Anti-Stalinism Is Based On Nazis Lies

Review of PBS Series: Stalin (May - June 1990)

The following article is the first of four articles which review Stalin, the PBS television series, and the accompanying book Stalin: A Time for Judgment, by Jonathan Lewis and Phillip Whitehead (New York: Pantheon, 1990).

The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) has produced a three- part series on the life of Joseph Stalin, part 1 of which was broadcast on Monday, May 28.

This series coincides with an unprecedented attack on the entire concept of communism, unleashed by the overt return to capitalism in Eastern Europe and sponsored by Gorbachov. This policy of "perestroika" is nothing but a hug attack upon the working class. Under the name of economic "reform" wages are being drastically cut, and prices of all necessities -- food, shelter, transportation -- drastically raised. Fascist nationalism has been unleashed to get workers fighting amongst themselves. Like racism, nationalist rivalries dim class consciousness, encouraging workers to ally with bosses of "their own" ethnic or linguistic group and fight other workers.

The political "reforms" -- capitalist-style elections, multi- party systems, and the accession to power of openly capitalist and fascist parties -- are necessary in order to prevent rebellion against this attack. Workers are more likely to accept these drastic cuts if the bosses that oversee them have more credibility. As Lenin, for one, noted long ago, capitalist democracy serves this purpose.

These attacks on the working class -- that is, this attempt to raise the level of exploitation of the working class, get them to provide a source of cheap labor in order to profit a few capitalists -- cannot succeed without an all-out assault on the ideas of communism, internationalism, working-class dictatorship and class consciousness. For it was during the period of working-class power that subsidies for food, clothing and housing, free medical care, day care, guaranteed jobs, and other pro-worker benefits were put into effect. this period and the benefits which survive from it are associated with Joseph Stalin. Therefore, the Soviet and East European bosses, who are now removing the last vestiges of the benefits won by the communist movement, must justify their acts by saying that the period of Stalin was horrible.

As this review shows, Part One of the series fails to conform even to the facts accepted by pro-capitalist, bourgeois scholars concerning the Russian Revolution and the left of Stalin. (Naturally, we could not expect the series to have a pro-working class, communist outlook.) The lies and distortions in it are very crude, and can be effective only because most people are not aware of the facts.

As you read these reviews, ask yourself: Does someone lie if the truth is on his side? Obviously the real facts, even as established by capitalist research, do not paint a bad enough picture to justify a return to exploitation and all its horror and misery.

Mass Murders

Part One opens with Stalin's portrait superimposed upon drawings of skeletons and skulls, and then upon mass graves. A Soviet archeologist describes the murders as though he witnessed them. However, there has been no independent study of these mass graves near Minsk, in a part of Byelorusssia (one of the USSR's republics, now the independent state of Belarus) which was the scene of literally millions of murders by the Nazis in 1941-44. In other words: there is no evidence that these killings were not Nazi killings.

The book mentions the very similar mass graves uncovered by the Nazis in 1943 in Vinnitsa, in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, which were certainly either mainly or totally of Nazi victims. The only source for this conclusion -- that the victims were killed by the Soviets -- is a Nazi propaganda report, which is contradicted by post-war evidence. A German soldier swore to both American and Soviet interrogators in 1945 that these were graves of Nazi victims whom he saw the Nazis kill; but this well-known source is never even mentioned. The fact that the Soviets have recently "admitted" these were victims of Stalin's time suggests that they may be doing the same with these other mass graves.

The point here is not that there were not many killings during the `30s -- there were -- but that these anti- Communist Soviet and Western writers attribute these mass murders to Stalin without the evidence they would unquestionably demand if, say, somebody were alleging they were done by Americans.

Stalin's `School Friend'

The main form of distortion in the film and book is the dishonest use of evidence. For example, the narrator tells us a "school friend" said of young Stalin: "To gain victory and be feared was triumph for him"; "he was a good friend so long as one submitted to his imperious will." Later, we are told that Stalin told a `friend" at the funeral of his first wife in 1909 that "this creature softened my heart of stone." With her died my last warm feelings for people." This "friend" was Joseph Iremashvili, who later became a Nazi and published his book in Berlin in 1932. Once again, a Nazi source is used without admitting it.

Stalin a Police Informer"

The narrator tells us that Stalin may have informed on his comrades to the Tsarist secret police at times, whereupon a Soviet author, Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko, appears and tells us Stalin really did inform.

This is famous nonsense. Bourgeois historians have established that Antonov-Ovseyenko's book is full of falsifications and exaggerations. 1 Second, the film at this point is following Robert C. Tucker's 1973 biography of Stalin. 2 According to Tucker, the only allegations that Stalin ever informed on them were made by anti-Communist Mensheviks in exile in the `20s. Thought Tucker wants to believe them, he admits he can prove nothing, and goes on to show that a later book alleging Stalin's role as an informer was a complete fake (Tucker, pp. 108-114).

The point here is that the film goes out of its way to make viewers aware of this allegation, despite the fact that its authors know there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The accompanying book dismisses the whole "informer" matter as rumors in a single sentence.

The Bolshevik Dispersal of the Constituent Assembly

This is termed an attack on democracy. We are not told that the Bolsheviks had been elected to a majority of the Soviets in Petrograd and other cities by October 1917, and had the second largest delegation to the Assembly; that the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the party with the majority in the Assembly, had split, with the largest section voting to support the Bolsheviks; or that, since the vote, the Bolsheviks had seized state power and had given the land to the peasants and had promised peace -- the major peasant demands.

E. H. Carr, the eminent British bourgeois historian of the Russian Revolution, makes it clear that the Assembly did not in fact express the will of the population and that, if any one group did, it was the Bolsheviks. 3

The larger point here, though, is the equation of elections, held under capitalist domination of the mass media, the schools, churches, and government, with "democracy." In fact, at best such elections are the attributes of capitalist dictatorship. No act, however arrived at, can be considered "democratic" unless it suits the interest of the mass of the population. The Bolshevik victory, working-class power, an end to the bosses' rule, to the murderous war, and giving the land to the peasants and the factories to the working class, was the most democratic act imaginable!

Stalin in Tsaritsyn

This is not even mentioned in the accompanying book, but is taken from Tucker, who interprets it as evidence of Stalin's envy of Trotsky. In fact, Stalin's actions in dismissing the Tsarist Generals in whom Trotsky had confidence, and replacing them with communist commanders like Voroshilov and Frunze, saved the day, and was the principle behind the military feud with Trotsky, here as elsewhere far to the right of Stalin. 4

Stalin in Georgia and Lenin's Testament

These stories follow the Soviet revisionist line of glorifying anything Lenin ever said. The Georgia affair had to do with Stalin's and Ordzhonikidze's hostility to Georgian nationalists, and Lenin's desire to placate them. Stalin and Ordzhonikidze were both of them of Georgian nationality themselves, and had spent years organizing workers in Georgia, largely against nationalists such as these. This was a principled disagreement in which Lenin, in desiring to placate the nationalists, was wrong. We are not told that, in his Testament, Lenin attacked, not merely Stalin, but Trotsky, Bukharin, and virtually everyone in the Soviet leadership. 5

Stalin Stacks the Party?

The final major falsehood concerns the way in which Stalin became the main leader in the Party after Lenin's death. Here the series adopts the line made famous by Trotsky: that Stalin had used his position as General Secretary to "stack" the Party in his favor:

"By controlling appointments within the Party, Stalin gradually acquired greater real power than his rivals. A country-wide network of Party members owing allegiance only to Stalin lay at the end of the telephone."

Nadyezhda Yoffe, daughter of one of Trotsky's most loyal allies, and Esteban Volkov, Trotsky's own grandson, are quoted on this point, as well as Lewin.

This elitist position treats workers as idiots. Lewin says openly that Stalin's victory depended upon his control of the uneducated workers in the Party "because he has below a mass of people who don't understand what it's all about, listen to what they were told." It is worthy of any capitalist, and exposes Trotsky, as well as Lewin and the producers of the film. But Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (later a Nazi collaborator, but a Stalin supporter in the `20s) and a worker, Yelizaveta Tyomkina, are quoted as saying that they thought Stalin the best of the leaders. Even Stephen Cohen's very anti-Stalin book admits that Stalin won the allegiance of party activists and his victory cannot be attributed to his "stacking" the Party. 6 Cohen is interviewed and attacks Stalin several times in the film, but is not quoted here.

Part One ends at the beginning of the collectivization movement, caused by the utter failure of capitalist methods (in the form of the New Economic Policy, NEP) to provide a decent standard of living for the workers plus the funds to industrialize.

Notes

1. See Leo van Rossum, "A. Antonov- Ovseyenko's Book on Stalin: Is It Reliable? A Note," Soviet Studies, July 1984, pp. 445-7.

2. Stalin as Revolutionary 1879- 1929. This work is a "psychohistory," full of unsubstantiated psychological guesswork, a completely invalid historical procedure even by bourgeois capitalist standards -- except when applied to Stalin, apparently! It is so poorly regarded by other scholars that the second volume took twenty years to appear. See the review of this shoddy work in PL Magazine, Vol . 10, No. 4 (July, 1976), pp. 58-73, "The Name and the Game of the Anti- Stalinists."

3. E.H.Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, I, Chapter 5. A White Russian émigré noted a year later that "The Constituent Assembly was blamed more than the Bolsheviks who dispersed it." Car concludes that "it was one more demonstration of the lack of any solid basis, or any broad popular support, in Russia for the institutions and principles of bourgeois democracy." (p. 130)

4. For a thorough discussion see John Erickson, The Soviet High Command. New York: St Martin's Press, 1961.

5. Under the influence of his final illness, cut off from all activity, Lenin wrote and did things he had never done before. The essays he wrote at this time advocate the promotion of capitalist relations. As Pyatakov, a Politburo member, said later, the party leadership regarded all this as uncharacteristic of Lenin. They even considered not printing his final essays at all!

6. Steven F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 325-28. This book is also critically reviewed in the PL Magazine review published in 1976; see the citation in note 2 above.

Anti-Communists Use Big Lie to Slander Fight for Social Equality

(The following is a review of Stalin, Part II, part of a three-part television series on PBS channels. Part One was reviewed in the last issue of Challenge-Desafio)

During the period from 1929 to 1932 a great "turn to the left" took place in the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of activist workers went from the cities to help the poor peasants collectivize the countryside. The five-year plan, to begin the industrialization of the country, was begun. Brand-new industries sprang up; whole cities, like Komsomolsk and Magnitogorsk, were built from nothing, through the communist enthusiasm and dedication of hundreds of thousands of workers and youth. In the throes of this enthusiasm, a recruitment drive brought the majority of the Soviet working class into the Communist Party.

Parallel with these economic developments, left-wing forces pushed for a working-class line in literature, art, and education. Schools and colleges gave preferential admission to workers; communist writers and artists challenged themselves and their colleagues to "serve the working class" in whatever they did. It was truly a "cultural revolution," as some bourgeois scholars have termed it. 1

Taken together, these developments can be seen as the first attempt in human history to create an entirely new society based upon the working class! The profound importance of this period for workers and their allies everywhere cannot be overestimated.

These advances could be unleashed only because a left-wing line -- Stalin's line -- had won out in the central Communist Part debates of the 1920s. Naturally, this period horrifies capitalists and anti-working class forces. They would like to portray it, and everything that came after it, as a terrible time. And so they do in this program, through lies -- saying things happened that never did -- as well as by omission -- leaving out important events, like those mentioned above. This article will concentrate on exposing the lies.

Collectivization

There was much real support for collectivization among the poorer peasants, and among peasant women especially. Many hated the "kulaks" -- the rich peasants who, along with the priests, traditionally controlled village life -- as did many workers, most of whom were first- or second-generation away from the village and who remembered its oppression. But you would never guess it from this program, which portrays collectivization as an inhuman onslaught against a defenseless peasantry.

The lies about the "man-made famine" of 1932-33 are repeated, with the fabricated stories of 5 to 7 million deaths and phony photographs taken, without acknowledgement, from the �Volga famine of 1921-22. A long series appeared in Challenge-Desafio three years ago on this question; 3 ; its arguments will not be repeated here, except to say that bourgeois, capitalist scholars have themselves long since exposed this nonsense [ed. -- to go to the first article of this earlier series on the "Hoax of the 'Man-Made Famine' in the Ukraine", click here .]

The Murder of Sergei Kirov

A long section of the film is devoted to trying to show that Stalin was responsible for the murder of Kirov, his closest ally in the leadership of the Communist Party. The film takes its argument from a recent book by professional anti-communist liar and British Secret Service agent Robert Conquest. 4 Though Conquest repeats over and over in his book that Stalin's guilt is "proven," in fact he has no decent evidence at all! A recent (and very polite) review of Conquest's book points out how dishonest it is, and repeats that there is apparently no Soviet evidence of Stalin's guilt -- for the best of reasons, we might add! 5

The International Communist Movement

Just over one minute of the program is devoted to the Communist International, or Comintern. We are told that "it was all Trotsky's idea," "Stalin disliked foreigners," -- complete lies! The Comintern also partook of the "left turn" during the period 1929-32, which witnessed the most class-conscious, revolutionary efforts of workers towards the goal of communist revolution. Far from a xenophobic madman, as the film portrays him, Stalin himself led the struggle, ultimately unsuccessful, to rid the communist parties of their right-wing leadership and tendencies during this period.

The Trials and the "Terror"

The most striking part of Stalin, Part II focuses on the arrests, imprisonments, trials and executions which followed Kirov's murder in December 1934. The period from 1934 to the war is described as one of "terror," when millions were wrongly killed and everyone lived in fear (although, incongruously, we are also told that "for many people, life was better"). The film portrays all this as a result of Stalin's "greed for power," and paranoia. This too is all rubbish.

Some important trials were held in 1935 and 1936, of high-ranking Party officials who were accused of anti-Party conspiracies and industrial sabotage. That the conspiracies, including contact with Trotsky abroad, and secret factionalizing existed, has been proven by bourgeois scholars. 6 As for the sabotage, both émigrés and American engineers working as consultants in the USSR at the time attest to it, particularly suspecting Yuri Pyatakov, in fact charged with sabotage in his 1936 trial 7

The real wave of arrests, imprisonments, and executions, during which many innocent people were unquestionably punished or killed, did not in fact occur until the Soviet government uncovered a massive treasonable conspiracy involving top party and military leaders, in May 1937. Much circumstantial evidence exists to confirm this plot, and the NKVD (political police) reacted in panic. 8

Following Conquest, Cohen and other liars, the film estimates 8 to 14 million persons killed as a result of the "terror." Conquest's death figures have been disproven and mocked by more responsible bourgeois scholars. 9

One of them (still a ferocious anti-Communist) recently estimated the death toll at 75,000 - 200,000 10 , or one one-hundredth of the figures given in the film and book!

Why the numbers game? Isn't this level of deaths "bad enough" for the anti-Communists? No! They realize that their audience knows millions have been killed by capitalists in the name of anti- communism and for exploitation. They know that anti-Communism can be effective only if workers can be convinced that communism is worse than the worst form of capitalism -- fascism. Hitler killed 20 million Soviet citizens [ed. -- actually, more like 28 million, as the Russian government revealed a few years ago], Hitlerism was capitalism -- therefore, they must "prove" that Stalin was even worse! Hence the lies.

Notes

1. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Indiana University Press, 1978).

2. Lynne Viola, The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); "Bab'y Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest During Collectivization," The Russian Review, 45 (Jan. 1986). For the mixed response of peasants to the early stages of collectivization including the support of many peasants for the Soviets, see Maurice Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village (Indiana U. Pr., 1988; original edition, 1931). Hindus grew up in this village and then emigrated to the US; he came back to see how the people were reacting to Soviet power.

3. Challenge-Desafio, February 26 through April 1, 1987. This series is now available on the Worldwide Web: click here to go to the first article in the series of six, with links to the rest.

4. Stalin and the Murder of Kirov New York: Oxford, 1989.

5. J. Arch Getty, review of Conquest's book in The Russian Review, 48 (July, 1989), 348-351.

6. J. Arch Getty, "Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International," Soviet Studies, 38 (Jan. 1986); Pierre Broué, in Cahiers Léon Trotsky, Number 5. Broué is a leading Trotskyite, but admits the evidence shows his hero lied.

7. Americans: see John Littlepage, "Red Wreckers in Russia," Saturday Evening Post, January 1, 1938; Carroll G. Holmes, "I Knew Those Wreckers," Soviet Russia Today, April, 1938; for the émigré, see N. Valentinov-Volsky, "Sut' bol'shevizma v izobrazhenii Yu. Pyatakova," Novy Zhurnal (New York), No. 52 (1958), 146- 149.

8. J. Arch Getty, The 'Great Purges' Reconsidered: The Soviet Communist Party, 1933-1939 (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1979), 422-457. For Tukhachevsky, see the very cautious article by Grover Furr, "New Light on Old Stories About Marshal Tukhachevskii: Some Documents Reconsidered," Russian History / Histoire Russe, 13 (1986), 293-308 [ed. - now available on the Worldwide Web; click here to go to this article].

Some anti-communist émigrés like Grigori Tokaev (Betrayal of an Ideal and Comrade X) wrote openly about a military conspiracy; their works are often cited by anti- communist scholars, but this fact is never mentioned.

9. See the series in Challenge-Desafio referred to in note 3 above, and the bibliography cited there.

10. The Nation (New York), August 7/14, 1989, p. 184

Bosses Still Don't Understand Why Red Army Defeated the Nazis

The third and concluding part of the PBS series Stalin rams home the producer's basic idea, the Big Lie that communism equals fascism 1 At the beginning Soviet émigré Lev Kopelev equates "Stalinism" with Hitlerism and fascism, returning at the end to remind us that "Stalinism" threatens "the survival of the human race." Meanwhile, Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva assures us that "Stalinism" was in reality "the terror of the Bolshevik Party of Lenin, of the one-party régime" -- in other words, communism. The Big Lie is made up of little ones; this review can only expose a few of them. Next week's bibliography will help the interested reader explore what did happen in the first working-class state in world history.

The film begins with the bald assertion that Stalin had already killed "25 million" people -- a nonsensical figure (see last week's review), the purpose of which is simply to equate Stalin with Hitler in viewer's minds. Recent researchers have once again confirmed that there was neither widespread "fear of the Gulag" nor "total control" by Stalin or the Party. 2

And this has been going on for decades! In 1953 Henry Shapiro, long-time Moscow correspondent for United Press, called tales of 10-20 million victims "part of the Cold War gone crazy":

When I was in the States in 1950 I was up against the same kind of thing... in those days even the simplest two-and-two- make-four commonsense made you suspect of communist sympathies.

Film Smears Communist Victory in WWII

The film concentrates upon belittling the tremendous soviet victory over the Nazis in World War 2. A Professor Samsonov doubles previous soviet figures for officers arrested as a result of the Tukhachevsky military plot, and then claims these commanders were `the most experienced, the most loyal," whose arrest was "one of the reasons for the defeats and failure when Hitler attacked."

Hitler himself knew better:

The Führer [Hitler] recalled the case of Tukhachevsky and expressed the opinion that we were entirely wrong then in believing that Stalin would ruin the Red Army by the way he handled it. The opposite was true: Stalin got rid of all opposition in the Red Army and thereby brought an end to defeatism." 3

Lies About German-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1939

According to the film, the British and French sent a mission to the USSR in the summer of 1939, but Stalin did not trust them "saw pickings for himself there." All these statements are stone lies! First, even anti-Communist historians hold that this mission, of obscure officers, on a slow boat, without any right to negotiate for their governments, proved the British and French were not serious about allying with the Soviets. The Soviets, who had tried hard to ally with the French and British -- in effect, trusting them more than the Nazis -- had no choice but to turn to Germany.4

Second, the part of Eastern Poland which the soviets occupied in 1939 was simply a part of Russia which the Polish imperialists had seized by invasion in 1920, with Allied (mainly French) help. Also, the Soviets waited for over two weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland, until it was clear that Britain and France, despite their declarations of war against Germany, would do nothing in Poland's defense (this was the beginning of the period known in England as the "phony war"; it lasted until Hitler turned against France in the spring of 1940). All this is suppressed in the film! Samsonov appears again to claim that, early in the war, Stalin secretly offered Hitler the Ukraine and other lands in exchange for peace. Of course no evidence is given for this statement, which no one has ever heard of before! Is it a "new discovery"? Remember, the Nazi diplomatic archives were all captured, and microfilmed, by the Allies in 1945. As Samsonov admits, the purpose of this "fact" is simply to make Stalin's wartime leadership look bad. 4a

Why Did The Soviet Win?

Anti-Communists have been wrestling with this for years, beginning with Hitler himself:

Hitler himself was confused. In the Great War [World War One -- ed.] the Russian infantrymen had fought poorly; now they were tigers. Why? (John Toland, Adolf Hitler, Vol 2., p. 791).

...the Russians fought far more bitterly than had the Poles or Allied troops... (Joachim Fest, Hitler, p. 679).

They are still trying to figure it out. The film tells us that the Stalingrad victory was "due in part to the heroism of the Red Army," and that the Battle of Moscow was won by an extra 100,000 men. Remember, the Nazi defeat at Moscow was the first defeat for the Wehrmacht in the war. All the armies of capitalist Europe, including the British, had been crushed. A British professor tells us that Soviet production was outstripping all of German and occupied Europe -- "indeed an achievement." But we never learn what made this possible.

What's the mystery? Haven't the experiences of the Russian Revolution, the Resistance movement, the Chinese Communist Revolution, the heroic Vietnamese struggle against US imperialism, and countless other examples shown the bosses that workers, under the influence of communist ideas, can perform miracles? Capitalists can never admit this.

Lies About the Warsaw Uprising

The film lies about the Warsaw uprising of 1943, accusing Stalin of delaying the Red Army so the anti-Communist (and intensely anti-Semitic -- the film never tells us that) Home Army would be defeated. In fact, Soviet commanders Rokossovsky and Chiukov, as well as German commanders Tippelskirch and Guderian, agree that Nazi resistance is what held the Red Army up. 5 Perhaps the most cynical part of the film blames Stalin for the Nazi murder of millions of Soviet POWs because he refused to sign the Geneva Convention! This is really a disgusting lie. The Nazis treated civilians no better; they considered all Slavs to be "subhuman." It's hard to sink lower than this.

A Rash of Other Lies

We are told that in 1948 Stalin personally planned the murder of Solomon Mikhoels, a famous Jewish actor-director. Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva claims to have overheard her father planning this. There are two aspects to this lie. First, the account of this even in Svetlana's second book shows nothing of the kind. His daughter overhears him say, "Well, it's an auto accident, then," to someone over the phone, and later tells her Mikhoels has been killed in a car accident. She fabricates the rest.

Second, Svetlana mentions Mikhoels' death in her first book, but in a way that shows the does not at all think her father had anything to do with it. Her second volume was written after moving to the US and befriending several virulent anti- Communists at Princeton (who are thanked in the book). Clearly it was they who "convinced" her of what she heard 6

But Svetlana helps us unravel the lie about the "Doctor's Plot." In January 1953 some Kremlin doctors were charged with murder, then released six months later after Stalin's death and the later execution of Beria (chief of the political police). The film blames this squarely on Stalin, who "apparently wanted a new terror." But Stalin had told his daughter he thought all the Doctor were innocent! The film's writers simply suppress this, as they did her statements that Stalin was devastated by the murder of Kirov (see last week's review). 7

We have limited space, and there are many, many other provable lies in this film and in the series. Once again, ask yourself: Why would they lie if the truth were on their side?

Next week: a final article on the series will explore what's behind the attack on Stalin, and give a bibliography of good historical works to read.

Notes

1. "The Lie that Stalin Was Worse than Hitler," Challenge/Desafio, March 18, 1987, pp. 11 ff. Click here to read this article. 

2. Robert W. Thurston, "Fear and Belief in the USSR's Great Terror: Response to Arrest, 1935-1939," Slavic Review, 45 (Summer 1986), pp. 213-244. See also the works by Getty and Manning in the bibliography, to be printed in next issue (Click here to go to this article now). 

3. Goebbels' diary, May 8, 1943. 

4. Jonathan Haslam; Alexander Werth, Russia At War

4a. Ed. note, 1996: the late anti- Communist Soviet historian General Dmitry Volkogonov's biography of Stalin reveals the source of this tale. According to a document which he footnotes, someone raised the alternative of ceding land to the Nazis at a Politburo meeting right after the start of the war. This suggestion was immediately rejected, and apparently never raised again. There is no evidence that it was Stalin who raised this point. 

5. Werth, Russia At War, pp. 795- 800 (paperback edition).

6 . Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 154; Twenty Letters to a Friend (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 196. 

7. Twenty Letters, p. 207.