50 years after the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili Stalin
Ludo Martens (Chairman of Workers’ Party of Belgium)
Courtesy – http://www.lalkar.org
At commemoration organised by the Institute for Marxist Studies (IMAST), At the Free University of Brussels, 5 March 2003
“Stalin was the greatest individual of the Twentieth century, the greatest political genius” So spoke the ex-Soviet dissident, Alexander Zinoviev in 1993: “I was already a confirmed anti-Stalinist at the age of seventeen… The idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings… We studied the ‘technical’ possibilities of an attack… We even practised. If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just…When Stalin was alive, I saw things differently, but as I look back over this century, I can state that Stalin was the greatest individual of this century, the greatest political genius.”
In 1994, I gave a talk on Stalin in Paris. An Algerian Communist intervened to recall the 5 March 1953. He said: “That morning, my father took my hand and we went out. I saw how upset all the Algerians looked and how the French were rejoicing. I asked my father what had happened. He gravely replied: ‘Stalin is dead…’ I asked who Stalin was. My father said: ‘He was the greatest man of our time. He was the leader of the Soviet Union, the greatest revolutionary country. Stalin was the son of a cobbler.’ And I thought: the son of a cobbler, someone like me…”. For the Algerian patriots, on whom French colonialism would inflict a million casualties during the war of liberation, Stalin represented the fight against colonialism and imperialism.
Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, revolutionaries commemorate Stalin as one of the greatest revolutionaries the world has known until now. It was Stalin who carried out the extraordinary political and economic transformations in the Soviet Union, a landmark in the history of mankind. It was Stalin who led the greatest revolutionary war the world has known, the antifascist war of patriotic defence of the Soviet Union. It was Stalin who gave the impulse to the liberation struggles in the whole of the colonised world, particularly in Asia, notably in China and India.
Today, we are commemorating Stalin because his achievements are of crucial importance for the future of mankind. Stalin’s name symbolises the four great revolutionary struggles, which will decide the fate of mankind during this twenty-first century: the fight for economic development, for independence, for peace and for socialism.
Stalin and the Fight for Independence against Imperialism
The experience of Lenin and Stalin shows that the fight for national independence and the struggle for socialism are inseparable. It also shows that opportunism is a reserve force for imperialism and capitalism.
The great socialist Revolution triumphed on 25 October 1917.
The very next day, the Menshevik Party declared its intention of overthrowing the Bolsheviks, accused of installing a “system of slavery”. Russian social-democracy decided to “free Russia from Bolshevik tyranny” by appealing to imperialist armies! Churchill played a key role in the intervention of British, French, Japanese, Italian and US troops against the infant Soviet Union.
Stalin was the main Bolshevik leader to be sent by Lenin to the decisive battlefronts to lead the people’s war against the interventionist armies. After a long period underground, the Bolsheviks were not yet very numerous. The imperialist powers estimated that the Soviet Union could not hold out against eight foreign armies, supported by the remnants of the tsarist army, the big landowners, the capitalists and the social-democrat parties. Lenin and Stalin organised a real war of the popular masses, however, which overcame all the aggressors and all their Russian allies.
The political and military battles led by Lenin and Stalin to guarantee the independence of the Soviet Union take on a particular meaning in present-day conditions of imperialist globalisation. Today, the major problem facing the overwhelming majority of mankind is that of achieving genuine political and economic independence. It is the problem of the national liberation struggle against political, economic, military and cultural recolonisation, bloodier and more ferocious than Nineteenth century colonisation.
These last six years, I have experienced this reality at first hand in the Congo, one of the potentially richest countries in the world, but which, deprived for 37 years of neo colonial dictatorship and now victim of a war of aggression instigated by the United States, struggles to survive in appalling poverty.
Anglo-American imperialism foresees ” a new battle for Africa because raw materials in the industrialised world are running out”. The United States has declared that “the Congo is of vital importance to the interests of the United States in Africa… because the latter possesses 13 % of hydroelectric reserves in the world, 28 % of cobalt reserves, 18 % of reserves of industrial diamonds”. Anglo-American imperialism is almost openly claiming its right to “recolonise” the Congo and Africa and categorically refusing any kind of genuine independence. How can the wealth of the Congo be “of vital interest to American interests”, unless the Americans have decided to lay their hands on the Congo, whatever the price? The American-Rwandan-Ugandan war of aggression has already caused 4,000,000 deaths in the Congo. Who mentions that? For the fiftieth anniversary of comrade Stalin’s death, however, the entire bourgeois press has gone back to the calumnies about Stalin-the-bloodthirsty which were bandied about long ago by the Nazis.
Stalin and the fight for socialist development
Independence was the prerequisite for speeding up development in the Soviet Union.
Independence made possible the concentration of the most important means of production in the hands of the socialist state and their planned use to solve the main problems of industrial, agricultural, cultural and military development in record time. It was in 1928 that Stalin launched the first Five-year Plan for spectacular economic development. On 4 February 1931, Stalin declared: “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we’ll succeed or we’ll go under”. Stalin won his bet, a challenge no bourgeois would have thought possible.
He used two magic weapons: the organisation of vanguard workers and peasants in the Bolshevik Party in the first place, and the raising of consciousness and the mobilisation of the masses for economic development in the second place.
A foreigner who had lived for 37 years in tsarist Russia testified: “The Bolsheviks have mobilised more than 50 million apathetic human beings, more dead than alive and have breathed a new spirit into them. Revolutionary ardour is melting colossal obstacles. Nothing like it has ever been witnessed”.
Brought up in the country, the dissident Alexander Zinoviev lived through the harsh struggles for collectivisation and the modernisation of agriculture. He has this to say: “When I returned to the village, I often asked my mother and other kolkhozians if they would have accepted an individual farm if they were offered the possibility. They all refused categorically. During the collectivisation, the countryside had experienced an unprecedented cultural revolution: primary schools were set up, as well as technical schools for training veterinary surgeons, agronomists, mechanics, tractor drivers and a secondary school. The structure of the rural population became closer to that of urban society…This extremely rapid change of rural society gave the new system colossal support from the masses of the population”.
From 1928 to 1937, industrial production increased each year by 16.5 %. Lenin had proposed in 1920 a general plan for the electrification of the Soviet Union. Fifteen years later, Stalin had carried out the Plan at 230 %.
The collectivisation of agriculture was a mass movement of unprecedented extent, which allowed poor and middle peasants to prosper through collective work using modern tools and machines, while doing away with their exploitation by the old rich peasantry. At the beginning of 1929, the Soviet Union possessed 19,000 tractors. Twelve years later, in 1941, the kolkhozes (collective farms) and sovkhozes (state farms) had 684,000 tractors.
A mobilisation of the people never before witnessed in history made it possible for a backward, ruined country to catch up with the most formidable imperialist power in Europe, Nazi Germany, in just twelve years. In the Third World of today, subject to privatisation, foreign orders, deindustrialisation and general poverty, what country does not envy the achievements of Stalin?
Stalin and the revolutionary Bolshevik Party
The Bolshevik Party brought about all these victories. It was composed of only 30,000 hardened militants at the end of the underground period, at the time of the triumph of the revolution in 1917. In 1921, after the war of resistance against 14 foreign powers, the Party had 600,000 members. Stalin gave an unprecedented impulse to organisation and education and in 1932, a crucial year for the success of industrialisation and collectivisation, the Party had 2,500,000 members. It was the spirit of sacrifice, the dedication to the people, the zeal for work of this great political army that galvanised the workers for the war against under-development.
Although it was Lenin who had drawn up the principles of the revolutionary party of modern times and formed the hard core of the party, it was Stalin who transformed the Party into a great political army, educating and inspiring the masses of the population.
Without the decisive leading role of the party, none of the historic victories could have been won, whether it was the struggle for independence, the fight for development or the great antifascist war. Stalin was the main author of the handbook History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, an essential book which is still used today for the education of a new generation of revolutionaries throughout the world.
Stalin and the mortal danger of opportunism and infiltration
The enemies within Soviet socialism understood the decisive role of the Party from the start and set everything in motion to infiltrate and destroy it from within.
The young counter-revolutionary Boris Bazhanov was 19 when he decided in 1919 to infiltrate the Bolshevik Party. In 1923, he became secretary to comrade Stalin and the Politburo! In his autobiography, he later wrote: “Soldier of the anti-bolshevik army, I had fixed myself the difficult and dangerous task of penetrating enemy headquarters. I had achieved my aim.”
In addition, however, the habits of the old society, dominated by exploitation, were stubborn and gradually influenced a certain number of leaders of the new socialist regime.
Struggles between the different political tendencies within the Party therefore always reflected the struggle between the different class interests which traversed the Soviet Union. From the moment of victory in 1917, opportunist trends within the Bolshevik Party opposed the policies of Lenin and Stalin.
In 1927, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were rightly excluded from the Party for their hostile activities. Zinoviev and Kamenev, however, were readmitted not long after. Between 1928 and 1930, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin bitterly opposed forced industrialisation and collectivisation. And in 1931, Zinoviev and Kamenev were again excluded for having publicly supported an anti-Bolshevik programme which Bukharin, still a member of the Politburo, had also backed.
In 1934, the Party held its 17th Congress, the Congress of Victory and Unity. The gigantic achievements, fruits of the heroic work of tens of millions of workers, could no longer be denied. Stalin believed that the phenomenal advances achieved by the Party and the masses, would bring the dissenters round to a correct point of view. Many cadres who had been excluded were re-established in their rights as members, among others Piatakov, Radek, Smirnov, Preobrazhensky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, who all took part in the 17th Congress and made speeches there.
It must be said that Stalin was never sectarian, he could forgive the cadres their past mistakes and give them a second chance.
On 1st December 1934, Kirov, the second in charge of the Party, was assassinated in his office. The murderers were never found.
It was only in 1936-37 that the Party discovered that the plot against Kirov had been organised by an underground organisation to which Zinoviev, Kamenev, Smirnov, Radek and other cadres belonged and which was in liaison with Trotsky.
Trotsky was the prototype of the communist who degenerates to the point of becoming a rabid anti-communist. In 1934 he wrote: ” Hitler’s victory was the result of the criminal policies of Stalin.” “In order to overthrow Hitler, the Communist International will first have to be done away with”.
In barely veiled terms, Trotsky encouraged Germany to attack the Soviet Union. He wrote in 1938: “Berlin knows to what degree of demoralisation the ruling clique has led the army and the population. Stalin continues to undermine the moral force and the resistance of the country. The Stalinist careerists will betray the country when it comes to the bit”. Just when the Nazis were preparing the attack on the Soviet Union, Trotsky called on the Soviet people to rise up against the Party and Stalin. He declared: “Only an uprising of the Soviet proletariat against the infamous tyranny of the new parasites can save what still exists of the achievements of October”. The provocative language of Trotsky directly served the German fascists.
During the enquiry into the underground networks of dissenters and enemy infiltrators, proof was discovered of the existence of underground groups within the military hierarchy which were preparing a coup. Marshal Tukhachevsky and generals Osepyan, Kashirin and Alksnis were among the dozens of military plotters who were shot.
Contrary to countries like France and Belgium, where a major part of the bourgeoisie collaborated with the enemy, in the Soviet Union the Fifth Column was practically eliminated.
About the purges carried out by Stalin, Churchill, who in Britain was in favour of the struggle against Hitler’s expansionism, had this to say: “The German government was in touch with important Russian personalities through the Soviet embassy in Prague. The plot aimed at overthrowing Stalin and introducing into Russia a new pro-German regime. Soviet Russia carried out a merciless but doubtless useful purge of political and economic circles. The Soviet army was purged of pro-German elements”.
Still about the purges, the Nazi Goebbels noted in his diary on 8 May 1943: “The Führer explained the case of Tukhachevsky and added that we were absolutely wrong if we thought Stalin would ruin the Red Army. It was the opposite that was true: Stalin got rid of all the opposition circles in the Red Army and thus succeeded in making sure there were no more defeatist groups in the Army.”
From social-democrat Bukharin to revisionist Gorbachev
If the purges of 1937-38 created the conditions for a generalised implacable resistance to Nazi aggression, they also dealt the deathblow to the opportunist trends which aimed at winning over the majority of the Party leadership and advocating a gradual return to capitalism.
In this context, the trial of Bukharin in 1938 takes on a historical importance: Bukharin was the Gorbachev of that time.
Bukharin was in 1938 the most prestigious Party leader and the highest placed among those who plotted the overthrow of the communist regime. The US ambassador, Joseph Davis, who was present at the trial, wrote: “The general sentiment of the diplomats who were present at the trial is that the existence of an extremely serious plot was proven”.
Faced with overwhelming proof, Bukharin had a burst of communist honour and confessed. He revealed the whole process of political degeneration which had led him, old Bolshevik that he was and dearest son of Lenin, to betray the Soviet revolution.
His confession is particularly revealing because, fifty years later, Gorbachev’s counter-revolutionary group took exactly the same line, pursuing it to its logical conclusion, the restoration of capitalism in its most Mafia-like form.
It is extremely instructive to reread today the report of the “Trial of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Bukharinites and Trotskyites”.
During the trial, Bukharin, Trotsky and their followers were accused of using pseudo-Leninist language to attack the foundations of the socialist regime, of presenting demagogical platforms to rally the old bourgeois and feudal elements as well as all the other forces which were pursuing the overthrow of socialism in the USSR. “Behind the flashy Trotskyite and Bukharinite phraseology, they were preparing the restoration of capitalism”. That was exactly what Gorbachev did with his falsely “Leninist” demagogy!
The account of Bukharin’s trial goes on to declare that the opponents had got in touch with imperialist powers, among which was Nazi Germany, to facilitate their takeover. The indictment says that “the Bukharinites and the Trotskyites are an advanced detachment of international fascism”, ” a bloc of traitors”. “This trial reminds us that two worlds are face to face, like mortal and irreconcilable enemies, the world of capitalism and the world of socialism. The logic of class antagonism incites the remains of the exploiting classes within the USSR as well as the exploiting classes beyond our borders to fiercer and fiercer attacks on the Workers’ state.” In exactly the same way, fifty years later, the followers of Gorbachev acted like traitors to the cause of socialism and like an advanced detachment of American imperialism and international fascism. In the Russia of Yeltsin, the fascist organisation of Vlassov operated openly.
The trial of Bukharin underlined the fact that there were relations between the plotters and Western intelligence services. The charges also mentioned the fact that Bukharinites and Trotskyites were preparing “the separation of Ukraine and Byelorussia and the break-up of the Soviet Union. “.
Today, we can realise that Gorbachev and Yeltsin did indeed carry out the programme for which their predecessors Bukharin and Trotsky were condemned to death in 1938. Since then, high-placed civil servants of Gorbachev’s time have boasted that they had been in touch with American intelligence services for decades! So the fact that Gorbachev officially rehabilitated both Trotsky and Bukharin in 1990 is no unimportant detail! It is also significant that a Trotskyite leader like Ernest Mandel could declare in 1989: “The Perestroïka is truly a new revolution. The Trotskyite movement has defended the same idea for 55 years, which is why it was taxed with being counter-revolutionary. Today, it is easier to understand where the true counter-revolutionaries stand and where the true revolutionaries.” Bukharin and Trotsky were indeed the Gorbachevs and the Yeltsins of 1935… but they were unmasked and executed. The Soviet Union was able to go on building socialism and preparing its defence against the imminent fascist aggression…
History has shown that opportunism and infiltration were a mortal inside danger for the whole socialist revolution. Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin formed a chain of opportunists, who were linked to reactionary forces within the country and to fascists outside it. However, they were crushed by the revolutionary workers, peasants and intellectuals mobilised by Stalin and the Party. Purged of its Fifth Column, the Soviet Union was able to vanquish the barbaric fascist hordes. The Soviet people waged heroic battles for their own freedom but also for the freedom of all peoples crushed by fascism or oppressed by colonialism. In these historic struggles they sacrificed 27 million fighters and civilian resistors. Never before had there been a battle so grandiose, heroic and decisive for the evolution of the world. The pathetic lies and the grotesque intoxication we are fed by the bourgeois media for the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Stalin will not change one whit this truth written with the blood of the brave.
Stalin and the international anti-fascist alliance
Stalin not only destroyed the Nazi Fifth Column operating within the Soviet Union, he also favoured, from 1935 on, an international alliance of anti-fascist forces and countries.
In 1935, the Soviet Union proposed establishing a system of collective security in Europe, aimed against German and Italian fascist expansionism. The “democratic” powers, Britain and France, refused and followed a policy of “neutrality” in 1936 when the fascist powers intervened in Spain to help Franco establish his fascist dictatorship. Then London and Paris negotiated in Munich with the fascist powers and handed over the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. At the same moment, Hitler’s Germany signed a declaration with Great Britain according to which they would never again go to war one against the other. The repeated appeals of Stalin to form a collective defence system remained without effect: Britain and France even allowed Hitler to occupy the whole of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In fact, they were inciting Hitler to make war in the East.
From June to August 1939, the Soviet Union carried on last minute negotiations with Britain and France for an anti-fascist alliance. In July, however, Chamberlain held secret negotiations with Hitler, to whom he guaranteed freedom of action in the East and the South-East of Europe, also promising to break off relations with Stalin. In August 1939, Stalin understood that London and Paris had decided to let Hitler occupy Poland and thus leave the way free to the Soviet Union.
Hitler was determined to beat the Soviet Union, France and Britain, but he did not want a war on two fronts. He wanted either war against Britain and France alone, or against the Soviet Union alone. As a strategist, he preferred to fight and vanquish his weaker enemies first. He knew that the war against the Soviet Union would be implacable, ferocious, the decisive battle between two radically opposed worlds. Hitler knew he had many friends and sympathisers in France and Britain. On 20 August, he proposed a pact of non-aggression to the Soviet Union. Stalin, faced with the possibility of having to confront Nazi barbarity alone, immediately accepted.
The British and French imperialists who wanted to use Hitler to destroy the Soviet Union, were caught in their own trap. Hitler thought he could first defeat France, Belgium and Britain, before turning, with all Europe’s military might, against Stalin.
The Soviet Union won 21 crucial months to strengthen its defences decisively. This was a determining factor for the creation of a world anti-fascist front and for victory over the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy.
The decisive role of Stalin in the great anti-fascist war
Throughout the war, but above all during the first most difficult year, Stalin’s courage, determination and competence galvanised the entire Soviet population. In the hours of despair, it was Stalin who embodied faith in the final victory.
On 25 October 1941, the Nazi army was at the gates of Moscow. Stalin nonetheless decided to defy Hitler’s troops and hold the traditional military parade in Red Square, where he gave a historic speech which was broadcast throughout the country, bringing tears of joy to the eyes of hardened partisans in Ukraine: Stalin says we shall win, and win we shall!
In the weeks to come, the Nazis entered the suburbs of Moscow, but Stalin calmly remained in the city and went on secretly concentrating more than 700.000 soldiers nearby. After consulting all his commanding officers, Stalin decided on the great counter-offensive which was to free Moscow. The Nazis lost 500.000 men. It was a turning point in the war.
The basis of the Soviet victory against the Nazis is to be found in the gigantic accomplishments of Stalin between 1928 and 1941. This imposing achievement is what the supporters of old and new fascism call, on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the man who defeated Hitler, terror, blind murder, mad destruction… Impossible not to see that these bourgeois journalists, paid to flatter the fascists of our time, think they will thus obtain higher remuneration and more prestige.
Marshall Zhukov, the most brilliant senior officer of the great anti-fascist war, was later to support the crook Khrushchev at the critical moment, but a few years later he made this appraisal of Stalin in order to refute Khrushchev’s lies: “A highly developed industry, a collectivised agriculture, public education extended to the whole population, unity of the nation, the power of the socialist state, the high degree of patriotism among the people, the leadership which, through the Party, was capable of achieving unity between the battlefront and the rear, all these factors together were the fundamental cause of the great victory which was to crown our struggle against fascism. Soviet industry proved capable of producing a colossal amount of arms: almost 490,000 guns and mortars, more than 102,000 tanks and self-driven cannon, more than 137,000 fighter aircraft show that the foundations of the economy, from a military point of view were sound.”
The traitor and counter-revolutionary Khrushchev dared write that Stalin relied on no one and asked no one’s advice. In fact, Stalin got through a colossal amount of work waging the greatest war in history, applying collective wisdom to the signing of 10,000 orders and instructions. Stalin always maintained a democratic work-style, listening to all opposing points of view, concentrating all useful opinions and summarising all worthwhile ideas.
Vasilevsky, chief of staff from 1942, wrote that when Stalin was preparing an operation, he always had the commanding officers concerned come so as to obtain the necessary information and advice and submit to them the preliminary outline of the decisions. He wrote: “Stalin always relied on collective reasoning.”
General Shtemenko, vice-chief of staff, also refuted Khrushchev’s calumnies: “Stalin did not decide the important questions of the war on his own and did not like deciding on his own. He understood the necessity of collective work in this complex field perfectly. He could tell someone who had authority in such and such a field and always took his opinion into account “.
Zhukov, the first chief of staff, testified: “Joseph Stalin was not at all a man with whom difficult problems could not be brought up, with whom one could not discuss and even energetically defend one’s opinion. If some people maintain the contrary, I say their declarations are untrue”. “Stalin’s erudition was very great and his memory astonishing. He possessed great natural intelligence but was also astonishingly knowledgeable. He listened carefully, sometimes asked questions, replied. When the discussion was over, he formulated the conclusions with precision “.
Even the American diplomat Averell Harriman, speaking about Stalin, recalled, “his great intelligence, his fantastic capacity for going into detail, his perspicacity and the surprising human sensitivity he could show. Better informed than Roosevelt, more realistic than Churchill, he was in many ways the most efficient of the war leaders”.
In 1945, the United States took up the banner of Hitler
Immediately after the defeat of the German, Japanese and Italian fascist powers, the United States took up Hitler’s dream of dominating the world and took in a large number of ex-Nazis to do so.
Robert Murphy, adviser to the American military governor in Germany, wrote in 1945: “General Patton wanted to rearm two divisions of Waffen SS and incorporate them into the Third US Army in order to send them against the Reds. He told me: ‘We can drive the Red Army back to Russia. With my Germans, we are capable of doing it.’ Patton boasted that he could reach Moscow in thirty days.”
During the war, the Nazi general Gehlen was chief of Nazi espionage in the Soviet Union. In May 1945, he surrendered to the Americans. According to Allied agreements, the Americans were to hand over Gehlen to the Soviets, since he figured on the list of the main war criminals wanted in the Soviet Union. However the Americans transferred Gehlen undercover to the United States, where he negotiated with Allan Dulles, the secret service chief, himself. An agreement was reached: Gehlen transferred all his archives on the Soviet Union to the United States and reactivated his old networks in the Soviet Union under United States leadership. Shortly afterwards, Gehlen became the first chief of intelligence services in the Federal Republic of Germany, where he simply continued, under United States orders, the anti-communist war he had waged under Hitler.
During the war, John Loftus was the chief of the American secret service responsible for tracking ex-Nazis who tried to get into the United States. However, from 1944, other American secret services were trying to get as many ex-Nazis into the country as possible! In his book, Loftus estimates the number of ex-Nazis established in the US at some ten thousand. These German, Ukrainian, Latvian, Russian ex-Nazis were to play a crucial role in the Cold War. Among them were some of the greatest Nazi criminals like Klaus Barbie, Alois Brunner, held to be responsible for the death of 130,000 people, Otto von Bolschwig, Eichmann’s aide…
From 1945, the United States took up the place and the role of Hitler’s Germany as the most aggressive and most warlike power.
The Americans used the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any military justification: the Japanese army had been crushed in China by the Red Army. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were basically a demonstration for Stalin’s attention, to let him know what he could expect. The English Field-Marshall Alan Brooke testified that Churchill already thought he was capable of eliminating the industrial centres of the Soviet Union.
The Greek people liberated themselves from the German fascists by organising their own anti-fascist, revolutionary armed forces. After the liberation of Greece, British imperialism occupied Athens and linked up with the ex-supporters of Nazi Germany to fight the patriots.
In Korea, the nationalist and communist forces had defeated the Japanese army of occupation with the help of the Soviet Union and the army of Mao Zedong. The Americans disembarked in the southern part of Korea, where they let the ex-fascist collaborators out of prison to set up a South-Korean Republic led by American lackeys.
The United States launched the war against Korea in 1950 as a starting point for a general anti-communist war: once Korea was beaten, China would be the next target. China under US domination would become the main base for the war against the Soviet Union, which could also be attacked from the Federal Republic of Germany.
When the Americans attacked Korea, the Soviet Union issued a declaration which takes on a new significance today, 53 years later: “If the imperialists launch a Third World War, it will be the death not only of isolated capitalist states, but of world capitalism as a whole “.
Against the American attack on Korea was developed the greatest peace movement the world had ever seen, under the leadership of the World Council for Peace. Five hundred million people signed the Stockholm Appeal calling in particular for the banning of nuclear weapons and for general disarmament.
The American aggressors killed 3,000,000 Koreans, but resistance won the day; resistance led by the Workers’ Party of Korea and comrade Kim Il Sung; resistance supported by socialist China, by the Soviet Union and by a worldwide campaign against the war. The plan to eliminate the socialist regimes in China and in the Soviet Union had to be dropped.
From Counter-Revolution in the Soviet Union to the World Front against American Wars
Fifty years, rich in events and reversals, have passed since the much lamented death of comrade Stalin. With Khrushchev, a revisionist group, heirs to Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin, took power and precipitated political and ideological degeneration. In order to deceive the Soviet people, who were very attached to socialism, the anticommunist Khrushchev promised… the complete achievement of communism for the year 1980…
Under Brezhnev, …. the civilian sector fell back and was invaded by capitalist methods. A shadow economy, clearly capitalist, developed simultaneously with a progressive degeneration of the Party leadership structure.
The Soviet Union remained a great power, however, capable of blocking the most aggressive tendencies of American imperialism. The revolutionary struggles of the Third World also created difficulties for imperialism: the victorious war in Vietnam, the war of liberation in Angola, the struggle of the oil-producing countries and other producers of raw materials. …[In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, this collapse was greeted by the bourgeoisie with unrestrained triumphalism and to declare the end of communism – and indeed the end of history.]
However, history, like no other professor, teaches us dialectics: the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union of 1989-91 completely restored capitalism in its most mafia-like form, but at the same time it proved that… capitalism has no future! Imperialism promised that capitalism would work wonders in the ex-Soviet Union. It was the end of history.
Well, as a gift for the end of history, the Soviets underwent the greatest catastrophe ever experienced by a great industrialised country. In 1999, industrial production in Russia had diminished by 41 % compared with 1990, in Ukraine by 58 %. In 12 years, the Russian population fell by 12 million inhabitants. Since the counter-revolution, mortality has increased by 33% and the number of births has fallen by 40%. Today, it has 4,000,000 abandoned children, a situation that was totally unthinkable under the Soviet regime. In 1985, the attendance rate in secondary education was almost 100 %. Today it has fallen to 75 %.
In the victorious capitalist camp, the end of history takes odd turns: huge economic crises follow one another in almost all of the “model” countries: there have been slumps in Japan, Mexico, South-East Asia, Russia, Brazil…
Today, we can observe huge waves of capitalist concentration on a world scale: 5 to 10 transnational corporations control the different sectors of the world economy. They step up exploitation, lower the number of workers, increase productivity to a phenomenal extent. All that reveals in the most destructive way the fundamental insoluble contradiction of the capitalist system: the contradiction between an apparently unlimited production capacity and ever decreasing markets..
In order to flee the economic crises which will shake their system, the American transnational corporations are embarking today on the only course remaining to capitalism every time it is faced with an insoluble economic crisis: the course of world war by “relaunching” production in arms manufacturing, and so as to crush rivals and conquer raw materials and markets.
It is not by malice, but because of the economic and political laws inherent to the imperialist system that the world has experienced two world wars.
Today, faced with the perspective of unprecedented economic crises, the United States has gone back to the years 1945-1953, when it took up the banner of the German Nazis and tried to establish its hegemony by preparing for a Third World War against Korea, China and the Soviet Union.
Today, however, the peoples of the world have learnt much from the great revolutionary victories of the twentieth century, as well as from the great defeats caused by opportunism.
In 2003 an unprecedented world front against the number 1 enemy of the peoples of the world, American hegemonism, has sprung up. It is a larger, more powerful and more international front than that set up in 1941 against the fascist Axis of Berlin-Tokyo-Rome.
Today, on this fiftieth anniversary of the death of comrade Stalin, all the political dwarfs who eat out of the hands of the American bourgeoisie, can spit out their poison on the communist revolutionaries of the glorious years of 1941-1953. That will not stop an unparalleled anti-war and anti-imperialist movement from developing against the fascism of Bush and his delirious plans for a world war to establish a thousand year American Reich.
The tens of millions of activists against imperialist globalisation will find instruction in the experience of struggle and by reflecting on the revolutionary history of the twentieth century.
The strategy and the tactics developed by comrade Stalin between 1932 and 1953 first against the fascist powers and then against American hegemonism, remain the most important references for all peoples determined to win peace, independence, planned and balanced development – and socialism!
