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Post by dodger on Jul 30, 2013 12:44:10 GMT
A very useful study of the leading cadres of socialist construction 5 March 2012
Reviewed by William Podmore -
The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization
In this fascinating book, Lynne Viola studies the work of the 25,000 workers who went to the Soviet countryside to assist collectivisation.
As she writes, "the 25,000ers were representative of a politically and numerically significant group of workers - politically active cadre workers. Their primary motives in volunteering to participate in the campaign were not based on coercion or material self-interest. The 25,000ers were workers who, on one level or another, identified with the state and party and supported the program of the First Five-Year Plan revolution."
She continues, "The 25,000ers' role in the proletarianization of the rural apparatus through purge and recruitments was an extension of the social and political policies of the cultural revolution of the First Five-Year Plan in the cities. Purge and recruitment of working-class forces in the urban government apparatus, industry and higher education had broad ramifications in the creation of a base of social support for the state in later years, as well as providing a response to the grievances and aspirations of workers who claimed that the role of the working class had been slighted during NEP."
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Post by dodger on Aug 15, 2013 22:10:44 GMT
This review is from: The Stalin-Kaganovich Correspondence, 193 1-36(Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover) Reviewed by William Podmore
This is an interesting compilation of letters between Joseph Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich. In the 1930s, Kaganovich was Stalin's deputy on party matters, a secretary of the Central Committee, secretary of the Moscow Regional Party Committee, and Stalin's deputy in the Defence Commission. Despite the intentions of the anti-Soviet editors, we can learn much about how the Soviet working class governed the Soviet Union.
During these years, the Soviet working class collectivised agriculture, industrialised the country and hugely expanded the health and education services. The first Five-Year Plan (1928-33) successfully laid the foundations of a heavy industry able to re-equip the national economy. This reconstruction doubled industrial output between 1929 and 1933, while the capitalist world was mired in slump. The Soviet working class built a workers' state in the teeth of hostile encirclement by the capitalist states, and of sharpening class struggle in the country and in the party.
The Soviet Union also, alone, aided the Spanish Republic's heroic struggle against the Hitler-Mussolini invasion. Stalin urged that the Soviet Union sell oil, grain and food to the Republic `on the most favourable terms for them'.
The book shows how the capitalist class used splits in the Bolshevik party, supporting oppositions `left' or `right' to try to defeat socialism and restore capitalism. The party continually struggled to defeat the kulaks (the rural capitalist class) and the Opposition.
The Opposition assisted the Soviet Union's enemies abroad and adopted a strategy of terrorism: Trotsky wrote, "Inside the Party, Stalin has put himself above all criticism and the State. It is impossible to displace him except by assassination. Every oppositionist becomes ipso facto a terrorist."
In 1936, the Soviet Union responded by trying members of the Anti-Soviet United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre for their terrorist activities, including the assassination of Sergei Kirov, a member of the Politburo. This focused and open response is surely a better way to fight terrorism than the Bush/Blair method of holding terrorist suspects forever without charge or trial.
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 8:57:35 GMT
Trashy book that should appeal to Hitlerites, June 22, 2004
This William Podmore review is from: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Hardcover)
This book rebuts some of the many slanders against Stalin. For example, Montefiore describes Stalin as `a super-intelligent and gifted politician'. He shows who was to blame for the damage to agriculture when he points out that the kulaks "refused to sow their crops, declaring war on the regime." He shows that there is no evidence for the ludicrous assertion that Stalin ordered Kirov's assassination. He refutes the Trotskyist lie that Stalin collapsed after the Nazis invaded, and he applauds Stalin's decision to stay and fight in Moscow in 1941.
Montefiore notes that the Warsaw rising aimed "not to help the Soviet advance but to forestall it." As Marshal Rokossovsky said, "the rising would have made sense only if we were on the point of taking Warsaw. That point had not been reached ..."
Montefiore observes that Khrushchev's memoirs were `designed to blacken Stalin wherever possible', although they are still taken as gospel by the enemies of socialism.
But unfortunately most of the book is just abusive, sensationalist and slanderous gossip, mostly derived from memoirs and interviews. It has more in common with Martin Amis' vapid little book `Koba the dread' than with decent scholarship like Ian Grey's `Stalin: man of history', Ludo Martens' `Another view of Stalin', or Erik van Ree's `The political thought of Joseph Stalin'.
Montefiore writes of the huge workloads carried by Stalin and his colleagues. This belies his glib sub-title: which tsar, or courtier, ever worked 16-hour days for Russia?
Montefiore rubbishes the Soviet Union's unparalleled achievements - the defeat of the pro-fascist fifth column, the unification of the country, industrialisation, the collectivisation of agriculture, the provision of education, health and welfare for all, and the defeat of Nazism. (He writes, "Education was one of the great Bolshevik achievements", and then never says another word about it.)
As the Russians say nowadays, Stalin found the Soviet Union a wreck and left it a superpower, Gorbachev and Yeltsin found it a superpower and left it a wreck.
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 9:28:17 GMT
The best biography of a great revolutionary 28 Aug 2004
This William Podmore review is from: Stalin: Man of History (Hardcover)
Ian Grey has written by far the best biography of Stalin. He shows what an important role Stalin played in building socialism in the Soviet Union, in defeating the Nazi tyranny in World War Two, and then in leading the postwar rebuilding of the Soviet Union.
Without a capitalist class, and without capital from abroad, without profits from exploiting people in other countries, or investment by foreign firms, or foreign aid, the Soviet people built an economy that transformed the Soviet Union from the backward semi-colonial land of the tsars into the second industrial, scientific and military power in the world. They collectivised agriculture, and created an iron and steel industry, and tractor, car, machine tool, chemical, agricultural machinery and aircraft industries. They produced electricity, coal and oil. There was no unemployment, and people had free housing, free education and free health care: children got free vitamins. The late Lord Bullock, not the friendliest witness, wrote, "the achievement of the Russian people on the economic front, under the Soviet system and Stalin's leadership, was remarkable."
Capitalist forces, internal and external, fought to prevent these working class achievements. The Soviet Union had to fight a war of self-defense against internal fascism, supported from outside. As the recently opened Russian archives show, during the 1930s approximately 300,000 people were killed in this war. This figure is far lower than the numbers publicised by, for example, Robert Conquest. Richard Evans, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has explained how Conquest reached his exaggerated figures: "Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (New York, 1986) argues that the `dekulakization' of the early 1930s led to the deaths of 6,500,000 people. But this estimate is arrived at by extremely dubious methods, ranging from reliance on hearsay evidence through double counting to the consistent employment of the highest possible figures in estimates made by other historians."
Almost all subsequent writers and propagandists on the subject have relied completely on Conquest's hugely inflated estimates. For example, Charles Maier, an American historian, stated that Stalin caused more deaths than Hitler. But Maier omitted the 20 million deaths caused by the Nazi aggression.
Stalin had warned in 1931, "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." Astonishingly, the Soviet people reached this goal: between 1928 and 1937, industrial production had increased each year by 16.5%. As Mark Arnold-Forster wrote in The world at war, "The first plan and its successors ensured Germany's eventual defeat in World War Two."
Stalin sought with every means in his power to stay out of war, whereas Hitler did all that he could to start it. The 1939 pact with Germany gave the Soviet Union an enormous strategic advantage in the inevitable war ahead. From the Black Sea to the White Sea, the USSR was able to shift its entire Western boundary 200-300 kilometres further West. And in the vulnerable northwestern sector, the border became shorter by almost 600 kilometres, so Leningrad and Kronstadt were now deep within Soviet territory, whether approached from the Baltic states or from Finland.
In June 1941, when Hitler's blitzkrieg menaced the Soviet Union, the Defence Ministry and the General Staff both urged Stalin to transfer a larger number of divisions from the reserves to the Western borders. Stalin rightly refused. The decision to keep the main forces of the Soviet army 200-300 kilometres from the border was absolutely correct.
After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, "Russia tore the guts out of the German armies", as Churchill wrote, destroying 70% of the Nazi divisions. Henri Michel, the French historian, wrote, "The Soviet victory was the Red Army's victory, but it was also the victory of the Soviet economy and of the Bolshevik regime ... finally, this victory was Stalin's victory." Without Stalin's leadership of the Soviet Union, Hitler would have won the war and Britain would have been defeated and occupied. We all owe a huge debt to Stalin and the Soviet people.
In August 1945, General Eisenhower flew from Berlin to Moscow and "did not see a single house standing intact from the Russian-Polish border to Moscow. Not one." The Soviet Union, with Stalin's leadership, made an extraordinary recovery from unparalleled devastation. It built the atomic bomb, successfully deterring a US/British nuclear attack. It launched the world's first satellite, the Sputnik, and sent the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin.
Less than forty years after Stalin's death, Mikhail Gorbachev traduced Stalin, claiming that this would restore true Leninism. Yet when Stalin was, temporarily, effaced, Lenin and Marx went too. Gorbachev and Yeltsin adopted Trotsky's policies of demolishing the collective farms and selling concessions to foreign powers. The leader of Trotsky's `Fourth International', Ernest Mandel, wrote approvingly, "The reformer Yeltsin represents the tendency which wants to reduce the gigantic state apparatus. Consequently he follows in Trotsky's footsteps." (De Financieel Ekonomische Tijd, 21 March 1990.)
Stalin had always fought these policies, warning that they would wreck the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. And they did!
As the Russians say nowadays, Stalin found the Soviet Union a wreck and left it a superpower; Gorbachev found it a superpower and left it a wreck.
Forget Volkogonov, Deutscher, Conquest, Montefiore, and all the other Thatcherite/Trotskyites. This is the one to read.
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 9:43:01 GMT
Well-researched study of the USSR from 1945 to 1991, November 1, 2012
This William Podmore review is from: Failed Empire - Revised Paperback: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (New Cold War History) (Kindle Edition)
This well-researched and insightful work is a major study of the Soviet Union in the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. It is far better than Jonathan Haslam's recent Russia's cold war.
Zubok presents Stalin's brilliant analysis in September 1945 of the purposes behind the US proposal for a treaty to demilitarise Germany: "First, to divert our attention from the Far East, where Americans assume a role of tomorrow's friend of Japan, and to create thereby a perception that everything is fine there; second, to receive from the USSR a formal sanction for the US playing the same role in European affairs as the USSR, so that the US may hereafter, in league with England, take the future of Europe into their hands; third, to devalue the treaties of alliance that the USSR have already reached with European states; fourth, to pull out the rug from any future treaties of alliance between the USSR and Rumania, Finland, etc."
Zubok assigns the blame for the start of the Cold War to Britain and the USA, noting that the British consul in Mashhad wrote that it was "above all, the efforts of Standard and Shell to secure oil-prospecting rights that changed the Russians in Persia from hot-war allies to cold-war rivals."
As Zubok points out, "Stalin left to the West the role of breaking the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam and starting a confrontation." He observes, "every Soviet step towards creating units of military and secret police inside the zone was taken after the Western powers took their own decisive steps toward the separation of West Germany: Bizonia, the Marshall Plan, and the formation of West Germany."
He comments, "Land reforms in East Germany as well as elsewhere in Central Europe were a definite political success for the Soviets and their Communist appointees."
Zubok shows how Gorbachev's policies destroyed Soviet finances and ran up huge foreign debts. Gorbachev's failed anti-alcohol campaign cut state revenues by 15 billion rubles, contributing towards an 80 billion ruble gap between income and spending. He disorganised industrial production by a partial decentralisation. He wrecked Russia's social services. Zubok comments, "The extensive social services of Soviet times, from free kindergartens to free health care and paid vacations, disappeared overnight." He sums up, "the grave economic, financial, and state crisis began only between 1986 and 1988, and it kept growing worse because of Gorbachev's choices and policies."
Zubok cites Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich: "the USSR was killed, against the wishes of its ruler, by politics, not economics." As the Russians say nowadays, Stalin found a ruin and left it a superpower; Gorbachev found a superpower and left it a ruin.
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 12:32:56 GMT
By William Podmore
This review is from: TWO SYSTEMS: SOCIALIST ECONOMY AND CAPITALIST ECONOMY. Eugene Varga.
Between 1927 and 1936, production of the means of production grew eightfold in the Soviet Union, while it was static in the USA, Germany and Poland. The Soviet Union's annual rate of accumulation was 14.5%, Britain and the USA's 2%. Between 1920 and 1937, industrial production in the Soviet Union grew by 29% a year, in the capitalist countries by just 2.7%.
In the years of the Great Crash, 1930-32, the industrial production of capitalism fell by 38%, while the Soviet Union's rose by 81%. This disproved Trotsky's notion that the Soviet economy was still somehow `subjected to', `regulated by', capitalism.
Yet the forces of production do develop under capitalism, although this development is always uneven, limited and subject to crisis. Lenin said that capitalism was decaying, in absolute decline, not that it was dead. (Trotsky, on the other hand, said that the forces of production stagnated under capitalism.)
This decline was not technological decline, or a decline in GNP. But capitalism cannot use existing productive forces, if it could, it wouldn't be capitalism. The market problem - the limited consumption power of the working class - puts a constant constraint on the development of the economy, a problem that gets ever worse under capitalism.
This results in chronic unemployment, the growing underuse of productive plant in capitalist countries, using only about half the capacity in the USA, Britain and Germany, and in constant cuts in the numbers of productive workers, those who directly create value and surplus value
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 12:35:54 GMT
This review is from: The Industrialisation of Soviet Russia Volume 3: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil 1929-1930: The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929-30 Vol 3 Reviewed by William Podmore
In his Preface, Professor Davies wrote, "I am still convinced that rapid industrialisation was incompatible with the market economy of NEP; the industrial objectives of the leadership required the replacement of NEP by some kind of administrative planning system."
He pointed out, "In France, Germany and the Soviet Union industrial production approximately recovered to the pre-war level by 1926/27. The Soviet achievement was impressive. The decline in production, and the damage and destruction of industrial plant, had been far greater than in the other belligerent countries. ... the rate of growth of Soviet industry in the mid-1920s was already higher and more consistent than in the capitalist countries."
In August 1928 communists forecast `tremendous catastrophes'. The 6th Congress of Comintern also foresaw growing contradictions within and between the major capitalist states, an increasing danger of war and intensifying class struggle.
Davies noted, "Bukharin wanted to restrict industrial development to a level compatible with a market relation with the peasants."
Davies concluded, "In spite of its major imperfections and defects, Soviet planning achieved notable successes. The outstanding achievement was the astonishing expansion in industrial investment, which was in 1929/30 more than 90 per cent above the level of the previous year, and several times as large as in 1913. With the aid of the increased investment, the building season of 1930 saw the completion of the first three major projects - the Turkish railway, the agricultural machinery factory at Rostov-on-Don, and the Stalingrad tractor factory. Construction of the Dneprostroi hydro-electric plant was reaching its peak. At the Uralmashzavod heavy engineering factory in Sverdlovsk, the main production shops of the greatly expanded project began to be constructed. After many vicissitudes, construction was started at both ends of the grandiose Ural-Kuznetsk combine. The vast construction programme which began the transformation of the USSR into a great industrial power was under way."
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 12:40:11 GMT
Splendid survey of Russia in the 20th century, Reviewed by William Podmore
This review is from: The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume 3, The Twentieth Century (Hardcover)
Part 1 covers Russia's story through time from 1900 to the present. Part 2 looks at themes and trends - economic and demographic change, rural development, industrialisation, women, non-Russians in the USSR, the western republics, science and technology, culture, foreign policy, and the road to communism.
Ronald Suny writes, "The totalitarian approach turned an apt if not wholly accurate description into a model, complete with predictions of future trajectories. The concept exaggerated similarities and underestimated differences between quite distinct regimes, ignoring the contrast between an egalitarian, internationalist doctrine (Marxism) that the Soviet regime failed to realise and the inegalitarian, racist and imperialist ideology (Fascism) that the Nazis implemented only too well. Little was said about the different dynamics in a state capitalist system with private ownership of property (Nazi Germany) and those operating in a completely state-dominated economy with almost no production for the market (Stalin's USSR), or how an advanced industrial economy geared essentially to war and territorial expansion (Nazi Germany) differed from a programme for modernising a backward, peasant society and transforming it into an industrial, urban one (Stalinist Soviet Union). The T-model led many political scientists and historians to deal almost exclusively with the state, the centre and the top of the political pyramid, and make deductions from a supposedly fixed ideology, while largely ignoring social dynamics and the shifts and improvisations that characterised both Soviet and Nazi policies. Even more pernicious were the predictive parallels: since Nazi Germany had acted in an expansionist, aggressive way, it could be expected that another totalitarian regime would also be aggressive and expansionist. Indeed, during the Cold War Western media and governments fostered the notion that the USSR was poised and ready to invade Western Europe. Any concessions to Soviet Communism were labelled `appeasement', a direct analogy to Western negotiations with the Nazis in the 1930s."
David R. Shearer writes, "the litany of statistics chronicling Soviet industrial achievements under Stalin was and still is impressive. In the Russian republic, alone, construction of new energy sources jumped the number of kilowatt hours of energy generated from 3.2 billion in 1928 to 31 billion in 1940. Coal production increased from 10 to 73 million tons per year, iron ore from 1 to 5.5 million tons, steel from 2 to 9 million tons. The Soviet Union went from an importer to an exporter of natural gas, producing 560 million metric tons by 1932."
Spending on science tripled between 1927-28 and 1933 and doubled between 1933 and 1940. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union spent a greater proportion of its national income on science than any other country. The number of research scientists grew from 18,000 in 1929 to 46,000 in 1935. David Holloway sums up, "Important though the Lysenko affair was, it did not characterize Stalinist science as a whole."
The proportion of women in institutions of higher education rose from 31 per cent in 1926 to 43 per cent in 1937 and to 77 per cent in World War Two, then fell to 52 per cent in 1955 and 42 per cent in 1962. As Barbara Engel comments, "Most of the women who benefited derived from lower-class backgrounds."
David R. Shearer points out, "Although the famine hit Ukraine hard, it was not, as some historians argue, a purposefully genocidal policy against Ukrainians. ... no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the famine was planned, and it affected broad segments of the Russian and other non-Ukrainian populations both in Ukraine and in Russia."
Peter Gatrell notes, "The state also derived a degree of legitimacy from the promise and the reality of economic growth, technological modernisation and social progress. There were genuine and important gains in literacy and life expectancy from one generation to the next. In the words of a broadly hostile critic, Soviet economic policies secured `some broad acquiescence on the part of the people' [Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic backwardness in historical perspective, Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 29]. That acquiescence rested upon Soviet-style welfare provision and opportunities for upward social mobility, which generated a sense of civic commitment and left a positive legacy."
In the 1970s, living standards, incomes and literacy rates rose dramatically. Between 1950 and 1975 Soviet agricultural output more than doubled, the world's fastest growth rate in volume and per head.
But with the counter-revolution led by Gorbachev and Yeltsin came disaster. In 1996, Russia's income per head was 47 per cent of 1992's level; agricultural production was 36 per cent lower in 1997 than in 1990. Wages in 1995 were 55 per cent of their 1985 level; wages in 2000 were still only 50 per cent of their 1990 level. Unemployment rose from 3.6 million - 4.8 per cent - in 1992 to 8.9 million - 10 per cent - in 1998. There were 8.2 million fewer industrial workers in 1998 than in 1991, a 36.8 per cent fall. Science lost half its workers
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Post by dodger on Aug 23, 2013 12:48:55 GMT
Fascinating view of a great foreign minister and communist, July 31 2001
This William Podmore review is from: Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics (Hardcover)
This book gives us fascinating portraits of Lenin and Stalin, which refute all the vicious lies about them. It tells us much about international affairs, especially the Soviet Union's successful efforts to delay Hitler's treacherous attack in 1941, and on the period since Stalin's death in 1953. As he told Chuev, "I write about socialism - what it is and, as peasants say, 'what we need it for.'"
The book shows Stalin's great achievements: solving the nationalities question, industrialisation, the collectivisation of agriculture, the defeat of Hitler. Molotov points out that the Soviet Union created "industrialisation by our own means, by our own manpower. We could not rely on foreign loans." He sums up the successes of the 1920s and 1930s: "In essence we were largely ready for the war. The five-year plans, the industrial capacity we had created - that's what helped us to endure, otherwise we wouldn't have won out." As he said, "Many things have been done wonderfully, but that is not enough."
Molotov was "a fighter for communism, Lenin's longest surviving comrade-in-arms." He was born in 1890. In 1912 he helped to found Pravda. In 1917 he joined the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. In October 1917 he became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee which prepared the armed uprising in Petrograd.
In 1926 he became a member of the Politburo, where he worked till 1952. From 1930, when he became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, he helped to lead the drives for industrialisation and for collectivisation. He took a leading role in the fight to defeat the Fifth column. In May 1939 he was appointed Commissar for Foreign Affairs.
He was Deputy Chairman of the State Council of Defence throughout the Great Patriotic War (World War Two). In 1942 he signed the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Alliance; he also secured Roosevelt and Churchill's agreement "To the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942." In 1943 he seconded Stalin at the Teheran Conference, and in 1945 he did the same at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. He represented the Soviet Union at the San Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations.
In 1957 the attempt to remove Krushchev was defeated and Molotov and the other Communists were expelled from the Central Committee. In 1962 he was expelled from the Party. In 1984 he was reinstated. He died in 1986.
Perhaps his epitaph should be what he said in 1976, "Properly speaking, what was Hitler's aggression? Wasn't it class struggle? It was. And the fact that atomic war may break out, isn't that class struggle? There is no alternative to class struggle. This is a very serious question. The be-all and end-all is not peaceful coexistence. After all, we have been holding on for some time, and under Stalin we held on to the point where the imperialists felt able to demand point-blank: either surrender such and such positions, or it means war. So far the imperialists haven't renounced that."
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Post by dodger on Aug 27, 2013 16:17:30 GMT
Praise of one counter-revolutionary by another, 20 July 2009
This Will Podmore review is from: Tragedy of Bukharin (Paperback)
This book is a paean of praise of one counter-revolutionary by another.
Bukharin was part of the right opposition in the USSR. He opposed the programmes of industrialisation and collectivisation that the country needed.
In May 1927 the British government raided 49 Moorgate, the headquarters of the Soviet trade delegation. Terrorists attacked communists in Leningrad and Smolensk, and kulaks `openly toasted the forthcoming liquidation of all communists'.
These were all threats to the independence and sovereignty of the Soviet Union. If it was to stay independent it needed to have an advanced industry as a basis for defence. As Stalin warned in 1931, "we are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us."
The Bolshevik party opposed Bukharin's line that the Soviet Union should put agriculture first to pay for imports of industrial equipment. This was an openly pro-kulak policy.
Instead the Soviet Union put industry first. It needed new industries to produce lorries, tractors, aircraft and capital equipment, especially machine tools. In 1924 Russia had only 2,560 tractors; by 1929, it had 34,943. (Monks joined kulaks in damning tractors as `the work of anti-Christ'.) Agricultural cooperatives helped to mechanise farming, using first tractor columns then tractor stations.
Industrial production rose by 55% between 1925-6 and 1928-9. 80% of this rise was due to increased capital investment (up 40%). Stalin wrote, "to slow down the rate of development of industry means to weaken the working class."
The Supreme Council of the National Economy was the economy's leading body. Its eight industry-based directorates dealt directly with the growing number of factories. Its planning body strengthened the government's efforts to get more resources into industry.
Through central planning, the country built up its industry and became self-sufficient, independent of the capitalist world. Its industrialisation was based where possible on imports of the most advanced new technology.
The Soviet Union's collectivised farming and industrialisation enabled it to defeat the largest invasion in history, Hitler's unprovoked attack of 1941.
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Post by dodger on Sept 10, 2013 8:27:05 GMT
Address to the Solemn Meeting on the Opening of the L. M. Kaganovich Metro
14th May, 1935
Source: Works, Vol. 14
Publisher: Red Star Press Ltd., London, 1978
Transcription/HTML Markup: Salil Sen for MIA, 2008
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.
Comrades, wait! Do not applaud in advance, said Stalin jokingly, - you do not yet know what I am going to say to you. (Laughter and applause).
I have two corrections dictated by the comrades sitting right here. (Comrade Stalin made a large sweep of the hall with his hand). The matter can be presented as follows.
The Party and the State have given decorations for the success of the construction of the Moscow Metro, the first with the Order of Lenin, the second with the Order of the Red Star, the third with the Order of the Red Flag of Labour, the fourth with the Charter of the Central Committee of Soviets.
But here is the question. What to do with the others, what to do with the comrades who worked just as hard as those who have been decorated, who have put as much into their work with their ability and strength? Some among you seem to be happy and others are perplexed. What should we do? That is the question.
Therefore, we want to repair this mistake of the Party and of the State in the face of all honest people. (Laughter and lively applause). I am not an amateur in making long speeches, therefore allow me to expound on the corrections.
First correction : for the successful work of the Metro construction, congratulations on behalf of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the U.S.S.R., to the shock workers, the whole collective of mechanics, technicians, working men and women of the Metro construction. (The hall greets the propositions of Comrade Stalin with cheers and a loud ovation - all rise).
Even today, it is necessary to correct our mistake by congratulating the workers of the construction of the Metro (applause). Do not applaud me : it is the decision of all the comrades.
And the second correction, I tell you it directly.
For the particular merits in the cause of mobilization, deserved by the Komsomols in the successful construction of the Moscow Metro, I decorate with the Order of Lenin, the organization of Komsomols of Moscow. (More applause and ovations. Smiling, Comrade Stalin applauds with all the people assembled in the Hall of Collonades). It is also necessary to correct this mistake today and publish it tomorrow. (Holding up the paper of corrections, Comrade Stalin addressed the audience simply and warmly) . Perhaps, Comrades, it is a small thing, but we have not been able to invent anything better.
If we could do something else, go ahead, tell us!
Saluting the workers and builders of the Metro, the director leaves the tribune. The operators of the concrete mixers, the shaft sinkers from the mines, the welders, the engineers, the foremen, the professors, the working men and women, happy people, leave the hall filled with joy, applauding and shouting "Hurrah for beloved Stalin!"
In the sixth row, a young girl in a pink sweater stood up on a chair and addressing herself to the presidents, shouted with emotion, "A Komsomol Hurrah for Comrade Stalin!"
The ovation continued for several minutes, and when finally the cheering stopped, Comrade Stalin asked the assembly once again "What do you think? Are these enough corrections?"
And again the hall responded with a lively ovation.
Pravda
15 May 1935
here
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Post by dodger on Sept 12, 2013 7:31:10 GMT
Excellent study of the Soviet government in the 1930s, January 12, 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle (The Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War) (Hardcover)
This is a fascinating study of the Soviet government in the 1930s. Khlevniuk presents evidence that refutes Khrushchev's claim that during the Stalin years there was always a split in the leadership, between the good guys, pre-eminently Khrushchev himself, and the bad guys.
So, as Khlevniuk writes, "New versions of events, countenanced from above, entered into circulation through a variety of channels. There were new accounts of meetings of high-level party functionaries, who purportedly were hatching plans during the 17th Party Congress to replace Stalin with Kirov as general secretary of the Central Committee; a new notion that Kirov was killed by order of Stalin, who saw in the Leningrad party secretary a political rival; a new version of the circumstances of Ordzhonikidze's death and allegations that it resulted from conflict with Stalin; and a new suggestion that Postyshev spoke out against repression during the February-March 1937 Central Committee plenum, among others.
"None of these accounts were backed up with documentary evidence. Even Khrushchev, who had the entire party archive at his disposal, preferred to rely on the recollections of old Bolsheviks returning from the camps. This did not faze historians. The complete inaccessibility of Soviet archives and the lack of candidness, to put it mildly, of Soviet political leaders were both taken for granted. Given the unavailability of hard evidence, for many historians the slightest hint in a speech by Khrushchev or in the official Soviet press took on the weight of fact. As a result, every scrap of evidence that there was conflict within the Politburo was stitched together into a confused patchwork in which it was hard to distinguish rumor from hard fact or opportunistic falsification from mistaken recollection."
Khlevniuk concludes, "Archival sources do not back up widely held beliefs about the reformist role of Kirov and his supporters within the Politburo. ... Historians have yet to offer a single solid piece of evidence to sustain or develop the hypothesis that Kirov was seen as an alternative to Stalin. Analogous conclusions can also be drawn in regard to other suppositions about a struggle within the Politburo between moderates and radicals."
Further, Khlevniuk presents much evidence that refutes claims that Stalin worked as a solitary dictator. For example, he cites Stalin's letter to Ordzhonikidze in September 1931, "I don't agree with you about Molotov. If he's giving you or VSNKh [Supreme Economic Council] a hard time, raise the matter in the PB [Politburo]. You know perfectly well that the PB will not let Molotov or anyone else persecute you or the VSNKh. In any event, you're just as much to blame as Molotov is. You called him a `scoundrel'. That can't be allowed in a comradely environment.
"... Do you really think that Molotov should be excluded from this ruling circle that has taken shape in the struggle against the Trotsky-Zinoviev and Bukharin-Rykov deviations? ... To isolate Molotov and scatter the ruling Bolshevik circle ... no, I won't go for that `business', however much that might upset you and however close our friendship might be.
"Of course Molotov has his faults, and I am aware of them. But who doesn't have faults? We're all rich in faults. We have to work and struggle together - there's plenty of work to go around. We have to respect one another and deal with one another."
And again, on 4 October, "We work together, come what may! The preservation of the unity and indivisibility of our ruling circle! Understood?"
Comments: www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3F985LBFZX13Y/ref=cm_aya_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0300110669#wasThisHelpful |
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Post by dodger on Sept 12, 2013 7:50:24 GMT
Very useful study of Molotov, 21 May 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Molotov: Stalin's Cold Warrior (Shapers of International History) (Hardcover)
Geoffrey Roberts, author of Stalin's wars: from World War to Cold War 1939-1953 and many other books, has written another splendid book. This biography of Molotov, based on archival research, sheds new light on the Cold War.
Roberts recounts the Soviet view of World War Two: "the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition had won the war together, but the greatest contribution had come from the Red Army, which had turned the tide of war in the Allies' favour a full year before the D-Day landings in France. It was the Soviet Union that had largely liberated Europe from German occupation and thereby saved European civilization." Roberts writes, "As Molotov was fond of saying, European civilization was saved by the Red Army, by the sacrifices of the Soviet people, and by the resources generated by the communist system."
Immediately at the end of World War Two, "The Soviet perspective was that great-power collaboration would continue in the long term to contain Germany and to maintain a stable setting for postwar reconstruction."
Stalin persistently urged peaceful coexistence between the socialist and capitalist systems, and the peaceful settlement of differences. The US and British governments replied with Churchill's Fulton speech (a virtual declaration of war on the Soviet Union), the Truman Doctrine and the formation of NATO.
Roberts points out that Stalin said in January 1949 that the Soviet Union would lift the Berlin blockade if the West agreed to another conference on the German question, and this is what happened.
In March 1952, Molotov sent a Note proposing a German peace treaty based on withdrawing all Allied forces from Germany, German unification, and a German pledge not to join NATO. As Roberts points out, Molotov wanted "a deal with the West on the German question that might have led to a loss of communist control in East Germany. In exchange for this sacrifice Molotov sought a comprehensive system of European collective security ..." - like Gorbachev's later proposal of a `common European home'. Giving up the GDR would have destroyed the whole Soviet bloc.
Stalin opposed Molotov's capitulationism. In April, Stalin told the GDR's leaders, "Whatever proposals we make on the German question the Western powers won't agree with them and they won't withdraw from West Germany. To think that the Americans will compromise or accept the draft peace treaty would be a mistake. The Americans need an army in West Germany in order to keep control of Western Europe. ... The Americans are drawing West Germany into the [NATO] pact. They will form West German forces ... In West Germany an independent state is being formed. And you must organize your own state."
In 1953, after Stalin died, Molotov, with Malenkov and Beria, continued to push for this German peace treaty. Malenkov said, "Profoundly mistaken are those who think that Germany can exist for a long time under conditions of dismemberment in the form of two independent states. To stick to the position of the existence of a dismembered Germany means to keep to the course for a new war." History proved that Molotov and Malenkov, not Stalin, were `profoundly mistaken'.
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Post by dodger on Sept 23, 2013 14:03:37 GMT
A great liar, 18 Aug 2011
This William Podmore review is from: The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Paperback)
Veteran Sovietologist Roberta Manning of Boston College said of Conquest, "He's terrible at doing research," and, "He misuses sources, he twists everything."
Data from the recently opened Russian archives prove that Robert Conquest hugely inflated figures for deaths and deportations in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Too many writers on the subject, like Stephen Cohen, Alan Bullock and Martin Malia, relied on what Pofessor R. W. Davies called, `Conquest's very high figures for deaths from political causes under Stalin'.
They all claimed that the opened archives would prove their figures true, but when the archives were opened, they went very quiet.
As Professor Richard Overy, Professor of History at King's College London, writes, "For years the figures circulating in the West for Soviet repression were greatly inflated. ... The archive shows a very different picture." Victor Zemskov, who Conquest called `a thoroughly reliable researcher', said the figure of 7 million executed in 1935-41 was `overestimated by a factor of ten'. Archive figures are 799,257 between 1921 and 1952.
The number of those sentenced to prison in those years was 3.85 million. Prisoners in 1939, Conquest said 9 million, a figure again repeated by Cohen. The camp and prison population in January 1939 was two million, not the 15 million that Robert Conquest alleged, which would have been half the adult male population. Alec Nove wrote that Conquest's figures `are indeed incredible'. Conquest alleged that 12 million were political prisoners; the NKVD figure was under 500,000. D. J. Dallin claimed that there were 10-12 million in the camps, 30-40 per cent of whom, that is 3-4 million, died yearly (this from an adult male population of 50 million). Wheatcroft and Davies point out that recent Russian estimates for the numbers in the camps are `far lower than those by Robert Conquest'. Conquest claimed that there were 12 million people in the camps in 1950: the real figure was 578,912. 166,424 died in the labour camps in 1937-39, not 3 million. Conquest's figure of 13 million exiled or sent to the camps during collectivisation was `four times the true figure'. The highest number in the camps was 2,417,468 in 1941, 2.4 per cent of the adult population. Compare the USA in 1996, 5.5 million, a record high, 2.8 per cent of the adult population. Gabor Rittersporn agreed that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's figures for deportations during the 1930s in the Soviet Union were `grossly exaggerated'.
Conquest wrote in 1969 `Great Terror' that 5-6 million died in the famine; by 1986, 14-15 million.
There were 17 million excess deaths in 1930-38, according to Conquest.
As Davies pointed out about excess deaths and the numbers in camps, "Extreme (and untenable) figures often prevailed." Zemskov claims that "the statistical data adduced by Robert Conquest and Stephen Cohen are exaggerated by almost 500 per cent."
Conquest alleged that in 1937-38, 35,000 of the Red Army's 70,000 officers were arrested. The archive showed indeed that 35,000 officers were arrested or discharged, but also that 10,994 were reinstated. It also showed that there were 178,000 officers in 1938, not 70,000, so the arrest rate was about 15 per cent, not 50 per cent. After the war, returning POWs were not `either executed or sent to the Gulag' as Malia claimed. 6.5 per cent went to the NKVD's `special contingent', 58 per cent were sent home, and 33 per cent returned to the army.
Davies summed up, "Russian historians who have worked in the formerly secret archives peremptorily reject the high estimates of Conquest and others. ... The archival data are entirely incompatible with such very high figures, which continue to be cited as firm fact in both the Russian and the Western media."
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Post by dodger on Oct 1, 2013 8:52:57 GMT
The 1930s saw mass unemployment sweep across the world – though not in the Soviet Union, which planned its economy and took the concepts of credit and finance seriously...
Socialism and finance: lessons from the Soviet Union about securing real progress
WORKERS, MAR 2013 ISSUE
The inadequacy of terms such as austerity or economic downturn is becoming obvious to more and more British workers. In fact Britain is in an economic slump that has similarities with the slump of the 1930s. But this time at its core is a private sector banking mess.
Assembling a pumping plant at Magnitostroi
– Russia thrived while the West slumped.
What works, and what doesn’t work? During the 1930s what didn’t work was capitalist finance – just like now it had painted itself into a corner. What certainly did work during this period was the industrial and financial structure that had been developed in the Soviet Union.
Soviet industrial achievement up to the Second World War has been well documented, but often with little or no mention of banking, credit and the role that financial techniques played in helping to bring about this Soviet success. This is curious because it was not just through industry but also through finance that the Marxist political economy was tested at a time of complete paralysis in capitalist circles.
Taking responsibility
The origins of this Marxist leap forwards can be traced back to 1911, when the Bolsheviks started to ask some hard questions of themselves concerning their understanding of money and currency. For example, they recognised that to talk about the regularisation of economic life under Socialism and to evade the question of finance, means either to betray complete ignorance or to fool the “simple folk” with high-sounding words. They also recognised that taking responsibility was key and should be accompanied by humility, knowing that it is a complicated measure and that none of them was an expert.
But by 1916 the rewards of rigorous study were emerging, with the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Three features were identified in this ground-breaking study: first, that the slogan “United States of Europe” was counter revolutionary; second, that there is an iron law under capitalism whereby the uneven economic development of countries is guaranteed; and third, that arising from point 2 it is possible for revolution to occur in one country.
By 1922 things for the Bolsheviks had moved on. The First World War had ended in 1918, revolution followed by civil war had taken place and ten invading capitalist armies had been beaten and removed from Soviet territory. The Bolsheviks then had to address what they called the “swing to the left” that began to gather momentum from 1922 to 1934. This leftist thinking sought to exploit a number of misconceptions: that money loses its importance after a revolution, that money would be quickly abolished, that credit is an anomaly, and that finance is not supposed to exist in a socialist society.
To address these falsehoods an understanding of the behaviour and characteristics of money and banking under socialism was considered to be key. Central to this Bolshevik thinking was the notion that the economic weapons of the bourgeoisie should be used by the working class with a view to overcoming capitalism: not only can you have industry without capitalism but you can also have money and banking without capitalism. “Use industry against capitalism. Use money against capitalism” was the Bolshevik political shorthand of the day.
A sound currency and banking structure was considered a key part of “the dual nature of trade under the present conditions of the struggle between socialistic elements and capitalistic elements”, as Stalin put it in 1925. This had been ill understood in certain quarters, with a stepping up of leftist reaction following the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1922. Indeed the success of the NEP, the achievement by 1927 of getting production back to the levels of 1913, the success of the Central Bank (Gosbank) in monetary policy and the introduction in 1927 of the first 5-year plan did not deter the leftist attack. In 1931 they were claiming that it was now necessary to proceed with the organisation of direct exchange of products, and that money would soon be abolished.
Clearly this matter now had to be dealt with, and it was (see below).
It was during 1931 to 1934 that the monetarist struggle was won by the Bolsheviks. At which point the international capitalists realised that they had lost in the Soviet Union. For the first time ever in a country the political economy of the capi-talist class had been successfully changed into the political economy of the working class. Of course the Bolsheviks noted that it was not by coincidence that the Nazi Party in Germany, with their promise of attacking the Soviet Union, suddenly found that their coffers were being flooded by donations from firms such as Siemens, Krupp and Rheinmetall (see Workers, March 2012). But what of the German Communist Party, which had 4.8 million voters in 1933? The paucity of their thinking was summed up by the following acknowledgement that appeared in the June 1934 journal of the German Social Democrats, by now in exile.
“Faced with the despair of proletarians reduced to joblessness, of young people with diplomas and no future, of the middle classes of merchants and artisans condemned to bankruptcy, and of farmers terribly threatened by the collapse in agricultural prices, we all failed. We weren’t capable of offering the masses anything but speeches about the glory of socialism.”
What the 1930s reveal is that when tested by the touchstone of reality, practical organisation furnished a much more severe test on Marxism than would be supplied by theory or logic in isolation. At a time of worldwide capitalist slump throughout the decade the Soviet Union came through with flying colours.
What went right
It is not so much a matter of looking at what went wrong in the Soviet Union post 1953 but first looking closely at what went right between 1917 and 1953. And for today’s naysayers in our trade unions who seek to portray the Bolsheviks in a negative light, here are two possible clues as to why things went wrong eventually.
Firstly. as Stalin commented in 1945, the tragic loss of 20 million lives in repelling the Nazi invasion could not really be expressed by a statistic; in reality the loss was incalculable. Secondly, in 1958 consumer instalment credit was introduced in the Soviet Union. Specialised credit agencies granted loans to individuals to improve homes charging 2 to 3 per cent over a ten-year period. The loans grew rapidly in popularity. Could easy credit be a route back to capitalism? It has certainly been a prop for capitalism in our time.
Irrespective of the condition of Russia today, we can see what a bold step British capitalism took from 1979 to 2008 in making credit easily available to British workers at amounts unprecedented.
By creating the illusion that living standards could be maintained through queuing for credit rather than fighting for wages, the effects of the policy of industrial destruction pursued by successive governments were cushioned. The reality is now for all to see and it is for the British working class to decide whether to take a bold step in response.
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