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Everything we’re told about Stalin is wrong | Jerm Warfare · UK Column Radio

0:30
Speaker 1: My name is Jim. This is Germ Warfare, the Battle
0:33
Speaker 1: of Ideas, Grover Fair, thank you for joining me in
0:37
Speaker 1: the trenches.
0:38
Speaker 2: I'm very pleased to be invited here.
0:40
Speaker 1: Jeremy, this is such a big topic. I've always wondered
0:44
Speaker 1: about Stalin. I guess it's fitting if I just quickly
0:47
Speaker 1: ask about you and your background.
0:50
Speaker 2: Well, I was born in the United States, Washington, d C.
0:59
Speaker 2: My father was off at the war. Then he got
1:02
Speaker 2: a job in Montreal and we moved to Montreal when
1:05
Speaker 2: I was just two years old, and I grew up there,
1:09
Speaker 2: and then I came down to the Estates to go
1:12
Speaker 2: to graduate school and stayed here to work at Montclair
1:17
Speaker 2: State University. That's about it. I got interested in, let's say,
1:25
Speaker 2: Soviet history because of the the anti Vietnam War protest movement,
1:33
Speaker 2: which I got involved in as a student, and the
1:40
Speaker 2: issue of Stalin came up any number of times. Now
1:43
Speaker 2: I have studied, and I was studying, you know, how
1:47
Speaker 2: to do research. I got my doctorate in medieval European
1:53
Speaker 2: and English literature, and so research methods were an important
1:57
Speaker 2: part of what I was concentrating on. And it was
1:59
Speaker 2: clear to me once I started to look into that
2:03
Speaker 2: question of Stalin, that there really was no decent evidence
2:07
Speaker 2: at that time. All of the books about Stalin relied
2:13
Speaker 2: on quoting other books which quoted other books, but they
2:16
Speaker 2: never got down to any real evidence, and of course
2:21
Speaker 2: Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech was not accompanied by any evidence.
2:25
Speaker 2: That was in nineteen fifty six, the famous attack on Stalin.
2:29
Speaker 2: So I got interested in Stalin just because of my
2:36
Speaker 2: involvement in the anti war movement. You know. Sometimes those
2:42
Speaker 2: of us who were involved in it got were called Stalinists,
2:48
Speaker 2: and I did a little work on it. But in
2:55
Speaker 2: fast forwarding to nineteen ninety nine, a Russian historian, an
3:03
Speaker 2: amateur historian, contacted me and said that he liked one
3:09
Speaker 2: of the articles that I had published and put online,
3:12
Speaker 2: but that I was clearly unaware that since the end
3:18
Speaker 2: of the Soviet Union, a great many documents from former
3:22
Speaker 2: Soviet archives were beginning to be made available and they
3:30
Speaker 2: needed to be taken into account. So, with the guidance
3:36
Speaker 2: of my colleague now Vladimir Bobrov in Moscow, I started
3:41
Speaker 2: to study those and I realized that here we have
3:45
Speaker 2: some primary source evidence, and the primary source evidence simply
3:51
Speaker 2: refutes the claims about Stalin's crimes that were virtually universally accepted.
4:04
Speaker 2: So my first book was called Khrushchev Lied. And what
4:08
Speaker 2: I did was I went through Kruschev's Secret Speech of
4:10
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty six. I hadn't read it in many years,
4:15
Speaker 2: but I had some vague memory about it, and I
4:21
Speaker 2: started to compare what Khrushchev Khrushchev's accusations with the documents
4:28
Speaker 2: from Soviet archives that were available at that time. So
4:31
Speaker 2: we're talking about twenty years ago. And I saw that
4:39
Speaker 2: right away that a number of the statements that Krushchev
4:42
Speaker 2: made could be refuted, disproven by the documents that we
4:49
Speaker 2: had access to now that the Soviet Union was gone.
4:58
Speaker 2: And puts started out as a small article, you know,
5:02
Speaker 2: I was going to just deal with a couple of
5:04
Speaker 2: kruse Chef statements, eventually turned into a whole book. And
5:07
Speaker 2: I found out that there's no accusation that Kruschev made
5:12
Speaker 2: in that speech that can be supported by the evidence,
5:14
Speaker 2: and many of them, many of his statements can be
5:18
Speaker 2: affirmatively disproven. That is, you can actually prove it they're false,
5:22
Speaker 2: as opposed to simply, let's say, not supported by evidence.
5:29
Speaker 2: So evidence is very important, and the other is the
5:34
Speaker 2: other issue I would say is objectivity. There's very little
5:40
Speaker 2: objectivity in the study of Soviet history, particularly of the
5:44
Speaker 2: Stalin period. People proceed from their preconceived biases, and that
5:52
Speaker 2: forecloses your ability to discover the truth because looking you're
5:57
Speaker 2: looking to cherry pick whatever evidence you can find that
6:01
Speaker 2: will support what you already believe. So, armed as it were,
6:08
Speaker 2: with the conviction that it's necessary to be objective and
6:13
Speaker 2: continuing to investigate, collect and investigate the documents from former
6:18
Speaker 2: Soviet archives, I've just proceeded since then to research various
6:23
Speaker 2: aspects of the Stalin period in the Soviet.
6:28
Speaker 1: The common narrative is that he was born in eighteen
6:31
Speaker 1: seventy eight, I think, and he was abused by his father.
6:36
Speaker 2: There's no evidence that he was abused by his father.
6:38
Speaker 2: I know that's a story, but it's without foundation except
6:45
Speaker 2: I mean, it's without without any decent foundation. One of
6:49
Speaker 2: his school mates when he was a child, named Irimashjili,
6:57
Speaker 2: wrote a book in German in the early nine teen
7:00
Speaker 2: thirties in which he made that claim and other claims.
7:08
Speaker 2: But they have never been supported by any evidence, and
7:13
Speaker 2: the most even the most recent let's say anti Stalin,
7:17
Speaker 2: but professional historians, you know, like Stephen Kottken, just dismissed them.
7:23
Speaker 2: Rymashvili later became a Nazi supporter. He lived in Germany.
7:30
Speaker 2: He died in Germany during the war. So I would
7:33
Speaker 2: say that that story is is not. You don't find
7:38
Speaker 2: it even in contemporary anti Stalin literature any longer.
7:43
Speaker 1: So what what was Stalin's upbringing?
7:48
Speaker 2: Well, he went to he went to school, He went
7:51
Speaker 2: to a religious school and was expelled for political activity.
7:59
Speaker 2: He joined the very active and clandestine social democratic movement
8:11
Speaker 2: in Georgia, where he lived, where he was born and raised,
8:17
Speaker 2: and he was raised in a at a time when
8:21
Speaker 2: there was a lot of revolutionary activity on the part
8:24
Speaker 2: of various groups under you know, predominantly underground, and not
8:30
Speaker 2: just in Georgia but throughout the Russian Empire. So there
8:33
Speaker 2: was a lot of this kind of activity going on,
8:36
Speaker 2: and Marxism was very influential. So there was, you know,
8:42
Speaker 2: the the many of these groups needed to concentrate on
8:45
Speaker 2: the working class, and the Russian Empire was gradually becoming industrialized,
8:52
Speaker 2: although it was still far far and away behind Western Europe. Nevertheless,
8:59
Speaker 2: it was it was making place, so there was a
9:01
Speaker 2: considerable working class, and Stalin got very active in that
9:06
Speaker 2: movement in Georgia, was arrested a few times, exiled a
9:12
Speaker 2: few times, and the last time he was arrested and
9:14
Speaker 2: exiled nineteen twelve or nineteen thirteen, he was sent to Siberia,
9:19
Speaker 2: where he remained until the February Revolution of nineteen seventeen,
9:24
Speaker 2: when basically all of the political prisoners just picked up
9:29
Speaker 2: and left their camps because the Czarist government had ceased
9:34
Speaker 2: to exist and they were able to do that. So
9:38
Speaker 2: he put his butt on the line for many years
9:43
Speaker 2: and was a worker, an organizer, clandestine revolutionary. There was
9:51
Speaker 2: a very active It's not like he was all by himself.
9:54
Speaker 2: I'm trying to paint the picture that there was a
9:56
Speaker 2: very active revolutionary underground which a person like him could
10:02
Speaker 2: join and be a part of right away, and he,
10:07
Speaker 2: of course was good at it. At some point during
10:12
Speaker 2: this period of time, when he was still fairly young,
10:16
Speaker 2: he became acquainted with the Bolshevik literature Lenin's party and
10:22
Speaker 2: gravitated to that party. When the February Revolution took place,
10:27
Speaker 2: that's when the czar was overthrown and there was a
10:32
Speaker 2: capitalist sort of social democratically leaning capitalist regime organized in Moscow.
10:40
Speaker 2: So Stalin went to Moscow. He assumed his position as
10:48
Speaker 2: one of the editors of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, and
10:56
Speaker 2: was I think in March nineteen seventeen Lenin returned from
11:00
Speaker 2: exile in Switzerland, and April nineteen seventeen he was a
11:07
Speaker 2: charismatic figure. Stalin and others gravitated to his leadership. Stalin
11:13
Speaker 2: had followed him before, but you know, at a distance. Then.
11:21
Speaker 2: The Bolshevik Party was involved in various struggles during nineteen seventeen.
11:27
Speaker 2: There was an attempt at a seizure of power by
11:31
Speaker 2: some workers in July. The Bolsheviks joined. It failed, and
11:39
Speaker 2: from then on they were pretty much underground. But as
11:43
Speaker 2: you know, I'm sure at the end of October nineteen
11:49
Speaker 2: seventeen by the Julian calendar, beginning of November by the
11:53
Speaker 2: Western calendar, they organized this seizure of power not only
12:01
Speaker 2: in Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was called then, but in
12:06
Speaker 2: a number of other important cities and centers in Russia.
12:10
Speaker 2: Stalin was in Petrograd and he was involved in the
12:16
Speaker 2: organizing of the seizure of power as you know, as
12:21
Speaker 2: were others, as was Leon Trotsky and others who later
12:25
Speaker 2: on became highly placed leaders in the Bolshevik Party. Now then,
12:34
Speaker 2: is that where you'd like me to stop or shall
12:36
Speaker 2: I continue on?
12:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just going to point out that the
12:40
Speaker 1: popular narrative is that it was like a scheming takeover.
12:45
Speaker 2: Well, and yeah, so there's okay. So most of the books,
12:52
Speaker 2: let's say, that deal with the Russian Revolution, really concentrate
12:55
Speaker 2: on Petrograd formerly Saint Petersburg and later on Leningrad, right,
13:00
Speaker 2: because that's where the uh, that's where the government was centered,
13:06
Speaker 2: and that's that's where the revolution that there was one
13:11
Speaker 2: revolution there and the Bolsheviks had a big base in
13:17
Speaker 2: the working class, and they mobilized that base and they
13:20
Speaker 2: seized the the seats of made seats of government in
13:27
Speaker 2: the city of Petrograd. But there were similar uprisings in
13:31
Speaker 2: many other places. So if it was just Petrograd, you
13:35
Speaker 2: could say, well, you know, it's a little bit like
13:37
Speaker 2: a like a coup, you know, with not all that
13:41
Speaker 2: many people involved and no demonstration of any kind of
13:45
Speaker 2: deep roots among the population. But the same thing happened
13:49
Speaker 2: in Moscow. The revolution in Moscow was in some respects
13:55
Speaker 2: much more interesting because it was it took a longer
13:58
Speaker 2: time and was much more violent. There was little violence
14:01
Speaker 2: involved in the revolution in Saint Petersburg in nineteen seventeen,
14:04
Speaker 2: but Moscow was very different, and the Bolsheviks had a
14:09
Speaker 2: lot of support there and they seized power there too,
14:12
Speaker 2: as well as in other cities. So the version of
14:18
Speaker 2: the Bolshevik Revolution that just concentrates on what happened in Petrograd,
14:26
Speaker 2: you know, gives a distorted picture of what really occurred.
14:33
Speaker 1: Just for clarity, who were the Bolsheviks?
14:36
Speaker 2: Well, okay, So Vladimir Lenin started to organize a political
14:45
Speaker 2: party in the eighteen nineties, and the Russian Social Democratic
14:55
Speaker 2: Workers Party, and then in nineteen hundred three there was
15:01
Speaker 2: a split the between and the two parties that UH
15:08
Speaker 2: in the split became known as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
15:13
Speaker 2: Lenin's party was the Bolsheviks UH, and although they remained
15:18
Speaker 2: formally one party, they in fact were UH were organizationally
15:26
Speaker 2: separate because they had very different views of how to
15:29
Speaker 2: make a revolution. So the Mensheviks followed the more or
15:35
Speaker 2: less the template of the Second International, which was at
15:40
Speaker 2: that time, you know, the Socialist parties of Western Europe
15:44
Speaker 2: and the United States uh the Way and the Socialist Party,
15:47
Speaker 2: the Socialist parties, the socialist movement. The Second International was
15:51
Speaker 2: it self split between those parties and those individuals who
15:56
Speaker 2: thought that socialism could be elected, could be brought in
16:01
Speaker 2: by peaceful parliamentary means, and those people who thought it
16:07
Speaker 2: could not be and that a violent revolution to overthrow
16:14
Speaker 2: the capitalists was going to be necessary. And that was
16:17
Speaker 2: Lenin's stance, whereas the Mensheviks were basically oriented towards the
16:26
Speaker 2: position that capitalism had to develop in Russia, had to
16:31
Speaker 2: go through a long, probably prolonged period of evolution before
16:39
Speaker 2: the country could be industrialized, before a large proletariat could
16:43
Speaker 2: be formed, and then either there would be a revolution
16:51
Speaker 2: or as most of the Mensheviks thought, they would have
16:54
Speaker 2: so much support that they would be able to vote
16:57
Speaker 2: in socialism. That was the Menshevik position, and the Bolshevik
17:02
Speaker 2: position was that this was not going to be possible,
17:04
Speaker 2: that they needed to prepare for revolution, okay, to overthrow
17:10
Speaker 2: the government, and that's what eventually took place. Once the
17:16
Speaker 2: revolution took place, some Mensheviks joined the Bolshevik Party, many
17:23
Speaker 2: of them stuck to their principles that said, this is premature,
17:30
Speaker 2: this is never going to work. We need to, you know,
17:34
Speaker 2: we need to have a bourgeois capitalist government which will
17:39
Speaker 2: industrialize the country, and only at the end of that
17:43
Speaker 2: process will be be able to have a revolution. Some
17:49
Speaker 2: of them stayed in Russia, some of them moved abroad
17:51
Speaker 2: and became important forces in the anti communist movement. The
17:59
Speaker 2: important force is in and the world capitalist movement. If
18:05
Speaker 2: you want to oppose the Soviet.
18:10
Speaker 1: Revolution, what influence did the First World War have, because
18:16
Speaker 1: I mean Stalin was if I'm correct, he was appointed
18:19
Speaker 1: General Secretary in nineteen twenty two on Lenin's recommendation. A
18:25
Speaker 1: few years earlier, the Bizarre family were executed. What was
18:30
Speaker 1: going on there around the time of the First World War.
18:35
Speaker 2: There was a well, let's start with the revelator. Stalin
18:41
Speaker 2: for the most part was in exile in Siberia during
18:46
Speaker 2: most of the First World War. He left, as I said,
18:50
Speaker 2: when the February Revolution took place, and that's when, and
18:57
Speaker 2: then shortly after that Lenin arrived. The First World War
19:02
Speaker 2: created the preconditions, if you want to, or sped up
19:06
Speaker 2: the developing preconditions for the revolution. The first World War
19:10
Speaker 2: was a disaster for Russia. The soldiers were poorly trained,
19:18
Speaker 2: very poorly armed, and after an initial period, very poorly motivated.
19:27
Speaker 2: And the Bolsheviks had a movement to recruit members among
19:36
Speaker 2: the military, and their activities to build a Communist base
19:44
Speaker 2: among the military were very important, but Stalin was not
19:47
Speaker 2: involved in that. Let's just be clear. One of the
19:50
Speaker 2: people who was involved in it, one of the many
19:55
Speaker 2: was a guy named Clement Vorashilov, who became a close
20:03
Speaker 2: ally of Stalin's and eventually became the Minister of Defense
20:07
Speaker 2: of the People's Commissar for Defense in the Soviet Union.
20:15
Speaker 2: So that the organized the Bolshevik organization in the army
20:19
Speaker 2: was very important, but Stalin was not centrally involved in that.
20:23
Speaker 2: Then there was a civil war which lasted let's say,
20:26
Speaker 2: roughly four years, fighting against the forces that wanted to
20:34
Speaker 2: re establish the Tsarism, who are called the Whites. There
20:39
Speaker 2: are a number of leaders of these armies also fighting
20:47
Speaker 2: against the interventionists, soldiers from more than a dozen countries
20:56
Speaker 2: in Europe and Asia, and the United States troops to
21:03
Speaker 2: try to suppress the Russian Revolution. They didn't make any
21:12
Speaker 2: serious headway and withdrew the troops after a few years.
21:16
Speaker 2: But that was a serious, a serious attempt to overthrow the.
21:23
Speaker 1: Sorry when was this the more or less?
21:25
Speaker 2: What? Yet? Nineteen? Okay? The revolution was nineteen seventeen. The
21:29
Speaker 2: intervention is nineteen eighteen, nineteen to nineteen twenty one.
21:32
Speaker 1: Right, okay, And the war was from nineteen thirteen.
21:38
Speaker 2: Which was nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen. Right. August nineteen
21:42
Speaker 2: fourteen was the beginning of the second being in the
21:44
Speaker 2: First World War. One of the things that Bolsheviks did
21:49
Speaker 2: immediately after seizing power was withdraw from the war. Okay,
21:54
Speaker 2: the war was phenomenally unpopular, and not only that, but
21:58
Speaker 2: it was a It was killing millions of people, including
22:04
Speaker 2: millions of the Russian soldiers, and the Russian army experienced
22:11
Speaker 2: a serious revolt which precluded the Whites from really being
22:18
Speaker 2: able to seize the Russian army and turn it around
22:22
Speaker 2: against the Bolsheviks. They were never able to really do that. Eventually,
22:26
Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks recruited many soldiers others to their own site
22:33
Speaker 2: to the Red Army and defeated the armies of the Whites.
22:36
Speaker 2: And there was an invasion well the Polish that newly
22:41
Speaker 2: foreigned Polish state invaded Russia in nineteen eighteen. There was
22:49
Speaker 2: a war against to push the Poles back. The foot
22:54
Speaker 2: lines went back and forth. Eventually the Soviet Soviet Russia
22:59
Speaker 2: wasn't the Soviet Union and yet signed a treaty with
23:02
Speaker 2: Poland because they just couldn't fight anymore. And likewise they
23:06
Speaker 2: signed a treaty with the Germans to stop fighting against Germany,
23:13
Speaker 2: to withdraw from the Allied side because they just didn't
23:17
Speaker 2: have the strength. They wanted to be able to consolidate
23:20
Speaker 2: their forces. Stalin was very active in in the war,
23:28
Speaker 2: in the Civil War in various places in Russia as
23:32
Speaker 2: a commissar and a commander of troops.
23:38
Speaker 1: Now, what about the famous testament from Lenin?
23:43
Speaker 2: Sure I wrote a book about that called The Fraud
23:48
Speaker 2: of the Testament of Lenin. Okay, the basic story is
23:58
Speaker 2: something like this. Lenin had a number of strokes in
24:04
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty two. He could not write, he didn't have
24:11
Speaker 2: control over his hands after a stroke in December nineteen
24:16
Speaker 2: twenty two, and he dictated some materials to secretaries. A
24:25
Speaker 2: few of these articles, or let's call them articles, were
24:32
Speaker 2: very critical of Stalin and more positive, more positive to Trotsky,
24:40
Speaker 2: not entirely uncritical, but more positive towards Trotsky. Okay, that
24:48
Speaker 2: didn't have any effect on the let's say, the elections
24:55
Speaker 2: for the Central Committee and so forth in the party
24:58
Speaker 2: congresses during the nineteen twenties, but I think they were
25:06
Speaker 2: It seems like they were basically accepted as genuine. So
25:10
Speaker 2: after the fall of the Soviet Union, let me try
25:13
Speaker 2: to make this quick. Let me after the fall of
25:16
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union, some historians in Russia got privileged access
25:23
Speaker 2: to documents which no one else could see at that time,
25:27
Speaker 2: and I don't think anybody can see them now either.
25:29
Speaker 2: One of them, a man named Valentine Sakharov, professor at
25:33
Speaker 2: Moscow University, got access to the Lenin archive, and he
25:41
Speaker 2: wrote his dissertation, and then he wrote a seven hundred
25:44
Speaker 2: page book with illustrations and so forth, where he argued
25:49
Speaker 2: that the articles that were dictated by Lenin after December
25:57
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty two up until his final stroke in the
26:04
Speaker 2: second week of March nineteen twenty three, that some of
26:07
Speaker 2: those articles were genuine, but others were not genuine. They
26:12
Speaker 2: were not by Lenin, and he wrote a book to
26:18
Speaker 2: demonstrate this claim. As I said, it's some hunty pages long,
26:23
Speaker 2: was published in two thousand and three. I bought it
26:26
Speaker 2: when it came out, more or less, and I looked
26:29
Speaker 2: at it and I said, oh my god, it's seven
26:30
Speaker 2: hundred pages long. I'm doing something else right now. I'll
26:34
Speaker 2: read it another day. Fast forward to the teens, you know,
26:42
Speaker 2: ten years ago or so, a historian named Stephen Kotkin,
26:48
Speaker 2: who at that time was at Princeton University, and of course,
26:51
Speaker 2: like all other legitimated historians, was extremely anti Stalin and
26:56
Speaker 2: anti communists, wrote the first volume of his biography of Stalin. Okay,
27:05
Speaker 2: that was a that was in the mid twenty teens.
27:12
Speaker 2: And in that book, it's a very long book. But
27:17
Speaker 2: one of the things he did was to very carefully
27:21
Speaker 2: study Sakharov's book, and it convinced him. Now, now Kotkin
27:28
Speaker 2: is an extremely anti Stalin, anti communist scholar, but he
27:33
Speaker 2: was convinced by Sakharov's book that Sakharov had proven that
27:38
Speaker 2: the articles these Lenin's last articles, the so called Testament
27:44
Speaker 2: of Lenin, in which he Lenin supposedly purportedly criticized Stalin
27:53
Speaker 2: and even threatened to break off relations with him, were false,
27:59
Speaker 2: were fraudulent, and Kotkin accepted this. That was pretty interesting
28:06
Speaker 2: to me. So then I went back and studied Sakharov's
28:11
Speaker 2: book very carefully, and of course other materials too that
28:16
Speaker 2: are related to that. And as a result of that,
28:19
Speaker 2: I wrote The Fraud of the testa bit of linen,
28:22
Speaker 2: and I did it mainly because I thought, and I
28:26
Speaker 2: still think, that if I hadn't done it, no one
28:29
Speaker 2: would do It's This is a seven hundred page book
28:34
Speaker 2: in Russian. It has a kind of academic style. It's
28:37
Speaker 2: not easy reading, and the mainstream of Soviet history all
28:49
Speaker 2: the way from the real right wingers to the Trotskyists,
28:54
Speaker 2: are just not going to want to accept this, so
28:56
Speaker 2: they're going to ignore it. It's going to be ignored.
28:59
Speaker 2: And yet I thought that his evidence was very good,
29:02
Speaker 2: so I wrote a book about that. Investigating it, I
29:07
Speaker 2: tried to go a little bit beyond his evidence, but
29:10
Speaker 2: his evidence is very good. Sakorov's evidence is very good,
29:13
Speaker 2: and I reproduced some of the documents that he himself
29:16
Speaker 2: reproduced in his book in my book so that you
29:20
Speaker 2: can see what he's talking about. So it seems that
29:24
Speaker 2: there was some sort of conspiracy, probably involving Trotsky certainly
29:32
Speaker 2: involving Lenin's wife, not yet his widow, because Lenin was
29:36
Speaker 2: still alive, although after March seventh or eighth, nineteen twenty three,
29:43
Speaker 2: Lenin could not speak. He had another stroke and I
29:47
Speaker 2: believe never spoke another word. There was some sort of
29:53
Speaker 2: conspiracy to weaken Stalin of for some reason, perhaps just
30:02
Speaker 2: to create a situation whereby there was not one single inheritor,
30:09
Speaker 2: let's say, of Lenin's mantle, but maybe more than one,
30:12
Speaker 2: maybe trying to take Stalin down a peg or two
30:15
Speaker 2: and put Trotsky up a peger two. It's not clear.
30:19
Speaker 2: But what is clear is that there was this kind
30:22
Speaker 2: of conspiracy to create these documents in which Lenin supposedly
30:31
Speaker 2: criticized stolid So it's a very interesting issue, although it
30:36
Speaker 2: did not really make much of a stir except in
30:42
Speaker 2: among the Trotskyists. The Trotsky and his followers, of course,
30:48
Speaker 2: thought this was wonderful because Lenin, in those same documents,
30:51
Speaker 2: has said some positive things about Trotsky. Trotsky claimed that
30:55
Speaker 2: these documents really indicated that Lenin would like to Trotsky
31:01
Speaker 2: to have replaced him as the you know, the leader
31:06
Speaker 2: of the Bolshevik Party. The documents don't say that, but
31:11
Speaker 2: they're very positive towards Trotsky. Then along comes Nikita Krushchev
31:17
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty six, and he really used the testament
31:23
Speaker 2: of Lenin to discredit Stalin.
31:26
Speaker 1: There's an anti Stalin narrative that has dominated particularly Western
31:31
Speaker 1: history for the last few decades.
31:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, since since the yes, yes, especially since Khrushchev. But
31:41
Speaker 2: but but before that too, because Western I mean forget
31:46
Speaker 2: about Western Soviet historiography from the time of the revolution,
31:52
Speaker 2: from virtually at the time of the revolution was not
31:55
Speaker 2: primarily about finding out the truth about, you know, events
32:04
Speaker 2: in the Soviet Union. It was primarily its primary task
32:09
Speaker 2: was to generate anti communist propaganda for political purposes that
32:16
Speaker 2: could be used, you know, to not only by governments,
32:20
Speaker 2: but you're used as propaganda against communists. The ruling elites,
32:26
Speaker 2: the ruling classes in all of the western capitalist countries
32:30
Speaker 2: were very afraid that the example of the Russian Revolution
32:39
Speaker 2: would spread to other countries, and of course the Bolsheviks
32:42
Speaker 2: tried to do that right they set up the Communist
32:47
Speaker 2: International in nineteen nineteen. Their goal was to stimulate revolutions
32:52
Speaker 2: in industrialized countries and anti colonial movements in the empire
33:00
Speaker 2: of the Western imperialist countries. So the rulers of these countries,
33:06
Speaker 2: you know, England, the United States, particularly the European countries,
33:11
Speaker 2: we're terribly afraid of the of the enthusiasm for the
33:16
Speaker 2: Russian Revolution that was generated among their own working classes.
33:22
Speaker 2: And there were attempted revolutions in Germany, of course, in
33:28
Speaker 2: Hungary they were suppressed. In Finland also suppressed, but at
33:37
Speaker 2: the Baltic states, which sprang to existence along with Poland
33:43
Speaker 2: when the Russian Empire collapsed. So there was a great
33:48
Speaker 2: need among the capitalist countries in the world, among the
33:52
Speaker 2: capitalists anyway, for good anti communist, anti Bolshevik propaganda, and
33:59
Speaker 2: that was the main function of the academic study of
34:06
Speaker 2: Soviet history. There was a secondary function, which was to
34:09
Speaker 2: try to figure out what was really going on, and
34:12
Speaker 2: there were some good books published, but that wasn't the
34:15
Speaker 2: main thing that was happening. The main thing that was
34:16
Speaker 2: happening was an eager willingness to accept any kind of
34:26
Speaker 2: negative stories about what was going on in the Soviet Union.
34:31
Speaker 2: And since after the mid twenties Stalin was clear that
34:35
Speaker 2: Stalin was going to become the central leader of the
34:39
Speaker 2: Bolshevik Party and of the Soviet Union. Anything that would
34:42
Speaker 2: make Stalin look like a monster was going to be
34:46
Speaker 2: welcomed in important circles in the West.
34:50
Speaker 1: Now, the nineteenth thirties were particularly significant decade, and you've
34:56
Speaker 1: pointed out that the nineteen thirty six Stalin Constitution was
35:01
Speaker 1: evidence of perhaps genuine democratic intent. I think you note
35:07
Speaker 1: things like universal suffrage, secret ballots, contested elections, and that
35:12
Speaker 1: was a lot more progressive than many Western democracies at
35:15
Speaker 1: that time.
35:17
Speaker 2: So Stalin, as I pointed out, and of course here
35:20
Speaker 2: I'm drawing on Russian historians as well as on primary sources.
35:28
Speaker 2: The Russian historians of course guide you can guide you
35:31
Speaker 2: to sources that you might not have seen otherwise. Stalin
35:35
Speaker 2: really wanted to have contested elections, contested secret elections where
35:44
Speaker 2: all the voters had equal power. Under the nineteen twenty
35:51
Speaker 2: four Constitution of the Soviet Union, it was set up
35:54
Speaker 2: so that working class areas had more influence than peasant
35:58
Speaker 2: areas than country areas, for example. So Stalin wanted this
36:02
Speaker 2: kind of of of constitution and he got it, but
36:07
Speaker 2: it was not implemented. And I point that out in
36:11
Speaker 2: one or two of my books that in the Central
36:16
Speaker 2: Committee Pleniums of thirty six and thirty seven, the Stalin
36:23
Speaker 2: leadership argued for acceptance and support for contested elections, but
36:34
Speaker 2: on I believe the date was October the tenth, nineteen
36:37
Speaker 2: thirty seven, when there was a meeting of the pollt Bureau.
36:41
Speaker 2: Even some members of Stalin's polit bureau thought that they
36:46
Speaker 2: could not permit this. Now they believed they had been
36:51
Speaker 2: led to believe that there was a widespread and maybe
36:55
Speaker 2: more than one widespread rebellion in the far reaches of
37:05
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union in various places to overthrow the Soviet government.
37:13
Speaker 2: So that was one of the explanations for why for
37:21
Speaker 2: the rationales for why the contested elections were canceled. Elections
37:28
Speaker 2: were held. Some of the candidates were chosen by the
37:35
Speaker 2: Communist Party and were not necessarily members of the Communist Party,
37:39
Speaker 2: but they were no cadested elections. And Stalin tried to
37:44
Speaker 2: gain after the Second World War to revive this kind
37:53
Speaker 2: of democratic if you want to put it that way,
37:58
Speaker 2: a democratic political order, but he was not able to
38:06
Speaker 2: do it. Okay, and we don't know all the details,
38:09
Speaker 2: but it just didn't happen.
38:13
Speaker 1: Then came the purgas well.
38:16
Speaker 2: Okay, that was the nineteen thirties. Okay, so let's back
38:22
Speaker 2: up a little bit. During the nineteen twenties, there was
38:27
Speaker 2: a here was the situation in the early nineteen twenties.
38:34
Speaker 2: The Bolsheviks had, in many respects counted on revolutions in
38:40
Speaker 2: other particularly Western industrial countries, that would support the Soviet
38:50
Speaker 2: Union and you know, and aid the Soviet Union in
38:55
Speaker 2: some ways, because the Soviet Union had been devastated first
38:59
Speaker 2: of all by the First World War, second of all
39:01
Speaker 2: by the very wide ranging Civil War, which was also
39:06
Speaker 2: very destructive. And then there was a very serious famine
39:11
Speaker 2: and epidemic in the early nineteen twenties which took many lives.
39:23
Speaker 2: And so the Soviet Union in the early nineteen twenties
39:26
Speaker 2: was in terrible shape. And when it became clear that
39:30
Speaker 2: revolutions were not going to take place in Western European
39:37
Speaker 2: countries which were more industrialized than Russia, certainly there was
39:45
Speaker 2: a vigorous debate in the Bolshevik Party, what are we
39:51
Speaker 2: going to do now? Marx Engels and Lenin did not
39:58
Speaker 2: write a blueprint for how you get from where Russia
40:03
Speaker 2: was where the Soviet Union was in the early nineteen twenties.
40:06
Speaker 2: You know, this basically devastated country with a small working
40:10
Speaker 2: class to begin with, and many of whom had been
40:14
Speaker 2: killed or had gone back to the farms to try
40:17
Speaker 2: to work there to get something to eat. Really a
40:20
Speaker 2: devastated country. What should be done? And that was what
40:26
Speaker 2: the debate in the party conferences and congresses during the
40:31
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties was all about. And this gave rise to
40:37
Speaker 2: opposition movements, opposition movements in opposition to the leadership of
40:43
Speaker 2: the Bolshek Party. To put it put it quickly, Leon
40:52
Speaker 2: Trotsky and a few others became the major leaders of
40:58
Speaker 2: this opposition movement. Now, in nineteen twenty one, at a
41:05
Speaker 2: party congress, the tenth Party Congress, under Lenin's instructions, or
41:13
Speaker 2: Linin's urging insistence, a resolution was passed that forbade fractions
41:23
Speaker 2: or the Americans call it factions within the Bolshevik Party,
41:28
Speaker 2: they had this idea, this concept of democratic centralism, which
41:32
Speaker 2: meant that there would be discussion at the party conferences
41:35
Speaker 2: and congresses over what the line should be, and then
41:38
Speaker 2: it would be voted on. And once the line was
41:40
Speaker 2: voted on and decided at these high level party meetings,
41:45
Speaker 2: everyone should follow that line. And factionalism or fractionalism was
41:53
Speaker 2: to be forbidden because factions would organize around their own line.
41:59
Speaker 2: They would organized try to organize to win people around
42:02
Speaker 2: whatever their particular line was, and that contradicted the idea
42:06
Speaker 2: of centralism. The democracy was in the discussions and the
42:11
Speaker 2: centralism was everybody tries to put the line into effect.
42:16
Speaker 2: A number of people were expelled from the party in
42:19
Speaker 2: the later nineteen twenties for continuing to factionalize, for not
42:26
Speaker 2: dissolving these oppositions, opposition movements. Most of those people then recanted,
42:34
Speaker 2: and we're talking about, you know, significant party leaders here,
42:39
Speaker 2: the local leaders and regional leaders of the party, a
42:44
Speaker 2: fairly prominent people, most of them men. Most of those
42:49
Speaker 2: people who were expelled for factionalism in the late nineteen
42:53
Speaker 2: twenties recanted, has to be with, readmitted to the party,
43:02
Speaker 2: vowed that they would continue, they would support the party
43:06
Speaker 2: line and would abjure any kind of oppositional activity. But
43:14
Speaker 2: many of them did not, and so they continued to
43:21
Speaker 2: exist underground. And I've written about that in a few
43:26
Speaker 2: of my books. Now, in December nineteen thirty four, the
43:35
Speaker 2: first secretary of the Leningrad Party was a man named
43:39
Speaker 2: Sergei Kirov was assassinated. He was shot in the head
43:45
Speaker 2: right outside his office in the headquarters of the party,
43:49
Speaker 2: and the man who shot him tried to commit suicide,
43:54
Speaker 2: but out of nervousness, evidently he did not succeed. He
44:00
Speaker 2: was arrested, and it's the man named Nikoliov. He was interrogated.
44:09
Speaker 2: He at first denied everything, but then he started to
44:12
Speaker 2: he started to name names. He started to say, well,
44:16
Speaker 2: you know, I didn't kill Kirov, but if I had
44:19
Speaker 2: wanted to kill Kirov, here's who I would have asked
44:21
Speaker 2: to help me this kind of thing. And so he
44:24
Speaker 2: started to talk, and then of course, the the the GPU,
44:29
Speaker 2: the the political police went out and arrested those people
44:33
Speaker 2: and started to interrogate them, and they started to name
44:40
Speaker 2: other names. So pretty quickly the people who had been
44:47
Speaker 2: involved in Nikolaiev's group planning the assassination of Kirov mentioned
44:57
Speaker 2: that they were in touch with two former top party
45:00
Speaker 2: leaders named Zenoviev and Kamynev, who were living in Moscow.
45:05
Speaker 2: See all this was happening in Leningrad. They said they
45:08
Speaker 2: were in touch with Zenoviev Kamyonev. So became clear that
45:12
Speaker 2: there was some kind of conspiracy. Well, the people. The
45:19
Speaker 2: men who were involved in the kire of assassination were
45:22
Speaker 2: executed in late December nineteen thirty six, but then Zenoviev,
45:29
Speaker 2: Kamynev and some of their associates back in Moscow were
45:32
Speaker 2: put on trial. They were given prison sentences as they
45:35
Speaker 2: confessed that yes, they had been in touch with these people.
45:37
Speaker 2: They had been in touch with these people who had
45:41
Speaker 2: assassinated Kirov. They had not told them to do that.
45:45
Speaker 2: They you know, they were horrified that they had done that,
45:48
Speaker 2: but they had been in touch with them, and they
45:50
Speaker 2: hadn't reported that to the party. So they were given
45:54
Speaker 2: prison sentences. But that's where the story begins. In the
46:04
Speaker 2: political police, who by this time were called the NKVD,
46:09
Speaker 2: They worked in the Department of the Interior, started to
46:14
Speaker 2: investigate these people's contacts, and by early nineteen thirty six
46:22
Speaker 2: there was a they got there. They found a number
46:27
Speaker 2: of figures, a number of people who confessed that they
46:31
Speaker 2: were Trotskyists and that they were bent on assassinating leading
46:36
Speaker 2: political figures. That led to the Moscow trials. The first
46:40
Speaker 2: Moscow trial was August nineteen thirty six, the second one
46:44
Speaker 2: January nineteen thirty seven, then the third one March nineteen
46:48
Speaker 2: thirty eight. Now, the transcripts of those trials, the edited transcripts,
46:55
Speaker 2: have been available for many years, and of course they
46:58
Speaker 2: were famous at the time. There's never been any evidence
47:03
Speaker 2: that the statements, the confessions and the details given by
47:09
Speaker 2: the defendants in those trials were made under compulsion. But
47:15
Speaker 2: that was the claim of people who wanted to believe that.
47:20
Speaker 2: And by the time Khrushchev comes along and denounces Stalin,
47:27
Speaker 2: Khrushchev's and his people just simply declared that all these
47:31
Speaker 2: people were framed. Okay, it took a few years for
47:35
Speaker 2: him to get that far, but they declared that. Now
47:38
Speaker 2: Khrushchev was ousted in nineteen sixty four, Leonid Brezhdev came in,
47:43
Speaker 2: and there were a few short lived first secretaries of
47:49
Speaker 2: the party after Brezev's death in nineteen eighty two, and
47:52
Speaker 2: then Mikhail Gorbachev came along, and Gorbachev carried on a
47:57
Speaker 2: campaign tax on Stalin even more vigorously than the one
48:06
Speaker 2: carried out by Christian, but again did not did not present,
48:13
Speaker 2: did not publish any evidence. So all during this time,
48:19
Speaker 2: except for the testimony at the Moscow trials, we really
48:21
Speaker 2: don't have any evidence that these trials were, that the
48:29
Speaker 2: people in these trials were tortured or threatened or forced
48:34
Speaker 2: to make false confessions. Since the end of the Soviet Union,
48:39
Speaker 2: we have a tremendous amount of documentation, including statements by
48:43
Speaker 2: a great many people who were either centrally or peripherally
48:47
Speaker 2: involved with these conspiracies, who confirm that these conspiracies really
48:53
Speaker 2: did exist. And we also have some evidence from the
48:57
Speaker 2: Trotsky Archive at Harvard University. That is to say, Trotsky
49:03
Speaker 2: and his son, who at that time lived in Paris,
49:07
Speaker 2: had a correspondence about some correspondents about the underground Trotskyites.
49:15
Speaker 2: So that's I would say, an important aspect of what
49:19
Speaker 2: you call the purgase. The purgase is not really the
49:22
Speaker 2: best word. A party purge was really a kind of
49:25
Speaker 2: a vetting of members to see if they, you know,
49:29
Speaker 2: are good party members or not. So this is really
49:32
Speaker 2: kind of a misnomer, but that's that's what that's the
49:36
Speaker 2: word that has become popularly used for these for these
49:42
Speaker 2: trials of conspirators in nineteen thirty six, late nineteen thirty six,
49:49
Speaker 2: the man who is in charge of the n KVD,
49:53
Speaker 2: the Interior Department, if you want the People's commis are
49:58
Speaker 2: for internal affairs, but which included, of course, the political police.
50:05
Speaker 2: Was dismissed from office, okay, a guy named Henri Genrich
50:15
Speaker 2: Yakov Yagurda, and was replaced by a man named Nikolai Yezhov.
50:24
Speaker 2: Now and during the next two years nineteen thirty seven
50:29
Speaker 2: to nineteen thirty eight, Yezhov and his men killed something
50:39
Speaker 2: like six hundred thousand, actually closer to seven hundred thousand
50:43
Speaker 2: Soviet citizens. And I think that is the period, that
50:53
Speaker 2: is the phenomenon that for the most part, people who
51:01
Speaker 2: researched the Soviet period, of the Stalin period the Soviet
51:05
Speaker 2: Union are concerned with did Yezhov do this at Stalin's
51:11
Speaker 2: behest or did he do it behind the back of
51:16
Speaker 2: the Soviet government. I wrote a little book about this,
51:19
Speaker 2: and of course others have written too, though mainly in Russian,
51:24
Speaker 2: that the evidence is he did it behind the back
51:26
Speaker 2: of the Soviet government. When it was discovered by the
51:30
Speaker 2: Stalin and the central leadership that Yezhov was doing this
51:34
Speaker 2: kind of stuff, he was either dismissed or persuaded to resign.
51:41
Speaker 2: In any case, he left his post. He was replaced
51:45
Speaker 2: by Leventi Berria, who started to investigate what Yezhov had
51:52
Speaker 2: been up to, and in late January nineteen thirty nine,
51:58
Speaker 2: Berya Alenkov and one or two other members of the
52:04
Speaker 2: politbureau of the leading group of the Soviet Party issued
52:09
Speaker 2: a report to Stalin detailing some of the atrocities that
52:16
Speaker 2: Yajhov's men had been engaged in. So Yazov and his
52:21
Speaker 2: men were arrested over the next few months, they confessed
52:27
Speaker 2: to doing all these things. I put Yezhov's confessions, both
52:33
Speaker 2: in the original Russian and also in English translation on
52:37
Speaker 2: my web page back in twenty ten. These are not
52:40
Speaker 2: hard to find. They're very revealing, and it's clear that
52:49
Speaker 2: Yajov and company had their own conspiracy, and they had
52:56
Speaker 2: part of that conspiracy was to engendered discontent among the
53:04
Speaker 2: Soviet population by these ruthless and murderous means, and they
53:14
Speaker 2: succeeded over you know, it took them a while, but
53:17
Speaker 2: they succeeded in sowing quite a lot of content discontent.
53:20
Speaker 2: And then of course they were caught. They were confessed
53:25
Speaker 2: to try to arrest it and execute it and so forth.
53:29
Speaker 2: But the Soviet government, for reasons that we do not know,
53:33
Speaker 2: the Soviet government never went public that this is what
53:38
Speaker 2: had happened, and I think that it was not only
53:44
Speaker 2: in retrospect, but at the time should have been seen
53:47
Speaker 2: as a terrible a terrible mistake that they should have
53:53
Speaker 2: done that. I understand what I think. I understand why
53:57
Speaker 2: they didn't do it. The Soviet Union was threatened, was
54:02
Speaker 2: expecting a war, expecting to be invaded, attacked either by
54:08
Speaker 2: Germany or Poland, or even the Western allies England and France,
54:15
Speaker 2: and had been attacked and were to be attacked again
54:18
Speaker 2: very shortly by Japan. Soviet Union fought two wars thirty
54:22
Speaker 2: eight one nineteen thirty thirty nine against against Japan. So
54:30
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union was seriously under threat. And I believe
54:38
Speaker 2: the reason that they did not, the stolen government did
54:42
Speaker 2: not come clean about what Yezhov's crimes and what Yeeshov
54:49
Speaker 2: and company had done, was because they did not want
54:52
Speaker 2: to appear as though the country was seriously divided. But
54:59
Speaker 2: that's just hypothesis. The point, the fact of matter is
55:02
Speaker 2: they did not announce to the Soviet population and to
55:07
Speaker 2: the world in effect of what Yezhov had done had
55:10
Speaker 2: been just massacring people without trial, without any any evidence,
55:17
Speaker 2: of guilt. They didn't want to admit that the country
55:21
Speaker 2: had had had had conspirators in such high positions that
55:30
Speaker 2: they could cause this kind of damage.
55:34
Speaker 1: We are running out of time, but sure no conversation
55:41
Speaker 1: about Stalin can be had without including the famine of
55:46
Speaker 1: thirty two. This is one of the most frequent bullets
55:49
Speaker 1: shot at Stalin.
55:52
Speaker 2: The best research on the on Soviet agriculture generally and
55:57
Speaker 2: the famine specifically is done by Marker, who just recently
56:01
Speaker 2: retired from West Virginia University, but he spent his professional
56:06
Speaker 2: life studying Soviet agriculture from primary sources. I discovered him
56:12
Speaker 2: god maybe twenty ten, twenty eleven or something, and immediately
56:18
Speaker 2: got in touch with him because his work just stands
56:20
Speaker 2: out now. Tauger is a not a leftist. I mean,
56:26
Speaker 2: he's a liberal, you know, but he's not a leftist
56:30
Speaker 2: in any way. And his research is based on primary
56:34
Speaker 2: sources and is extremely objected. He's not pro Stalin, certainly,
56:39
Speaker 2: and he demonstrates that the famine was caused by It
56:44
Speaker 2: was not man made. Famine was caused by bad natural conditions,
56:51
Speaker 2: flooding in some areas, drought in other areas, crop diseases,
56:57
Speaker 2: the crop diseases are known as rust and I looked
57:01
Speaker 2: them up one time. I can't tell you any more
57:03
Speaker 2: about them, but they are serious crop diseases. There were
57:08
Speaker 2: infestations of insects in some areas, and even an the
57:11
Speaker 2: infestation of field mice, so they were very serious famine.
57:18
Speaker 2: There very serious crop failures due to these conditions, and
57:24
Speaker 2: the Soviet government didn't understand that this was a widespread
57:28
Speaker 2: phenomena until around January nineteen thirty three, at which time
57:35
Speaker 2: they started to provide aid to those areas that were
57:40
Speaker 2: seriously affected by the famine. And there was a good
57:46
Speaker 2: famine in nineteen thirty three, which I'm sorry, good harvest
57:49
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty three which put an end to the famine.
57:52
Speaker 2: So Tauger as well has documented this very well. When
57:56
Speaker 2: I wrote this up for two of my books some
58:00
Speaker 2: years ago, I actually sent those parts to Mark Tauger
58:04
Speaker 2: to say, please criticize them, Please let me know if
58:07
Speaker 2: I have your the research correct here. I want to
58:10
Speaker 2: be accurate. And he made a few corrections and he said,
58:13
Speaker 2: you know, okay, go with it' that's basically accurate. It's
58:18
Speaker 2: important to note, and no one does note it that
58:20
Speaker 2: there were four famines in the Soviet Union in the
58:24
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties alone, so famine had been a feature of
58:30
Speaker 2: Soviet agriculture for at least one thousand years. Every three
58:33
Speaker 2: or four years there would be a famine, and every
58:38
Speaker 2: decade or so a very serious famine. And of course
58:41
Speaker 2: the people who suffered most are the poor peasants who
58:44
Speaker 2: had no you know, no or very little land, and
58:47
Speaker 2: the agricultural techniques, you know, were basically medieval. So that
58:53
Speaker 2: gave the the Stalin government that instilled in them the
58:59
Speaker 2: conviction that they had to collectivize agriculture, and they sent
59:06
Speaker 2: agronomists to the United States to investigate, to study large
59:10
Speaker 2: scale American Midwestern farms and the methods used there, and
59:15
Speaker 2: then set up a few demonstration farms to see how
59:19
Speaker 2: that would work in Russia, and then eventually collectivized agriculture.
59:24
Speaker 2: And without the collectivization of agriculture, the industrialization could never
59:29
Speaker 2: have taken place, and famines would have continued. So that's
59:34
Speaker 2: the story of the famine. But of course the Ukrainian
59:37
Speaker 2: nationalists and other anti communists have said that it was
59:41
Speaker 2: a man made famine, either caused deliberately or by incompetence
59:45
Speaker 2: by the Soviet government, and it just so happens that
59:48
Speaker 2: that's not true. You have to read the milinary sources
59:55
Speaker 2: that you have to go back. I have them, I've summarized.
59:58
Speaker 2: I've summarized a lot of Snyder's research in a couple
1:00:03
Speaker 2: of my books. So that and with the footnotes if
1:00:06
Speaker 2: you want to look further.
1:00:08
Speaker 3: But I might have this wrong, but I believe that
1:00:16
Speaker 3: Mao himself had some relationship with the famine in terms
1:00:21
Speaker 3: of because remember China also had big, big femine issues.
1:00:24
Speaker 1: Sure, but I can't remember the connection.
1:00:29
Speaker 2: I don't know that there's a connection. But okay, So
1:00:34
Speaker 2: after the Chinese revel and then this is beyond my
1:00:37
Speaker 2: field of expertise, but after the Chinese Revolution, it seems
1:00:40
Speaker 2: to me that the Chinese were basically following what you
1:00:43
Speaker 2: might call the the Stalin blueprint for building socialism. So
1:00:50
Speaker 2: they you know, they collectivized agriculture. They that was up
1:00:56
Speaker 2: until about nineteen fifty six or so. They even had
1:00:59
Speaker 2: a rural people commune movement where they went beyond just
1:01:03
Speaker 2: just the collective farms to you know, collectively owned farms communes.
1:01:08
Speaker 2: Then they there was this great leap forward which was
1:01:14
Speaker 2: in some respects like the first five Year Plan in
1:01:18
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union. And then there was a serious famine,
1:01:23
Speaker 2: okay in China and the many people, A number of
1:01:30
Speaker 2: people in the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party seized
1:01:33
Speaker 2: on this famine. They also, by this time were listening
1:01:37
Speaker 2: to Kruschev. R. Kruschev' speech was fifty six. So the
1:01:42
Speaker 2: Chinese had always followed the leadership of the Soviet Union.
1:01:45
Speaker 2: So when you know, when when Khrushchev gave that speech
1:01:50
Speaker 2: and then continued to critics I stalin some leaders of
1:01:55
Speaker 2: the Chinese Communist Party there may be more to it
1:01:57
Speaker 2: than this, but that this is at least the case.
1:01:59
Speaker 2: Some leaders the Chinese Commis's Party said, well, listen, we
1:02:01
Speaker 2: can't follow the stolen model anymore. Krushchev just exposed how
1:02:04
Speaker 2: bad it is. You know, how terrible this was. We
1:02:06
Speaker 2: can't do this, and Mao disagreed. Now it's not like
1:02:10
Speaker 2: they understood the ins and the outs, all the details
1:02:13
Speaker 2: that we have today, but Mao just Mao disagreed. And
1:02:18
Speaker 2: in the meanwhile, there was this Sino Soviet dispute that
1:02:22
Speaker 2: was that started in fifty seven. Mao and some of
1:02:26
Speaker 2: the other leaders of the Chinese Country's Party decided that
1:02:29
Speaker 2: Khrushchev was using this attack on Stalin, and that's not
1:02:33
Speaker 2: that they disbelieved what he said, but that Khrushchev was
1:02:36
Speaker 2: using this attack on Stalin to reverse certain basic principles
1:02:43
Speaker 2: of Marxism Leninism, like, for example, the need for revolution
1:02:47
Speaker 2: to overthrow capitalism. Right, Khrushchev was for peaceful, peaceful coexistence. Right,
1:02:54
Speaker 2: we can elect elect socialism in you know, euro Communism
1:03:00
Speaker 2: the result of that. So, yeah, there is a kind
1:03:04
Speaker 2: of connection. I have not investigated it closely, but I
1:03:07
Speaker 2: hope somebody does. There is a kind of important connection
1:03:10
Speaker 2: between the Khrushchev's attack on Stalin and the developments in
1:03:18
Speaker 2: China that eventually led to the Cultural Revolution for example, Okay, which.
1:03:24
Speaker 1: Anyway, Stalin died in nineteen fifty three, and you argue
1:03:29
Speaker 1: he was quite politically isolated. Is that correct?
1:03:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he seems to have been.
1:03:35
Speaker 2: He In nineteen forty seven, he Stalin and other leaders
1:03:42
Speaker 2: around him drafted a new constitution for the Soviet Union
1:03:48
Speaker 2: and a blueprint for how to develop towards communism. And
1:03:53
Speaker 2: this document, which was of course secret for decades, was
1:03:57
Speaker 2: finally published without much fanfare about ten years ago. A
1:04:04
Speaker 2: little bit of it was published before that, and I
1:04:07
Speaker 2: write a little bit about this at the very end
1:04:09
Speaker 2: of my two thousand and five articles. Stalin and the
1:04:12
Speaker 2: Struggle for Democratic were form Part two. But now we
1:04:14
Speaker 2: have the whole document, and it's clear that Stalin wanted
1:04:18
Speaker 2: to have the Soviet Union evolve more towards a more
1:04:26
Speaker 2: much more democratic system where the state would play a
1:04:28
Speaker 2: much smaller role, and take some more steps towards communism.
1:04:35
Speaker 2: I'm probably going to write something about that one of
1:04:37
Speaker 2: these days. And the nineteenth Party Congress in October nineteen
1:04:45
Speaker 2: fifty two had as its sort of main theme, you know,
1:04:51
Speaker 2: the next state, next step towards communist with the next
1:04:55
Speaker 2: pushing on towards communism. And Stalin wrote a book called
1:05:00
Speaker 2: Economic Problems of Socialism in the Soviet Union, and that
1:05:02
Speaker 2: was the leading publication that was discussed by everybody at
1:05:06
Speaker 2: the Nineteenth Party Congress. Stalin then that was in October
1:05:10
Speaker 2: fifty two. Stalin dies in March fifty three, and very
1:05:16
Speaker 2: quickly that book disappears off the shelves. Nobody talks about
1:05:19
Speaker 2: it anymore. The resolutions that were made at the twentieth,
1:05:24
Speaker 2: the nineteenth Party Congress, and then at the Central Committee
1:05:27
Speaker 2: meeting right after it we're forgotten about. So it's clearly
1:05:34
Speaker 2: what Stalin died. The rest of the party leadership just
1:05:39
Speaker 2: was not in support of these of these initiatives.
1:05:43
Speaker 1: What do you think Putin thinks of Stalin?
1:05:48
Speaker 2: Oh? He said many times when he thinks about Stalin,
1:05:51
Speaker 2: I mean not that I follow everything, but he's said
1:05:54
Speaker 2: it a few Okay, so Putin. Putin defends the role
1:06:00
Speaker 2: of the Stalin leadership in World War two. And in fact,
1:06:06
Speaker 2: I've just finished a book about the run up to
1:06:08
Speaker 2: World War two which shows that only the Soviet Union
1:06:13
Speaker 2: was really trying to stop Hitler. The Western European countries
1:06:18
Speaker 2: actually many of their leaders liked Hitler and they didn't
1:06:21
Speaker 2: want to stop it, and they were willing to sacrifice
1:06:24
Speaker 2: Poland in order to accommodate Hitler. And that position has
1:06:32
Speaker 2: become pretty well documented since Michael J. Carley of University
1:06:39
Speaker 2: of Montreal has published his three huge, three volume study
1:06:44
Speaker 2: of the period leading up to World War Two. It's
1:06:47
Speaker 2: just very clear. He finished his last volume last about
1:06:49
Speaker 2: a year ago, and he demonstrates that that's very clear too.
1:06:55
Speaker 2: But the Putin defends the Soviet Union's role in trying
1:07:05
Speaker 2: to fend off Hitler and the fascists, but he does
1:07:12
Speaker 2: not defend a stalin collectivization, industrialization. But there are some
1:07:25
Speaker 2: elp you know there. But there's contradictions too. There was
1:07:29
Speaker 2: a yeah, well he I don't know that he's so nuanced,
1:07:34
Speaker 2: but there For example, one of the one of the
1:07:37
Speaker 2: top figures in the Soviet military historian published a few
1:07:42
Speaker 2: years ago a statement that, well, it's clear that the Marshall,
1:07:48
Speaker 2: Tukachevsky and the other generals who were tried and executed
1:07:51
Speaker 2: for plotting with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet government.
1:07:55
Speaker 2: Something we didn't talk about in this interview. It's clear
1:07:58
Speaker 2: that they were guilty. Now I and my colleagues in
1:08:02
Speaker 2: Vladimir and sin Eric have published a book about this.
1:08:06
Speaker 2: There's a huge amount of evidence that Marshall Tookachevski and
1:08:11
Speaker 2: the other generals who were tried and executed with him
1:08:14
Speaker 2: in June nineteen thirty seven were in fact in collaboration
1:08:17
Speaker 2: with the Germans and Japanese. Another reason why the Soviet
1:08:24
Speaker 2: leadership felt so much under siege right is that there
1:08:27
Speaker 2: were these high level conspiracies, you know, including with the fascists,
1:08:35
Speaker 2: but Putin doesn't hasn't made any statements about that Russia.
1:08:43
Speaker 2: In Russia, you know, the largest the single largest party
1:08:47
Speaker 2: in Russia is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
1:08:50
Speaker 2: Now it's not what you would call a revolutionary party,
1:08:54
Speaker 2: but they are still millions of people in Russia who
1:08:57
Speaker 2: identify strongly with Communism. That means, okay, whatever that means
1:09:01
Speaker 2: to them. And that's not the case in the rest
1:09:07
Speaker 2: of what used to be the communist bloc, right the Baltics,
1:09:10
Speaker 2: of Finland, the other Eastern European countries, it's not the case.
1:09:14
Speaker 2: In fact, in most of those countries, communist parties are outlawed,
1:09:17
Speaker 2: they're essentially illegal. But in Russia there's a very large
1:09:24
Speaker 2: number of people who are very pro communist and even
1:09:26
Speaker 2: pro Stalin. And on the other hand, there are many
1:09:30
Speaker 2: forces in Russia who are many people, especially among the intelligencia.
1:09:34
Speaker 2: I don't want to beat up on the intelligencia as such,
1:09:37
Speaker 2: but many members of the intelligencia have never been pro
1:09:42
Speaker 2: communist and have always been very anti Stalin. It's sort
1:09:46
Speaker 2: of reminiscent of the nineteenth century or the eighteenth and
1:09:50
Speaker 2: nineteenth century feuds in Russia between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles,
1:09:59
Speaker 2: you know, I mean, it doesn't it's not exactly that.
1:10:02
Speaker 2: But it's the people who support, uh, support the Soviet Union,
1:10:06
Speaker 2: people who support Stalin, people who support the goals of
1:10:08
Speaker 2: communism and who identify with them, versus the people who
1:10:12
Speaker 2: who abhor them, and Russia is seriously divided in that way.
1:10:16
Speaker 2: So I think Putin, whereas of course he's he was
1:10:20
Speaker 2: a Yeltsin man. Yeltsin was super anti Stalin, Yelson was
1:10:24
Speaker 2: a Gorbachev man. But Putin straddles the fence. Although I
1:10:33
Speaker 2: think on the whole he comes down in an anti
1:10:35
Speaker 2: Stalin position, but around certain certain positions he uh, he
1:10:39
Speaker 2: certainly defends the Soviet record and the record of the
1:10:43
Speaker 2: Soviet Union during Stalin and particularly in the build up
1:10:47
Speaker 2: to World War Two. Now I've written one book and
1:10:52
Speaker 2: just finished writing another book on the cat and massacre.
1:10:55
Speaker 2: Putin hasn't come out with any position on that. He's
1:11:02
Speaker 2: kind of gone along with the mainstream view that Stalin
1:11:09
Speaker 2: and company had all of these Polish prisoners shot. But
1:11:12
Speaker 2: there are many people in Russia who do not accept
1:11:15
Speaker 2: that story, and I myself don't accept it, but we
1:11:18
Speaker 2: don't have time to talk about that right now.
1:11:20
Speaker 1: I suppose I really do appreciate your ability to compress
1:11:25
Speaker 1: so much of this history into such a short time.
1:11:28
Speaker 1: I understand that it's an incredibly complex topic and very
1:11:31
Speaker 1: very big. I guess Grover, the moral of the story
1:11:35
Speaker 1: is that if you are looking for the truth, you're
1:11:38
Speaker 1: not going to find that in mainstream institutions.
1:11:42
Speaker 2: Yes, objectivity and primary source evidence, and there's very little
1:11:48
Speaker 2: of that. Also, just let me mention that there's this phenomena,
1:11:54
Speaker 2: which I call the anti Stoalin paradigm. You can't get published,
1:11:57
Speaker 2: You can't have a career in the field of Soviet
1:11:59
Speaker 2: history in any country that I know of, except maybe China,
1:12:05
Speaker 2: and I don't know about that unless you make Unless
1:12:11
Speaker 2: you attack Stalin. I've been told that by some people
1:12:16
Speaker 2: in that field that I know that I respect that.
1:12:19
Speaker 2: You know, Grover, why don't you make Why don't you
1:12:21
Speaker 2: say some bad things about Stalin. Nobody's going to take
1:12:23
Speaker 2: you seriously unless you say bad things about Stalin, because
1:12:28
Speaker 2: that's the that's the position you must you must have
1:12:32
Speaker 2: if you're going to be have a career in the
1:12:34
Speaker 2: field of Soviet history, and otherwise you won't have a career,
1:12:37
Speaker 2: you won't get published, you won't get hired. Fortunately for me,
1:12:41
Speaker 2: I am not in that field. I teach medieval European
1:12:44
Speaker 2: literature and I can do all of this and it
1:12:48
Speaker 2: doesn't affect my career on my job.
1:12:52
Speaker 1: How can my audience get you books?
1:12:57
Speaker 2: Amazon? Is there an Amazon South Africa?
1:13:00
Speaker 1: There's Amazon everywhere?
1:13:02
Speaker 2: Not everywhere, but there there's Amazon a lot of places.
1:13:06
Speaker 2: If there's an Amazon South Africa, they're all there. That's
1:13:09
Speaker 2: the easiest way. If you live outside the United States,
1:13:12
Speaker 2: you know, of course, by.
1:13:13
Speaker 1: Publishing Audians Marlodians is international. Pardon me, my audience is international.
1:13:18
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, well my publisher is. You could also get
1:13:22
Speaker 2: them from my publisher. But I think the simplest thing
1:13:25
Speaker 2: to tell you right now is go to Amazon. All
1:13:27
Speaker 2: of my books in English and some of them in translation.
1:13:31
Speaker 2: Many of them translation are on Amazon. Okay, there's been
1:13:35
Speaker 2: a number of them have been translated into other languages, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian,
1:13:41
Speaker 2: of course, Polish, you know, stuff like that. But Amazon
1:13:46
Speaker 2: is the Amazon is the easiest place to go, and
1:13:50
Speaker 2: you won't have to pay shipping costs. From the United
1:13:54
Speaker 2: States to wherever it is you live, right, you'll just
1:13:56
Speaker 2: be able to get them there, So go to Amazon
1:13:59
Speaker 2: dot com.
1:14:00
Speaker 1: All listed there Grover for thank you for joining me
1:14:04
Speaker 1: in the trenches.
1:14:05
Speaker 2: Thank you very much for inviting me Jeremy. I appreciate
1:14:08
Speaker 2: it very much