Another View of Stalin 2
Stalin is of vital importance in the former socialist countries
Since capitalist restoration in the USSR, Stalin's work has become important in understanding the mechanisms of recent class struggles under socialism.
There is a link between the capitalist restoration and the virulent campaign against Stalin that preceded it. The explosion of hatred against a man who died in 1953 might seem strange, if not incomprehensible. During the twenty years that preceded Gorbachev's rise to power, Brezhnev incarnated bureaucracy, stagnation, corruption and militarism. But neither in the Soviet Union nor in the `Free World' did we ever witness a violent, raging attack against Brezhnev similar to the ones against Stalin. It is obvious that over the last few years, in the USSR as well as in the rest of the world, all the fanatics of capitalism and of imperialism, to finish off what remained of socialism in the USSR, focused on Stalin as the target.
The disastrous turn taken by Khrushchev shows in fact the pertinence of most of Stalin's ideas. Stalin stressed that class struggle continues under socialism, that the old feudal and bourgeois forces never stopped their struggle for restoration and that the opportunists in the Party, the Trotskyists, the Bukharinists and the bourgeois nationalists, helped the anti-Socialist classes regroup their forces. Khrushchev declared that these theses were aberrations and that they led to arbitrary measures. But in 1993, the apparition of Tsar Boris stands out as a monument to the correctness of Stalin's judgment.
Adversaries of the dictatorship of the proletariat never stopped in insisting that Stalin represented not the dictatorship of the workers but his own autocratic dictatorship. The word Gulag means `Stalinist dictatorship'. But those who were in the Gulag during Stalin's era are now part of the bourgeoisie in power. To demolish Stalin was to give socialist democracy a new birth. But once Stalin was buried, Hitler came out of his tomb. And in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, etc., all the fascist heroes are resurrected, ilk such as Vlasov, Bandera, Antonescu, Tiso and other Nazi collaborators. The destruction of the Berlin Wall heralded the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany. Today, when faced with the unleashing of capitalism and fascism in Eastern Europe, it is easier to understand that Stalin did in fact defend worker's power.
Stalin is at the center of political debates in socialist countries
The media never stop reminding us that there are still, unfortunately, a few Stalinist outposts on the planet. Fidél Castro holds his little island like a Stalinist dinosaur. Kim Il Sung surpassed Stalin in the area of the cult of the personality. The Chinese butchers of Tien An Men Square are worthy successors of Stalin. A few dogmatic Vietnamese still have pictures of Hô Chi Minh and of Stalin. In short, the four countries that still uphold a socialist line are excommunicated from the `civilized' world in the name of Stalin. This incessant clamor is designed to bring out and reinforce `anti-Stalinist' bourgeois and petit-bourgeois currents in these countries.
Stalin's work is of crucial importance in the Third World
At the same time, in the Third World, all the forces that oppose, in one way or another, imperialist barbarity, are hunted down and attacked in the name of the struggle against `Stalinism'.
So, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, the Communist Party of the Philippines has just been `seized by the Stalinist demon of the purges'.
According to a tract from the Meisone group, the `Stalinists' of the Tigray People's Liberation Front have just seized power in Addis Ababa. In Peru as well, we hear of Mao-Stalinist ideas, `that stereotyped formal language of another era'.
We can even read that the Syrian Baath party leads `a closed society, almost Stalinist'!
International Herald Tribune, 5 November 1991, p. 1.
Right in the middle of the Gulf War, a newspaper reported to us that a Soviet pamphlet compared photographs of Stalin and Saddam Hussein, and concluded that Saddam was an illegitimate son of the great Georgian. And the butchers that chased Father Aristide from Haiti seriously claimed that he had installed `a totalitarian dictatorship'.
Stalin's work is important for all peoples engaged in the revolutionary struggle for freedom from the barbaric domination of imperialism.
Stalin represents, just like Lenin, steadfastness in the fiercest and most merciless of class struggles. Stalin showed that, in the most difficult situations, only a firm and inflexible attitude towards the enemy can resolve the fundamental problems of the working masses. Conciliatory, opportunistic and capitulationist attitudes will inevitably lead to catastrophe and to bloody revenge by the reactionary forces.
Today, the working masses of the Third World find themselves in a very difficult situation, with no hope in sight, resembling conditions in the Soviet Union in 1920--1933. In Mozambique, the most reactionary forces in the country were used by the CIA and the South African BOSS to massacre 900,000 Mozambicans. The Hindu fundamentalists, long protected by the Congress Party and upheld by the Indian bourgeoisie, are leading India into bloody terror. In Colombia, the collusion between the reactionary army and police, the CIA and the drug traffickers is provoking a bloodbath among the masses. In Iraq, where criminal aggression killed more than 200,000, the embargo imposed by our great defenders of human rights continues to slowly kill tens of thousands of children.
In each of these extreme situations, Stalin's example shows us how to mobilize the masses for a relentless and victorious struggle against enemies ready to use any means.
But a great number of revolutionary parties of the Third World, engaged in merciless battles against barbaric imperialism, progressively deviated towards opportunism and capitulation, and this disintegration process almost always started with ideological attacks against Stalin. The evolution of parties such as the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador is a prime example.
From about 1985, a right-opportunist tendency developed within the Communist Party of the Philippines. It wanted to end the popular war and to start a process of `national reconciliation'. Following Gorbachev, the tendency virulently attacked Stalin. This same opportunism also had a `left' form. Wanting to come to power quickly, others proposed a militarist line and an urban political insurrection. In order to eliminate police infiltration, leaders of this tendency organized a purge within the Party in Mindanao: they executed several hundred persons, violating all of the Party's rules. But when the Central Committee decided to conduct an ideological and political rectification campaign, these opportunists all united against `the Stalinist purge'! Jose Maria wrote:
`(T)hose who oppose the rectification movement most bitterly are those who have been most responsible for the militarist viewpoint, the gross reduction of the mass base, witchhunts of monstrous proportions (violative of all sense of democracy and decency) and degeneration into gangsterism ....
`These renegades have in fact and in effect joined up with the intelligence and psywar agents of the U.S.--Ramos régime in an attempt to stop the CPP from strengthening itself ideologically, politically and organizationally.'
The journal Democratic Palestine, of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), also opened up a debate on Stalin:
`Negative aspects of the Stalin era which have been highlighted include: forced collectivization; repression of free expression and democracy in the party and in the society; ultracentralization of decision-making in the party, the Soviet state and the international Communist movement.'
Democratic Palestine, July--August--September 1992, p. 31.
All these so-called `criticisms' of Stalin are nothing more than a verbatim rehash of old social-democratic anti-Communist criticisms. To choose this road and to follow it to its end means, ultimately, the end of the PFLP as a revolutionary organization. The experience of all those who have taken this road leaves no room for doubt.
The recent evolution of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) is instructive about this subject. In his interview of Fidél Castro, Thomas Borge vigorously attacked `Stalinism': it is under this camouflage that the FSLN transformed itself into a bourgeois social-democratic entity.
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