Masterpost on Joseph

Stalin and the Great Purge

"Contradiction is universal and absolute, it is present in the process
of development of all things and permeates every process from
beginning to end... the history of a society is the history of its
internal contradictions." - Mao Zedong

Introduction

Hello comrades. Normally our masterposts deal with

entire nations or recent events, but seeing as this
particular topic is one of the most discussed in online
political circles, it seems deserving of its own discussion.
This is especially true because this topic often acts as a
barrier to those who wish to learn more about
communism, and Marxism-Leninism in particular.

In order to deal with this topic, I decided to put together a

discussion of Joseph Stalin from a Marxist-Leninist
perspective. In it, we will deal with Stalin's successes and
failures, correct various misconceptions and falsehoods
surrounding him, and place the man in his proper
historical context.

It should also be said, this discussion will not gloss over

and/or ignore Stalin's various flaws and misdoings; "Stalin
did nothing wrong" is a good meme, but it's a bad
analysis.
As always, all sources will be listed at the end of the post.

The Soviet Economy Under Stalin

It is commonly alleged that Stalin presided over a period

of economic failure in the USSR, due to his insistence
upon industrialization and the collectivization of
agriculture. However, more recent research has painted a
far more positive picture.

According to Professor Robert Allen:

The Soviet economy performed well... Planning led to

high rates of capital accumulation, rapid GDP growth,
and rising per capita consumption even in the 1930's.
[...] The expansion of heavy industry and the use of
output targets and soft-budgets to direct firms were
appropriate to the conditions of the 1930's, they were
adopted quickly, and they led to rapid growth of
investment and consumption.

Professor Elizabeth Brainerd refers to Soviet growth rates

as "impressive," noting that they "promoted the rapid
industrialization of the USSR, particularly in the decades
from the 1930's to the 1960's." She also states:

Both Western and Soviet estimates of GNP growth in

the Soviet Union indicate that GNP per capita grew in
every decade in the postwar era, at times far
surpassing the growth rates of the developed western
economies.
Even still, it is often claimed that this growth did not
improve the standard of living for the Soviet people.
However, more recent research has also shown this to be
false.

According to Professor Allen:

While investment certainly increased rapidly, recent

research shows that the standard of living also
increased briskly. [...] Calories are the most basic
dimension of the standard of living, and their
consumption was higher in the late 1930's than in the
1920's. [...] There has been no debate that ‘collective
consumption’ (principally education and health
services) rose sharply, but the standard view was that
private consumption declined. Recent research,
however, calls that conclusion into question...
Consumption per head rose about one quarter between
1928 and the late 1930's.

According to Professor Brainerd:

The conventional measures of GNP growth and

household consumption indicate a long, uninterrupted
upward climb in the Soviet standard of living from
1928 to 1985; even Western estimates of these
measures support this view, albeit at a slower rate of
growth than the Soviet measures.

While the economy is not the main purpose of this

discussion, it should be acknowledged that under Joseph
Stalin, the Soviet Union experienced rapid economic
growth, and a significant increase in the population's
standard of living.

The Great Purge

The purges of the late-1930's are a definite black mark on

the legacy of Soviet socialism; this much cannot be
denied. That being said, they have been the subject of
decades-worth of unjustified and intolerable distortions
and exaggerations by bourgeois academics, necessitating a
thorough reply.

Firstly, let us establish the facts of how many people

actually died in the purges. While Westerners are often
treated to numbers ranging from 20 to 50 million, the
true figures (while bad enough in their own right) are
nowhere near that high. According to Professor J. Arch
Getty:

From 1921 to Stalin's death, in 1953, around 800,000

people were sentenced to death and shot, 85 percent of
them in the years of the Great Terror of 1937-1938.
From 1934 to Stalin's death, more than a million
perished in the gulag camps.

To these figures must be added an important qualification:

contrary to popular opinion, the vast majority of gulag
inmates were not innocent political prisoners. Professor
Getty notes that those convicted of "counterrevolutionary
crimes" made up between 12 and 33 percent (depending
on the year) of the gulag population, with the rest having
been convicted of ordinary crimes. He also rejects the
common claim that non-Russian nationalities were
disproportionately targeted. To quote from his article in
the American Historical Review:

The long-awaited archival evidence on repression in

the period of the Great Purges shows that the levels of
arrests, political prisoners, executions, and general
camp populations tend to confirm the orders of
magnitude indicated by those labeled as "revisionists"
and mocked by those proposing high estimates...
inferences that the terror fell particularly hard on non-
Russian nationalities are not borne out by the camp
population data from the 1930's. The frequent
assertion that most of the camp prisoners were
'political' also seems not to be true.

In addition, the gulags were not death camps like those of

the Nazis; they were prisons, albeit harsh ones. Even
noted anti-communist scholars (such as those who
worked on the infamous Black Book of Communism) have
admitted this. To quote again from Professor Getty:

Stalin's camps were different from Hitler's. Tens of

thousands of prisoners were released every year upon
completion of their sentences. We now know that
before World War II more inmates escaped annually
from the Soviet camps than died there. [...] Werth, a
well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union
 whose sections in the Black Book on the Soviet
Communists are sober and damning, told Le Monde,
"Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union."

It must also be noted that, contrary to the popular

conception of Stalin's USSR as a place of "total terror" (to
quote Hannah Arendt), the majority of the population did
not feel threatened by the purges. Referring to the time of
the Great Purge, Professor Robert Thurston notes that
"my evidence suggests that widespread fear did not exist
in the case at hand." He also notes that the Great Purge
was an exceptional occurrence, which cannot be used to
characterize the Stalinist-era as a whole:

I will not simply imply but will state outright that the
Ezhovshchina [Great Purge] was an aberration. Torture
was uncommon until August 1937, when it became
the norm; it ended abruptly with Beria's rise to head of
the NKVD in late 1938. Mass arrests followed the
same pattern... A campaign for more regular, fair, and
systemic judicial procedures that began in 1933-1934
was interrupted and overwhelmed by the Terror in
1937. It resumed in the spring of 1938, more strongly
and effectively than before. Thus more than one trend
was broken by the Ezhovshchina, only to reappear after
it.

He also points out that some arrests which took place

during the Great Purge were based on previously-ignored
(yet arguably still legitimate) crimes against the Soviet
state, such as fighting with the reactionary forces during
the Civil War:

People were suddenly arrested in 1937 for things that

had happened many years earlier but had been ignored
since, for example, serving in a White army.

The question arises: why arrest former White Army

soldiers, among others? The answer lies in the general
fear of counterrevolution which pervaded the party at this
time. According to Professor James Harris:

By the mid-1930's, the rise of the Nazis in Germany

and the militarists in Japan, both stridently anti-
communist, posed a very real threat to the USSR. War
was then on the horizon, and Stalin felt he had no
choice but to take preemptive action against what he
saw as a potential fifth column – a group that would
undermine the larger collective.

Remember that since the moment of its founding (still a

recent event, at this time), the Soviet Union had been
invaded by multiple capitalist powers (including the
United States) in the early-1920's, and had also been
subject to espionage and internal sabotage. Combined
with the looming threat of war with an increasingly
powerful Nazi Germany, it is hardly surprising that these
factors came together to form an atmosphere of paranoia,
which lent itself to the sort of violent excess seen during
the Purge. This coincides with Professor Thurston's
interpretation of the events, from his book Life and Terror
in Stalin's Russia:

...between 1934 and 1936 police and court practice

relaxed significantly. Then a series of events, together
with the tense international situation and memories of
real enemy activity during the savage Russian Civil
War, combined to push leaders and people into a
hysterical hunt for perceived 'wreckers.' After late
1938, however, the police and courts became
dramatically milder.

This general atmosphere of fear (not of the purges, but of

external and internal enemies) is most likely why the
majority of the Soviet people seemed to support the
government's actions during the Purge period. According
to Professor Thurston:

The various reactions to arrest cataloged above suggest

that general fear did not exist in the USSR at any time
in the late 1930's... People who remained at liberty
often felt that some event in the backgrounds of the
detained individuals justified their arrests. The sense
that anyone could be next, the underpinning of
theoretical systems of terror, rarely appears.

Overall, perhaps the most succinct summary of this issue

is the one provided in Professor Thurston's book, in which
he states:

There was never a long period of Stalinism without a

 serious foreign threat, major internal dislocation, or
both, which makes identifying its true nature
impossible.

As Marxists, we should be well aware that material

conditions shape ideological and political structures. The
savagery of the Russian Civil War, the multiple invasions
from capitalist powers, and the increasing threat of a war
against fascism make the paranoid atmosphere of the late-
1930's understandable, if not condonable; yet even while
we discuss the genuine causes of the Purge, and reject the
hysterical anti-communist mud-throwing of the Cold
Warriors, we must still acknowledge the black mark that
the Purge leaves on Stalin's legacy.

The Ukrainian Famine ("Holodomor")

Perhaps the most pernicious accusation against Stalin is

that he orchestrated the dreadful famine of the early-
1930's in order to squash a Ukrainian nationalist revolt.
This despicable slander (which is peddled largely by
Ukrainian nationalist and neo-fascist groups) is easily
refuted by examining the historical consensus. The
following quotes are compiled in an article from the
Village Voice, cited below.

Alexander Dallin of Stanford University writes:

There is no evidence it was intentionally directed

against Ukrainians... that would be totally out of
keeping with what we know -- it makes no sense.
Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania stated:

This is crap, rubbish... I am an anti-Stalinist, but I

don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our
knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it
becomes a pathology.

Lynne Viola of the University of Toronto writes:

I absolutely reject it... Why in god's name would this

paranoid government consciously produce a famine
when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?

Mark Tauger, Professor of History at West Virginia

University (reviewing work by Stephen Wheatcroft and
R.W. Davies) has this to say:

Popular media and most historians for decades have

described the great famine that struck most of the
USSR in the early 1930s as “man-made,” very often
even a “genocide” that Stalin perpetrated intentionally
against Ukrainians and sometimes other national
groups to destroy them as nations... This perspective,
however, is wrong. The famine that took place was not
limited to Ukraine or even to rural areas of the USSR,
it was not fundamentally or exclusively man-made, and
it was far from the intention of Stalin and others in the
Soviet leadership to create such as disaster. A small
but growing literature relying on new archival
documents and a critical approach to other sources has
shown the flaws in the “genocide” or “intentionalist”
 interpretation of the famine and has developed an
alternative interpretation.

More recent research has discovered natural causes for the

Ukrainian famine. Tauger notes:

...the USSR experienced an unusual environmental

disaster in 1932: extremely wet and humid weather
that gave rise to severe plant disease infestations,
especially rust. Ukraine had double or triple the
normal rainfall in 1932. Both the weather conditions
and the rust spread from Eastern Europe, as plant
pathologists at the time documented. Soviet plant
pathologists in particular estimated that rust and other
fungal diseases reduced the potential harvest in 1932
by almost nine million tons, which is the largest
documented harvest loss from any single cause in
Soviet history.

It should be noted that this does not excuse the Soviet

state from any and all responsibility for the suffering that
took place; one could accuse the government of
insufficiently rapid response, and note that initial reports
were often downplayed to avoid rocking the boat. But it is
clear that the famine was not deliberate, was not a
genocide, and (to quote Tauger) "was not fundamentally
or exclusively man-made."

Conclusion

In short, comrades, Stalin was an extraordinarily complex

man. His legacy is far too nuanced to be summed-up in
catchphrases like "Stalin was worse than Hitler," or "Stalin
did nothing wrong." He was a flawed leader, who managed
some enormous achievements (rapid industrial and
economic growth, improvements to the standard of living,
leading the USSR to victory over Nazism), while also
making some enormous mistakes (the paranoia of the
purges, the errors of the famine, the rolling-back of
progressive social policies).

We should not respond to bourgeois propaganda by

insisting (as some well-meaning yet mistaken comrades
have done) that every single misdeed of Stalin is a lie;
rather, we should place them into proper historical
context, along with his various achievements. This is the
correct way for Marxists to analyze the world: with a firm,
well-grounded materialist critique, yielding no ground to
hero worship, or to a fictitious "great man" theory of
history. Recall what Fidel Castro said on the matter:

I believe Stalin made big mistakes but also showed

great wisdom. In my opinion, blaming Stalin for
everything that occurred in the Soviet Union would be
historical simplism, because no man by himself could
have created certain conditions. It would be the same
as giving Stalin all the credit for what the USSR once
was. That is impossible! I believe that the efforts of
millions and millions of heroic people contributed to
the USSR's development and to its relevant role in the
world in favor of hundreds of millions of people. [...] I
 think there should be an impartial analysis of Stalin.
Blaming him for everything that happened would be
historical simplism.

Stalin was a great proletarian revolutionary, and yet he

was also a highly flawed leader. Do not be ashamed of this
legacy, comrades; rather, recall that in all things, there is
contradiction.

Sources

University of Oxford | A Reassessment of the Soviet

Industrial Revolution

Williams College | Reassessing the Standard of

Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using
Archival and Anthropometric Data

The Atlantic | The Future Did Not Work

American Historical Review | Victims of the Soviet

Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach
on the Basis of Archival Evidence

Yale University Press | Life and Terror in Stalin's

Russia, 1934-1941

Slavic Review | On Desk-Bound Parochialism,

Commonsense Perspectives, and Lousy Evidence: A
Reply to Robert Conquest

Slavic Review | Fear and Belief in the USSR's "Great

Terror": Response to Arrest, 1935-1939

History News Network | Historian James Harris Says

Russian Archives Show We've Misunderstood Stalin

Village Voice | In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A

Fifty Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right

EH Reviews | The Years of Hunger: Soviet

Agriculture, 1931-1933

Marxists Internet Archive | Fidel Castro on Stalin