before 1941”,
stated a recent issue of The Economist,[1] conveniently
forgetting that, driven by a visceral hatred of the socialist Soviet Union,
Britain and France had a year before, on 30 September 1938, signed the Munich
Agreement with Hitler, which practically handed the fate of Czechoslovakia to
Nazi Germany.
Surely The Economist can’t have been unaware
of the following facts:
·
On 1 January 1970, when some secret Foreign Office files were
made public on the expiry of the statutory 30 years, the Guardian,
published from the same city as The Economist, wrote: “The Cabinet
papers for 1939, published this morning, show that the Second World War would
not have started that year, had the Chamberlain government accepted or
understood Russian advice that an alliance between Britain, France and Soviet
Union would prevent war because Hitler would not risk a conflict against powers
on two fronts.”
·
Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary (who later became prime
minister), is on record as saying: “Hardly anyone could doubt that had the
alliance between Russia, Britain and the United States, which was established
at Yalta, been formed in 1939, the war would never have taken place.”
·
André Beaufre, French General, commenting on the delay in the
setting up of the coalition against Germany, observed “When one reads today
the draft of the Anglo-French-Soviet Treaty one cannot help thinking how blind
and petty-minded our diplomacy must have been in solving this problem that it could miss the opportunity to conclude so important a Treaty.”
The reason for the
rejection of the Soviet proposal was the desire of Britain and France to appease Hitler in an attempt to direct his aggression in an easterly direction against the
Soviet Union, and thus kill two birds with one stone – destroy the socialist
Soviet Union and weaken imperialist Germany. Such motives were frankly, if
cynically, articulated by the US Senator (later President), Harry Truman. The
day after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Truman said: “If we see that Germany is winning, we should help the Russians, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany and that way we let them kill as many as possible” (New York Times, 24
June 1941).
Truman’s words were an
expression of the hope that Hitlerite Germany would destroy the socialist USSR and reintegrate it into the world capitalist system, while at the same time weakening
itself as a rival imperialist power.
The interpretation of history has a bearing on the
future. Those who are bent upon denying the working class and the oppressed
people a bright future are equally bent upon distorting and falsifying history
– all in the interests of prolonging the life of the moribund imperialist
system. The fact of the matter is that, with each passing day, capitalism is
discrediting itself and revealing its utter bankruptcy. The current crisis of
overproduction, the near meltdown of the imperialist financial system, the
burgeoning state deficits consequent upon the bail-outs of giant banks by the
various imperialist governments, the resultant cuts in social expenditure, mass
unemployment and misery, are beginning to alienate working people from the
bourgeois system of production, even if unconsciously. In the territories of
the former Soviet Union and the east European socialist countries, there is
growing discontent among the population against the depredations brought about
by the restoration of capitalism and a nostalgia for the former socialist
society. This growing nostalgia for the socialist system is behind the current
efforts to distort history and equate communism with fascism. The demolition
of Soviet war memorials in the Baltic states and Georgia, of the Palast der
Republik in Berlin are symptomatic of the vindictive bourgeoisie facing a
massive crisis. Just as Cato the Elder, through sheer hatred of Rome’s enemies, had declared “Carthage must be destroyed”, the present
imperialist bourgeoisie says: “The magnificent achievements of communism
must be obliterated from the memory of common humanity”.
Everything is being turned on its head. The
liberation by the Red Army of the peoples of eastern and central Europe from the jackboot of German fascism is being described as a subjugation of the
peoples in question. The heroic and successful fight by the Red Army and the
Soviet people, resulting in the crowning victory over fascism, is sought to be
belittled. It is a matter of great shame that some of the descendants of the
victims of Nazism are collaborating with the arch-reactionaries in this
anti-communist crusade.
“The bourgeoisie,” said Engels, “turns
everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is a part of
its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods; it falsified
the writing of history. And the best-paid historiography is that which is best
falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie” (Material for the History of
Ireland, 1870).
This shrewd observation of Engels’ should be
firmly kept in mind when judging the controversies raging between the
proletarian and the bourgeois camps concerning the interpretation of the causes
and the events that led to the second world war, the role in this war of the
imperialist camp on the one hand and the socialist Soviet Union on the other
and, finally, the results of this war. These controversies are not merely
concerned with our view of the past, important though that is. They are, more
importantly, meant to influence and shape the future.
The imperialist ruling class can hardly be expected
to admit that modern war is a product of, and inseparable from, imperialism;
that tens of millions of people were slaughtered during the war in order to
decide which group of imperialist bandits – Anglo-American-French or
German-Italian-Japanese, was to have the greatest share in plundering the
world; that the elimination of war is possible only through the complete
elimination of the division of society into classes; that it is “impossible
to escape imperialist war, and imperialist world which inevitably engenders
imperialist war, it is impossible to escape that inferno, except by a Bolshevik
struggle and a Bolshevik revolution” (‘The Fourth Anniversary of the
October Revolution’, V I Lenin, 14 October 1921).
In addition, the ruling classes of the imperialist
‘democracies’ were all complicit in the rise and strengthening of fascism, a
fact which they cannot, for obvious reasons, be expected to own up to. This
being the case, the ruling class of every imperialist country is obliged willy
nilly to falsify the writing of history, since actual history brings out in
bold relief the genocidal and murderous nature of imperialism – this
bloodthirsty monster that has spilt such colossal amounts of blood, reduced
humanity to starvation, misery and degradation, and put the fate of human
civilisation at risk.
The Soviet victory in the second world war was a
disaster for imperialism. If the first world war had ushered in the Great
October Socialist Revolution and brought into existence the mighty USSR, the
second world war gave birth to an entire socialist camp, which encompassed a
third of the globe and a quarter of the world’s population, and which shook
imperialism to its very foundations. Just as the war itself was a product of
imperialism, the victory of the Soviet Union in this titanic struggle was
firmly rooted in the system of socialism. Precisely for this reason, it has
been the unceasing endeavour of the imperialist bourgeoisie to distort and
falsify the history of the second world war – for the sole purpose of
prettifying the nature and role of imperialism and maligning that of the Soviet Union.
Every anniversary of the victory over fascism, this
festival of progressive humanity, only serves to become an occasion for the
bourgeois falsification of history.
Fifteen years ago, on the occasion of the 50th
anniversary of the victory against fascism, we were treated to headlines such
as “Germany’s fate settled in the Atlantic”, “How Hitler was defeated by his
own madness”, etc, when the fact is, as every well-informed person knows,
that the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed on the eastern front, in the titanic
battles of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk. Those who assert otherwise
would do well to remember the following observations of the wartime statesman
of Britain, France and the United States.
Churchill: “It’s the Russian army that
tore the guts out of the German military machine”.
General Charles de Gaulle: “The Russian
efforts, inflicting irreparable damage to the German war machine, were the main
factor in the liberation of our country’s territory”.
Franklin D Roosevelt: “Russian armies are
killing more Germans and destroying axis
material than all the 25 nations put together”.
Further, in his letter of February 1943, US President Roosevelt wrote to Stalin as follows:
“On behalf of the people of the United States, I want to express to the Red Army on its 25th anniversary our profound
admiration for its magnificent achievements unsurpassed in all history. For
many months, in spite of many tremendous losses of supplies, transportation and
territory, the Red Army denied victory to a most powerful enemy. It checked
him at Stalingrad, at Moscow, at Voronezh, in the Caucasus and finally at the
immortal battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army not only defeated the enemy but
launched the great offensive, which is still moving forward along the whole
front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Red Army and the Russian people
have surely started the Hitler forces on the road to ultimate defeat”.
Finally, US Secretary of State, Stettinius: “The
American people should remember that they were on the brink of disaster in
1942. If the Soviet Union had failed to hold on its front, Germany would have been in a position to conquer Great Britain. They would have been able to
overrun Africa too, and in this event they would have established a foothold in
Latin America.”
Equally, all objective observers agree that western
imperialism went to war against Nazi Germany not in the interests of freedom
and the fight against fascism but to protect its own colonialist and
imperialist interests after all attempts at safeguarding the same through
appeasement had resulted in an ignominious and scandalous collapse. Here,
briefly, are the facts that led to Britain and France declaring war against Germany.
Imperialism’s hatred for
the USSR
All imperialists, of the Nazi and ‘democratic’
variety alike, and all imperialist politicians, social democrats no less than
Conservatives, were fired by an intense hatred of the USSR, the only socialist
state at the time, for the simple reason that through planned socialist
construction, she was building a new life for her people, free of exploitation,
oppression, unemployment, misery and degradation. And this at a time when the
entire capitalist world was in the iron grip of the hitherto worst slump, which
had forced 50 million working people on to the scrap heap, rendering them
jobless, homeless and hungry. The Soviet Union alone stood as a shining beacon
and an example to the world’s workers of how their lives too could change
qualitatively for the better if only the state power was in the hands of the
working class. Encircled as she was by bloodthirsty imperialists, the USSR was well aware of the dangers confronting it. Its leadership followed an extremely
complicated, and singularly scientific policy on the question of war with
imperialism, which may be summarised as follows.
Soviet position on war
with imperialism
First, it was the endeavour of the Soviet Union not to embroil herself in a war with imperialism.
Second, since it was not entirely up to her
to avoid such a war, then, if imperialism should impose a war on the Soviet Union, the latter should not find herself in the position of having to fight
alone, let alone having to face the combined onslaught of the principal
imperialist countries.
Third, to this end, divisions between the
fascist imperialist states on the one hand and the ‘democratic’ imperialist
states on the other should be fully exploited. These divisions were real, based
on the material interests of the two groups of states under consideration.
Uneven development of capitalism had seen to it that Germany, Italy and Japan, having spurted ahead in the capitalist development of their economies (a
development that had rendered obsolete the old division of the world), were
demanding a new division, which could not but encroach upon the material
interests of the ‘democratic’ imperialist states. There was thus real scope for
this conflict of interests to be exploited by the socialist USSR.
Fourth, to this end, the USSR, pursuing a very complicated foreign policy, did its best to conclude a collective
security pact with the ‘democratic’ imperialist states, providing, in the event
of such aggression taking place, for collective action against the aggressors.
Fifth, when the ‘democratic’ imperialist
states, overcome by their hatred of communism, refused to conclude a collective
security pact with the USSR and continued their policy of appeasement of the
fascist states, in particular that of Nazi Germany in an effort to direct her
aggression in an eastwardly direction against the Soviet Union, the latter was
forced to try some other method of protecting the interests of the socialist
motherland of the international proletariat. Addressing the 18th Party Congress
of the CPSU in March, 1939, Stalin exposed the motives behind the policy of
non-intervention adopted by the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries,
particularly Britain and France, thus:
“The policy of non-intervention reveals an
eagerness, a desire . . . not to hinder Germany, say . . . from embroiling
herself in a war with the Soviet Union, to allow all the belligerents to sink
deeply in the mire of war, to encourage them surreptitiously in this; to allow
them to weaken and exhaust one another; and then, when they have become weak
enough, to appear on the scene with fresh strength, to appear, of course, ‘in
the interests of peace’, and to dictate conditions to the enfeebled
belligerents.
“Cheap
and easy!” (Stalin, Problems of Leninism, Moscow, 1953, p754)
Further, referring to the Munich agreement, which
surrendered Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Stalin continued: “one might think
that the districts of Czechoslovakia were yielded to Germany as the price of an
undertaking to launch war on the Soviet Union . . .” (Ibid, p756)
By way of outlining the tasks of Soviet foreign
policy, as well as by way of a veiled warning to the ruling classes in the
‘democratic’ imperialist countries, Stalin went on to stress the need “to be
cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who
are accustomed to have others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them”. (Ibid,
p759)
Thus it was that in the face of intransigent
refusal on the part of Britain and France to conclude a collective security
pact, and in the aftermath of the Munich agreement, about which the Soviet
Union was not even consulted, that the latter turned the tables on the foreign policy
of Britain and France by signing, on 23 August 1939, the German-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact.
Sixth, in signing this pact, the USSR not
only ensured that she would not be fighting Germany alone, but also that the
latter would be fighting against the very powers who had been trying, by their
refusal to agree on collective security, to embroil the USSR in a war with
Germany. On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, the
Anglo-French ultimatum expired, and Britain and France were at war with Germany.
Of course, it is understandable that imperialism
even today should attack and accuse the USSR and Stalin of ‘betrayal’
for concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany (conveniently ‘forgetting’
that the real betrayal had taken place at Munich a year earlier), for this Pact
advanced the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity from the yoke of
fascism.
It is understandable that imperialism should today
heap abuse on the Soviet Union and Stalin, for the Soviet-German non-aggression
pact turned the tables on Anglo-French imperialism, with its policy of turning
Hitlerite Germany against the Soviet Union. In pursuit of this policy Britain and France had turned a blind eye while the Hitlerite Nazis tore up all the restrictions on
German militarism imposed by the Versailles Treaty. They had allowed the
expansion and rearmament of German military forces as well as the organisation
of a powerful air force. A new Anglo-German naval agreement in 1935 allowed Germany to expand its Navy at frenetic speed in defiance of the Versailles Treaty – and this too
after Germany had withdrawn from the League of Nations and repudiated the
Treaty of Versailles. In 1936, Saar was handed over to Germany; and in March 1936 Anglo-French imperialism stood by while German troops entered the Rhineland. In March 1938, there was no protest when Germany annexed Austria. The final act in this nefarious game was the Munich Agreement of 30 September
1938.
In addition, there was enormous economic assistance
given by Britain and the US to strengthen Germany. A German capitalist in
prison at Nuremberg following the Second World War had this to say to his
British and American prosecutors: “If you want to put on trial the
industrialists who helped Germany arm itself, you must put on trial your own
industrialists”.[2]
An enquiry by the US Congress during the War
concluded that the Wehrmacht would have been unable to fight the war without
trucks built by the US-owned Opel and Ford plants, aircraft engines and special
equipment supplied by Lorenz Plants, and without oil supplies from the US.
Seventh, the provisions of the additional
secret protocol went far enough to safeguard the Soviet ‘spheres of interests’,
which proved vital to Soviet defences when the war actually reached her.
Finally, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression
Pact bought the Soviet Union an extremely valuable period of two years for
strengthening her defence preparedness before she entered a war she knew she
could not stay out of forever.
When the war was finally forced on the Soviet Union, she made the most heroic contribution in the crowning and glorious victory of
the allies against Nazi Germany. The Red Army and the Soviet people showed
their tenacity, and the tenacity and superiority of the socialist system, by
defeating the Nazis in the USSR and pursuing them all the way to Berlin, liberating in the process country after country from the Nazi jackboot occupation
and bringing socialism to Eastern Europe.
All revolutionary and honest bourgeois historians
and politicians agree on the above summary. Only the most die-hard
anti-communists, particularly the Trotskyites, ever dare to dispute it.
Bourgeois predictions of
Soviet collapse
By the summer of 1940, through a combination of
luck and some bold strokes, Hitler’s armies had chased the British off the
continent of Europe and thus become the masters of western and central Europe, whose people groaned under fascist occupation. Hitler was at last in a position to
wage war against the USSR, which he launched under the codename Operation
Barbarossa at 3.30am on 22 June 1941.
When, on that fateful day, the German army crossed
the border into the USSR, most western bourgeois politicians and military
strategists gave her no more than six weeks before what they regarded as her
inevitable collapse in the face of the mighty German armed forces. Their
judgement had obviously been coloured by the fate of countries such as Poland and France, each of which lay prostrate within less than two weeks of being invaded by the
German army. They were affected too by the fate of the British army, so
humiliatingly expelled from the Continent in the May 1940 fiasco, which goes by
the name of the Dunkirk spirit. Furthermore, the bourgeois ideologues believed
in their own anti-Soviet propaganda to the effect that the Soviet army had been
‘decimated’ and ‘decapitated’ as a result of the trial and execution of
Tukhachevsky and other army officers on treason charges and was therefore in no
position to wage war; that the Bolshevik Party had been ‘denuded’ of leadership
consequent upon the three Moscow Trials of the leading Trotskyites and
Bukharinites on charges of treason, murder, sabotage and wrecking; that as a
result of ‘forced’ collectivisation the peasantry was sullen and therefore most
likely to revolt against the Soviet regime in the conditions of war. In all
this, the bourgeois ideologists were cruelly deluded.
Even before the war against the Soviet Union
started, the chief imperialist ideologue, namely, Leon Trotsky, made, with
malicious glee, a number of predictions about the ‘inevitable’ defeat of
the USSR in the then coming war. In his Revolution Betrayed, he wrote:
“Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming
great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question we will answer as
frankly; if the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense, imperialism
is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the west,
imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October
Revolution.” (Revolution Betrayed, p. 216)
Bourgeois predictions
belied
Not only Trotsky, but also the imperialist
bourgeoisie (which paid Trotsky so well, and for whom it opened the columns of
its press, to write such rubbish and to spew out so much anti-Soviet venom)
believed in these baseless assertions. It therefore came as a total surprise to
the imperialists when the Soviet Union, far from collapsing under Nazi attack,
proved to be the only force, not only to withstand but also to defeat and smash
to smithereens the Nazi war machine.
The Red Army and Soviet people, united as one under
the leadership of the CPSU and their Supreme Commander Joseph Stalin, exploded
this myth of Nazi invincibility. Soviet victories in the titanic battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad and Berlin will forever be cherished not only by the
peoples of the former, great and glorious Soviet Union, but also by all
progressive humanity.
Each of these battles involved upwards of a million
men on each side. In the words of Ian Grey:
“The Battle of Moscow had been an epic event . .
. It had involved more than 2 million men, 2,500 tanks, 1,800 aircraft and
25,000 guns. Casualties had been horrifying in scale. For the Russians it had
ended in victory. They had suffered the full impact of the German ‘Blitzkrieg’
offensive and, notwithstanding their losses . . . they had been able to mount
an effective counterattack. They had begun to destroy the myth of German
invincibility . . .”[3]
In this battle the Germans lost more than half a
million soldiers, 1,300 tanks, 2,500 guns, 15,000 trucks and much other
equipment.
The defeat of Germany at Moscow had great
international significance and was greeted with jubilation throughout the
world; from then on all progressive humanity linked that victory to its hopes
for an approaching liberation from the fascist yoke.
Retreating German soldiers in Istra near Moscow wrote on the walls “Farewell Moscow, we are off to Berlin”, to which the
Soviet soldiers added a rejoinder: “We’ll get to Berlin too”.
“After the defeat of Germans before Moscow, the
strategic initiative on all sectors of the Soviet-German front passed to the
Soviet command . . . After the defeat of the Nazis at Moscow, not only ordinary
Germans but many German officers and generals were convinced of the might of
the Soviet state and recognised that the Soviet armed forces represented an
insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of Hitler’s objectives.” [4]
The surrender on 1 February 1943 at Stalingrad, by the fascist General Von Paulus and 23 other generals, mesmerised the world.
The victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad was as incredible as it was heroic.
The Nazi losses in the Volga-Don-Stalingrad area were 1.5 million men, 3,500
tanks, 12,000 guns and 3,000 aircraft. Never before had the Nazi war machine,
which was accustomed to running over countries in days and weeks, suffered such
a humiliating defeat, a defeat “in which the flower of the German army
perished. It was against the background of this battle . . . that Stalin now
rose to almost titanic stature in the eyes of the world”. (Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin – A Political Biography, Pelican, London, 1966, p472)
From now on, nothing but defeat stared the Germans
in the face, leading all the way to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and the storming by it of the Reichstag on 30 April 1945 – the same day that the
Führer committed suicide. Six days later, Field-Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, acting
on behalf of the German High Command, surrendered to Marshall Zhukov.
Reasons for Soviet Victory
How was it possible for the USSR to succeed where others had failed so miserably? There are several reasons for this
success.
1. Elimination of the fifth column
First, because the CPSU and the Soviet regime
ruthlessly purged the party, the government and the armed forces of the fifth
column elements.
Far from weakening the Soviet regime or the Red
Army, these purges, along with the Moscow Trials, helped to eliminate precisely
those elements who would have collaborated with the Nazis and acted as a fifth
column. In the summer of 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, US Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E Davies wrote the following appraisal of the historical
significance of the Moscow trials:
“There was no so-called ‘internal aggression’ in
Russia cooperating with the German High Command. Hitler’s march into Prague in 1939 was accompanied by the active military support of Henlein’s organisations
in Czechoslovakia. The same thing was true of his invasion of Norway. There were no Sudeten Henleins, no Slovakian Tisos, no Belgian De Grelles, no
Norwegian Quislings in the Russian picture . .
“The story had been told in the so-called
treason or purge trials of 1937 and 1938 which I attended and listened to. In
re-examining the record of these cases and also what I had written at the time
. . . I found that practically every device of German fifth columnist activity,
as we now know it, was disclosed and laid bare by the confessions and testimony
elicited at these trials of self-confessed ‘Quislings’ in Russia . . .
“All of these trials, purges, and liquidations,
which seemed so violent at the time and shocked the world, are now quite
clearly a part of a vigorous and determined effort of the Stalin government to
protect itself not only from revolution from within but from attack from
without. They went to work thoroughly to clean up and clean out all treasonable
elements within the country. All doubts were resolved in favour of the government.
“There were no fifth columnists in Russia in 1941 – they had shot them. The purge had cleansed the country and rid it of
treason.”[5]
If we are to believe the bourgeois-Trotskyist
drivel – that after the trials the USSR’s armed forces were left bereft of a
general staff – how, then are we to explain the existence in the Red Army of
such brilliant and legendary generals, whose exploits are known the world over,
as Zhukov, Chuikov, Shtemenko, Yeremenko, Timoshenko, Vasilevsky, Sokolovsky,
Rokossovsky, Koniev, Voroshilov, Budenny, Mekhlis, Kulik and many, many more?
2. Socialism
Second, the USSR was successful because she had
been building up her industry and collectivising her agriculture on the lines
of socialism. The implementation of such a programme, in addition to endowing
the USSR with material strength, brought a resurgence of proletarian pride in
their achievements, an ardent faith in the bright future of socialism, and a
grim determination to defend the gains of socialism against external and
internal enemies alike. But this programme did not fall from heaven by itself,
fortuitously as it were. It had to be fought for tooth and nail against its
‘left’ (Trotskyist) and Right (Bukharinite) opponents; it had to survive the
wrecking, sabotage and treasonable conspiracies of the Trotskyite and
Bukharinite capitulators and despicable lackeys of imperialism. In a word, it
was a programme born out of, and amidst, conditions of fierce class struggle.
Although the Soviet Union would have dearly loved
to have been left alone in peace to continue the task of socialist
construction, her leadership was well aware of the dangers, of the fact that
imperialism would drag her into the war. It was not, therefore, within Soviet
power to avert involvement in a war with imperialism, for, as a Chinese saying
has it, ‘The tree may prefer the calm, but the wind will not subside’.
Precisely for this reason, with the impending war in mind, the leadership of
the CPSU had refused, in the teeth of opposition from the camp of the
Bukharinite capitulators, to slow down the tempo of industrialisation. Speaking
at the Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry on 4 February
1931, Stalin had this to say:
“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the
advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do
it, or we shall go under.” [6]
As a result of this gigantic effort, in 1940 gross
output of Soviet industry was 8.5 times greater than the industrial production
of tsarist Russia in 1913, whereas the output of large-scale industry had
increased 12-fold and machine-building 35-fold.
3. The Communist Party
of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik)
The third reason for Soviet victory was that they
were led by such a revolutionary proletarian party as the CPSU(B), whose
leadership as well as lower ranks were characterised by an unreserved spirit of
dedication to the cause of the proletariat, and a self-sacrificing heroism, and
commanded the respect of non-party masses. Of 27 million Soviets who died in
the war, 3 million belonged to the Communist Party. Millions of Soviet
soldiers, partisans and civilians went to their deaths with the slogan: ‘For
the motherland and for Comrade Stalin’ on their lips – such were the love and
affection with which the Soviet masses cherished their socialist motherland and
its helmsman, such was the charisma of Joseph Stalin, who inspired the Soviet
people to unprecedented feats of heroism.
4. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
The fourth reason for the victory of the Soviet
Union was the existence of this unique institution in the history of humanity,
namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – a multi-national state
established by the victorious proletariat consequent upon the Great Socialist
October Revolution, which had outlawed exploitation of one human being by
another within each of its constituent parts, and exploitation of one nation by
another. In truth, this was a free and fraternal association of dozens of
nations who lived together to construct a common bright future, and where
injury to one was regarded as an injury to all.
It was in the defence of this USSR that the Soviet people were prepared to make the enormous sacrifices that they did
make and suffer the devastation that they did suffer. To defend the USSR, 27 million Soviet people paid with their lives. These 27 million represented 13.5%
of the pre-war Soviet population. In the 1,418 days of the war (22 June 1941
to 9 May 1945), the Soviet Union lost 9 lives every minute, 857 every hour and
14,000 every day. 25 million Soviet people were rendered homeless. In the end
the Soviet people were victorious. Through this victory, they not only cleared
the Nazis from Soviet soil, but also liberated 113 million people in the lands
lying to the west of the USSR. 300,000 Soviet soldiers died liberating Poland from the Nazis in 1944. It is nothing short of indecent ingratitude that the
present-day semi-fascist rulers of Poland and their imperialist masters try to
portray the Soviet role over Poland as an incoming colonial power rather than
an agent of liberation of the Polish people from Nazi fascism, and have even
gone to the absurd lengths of banning all Soviet symbols from depiction in
Poland (as a result of which the purported Soviet soldiers in the calumnious
film Katyn could not be shown wearing their hammer and sickle emblems on their
uniforms).
To put in perspective the relative contribution of
the various powers fighting against Germany and Japan, let it be remembered
that the US casualties in this war represented a mere 0.3% of its population,
and in the case of the UK, 0.6% of her population. In the Far East, in its
fight against Japanese fascism, China lost 20 million of her people. Thus it
can be seen that, of the 60 million lives lost in the Second World War, 47
million are accounted for by the Soviet Union and China. These are the two
countries that paid the heaviest price in the cause of the liberation of
humanity, and not the heroes of Normandy.
For every allied soldier, 40 Soviet soldiers died in
the war. 190 German divisions invaded the Soviet Union. 77% of the German
armed forces were mobilised against the USSR along the entire Soviet front. The
length of the Soviet front during the war years varied from 2,200 to 6,200
kilometres, while the front of the allies never exceeded 800 kilometres after
the Normandy landing. Germany suffered by far its heaviest losses on the
Soviet-German front, representing more than 73% of its losses in manpower, 75%
in tanks and aircraft and 74% in artillery.
ABSENCE OF A SECOND FRONT
In the first few weeks of the war the Soviet Union suffered enormous losses. These are to be explained not only by the surprise
German attack and earlier Nazi mobilisation but also the absence of a second
front.
In the absence of such a front, the German fascists
were not compelled to dissipate their forces and to wage war on two fronts, in
the west and in the east. Thus the German rear in the west was secured and this
enabled Germany to move all its troops against the USSR, which single-handedly
fought against the forces of Germany and her Finnish, Rumanian, Italian and
Hungarian allies.
In the first world war there were two fronts, and
therefore Germany was able to station only 85 of its 220 divisions on the
Russian front. If one takes into account the forces of Germany’s allies during the first world war, there were 127 German divisions stationed on
the Russian front.
In stark contrast, there was no second front during
the second world war, with the result that of the 256 German fascist divisions,
176 were stationed on the Soviet front. If we add to these 22 Rumanian, 14
Finnish, 10 Italian, 1 Slovak, 1 Spanish and 13 Hungarian divisions, this
brings the number of fascist divisions on the eastern front close to 240. The
remaining divisions of Germany and her allies performed garrison service in
occupied countries such as France, Belgium, Norway, Holland, Yugoslavia,
Poland, Czechoslovakia etc, while a few fought in Libya for Egypt against
Britain.
“Because of the absence of a second front, Germany was able to keep as little as 20 percent of its armed forces on other fronts and in
occupied countries.” (Zhukov, ibid, p115)
Thus 80 percent of the Nazi armed forces were
concentrated in the east, along the entire front from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea.
As early as May 1942, Soviet Foreign Minister
Molotov reached a complete agreement with Britain and the United States that a second front would be opened in Europe in 1942. This agreement was confirmed
the following month. However, within a month of this confirmation, it had been
put on the back burner, causing Stalin to send a message, in which he hardly
bothered to disguise his anger, to Churchill: “As to . . . opening a second
front in Europe, I fear the matter is taking an improper turn.
“In view of the situation of the Soviet-German
front, I state most emphatically that the Soviet government cannot tolerate the
second front in Europe being postponed till 1943.”
On 12 August 1942, Stalin met Churchill and US presidential envoy Harriman in Moscow. During this meeting, Churchill, fully supported by
Harriman, refused to honour their earlier promise concerning the second front.
A day later, in his memorandum of 13 August 1942, Stalin conveyed the Soviet
anger at the Anglo-American betrayal of an agreement solemnly reached barely
three months earlier in these blunt terms:
“It will be recalled that the decision to open a
second front in Europe in 1942 was reached at the time of Molotov’s visit to
London, and found expression in the agreed Anglo-Soviet communiqué released on
12 June last.
“It will be recalled further”, Stalin
continued, “that the opening of a second front in Europe was designed to
divert German forces from the eastern front to the west, to set up in the west
a major centre of resistance to the German fascist forces and thereby ease the
position of the Soviet troops on the Soviet-German front in 1942.
“Needless to say, the Soviet high command, in
planning its summer and autumn operations, counted on a second front being
opened in Europe in 1942.
“It
will be readily understood that the British government’s refusal to open a
second front in Europe in 1942 delivers a mortal blow to Soviet public opinion,
which had hoped that the second front would be opened, complicates the position
of the Red Army at the front and injures the plans of the Soviet high command.
“I say nothing of the fact that the difficulties
in which the Red Army is involved through the refusal to open a second front in
1942 are bound to impair the military position of Britain and the other allies.
“I and my colleagues believe that the year 1942
offers the most favourable conditions for a second front in Europe, seeing that
nearly all the German forces – and their crack troops, too – are tied down on
the eastern front, while only negligible forces, and the poorest, too, are left
in Europe.
“It is hard to say whether 1943 will offer as
favourable for opening a second front as 1942. For this reason we think that it
is possible and necessary to open a second front in Europe in 1942.
“Unfortunately, I did not succeed in convincing
the British prime minister of this, while Mr Harriman, the US president’s representative at the Moscow talks, fully supported the prime minister.”
At the time when Stalin sent the above memorandum, although
the Battle of Moscow had been won by it, the USSR, approaching as she was the
Battle of Stalingrad, which was to test her strength to the utmost, could
hardly be said to have emerged from the woods. These were singularly difficult
times for her and the USSR was literally fighting for her life, for it would be
another five months before the turning point of the war, the Soviet victory and
Nazi rout at Stalingrad, would be achieved. Churchill could not but have been
aware of all this. And yet his response was to deny that Britain and the US had ever given any undertaking for opening a second front in Europe in 1942.
A month after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad,
Churchill sent a message to Stalin stating that preparations were under way for
a “cross-channel operation in August, in which British and United States units would participate”.
Stalin, quite correctly regarding this as yet
another dilatory ploy, wrote back asking for “shortening these limits to the
utmost for the opening of a second front in the west”, stressing “so
that the enemy should not be given a chance to recover, it is very important,
to my mind, that the blow from the west, instead of being put off till the
second half of the year, be delivered in spring or early summer”.
But to no avail.
Why no second front?
Why was there no second front in the west? There
was no second front because, almost right up to the end of the war, Britain and America never gave up their duplicitous desire to come to an understanding with Hitler
and leave him free to concentrate his forces on the Soviet frontier, or, if the
possibility should present itself, to march hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany on Moscow. Nothing came of those desires for a variety of reasons.
While being compelled by the force of circumstances
to be on the same side as the USSR during the second world war, while being
obliged to pay hypocritical public tributes to the resistance and heroic
fighting spirit displayed by the Red Army, the western imperialist leaders, in
particular Churchill, imbued as they were with a burning hatred of communism,
never gave up their anti-Soviet plots. Way back in October 1942, at the height
of the battle of Stalingrad, realising the impossibility of the Soviet Union being crushed by Nazi Germany, Churchill commenced his anti-Soviet planning.
Churchill’s real policy aims in the war were
revealed in a secret memorandum he dictated as early as October 1942, but whose
contents were not made public until Harold Macmillan revealed them to a meeting
of the European Community in Strasbourg in September 1949. Realising the real
possibility of the Nazis being destroyed by the Red Army, Churchill stated in
this memorandum that instead of carrying forward the policy of genuine
coalition with the Soviet Union, he believed “it would be a measureless
disaster if this Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the
ancient states of Europe …” In view of this he blocked the opening of the
second front.
In a speech that he made in Woodford, England, on
23 November 1954, Churchill boasted in these terms: “even before the war had
ended and while the Germans were still surrendering by hundreds of thousands, I
telegraphed Lord Montgomery, directing him to stack German arms so that they
could be easily issued again to the German soldiers, with whom we should have
to work if the Soviet advance continued”.
Plots for a new
anti-Soviet alliance
By the end of March 1945, the Nazi leadership,
fully aware that the game was up and the days of Nazi Germany strictly limited,
tried to turn the tide by a reversal of alliances, hoping to convince Britain
and the US that the real threat was the ‘red menace’ of ‘imperialist
Bolshevism’. In pursuit of precisely such a reversal of alliances, the German
armies, while in headlong retreat everywhere on the western front, offered very
stiff resistance on the eastern front. In reply to Churchill’s communication
dated 5 April 1945 that “the German armies in the west have been broken’,
Stalin expressed himself in the following terms on 7 April: ‘The Germans have
147 divisions on the eastern front. They could safely withdraw from 15 to 20
divisions from the eastern front to aid their forces on the western front.
“Yet they have not done so, nor are they doing
so. They are fighting desperately for Zemlenice, an obscure station in
Czechoslovakia, which they need as much as a dead man needs a poultice, but
they surrender without any resistance such important towns in the heart of
Germany as Osnabrück, Mannheim and Kassel.
“You will admit that this behaviour on the part
of the Germans is more than strange and unaccountable.”
Not so strange, considering that on the night of 23
April 1945, a mere two weeks after Stalin’s above communication to Churchill,
in a cellar of the Swedish consulate in the old Hanseatic port of Lübeck, Count
Folke Bernadotte, envoy from allegedly neutral Sweden to Nazi Germany, and
Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, held a secret meeting at which Himmler
signed a document of surrender to Britain and the US on the assumption that the
latter two countries would now take over the eastern front and march on Moscow,
hand in hand with Germany. Hearing of the death on 12 April 1945 of ‘Jewish’ Roosevelt, Goebbels really believed that the ‘miracle’ was in the making. That this was not
the case is solely to be explained by the fact that by the time of Himmler’s
secret meeting with Count Bernadotte, “Hitler’s fate in the bunker was
sealed by the Red Army advance. None the less, the Nazi leadership knew that
Churchill had grave doubts about the fate of eastern Europe if the Soviets
established hegemony. In the closing days of the war the analyses in London and Berlin were uncannily identical.” (Sunday Times, ibid,
our emphasis)
Earlier still, in the autumn of 1944, when on the
surface it appeared that the Allies were working single-mindedly in their final
drive to victory, Churchill, with the knowledge of the Americans, entered into
negotiations with Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, for a separate peace. The Soviet Union came to know of it and Stalin, in a telegram,
questioned Churchill. The latter was obliged to tender an abject apology, which
was accepted by Stalin.
So much, then, for the rubbish concerning British
imperialism’s fight against fascism.
Barely a month before the Potsdam Conference, in a
last-ditch effort to postpone the retirement, as agreed under the Tripartite
Accord reached at Yalta in February, of the American forces from the areas
occupied by them to their prescribed occupation zone, Churchill returned to his
Goebbelsian obsession with the Soviet Union and the descent of the iron curtain
in a letter of 4 June to Harry Truman. “I view with profound misgivings the
retreat of the American army to our line of occupation in the central sector,
thus bringing Soviet power into the heart of western Europe and the descent of
an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward.
“I had hoped that this retreat, if it had to be
made, would be accompanied by the settlement of many great things which would
be the true foundation of world peace.”
However, the facts on the ground made certain that
Truman had no choice but to comply with the Tripartite Accord. This was
especially so as the US still badly needed Soviet armed might for the war in
the east against Japan. The successful testing of the atom bomb by the US was shortly to change all this.
Within a few weeks of the defeat of Nazi Germany,
Churchill instructed the war cabinet to draw up a contingency plan for a
massive attack against the Red Army resulting in the ‘elimination of Russia’. This was revealed by documents released by the Public Record Office in the autumn
of 1998. Churchill’s plan, code-named Operation Unthinkable was detailed in a
top secret file entitled ‘Russia: Threat to Western Civilisation’. It envisaged
tens of thousands of British and US troops, supported by 100,000 defeated
German Nazi soldiers, turning on their wartime ally in a surprise attack
stretching from the Baltic to Dresden.
The plan was based on the assumption that the third
world war would begin on 1 July 1945 – that is, less than two months after VE
Day celebrations of the ‘Allied’ victory in Europe. However, the plan was
quickly squashed by the chiefs of staff who believed that it would involve Britain in a protracted and costly war with no certainty of victory.
The absence of a second front reveals clearly that
Britain and America had gone to war against Germany not to fight against
fascism, which both of them had done much to bolster up prior to the war, in
the hope of hurling it against the USSR; that they had gone to war not in the
interests of liberty and self-determination of nations, but, on the contrary,
to preserve their colonial and imperialist interests against the encroachment
of rapacious German imperialism. Of all the allied powers, the Soviet Union alone entered the war and continued it until victory in the interests of
socialism, liberty and the right of the oppressed and colonial peoples to
self-determination.
D-Day: the long-delayed
second front
After the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, the Red Army’s inexorable march to Berlin began. No force on earth could stop it.
Such a prospect could not but alarm and terrify Anglo-American imperialism. If
the Red Army were to liberate the continent of Europe from Nazi occupation and
tyranny all by herself, as she certainly had then the capacity to do, surely
that would doom the rule of capital. The D-Day landings, of which we hear so
much nonsense every year, were launched not to free Europe and to defeat the
Nazi armed forces; for the Nazi army had been smashed single-handedly in the
previous three years by the Red Army, which had fought the Nazi war machine and
‘tore its guts’, to use Churchill’s apt expression. In one of his last messages
to Stalin, Churchill made a frank admission that the honour of sealing “the
doom of German militarism” belonged to the Red Army and the Soviet Union, adding that “future generations will acknowledge their debt to the Red
Army”.
It was thus with the object of saving as much for
imperialism as possible that the invasion of Normandy was finally launched by
the western allies of the Soviet Union on 6 June 1944, in which 200,000 men and
nearly 5,000 ships took part, and on which day western bombers flew 14,000
sorties. All the same, the Red Army was the first to reach Berlin and hoist the
red flag on the Reichstag building. In the process it had liberated eastern
Europe, helped to de-Nazify it, and helped establish people’s democracies,
which were moving stridently along the road of socialism before having their
development reversed by the triumph of Khrushchevite revisionism within the USSR itself.
STALIN AND THE GREAT
PATRIOTIC WAR
It is impossible to write anything like a serious
and meaningful account of the Soviet war effort and its contribution in smashing
German fascism and militarism while refusing to recognise the supremely
important role played by Stalin. Yet precisely this is being attempted by the
bourgeoisie everywhere. There is a kind of division of labour between the
imperialist bourgeoisie of the west and the new bourgeoisie of Russia.
Those who attempt to spit at the moon, end up
spitting at their own faces, runs an old saying. Attempts to belittle the role
of Stalin and to malign him will fare no better, for history has already passed
judgement in the form of the glorious achievements of the former USSR, under
his leadership, in every field – including, of course, the victory of the Red
Army in the Great Patriotic War. Zhukov himself would have agreed with this
statement.
Stalin’s leadership during the war was nothing
short of inspirational. When Moscow was under the shadow of the enemy guns,
Stalin refused to leave Moscow. The traditional Red Army parade to mark the
anniversary of the October Revolution took place, as usual, in Red Square on 7 November 1941. These are the words with which Stalin inspired the Red Army
soldiers:
“Comrades, men of the Red Army and Red Navy,
Commanders and political instructors, men and women guerrillas, the whole world
is looking to you as the forces capable of destroying the plundering hordes of
German invaders. The enslaved peoples of Europe who have fallen under the
yoke of the German invaders look to you as their liberators. A great
liberating mission has fallen to your lot. Be worthy of this mission! The
war you are waging is a war of liberation. A just war. Let the manly images
of our great ancestors – Alexander Nevsky, Dimitry Donskoy, Kazuma Minin,
Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutzov – inspire you in this
war! May the victorious banner of the great Lenin be your lodestar!”
(Emphasis added)
Although the credit for the victory must correctly
be given to the Soviet armed forces and the heroic efforts of the Soviet
people, no narrative of these fateful years is complete without a reference, indeed
a fulsome tribute, to the undisputed leader of the CPSU(B), the Soviet people,
and the Supreme Commander of the Soviet forces – Joseph Stalin. Even a renegade
like Gorbachev was obliged, apropos the Soviet victory in the second world war,
to admit that: “A factor in the achievement of victory was the tremendous
political will, purposefulness and persistence, ability to organise and
discipline people, displayed in the war years by Joseph Stalin.” (‘Report
at the festive meeting on the 70th anniversary of the Great October Revolution’
held in Moscow on 2 November 1987, p25)
Ian Grey, who is a bourgeois but honest writer, has
this to say: “The massive setbacks and the immediate threat to Moscow would have unnerved most men, but the impact on Stalin was to strengthen his grim
determination to fight. No single factor was more important in holding the
nation from disintegration at this time.” (Ibid, p335)
Further: “It was in a real sense his [Stalin’s]
victory. It could not have been won without his industrialisation campaign
and especially the intensive development of industry beyond the Volga. Collectivisation had contributed to the victory by enabling the government to
stockpile food and raw materials to prevent paralysis in industry and famine in
the towns. But also collectivisation, with its machine-tractor stations, had
given the peasants their first training in the use of tractors and other
machines.” (Ibid, p419)
Quoting Isaac Deutscher, who is far from friendly
to Stalin, approvingly, Ian Grey continues: “‘Collectivised farming had been
‘the peasants’ preparatory school for mechanised warfare’ . . .
“It was his victory, too, because he had
directed and controlled every branch of Russian operations throughout the war.
The range and burden of his responsibilities were extraordinary, but day by day
without a break for the four years of the war he exercised direct command of
the Russian forces and control over supplies, war industries, and government
policy, including foreign policy.” (Ibid, pp419-420)
Finally, the same writer says: “It was his
victory, above all, because it had been won by his genius and labours, heroic
in scale. The Russian people had looked to him for leadership, and he had not
failed them. His speeches of 3 July and 6 November 1941, which had steeled them
for the trials of war, and his presence in Moscow during the great battle of
the city, had demonstrated his will to victory. He . . . inspired them and gave
them positive direction. He had the capacity of attending to detail and keeping
in mind the broad picture, and, while remembering the past and immersed in the
present, he was constantly looking ahead to the future.” (Ibid,
p424)
Innately hostile as he is to Stalin, Deutscher is
nevertheless obliged to paint this picture of Stalin’s role during the war:
“Many allied visitors who called at the Kremlin
during the war were astonished to see on how many issues, great and small,
military, political or diplomatic, Stalin personally took the final decision.
He was in effect his own Commander-in-Chief, his own minister of defence, his
own quartermaster, his own minister of supply, his own foreign minister, and
even his own chef de protocol. The stavka, the Red Army’s GHQ, was in his
offices in the Kremlin. From his office desk, in constant and direct touch with
the commands of the various fronts, he watched and directed the campaigns in
the field. From his office desk, too, he managed another stupendous operation,
the evacuation of 1,360 plants and factories from western Russia and the
Ukraine to the Volga, the Urals and Siberia, an evacuation that involved not
only machines and installations but millions of workmen and their families.
Between one function and the other he bargained with, say, Beaverbrook and
Harriman over the quantities of aluminium or the calibre of rifles and
anti-aircraft guns to be delivered to Russia by the western allies; or he
received leaders of the guerrillas . . . from German occupied territory and
discussed with them raids to be carried out hundreds of miles behind the enemy’s
lines. At the height of the battle of Moscow, in December 1941, when the
thunder of Hitler’s guns hovered ominously over the streets of Moscow, he found
time enough to start a subtle diplomatic game with the Polish General Sikorski,
who had come to conclude a Russo-Polish treaty . . . He entertained them
[foreign envoys and visitors] usually late at night and in the small hours of
the morning. After a day filled with military reports, operational decisions,
economic instructions and diplomatic haggling, he would at dawn pore over the
latest dispatches from the commissariat of Home Affairs, the NKVD. . . . Thus
he went on, day after day, throughout four years of hostilities – a prodigy of
patience, tenacity, and vigilance, almost omnipresent, almost omniscient.”
(Isaac Deutscher, Stalin, pp456-457)
And further: “there is no doubt that he was
their [the Soviet troops’] real Commander-in-Chief. His leadership was
by no means confined to the taking of abstract strategic decisions, at which
civilian politicians may excel. The avid interest with which he studied the
technical aspects of modern warfare, down to the minute detail, shows him to
have been anything but a dilettante. He viewed the war primarily from the angle
of logistics . . . To secure reserves of manpower and supplies of weapons, in
the right quantities and proportions, to allocate them and transport them to
the right points at the right time, to amass a decisive strategic reserve and
to have it ready for intervention at decisive moments – these operations made
up nine-tenths of his task”. (Ibid, p459)
This is how Deutscher captures the victory parade
in Red Square at the end of the war:
“On 24 June 1945 Stalin stood at the top of the
Lenin Mausoleum and reviewed a great victory parade of the Red Army which
marked the fourth anniversary of Hitler’s attack. By Stalin’s side stood
Marshall Zhukov, his deputy, the victor of Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin. The troops that marched past him were led by Marshall Rokossovsky. As they marched,
rode, and galloped across Red Square, regiments of infantry, cavalry, and tanks
swept the mud of its pavement – it was a day of torrential rain – with
innumerable banners and standards of Hitler’s army. At the Mausoleum they threw
the banners at Stalin’s feet. The allegorical scene was strangely imaginative .
. .
“The next day Stalin received the tribute of Moscow for the defence of the city in 1941. The day after he was acclaimed as ‘Hero of the
Soviet Union’ and given the title of Generalissimo.”
In “these days of undreamt-of triumph and glory”,
continues Deutscher, “Stalin stood in the full blaze of popular recognition
and gratitude. These feelings were spontaneous, genuine, not engineered by
official propagandists. Overworked slogans about the ‘achievements of the Stalinist
era’ now conveyed fresh meaning not only to young people, but to sceptics and
malcontents of the older generation.” (Ibid, p534)
Conclusion
The victory of the USSR was also a victory for the
whole of progressive humanity. That is why every anniversary must be marked as
a festival by progressive humanity everywhere. At the same time, we must never
forget the sacrifices made by the people of the world, especially the people of
the Soviet Union, in order to free humanity from the plague of Hitlerite fascism.
We must also never forget to fight in defence of the hard-won rights and
democratic liberties of the working class and the oppressed people, for any
complacency on this score can only be at the cost of much greater sacrifices in
the future, as the German people, and with them the rest of humanity,
discovered in the thirties and forties. This is especially important at a
moment when the dark clouds of racism, national oppression and the wars
unleashed by imperialism, not to mention millions starved to death each week,
are a daily reality for hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
The second world war was a product of imperialism,
as was the first. It started as an inter-imperialist war to decide which group
of bandits – the Anglo-French-American or the German-Italian-Japanese – were to
have what share of the loot, colonies, markets and avenues for export of
capital. Only the Soviet Union and the broad masses of humanity everywhere
fought against fascism and for human advance. More than 60 million were killed
in this war, of which 12 million were done to death in fascist concentration
camps; another 95 million were left invalid. The losses of the Soviet Union alone were simply colossal.
Soviet victory came at a terrible cost.
Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, including 7.5 million Soviet soldiers,
lost their lives. In comparison, the US lost just under 300,000 soldiers and
the British Empire’s losses amounted to 353,652, of which Britain’s losses totalled no more than 224,723. To this must be added 60,000 British
civilian deaths.
In addition, a third of Soviet territory and
economic resources were devastated: 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages were
completely destroyed; 6 million homes and buildings were demolished; 65,000
kilometres of railway track were partially or totally destroyed; 31,800
industrial plants were stripped bare; and 98,000 collective or state farms were
broken up and their livestock, totalling 64 million animals, was destroyed or
taken to Germany.
This is the cost the socialist Soviet Union had to
pay. This is the cost the Soviet Union, and the Soviet people, had to pay for
the attempt by imperialism to prolong its outmoded life and for the betrayal of
socialism by social democracy, especially German social democracy, which crushed
the German revolution in 1918, restored the power of the bourgeoisie, and
facilitated the rise of Nazism, thus creating a monster, which eventually had
to be faced, and defeated, by the Soviet Union.
At a time when the imperialist bourgeoisie in the
West, along with the new bourgeoisie in Russia, are trying to belittle the
Soviet contribution, the role of the Soviet people, the CPSU(B) and its
undisputed leader, it is worth remembering the titanic battles and the scale of
effort involved in defeating Hitlerite Germany. The Soviet armed forces, in the
course of the Great Patriotic War, managed to destroy 506 German divisions and
100 divisions belonging to German satellites. In comparison, British and
American imperialism combined destroyed no more than 176 German divisions. In
the war against the USSR, Germany lost 10 million men, accounting for three
quarters of its total losses in the second world war.
The victories of the Red Army in the historic
battles of Moscow (October 1941-January 1942), Stalingrad (August 1942-February
1943), Kursk (Spring/Summer 1943) and Berlin (Spring 1945) shall forever remain
an eloquent tribute to the Soviet people, to the socialist system, to the
CPSU(B) and to Joseph Stalin.
Humanity at large shall never fail to express its
gratitude for the contribution of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi
Germany.
At the time, everyone, including Churchill,
recognised the colossal Soviet contribution towards the defeat of Nazi Germany.
On 4 February 1945, on the occasion of the Soviet Army Day, Churchill, while
plotting against the Soviet Union, was nevertheless obliged to send this
message: ‘The Red Army celebrates its twenty-seventh anniversary amid a
triumph which has won the unstinted applause of their allies and has sealed the
doom of German militarism. Future generations will acknowledge their debt to
the Red Army as unreservedly as do we who have lived to witness their proud
achievements.’
Soviet Union no more
Thanks to the treachery of Khrushchevite
revisionism, the great and glorious Soviet Union, which gave so much to save
the world from the scourge of fascism, is no more. Thanks to the same
treachery, socialism is no more in the land of Lenin and Stalin. What Nazis
with millions of soldiers, thousands of tanks and aircraft, could not achieve
through four years of a most devastating war against the land of the Soviets,
the revisionists achieved almost without firing a shot. Since the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the people of the former Soviet Union and people’s
democracies have been plunged into poverty, unemployment, homelessness and a
state of precarious existence. Since the disappearance of the Soviet Union the
population of Russia has declined by a precipitate 15 million – a mass
extinction, approaching the scale of losses during the Second World War, and
the biggest peacetime loss in any country ever. From this the most important
lesson to be drawn by the international proletariat is that revisionism is its
most deadly enemy.
Since the collapse of the Soviet regime and the
disintegration of the USSR, the imperialist bourgeoisie and all manner of
reactionaries have triumphantly asserted that ‘Marxism is destroyed’. There is
nothing new in these assertions, which are as old as Marxism itself. We
conclude this article by answering these assertions in the following, never to
be forgotten words of Stalin:
“It is said that
in some countries in the West, Marxism has already been destroyed. It is said
that it has been destroyed by the bourgeois-nationalist trend known as fascism.
That, of course, is nonsense. Only people who are ignorant of history can talk
like that. Marxism is the scientific expression of the fundamental interests of
the working class. To destroy Marxism, the working class must be destroyed. But
it is impossible to destroy the working class. More than 80 years have passed
since Marxism came into the arena. During this time scores and hundreds of
bourgeois governments have tried to destroy Marxism. And what has happened?
Bourgeois governments have come and gone, but Marxism has remained. Moreover,
Marxism has achieved complete victory on one-sixth of the globe; moreover, it
has achieved it in the very country in which Marxism was considered to have
been utterly destroyed. It cannot be regarded as an accident that the country
in which Marxism has achieved complete victory is now the only country in the
world which knows no crises and unemployment, whereas in all other countries,
including the fascist countries, crisis and unemployment have been reigning for
four years now. No, comrades, that is no accident.
“Yes, comrades,
our successes are due to the fact that we have worked and fought under the
banner of Marx, Engels, Lenin.
“Hence,
the second conclusion: We must remain true to the end to the great banner of
Marx, Engels, Lenin.” (Collected Works, Vol 13, pp386-7)
Eternal glory to all those heroes who fell in the fight against
fascism!
Eternal glory to the great and glorious USSR!
Eternal glory to the great October socialist revolution!
Eternal glory to Marxism-Leninism!
Eternal glory to J V Stalin!
Down with imperialism and its variant, fascism!
NOTES
[1] See The Unhistory Man, 3 September 2009.
[2] Cited by R Arun Kumar in ‘Some facts about the role
played by allied forces’, People’s Democracy, 9 May 2010.
[3] Stalin – Man of History, Abacus, p344.
[4] Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles, MacDonald,
London 1969, pp100-102.
[5] Mission to Moscow, Victor Gollancz, London 1942, p179-184.
[6] Collected Works, Vol 13, pp40-41