They obviously missed the point and gained no new experience at all, - I thought to myself, while looking at our opponents. In the past, the people somehow stopped short of personally disputing with the Communists. Of course, I had visualized them as something abstract, but in reality they leave a very particular mark.
Their first characteristic feature is their natural, constitutional disability
to account for something, to admit responsibility. All that counts for them are
victories and merits.
Oh well! Whenever something had turned out to be bad, it had not been their
fault, anyway. The intrigues of the enemies are to be blamed for it, the hostile
surroundings, the complicated international relations, the young generation with
all its greenness and inexperience, the adverseness of history and, should
necessity require it, even unfavourable weather conditions. “The present regime
is no good, it does not align with the people; the people suffer and perish to
no avail”. Don’t you feel remorseful, aren’t you conscious of any guilt? Don’t
you think that all this is the direct consequence of your unlimited 70 years’
rule? The rabble you are untiringly execrating – they are all pupils of the
pioneer organisation of the Young Communists’ League and the Party. They are
direct descendants of the Communist era. Yeltsin grew up in the hallways of your
Polit Bureau. And your would-be implication “Yeltsin is bad, hence Stalin must
be good” – does not work. As they say, the sins committed by others do not make
us any better. I would like to propose the following logical way of thinking:
the people suffer and perish to no avail – this means that the regime is working
against the people. Hence, Stalin was the chief of a regime which was working
against its own people. All the grief and agony we had to go through during
Stalin’s rule cannot be compared to anything else.
“Mistakes and errors were unavoidable, for they had no previous experience with socialism”. However, we cannot let you get away with such an argumentation. After 70 years of Communist dictatorship nobody was experienced in building democracy, either, but this does not excuse the reformers. Or do you merely forgive mistakes, in case you made them yourselves?
The second striking thing is their total disrespect towards the people. In some way this intrinsic attribute of theirs is entirely paradox, for they are also part of the people, after all.
As human beings they leave quite a regular impression: they love children, take pity on their parents, suffer and sometimes cry. In their capacity of being Communists, however, they truly represent inhabitants of a different planet. The people is something you are using up – no matter at what price this is done. Kill millions of people because of an abstract idea – without reflecting, without being horror-stricken, without being unrepentant. It does not suffice to merely appear as conqueror of a country, you have to be at least a non-native, a stranger.
Apart from this they say: “There was no alternative, anyway”. But this is not true, because you always have the possibility to choose. And not all of the Communists were that bloodthirsty. But all more or less moderate platforms suffered defeat, and the party would always choose the most cruel and merciless policy. That’s where we can find Josef Vissarionovich’s undoubted merits.
“Under Stalin’s rule there were many a construction site in the country”. Yes, in fact, you had. They excavated channels, lay tracks, build hydroelectric power plants, fell trees, mined coal and ores … By using slave workers from among the prisoners. An utterly unpleasant matter of fact, the absolute truth of which they are only reluctantly prepared to admit, by making all kinds of excuses: there were not so many prisoners at all; most of them were criminal offenders; they had been put to prison, and rightly so; yes, they were shot or locked up in cells, but only very few. They should have been much more in number!
Just like one of the opponents, who – jumping up from his chair – shouted: “The number of those who were repressed is overstated by 125 times!” – It seems that he has an issue with arithmetics. When official statements talk about 770.000 people, who still live in our country, who were victims of repressions and received their rehabilitation, then these mysterious, unknown “overstaters”obviously confirm the existence of 96 millions in all. When, according to the information of the regional Federal State Security 60.000 individuals received their rehabilitation within our region, then it cannot be that difficult to put this number in due proportion to the total population of the USSR and estimate or determine their total number, the more since not all of those who were affected by repressions, although they were entirely innocent, have been rehabilitated by now.
One must not think that all who were caught and arrested were declared enemies of the people. They were rather chosen to do hard labour. Everything was exactly the other way round. Boundaries were set to our state-directed economy. One had to be very careful, how many were designed for the 1st category (executuion), the 2nd (confinement) and the 3rd (internal exile). Well, now the NKVD carousel can turn round and round! You are not allowed to repress more people than determined by the plan – but you must not repress less, either. And then they still had to define, who to send packing and who to pin on some Polish-Japanese espionage affair. And soonafter the upper echelons of communism made new demands: it is now obvious that their will be considerable losses. Someone starts to total numbers, to concretize these demands. A fairy tale? Fiction? No, it’s plain truth.
An ingenious decision made by the leader, who, by means of his iron fist, intends to nip the slightest disagreement, the slightest civil commotion in the bud, to awe and terrorize the survivors and at the same time gain a huge number of slave workers for all his projects. To burn a certain part of the population in the combustion chamber of some locomotive, in order to let the train go at breakneck speed towards a sparkling, clear future.
There was law and order in the country, as well. By means of utterly draconic decrees, similar to the Ukase of the 07 August 1932, they introduced a well thought-out system of prosecution upon disregard of work discipline or pilferage. People were sent to prison, just for having arrived late at work, for having left the village to go downtown without official permission, for having stolen “3 ears” from the field to satisfy the pangs of hunger. As a result, the majority of this type of “criminals was represented by peasants and workers. But none of them was a true criminal or murderer, for sure. And what about the disspossed? Perhaps they were no “political” prisoners? Party politics comdemned them to internal exile and camp detention for being well-off, but not for having committed any serious crime. In a different political system they would have cultivated their grain to feed their country and the world. And here they were disspossessed, until the given limit had finally been reached.
They only shot a few people? Don’t you have an itch to walk under the weight of an axe for miles, fell trees from morning till night and send your own children there, too? Stalin, after all, relentlessly wiped out his rooters and devote henchmen, too. And they departed this life screaming: “Long live our great Stalin! …”
“50000 people were detained in the KrasLag in 1952; what are we going to talk about then!”
In fact, there is nothing to discuss. 300000 prisoners passed through the NorilLag, not to mention the Yeniseystroi and many other camps, the “road of death leading from “Salekhard to Igarka”, …..
“He took over Russia with a plough, he left it behind with the atom bomb”. There you go! What a paean of praise! He received and accepted Russia with its huge granaries and left it without a single ear. This was like a whiplash, it was worse than “canons instead of butter”. In the true sense of the word it means “a bomb instead of bread”. To accelerate the progress of industrialization, they were ready to ruin the entire farming community of the country. The population of the most fertile regions was forced to experience a horrible famine. According to lowest estimates 3 million people were tormented to death by well-organized famine in the Ukraine alone. And its agriculture never again was to be that healthy, as it had been before.
Instead, the industry of the country was exclusively geared to the war. Everything to be given for tanks and canons, bombs and airplanes, almost nothing for the people and its needs. An entirely adhorrent, absurd, one-sided development of economy.
And what came out of it? Which are the results? Over a period of ten years the country got prepared for the war, while the people were agonizing, had to labour and bathe in blood. And when the war finally broke out, it became evident that we were not prepared fpr this situation at all. “The Brave and Sagacious” had not foreseen the betrayal committed by his comrade: having signed the Ribbentrop Molotov Treaty (also known as Non-aggression Pact; translator’s note), he had stopped to think about a reasonable concept to defend his country and had given instructions to blow up all fortifications without building new ones. The deep disgrace of numerous defeats during the first months and in the course of the whole war, when reams of family members were killed at the front and the enemy moved forward up to Moscow and the river Volga, millions of soldiers involved in battles of encirclement and annihilation, the suffering and misery of the population in the occupaied territories – who is going to bear responsibility? Maybe the generals, who Stalin had executed in great number? Or those unfortunate little soldiers who Stalin permitted to become prisoners of war, then declared them traitors and, right after the war, repatriate them by transporting them from the Fascists` concentration camps directly into the camps of the Sovietunion?
Did it fight well – this army, which experienced a loss of human lives five times higher than the number of soldiers killed with the enemy? The human beings living in his country were nothing to Stalin, they were not worth a straw. Just to give an example: the capture of Kiev on the 7th November – which happened upon Stalin’s order, and it was issued for reasons of mere obstinacy and despotism. We could quote many more examples of the same kind yet.
But isn’t it time to name the culprit 60 years afterwards? Or do the words “I was your leader, I am the responsible person” do not exist in the Russian language? This kind of a supreme commander does not deserve to be famous, to be celebrated – he deserves a due process of law and an adjudication.
What are the results of Stalin’s rule then? The world revolution did not take place, the acrimonious fight against capitalism was lost in disgrace, the huge empire collapsed – it did not even continue to exist for 40 years after his death. Theentire people was humiliated and educated by Stalin in the spirit of slavery. The track on which he lead the country turned out to be a dead-end street. The workers of many other countries achieved a degree of social prosperity and quite a high quality of life, without having made such unimaginable sacrifices, without having suffered the kind of want and agonies Stalin and his successors lead the people through.
Stalin is one of the causers of a terrific hictorical failure. Is he really such a great historical person? In a sense – yes. However, history has not pronounced its final judgement clearly and unmistakably yet. The era of his rule has not yet receded far enough into the distance – you can still feel this icy wind in your back.
It’s hard for me to understand those, who count on him and place their trust in him. What is going on inside them? Are they still thinking about world revolution? Brezhnevs paradise in a separate country? The huge empire built on blood and a tremendous bomb? Are they dreaming of a new dictator? Haven’t they have enough yet? What are young people supposed to experience in their opinion, when looking at Stalin’s memorial? Get the urge to the past? Or believe in the legality of Stalin’s deeds, in his innocence?
Valeriy Khvostenko, deputy chairman of the Krasnoarsk “Memorial” organization, participant of the TV discussion “Do we need to put up Stalin’s memorial in Krasnoyarsk?”
The article was primarily intended for being published in the press; however, after due consideration by the editorial staff, it did not go to press, after all.