Another View of Stalin

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• Foreword
• Introduction: The importance of Stalin
  • Stalin is of vital importance in the former socialist countries
  • Stalin is at the center of political debates in socialist countries
  • Stalin's work is of crucial importance in the Third World
  • Stalin's work takes on new meaning given the situation created since capitalist restoration in Central and Eastern Europe
  • In Communist Parties around the world, the ideological struggle around the Stalin question presents many common characteristics
• The young Stalin forges his arms
  • Stalin's activities in 1900--1917
  • The `socialists' and revolution
  • Stalin during the Civil War
  • Lenin's `Will'
• Building socialism in one country
• Socialist industrialization
  • Heroism and enthusiasm
  • Class war
  • An economic miracle
• Collectivization
  • From rebuilding production to social confrontation
    • Weakness of the party in the countryside
    • The character of the Russian peasant
    • New class differentiation
    • Who controlled the market wheat?
    • Towards confrontation
    • Bukharin's position
    • Betting on the kolkhoz ...
    • ... or betting on the individual peasant?
  • The first wave of collectivization
    • The kulak
    • The kolkhozy surpass the kulaks
    • A fiery mass movement
    • The war against the kulak
    • The essential rôle of the most oppressed masses
  • The organizational line on collectivization
    • The Party apparatus in the countryside
    • Extraordinary organizational measures
    • The 25,000
    • The 25,000 against the bureaucracy
    • The 25,000 against the kulaks
    • The 25,000 and the organization of agricultural production
  • The political direction of collectivization
    • The November 1929 resolution
    • Reject Bukharin's opportunism
    • New difficulties, new tasks
    • The January 5, 1930 resolution
  • `Dekulakization'
    • Kulak rumors and indoctrination
    • What should be done with the kulaks?
    • Struggle to the end
    • The resolution on dekulakization
    • The kulak offensive picks up strength
    • Kautsky and the `kulak revolution'
  • `Dizzy with success'
    • Stalin corrects
    • Rectify and consolidate
    • Right opportunism rears its head
    • The anti-Communists attack
    • Retreats and advances
    • Remarkable results
  • The rise of socialist agriculture
    • The second wave of collectivization
    • Economic and social creativity
    • Investments in the countryside
    • The breakthrough of socialist agriculture
    • `Colossal support'
  • The collectivization `genocide'
• Collectivization and the `Ukrainian Holocaust'
  • A book from Hitler
  • A book from McCarthy
  • Between 1 and 15 Million Dead
  • Two professors to the rescue of Ukrainian Nazis
  • `Scientific' calculations
  • B-movies
  • Harvest of Sorrow: Conquest and the reconversion of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
  • Conquest's fascist sources
  • The causes of famine in the Ukraine
  • Ukraine under Nazi occupation
• The struggle against bureaucracy
  • Anti-Communists against `bureaucracy'
  • Bolsheviks against bureaucratization
  • Reinforce public education
  • Regularly purge the Party
  • The struggle for revolutionary democracy
  • The Party elections in 1937: a `revolution'
• The Great Purge
  • How did the class enemy problem pose itself?
    • Boris Bazhanov
    • George Solomon
    • Frunze
    • Alexander Zinoviev
  • The struggle against opportunism in the Party
  • The trials and struggle against revisionism and enemy infiltration
    • The trial of the Trotskyite-Zinovievist Centre
      • Trotsky and counter-revolution
        • `Destroy the communist movement'
        • Capitalist restoration is impossible
        • In support of terror and insurrection
      • The Zinoviev--Kamenev--Smirnov counter-revolutionary group
    • The trial of Pyatakov and the Trotskyists
      • Sabotage in the Urals
      • Sabotage in Kazakhstan
      • Pyatakov in Berlin
      • Sabotage in Magnitogorsk
    • The trial of the Bukharinist social-democratic group
      • The February 1937 decision to purge
      • The Riutin affair
      • Bukharin's revisionism
      • Bukharin and the enemies of Bolshevism
      • Bukharin and the military conspiracy
      • Bukharin and the question of the coup d'état
      • Bukharin's confession
      • From Bukharin to Gorbachev
    • The Tukhachevsky trial and the anti-Communist conspiracy within the army
      • Plot?
      • The militarist and Bonapartist tendency
      • Vlasov
      • Solzhenitsyn
      • A clandestine anti-Communist organization in the Red Army
  • The 1937--1938 Purge
  • The rectification
  • The Western bourgeoisie and the Purge
• Trotsky's rôle on the eve of the Second World War
  • The enemy is the new aristocracy, the new Bolshevik bourgeoisie
  • Bolshevism and fascism
  • Defeatism and capitulation in front of Nazi Germany
  • Trotsky and the Tukhachevsky plot
  • Provocations in the service of the Nazis
  • Trotsky encouraged terrorism and armed insurrection
• Stalin and the anti-fascist war
  • The Germano-Soviet Pact
  • Did Stalin poorly prepare the anti-fascist war?
  • The day of the German attack
  • Stalin and the Nazi war of annihilation
  • Stalin, his personality and his military capacities
    • Stalin, the `dictator'
    • Stalin, the `hysteric'
    • Stalin, of `mediocre intelligence'
    • Stalin's military merits
• From Stalin to Khrushchev
  • The U.S. takes up where Nazi Germany left off
    • Gehlen, the Nazi, and the CIA
    • The nuclear bomb against the Soviet Union
    • Anti-imperialist struggle and the struggle for peace
    • Tito's revisionism and the United States
  • Stalin against opportunism
    • Bourgeois tendencies in the thirties
    • Weaknesses in the struggle against opportunism
    • Beria's and Khrushchev's revisionist groups
    • Stalin against the future Khrushchevism
  • Khrushchev's coup d'état
    • Beria's intrigues
    • Stalin's death
    • Khrushchev's intrigues against Beria
    • The `rehabilitated' enemies
    • Khrushchev and the pacific counter-revolution
• 
  

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 practiced.

If they had condemned me to death in 1939, their decision would have been just. I had made up a plan to kill Stalin; wasn't that a crime?

When Stalin was still 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. To adopt a scientific attitude about someone is quite different from one's personal attitude. Alexander Zinoviev, 1993

Alexander Zinoviev, Les confessions d'un homme en trop (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1990), pp. 104, 188, 120. Humo interview, 25 February 1993, pp. 48--49.

I think there are two `swords': one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians. Gomulka and some people in Hungary have picked it up to stab at the Soviet Union and oppose so-called Stalinism.

The imperialists also use this sword to slay people with. Dulles, for instance, has brandished it for some time. This sword has not been lent out, it has been thrown out. We Chinese have not thrown it out.

As for the sword of Lenin, hasn't it too been discarded to a certain extent by some Soviet leaders? In my view, it has been discarded to a considerable extent. Is the October Revolution still valid? Can it still serve as the example for all countries? Khrushchov's report at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union says it is possible to seize power by the parliamentary road, that is to say, it is no longer necessary for all countries to learn from the October Revolution. Once this gate is opened, by and large Leninism is thrown away. Mao Zedong, November 15, 1956

Mao Tsetung, Speech at the Second Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. Selected Works of Mao Tsetung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), vol. 5, p. 341.