>>2418619it is a translation of the text of a french communist, Gilles Questiaux, who have a good blog
https://www.reveilcommuniste.fr/2020/04/de-qui-staline-est-il-le-nom.htmlhere have another one
Revolutionaries of the 21st century would do well to free themselves from the bourgeois discourse on Stalin, a discourse on an essential element of their history, whether they like it or not, a discourse that is false but hegemonic, even within their own ranks. And to realize that had Stalin been an angel, the bourgeois discourse on him would have been exactly the same. In fact, they would do well to realize that they themselves should have to earn some of Stalin's bad reputation among the world's bourgeoisie.
All over the world, the exploiters and hypocrites who work for them pronounce the name of Stalin, who died on March 5, 1953, with hatred, terror and horror. As a precaution, this is a rather good sign. Perhaps it's a sign that he must not have been so bad, if they're still afraid of him after all this time.
Stalin as the evil monster denounced by liberal-democratic ideology haunts the world at the end of history. He is wrongly equated with Hitler by the Cold War theory of “totalitarianism”. The German counter-revolutionary racist criminal leader is rejected in words by the same bourgeoisie that used him, as if it had nothing to do with him. Stalin, the victorious leader of the Soviet Union and the world revolution who fought and defeated Hitler's Nazism, is equated with him, in defiance of historical reality, to “exorcise communism”, as the newspaper “Le Monde” once wrote without quotation marks, to make a new revolution like that of October 1917 in Russia forever impossible.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the historical Stalin was not the monstrous figure that his enemies, both inside and out, sought to make him out to be. The objective history of his power over the USSR and the Communist movement is beginning to be written with the scientific distance necessary to reveal the truth. It's a terrible story, full of excess and brutality. But the Stalinist terror we denounce was not introduced into history by the malice of one man or a small ruling group. It was the result of a specific context and set of circumstances. When these circumstances calmed down, the gentrified ruling groups in the USSR and in the Communist parties of other countries, in search of respectability, no longer dared to take responsibility for their history, and thought they could get away with making Stalin the scapegoat for all their excesses and mistakes. And the scapegoat was particularly ill-chosen.
He was a politician of popular origin, highly intelligent, skilful, convinced, incorruptible and rather cautious, who was undoubtedly, like Mao after him, a victim of the illusions produced by overextended political power.
It's not so easy to dissociate him from the political tradition he applied and prolonged. Stalin embodied the dictatorship of the proletariat. If there's something wrong with Stalin, it's in the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, faithfully applied as envisaged by Karl Marx and Lenin.
And of course, it's not for nothing that Gramsci (who always supported Stalin, contrary to popular belief) took it up again at the same time, not to do away with it, but to bring it up to date.
The Stalinist attempt to put Marxism into practice was finally defeated. But it's astonishing to see the world's intelligentsia, brought up on the cult of Nietzsche, bewildered to see what it's like to act “out of good and evil”. To see what they interpret as a flesh-and-blood superman implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat at their expense.
The fact is that Stalin, whose self-chosen name meant “Man of Steel”, was the rational leader at the helm of the Revolution in the iron-clad circumstances in which it took place, in the world of limitless violence opened up by the butchery of the Great Imperialist War of 1914-1918, which had totally depreciated the value of human existence, and in the face of the equally limitless counter-revolution of Fascism and Nazism, which had it in for the very concept of being human. The analysis which seeks to propose a “communism without Stalin”, whether that of Trotsky, the anarchists, or “Socialism or Barbarism”, makes no sense. Moreover, their analysis runs counter to the facts:
Stalin did not exercise terror on behalf of the bureaucracy against the proletariat, he exercised terror on the bureaucracy, in the name of the proletariat.He, and the leading group around him, were convinced that a significant part of the Soviet bureaucracy was ready to betray the Revolution, “Lenin's work” to which they attached so much value, and to surrender to Nazi Germany, and then to the imperialist United States. Which is exactly what happened, two generations later.
The use of the Terror was intended to cope with the emergency situation created by the external Nazi and/or imperialist threat. The ruling group produced an inconsistent legal front for the Terror during the great Moscow trials of 1936 to 1938. This Terror, in itself, is infinitely tragic and demoralizing. But no one will ever know whether, without it, the USSR would not have collapsed at the first shock, like France in 1940, eaten away from within by the betrayal of its military, intellectual, political and economic elites.
The less revolutionaries will be tempted to repudiate the historical Stalin, the less they will be tempted to consign Stalin to the dustbin of history, the less they will be Stalinists, in the trivial sense of the word that characterizes the opportunist or post-communist bureaucrat: authoritarian, liar, dissembler, corrupt, brutal, uneducated, spineless, opposed to revolutionary spontaneity and democracy. For those who are spontaneously labelled as such, with all the justifiable opprobrium that entails, are not Stalinists, but Khrushchevians, Gorbachevians, Yeltsinians. Or, to put it in the terms of the French Revolution, they are the rotten, cynical people of Thermidor and the Directoire, who cannot judge the Terror, in which they participated without virtue.
There are still the merits of the historical figure Stalin, to whom we must do justice: he knew how to make concrete the experience of socialism in a single country (the alternative being, not the “permanent revolution” advocated by Trotsky, but “socialism in no country”), an experience that twentieth-century humanity had to make. He led the Soviet people to defeat Nazism. Without Stalin, the Soviet Communist Party and the Russian people, the Third Reich would have triumphed. It accelerated the decomposition of the colonial world and racism, and made exploitation and misery illegitimate throughout the world.
The only way to defeat socialism was to temporarily do better than it on its own terrain, the social terrain, and we can see what happens now this powerful stimulus has disappeared.
It's true that Stalin, along with all the other Soviet leaders (including those who fell victim to the Terror in their turn), took the terrible toll of the Terror, perhaps reaching (according to a very high estimate) a million condemned prisoners executed or killed in deportation, in thirty years, once we disregard the delirious assessments disseminated by professional anti-communist historians.
As the recently deceased Domenico Losurdo has shown, the revolutionary state founded by the Bolsheviks was never able to enjoy peace and emerge from the state of exception; it failed to found a new legality, so as to enter into a peaceful and prosaic development, Paradoxically, the Italian philosopher even thought that the anarchistic component of the communist project, which included the objective of rapidly eradicating the state, prevented socialism from stabilizing and returning to respect for legality. And indeed, the first beneficiaries of such pacification were to be the cadres, the “bureaucrats”, and their smiling cousins, the more or less dissident intellectuals and artists. Stalin, as the promoter of the democratic constitution of 1936, represented the search for the never-before-found balance between legality and revolution, between “experts” and “reds”.
But all this didn't happen in an era and in peaceful countries, where, as the Partisan song says, “people in the hollows of beds have dreams”, and in condemning Stalin and his leading group without qualification, we act as if there had never been a war waged against socialism, as if the Soviet Union and the proletarian revolution had never had an enemy, and above all as if this enemy had not taken the initiative of violence and terror even before October 1917. Basically, the real criticism of the USSR led by Lenin and Stalin is that it was not defeated in the same way as the Spanish Republic, over which so many crocodile tears have been shed.
In what sense should we use this history in our century? In any case, Marx shows us the path not to follow: to act like the revolutionaries of 1848, fascinated by the Montagne of 1793, who sought to re-enact the great revolution, and who often disguised themselves as revolutionaries rather than taking action. Reassessing Stalin's revolutionary role does not mean advocating the use of his language and methods of action here and now, still less using him as a hollow symbol designed to shock the bourgeois. But it does mean that overthrowing capitalism will require iron determination, like his.
We must recognize the indisputable fact that almost all determined proletarian revolutionaries worldwide sided with Stalin when he ruled the USSR. And so did many of the national liberation movements in the colonies and the Third World.
The revolutionary movement of the proletariat has mismanaged its ideological withdrawal since Stalin's death (1953), and its self-criticism must be taken up again at the beginning.
Anti-communist critics are right on three assumptions:
1) Stalin was an authentic Communist, and those who still call themselves Communists must assume this heritage and explain why they do so.
This challenge is very easy to take up, and without provocation or extremism! You just have to know what you want: respectability or revolution. For what is lost in obstruction, slander and conspiracy of silence can be regained and far outweighed by the unintended publicity generated by the outrage of the scandalized bourgeoisie and its intellectuals and journalists.
2) The USSR was an attempt to realize an economic-political utopia that failed in the confrontation with imperialism.
But for us, it's not the utopia itself that condemns it - on the contrary! And more and more clearly, it's the capitalist economic project as a whole that seems a deadly utopia. It has failed, of course, but not in some sort of fair sporting competition, or Darwinian selection of the fittest. It engaged, sustained and then lost a great and long battle. But the war is not over.
3) And the Nazi-fascist historical phenomenon can be explained as a reaction to the communist threat.
The appalling picture of the murderous effects of this by no means mysterious phenomenon demands no fearful silence, no astonishment from posterity. The Whites of the Civil War in Russia and the Ukraine foreshadowed the actions of the Nazis, right down to the most repugnant crimes. It is therefore perfectly possible, and necessary, to continue thinking “after Auschwitz”, contrary to the admonitions of the repentant Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Nazi horror is nothing other than the disproportionate fruit of a panic reaction by the bourgeoisie to what it called “Bolshevism”, an emotional signifier whose meaning then was much the same as that of “Stalin” today, and the plea for an implicit rehabilitation of Nazism, coherently presented by Ernst Nolte in Germany, is in fact a confession by the bourgeoisie, which places the genocide without mystery at the end of the criminal escalation of the counter-revolution of the 1920s/30s.
4) On the other hand, almost all the allegations made by anti-Stalinist historiography are fantastical, false or exaggerated.
Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, Trotsky, Shalamov, the Medvedev brothers etc. are not reliable sources, but partisan authors, most often directly linked to organized counter-revolutionary forces, often heavy-handed and crude authors who wouldn't be taken seriously if they wrote about any other issue.
5) In the confrontation between world revolution and world counter-revolution since 1914, the capitalist camp has been responsible for countless crimes and has no moral lessons to teach.
6) In the future, we will avoid anti-democratic drifts, errors and violent excesses by studying the real history of our movement, and not by reproducing our adversary's criticisms and version of events.
7) Criticism from movements or men who claim to be revolutionaries, but who haven't actually made a revolution, has no value. Like those of George Orwell, for example, prototype of all conservatives disguised as leftists. Nor are those issued by actors in the history of Communism who tried to cover up their responsibilities, such as Trotsky and Khrushchev.
The application of these principles, inspired in particular by the critical concepts developed in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, should lead to a nuanced critique, as the critique of Maoism in China does, and not to the demonization of the history of the revolution.