by Ludo Martens
Rittersporn, op. cit. , p. 12.
These figures are sheer fantasy, invented by enemies of socialism who were firmly committed to harming the rйgime by all means. Their `estimates' are based on no serious sources.
`Lacking evidence, all estimates are equally worthless, and it is hard to disagree with Brzezinski's observation that it is impossible to make any estimates without erring in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.'
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Getty, op. cit. , pp. 257--258, n. 16.
We would now like to address the Gulag and the more general problem of the number of imprisoned and dead in the corrective work camps, the word Gulag meaning Principal Administration of the camps.
Armed with the science of statistics and extrapolation, Robert Conquest makes brilliant calculations: 5 million interned in the Gulag at the beginning of 1934; more than 7 million arrested during the 1937--1938 purges, that makes 12 million; from this number one million executed and two million dead of different causes during those two years. That makes exactly 9 million politically detained in 1939 `not counting the common law'.
.
Conquest's figures and those that refute his claims all come from Nicolas Werth, `Goulag: les vrais chiffres', op. cit. . See also Getty, Rittersporn and Zemskov, op. cit. .
Now, given the size of the repression, Conquest starts to count cadavers. Between 1939 and 1953, there was an average annual mortality `of around 10 per cent'. But, during all these years, the number of detained remained stable, around 8 million. That means that during those years, 12 million persons were assassinated in the Gulag by Stalinism.
The Medvedez brothers, those `Communists' of the Bukharin--Gorbachev school, essentially confirmed those revealing figures.
There were `12 to 13 million people thought to have been in concentration camps during Stalin's time'. Under Khrushchev, who reawoke hopes for `democratization', things went much better, of course: in the Gulag, there were only some 2 million common law criminals left.
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Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 19.
Up to now, no problem. Everything was going just fine for our anti-Communists. Their word was taken for granted.
Then the USSR split up and Gorbachev's disciples were able to grab the Soviet archives. In 1990, the Soviet historians Zemskov and Dugin published the unedited statistics for the Gulag. They contain the arrivals and departures, right down to the last person.
Unexpected consequence: These accounting books made it possible to remove Conquest's scientific mask.
In 1934, Conquest counted 5 million political detainees. In fact there were between 127,000 and 170,000. The exact number of all detained in the work camps, political and common law combined, was 510,307. The political prisoners formed only 25 to 35 per cent of the detainees. To the approximately 150,000 detainees, Conquest added 4,850,000. Small detail!
Annually, Conquest estimated an average of 8 million detainees in the camps. And Medvedev 12 to 13 million. In fact, the number of political detainees oscillated between a minimum of 127,000 in 1934 and a maximum of 500,000 during the two war years, 1941 and 1942. The real figures were therefore multiplied by a factor of between 16 and 26. When the average number of detainees was somewhere between 236,000 and 315,000 political detainees, Conquest `invented' 7,700,000 extra! Marginal statistical error, of course. Our school books, our newspapers, do not give the real figure of around 272,000, but the horror of 8,000,000!
Conquest, the fraud, claims that in 1937--1938, during the Great Purge, the camps swelled by 7 million `politicals' and there were in addition 1 million executions and 2 million other deaths. In fact, from 1936 to 1939, the number of detained in the camps increased by 477,789 persons (passing from 839,406 to 1,317,195). A falsification factor of 14. In two years, there were 115,922 deaths, not 2,000,000. For the 116,000 dead of various causes, Conquest adds 1,884,000 `victims of Stalinism'.
Gorbachev's ideologue, Medvedev, refers to 12 to 13 million in the camps; under the liberal Khrushchev, there remained 2 million, all common law. In fact, during Stalin's time, in 1951, the year of the greatest number of detained in the Gulag, there were 1,948,158 common law prisoners, as many as during Khrushchev's time. The real number of political prisoners was then 579,878. Most of these `politicals' had been Nazi collaborators: 334,538 had been convicted for treason.
According to Conquest, between 1939 and 1953, there was, in the work camps, a 10 per cent death rate per year, some 12 million `victims of Stalinism'. An average of 855,000 dead per year. In fact, the real figure in peace time was 49,000. Conquest invented a figure of 806,000 deaths per year. During the four years of the war, when Nazi barbarity was imposing unbearable conditions on all Soviets, the average number of deaths was 194,000. Hence, in four years, the Nazis caused an excess of 580,000 deaths, for which, of course, Stalin is responsible.
Werth, who denounces Conquest's falsifications, still does his best to maintain as much as possible the myth of Stalinist `crimes'.
`In fourteen years (1934--1947), 1 million deaths were registered in the work camps alone.' So Werth also blames socialism for the 580,000 extra deaths caused by the Nazis!
Let us return to the purge itself.
One of the best-known slanders claims that the purge was intended to eliminate the `Old Bolshevik Guard'. Even a vicious enemy of Bolshevism like Brzezinski can take up the same line.
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Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989), p. 89.
In 1934, there were 182,600 `Old Bolsheviks' in the Party, i.e. members who joined in 1920 at the latest. In 1939, there were 125,000. The great majority, 69 per cent, were still in the Party. There was during those five years a drop of 57,000 individuals, i.e. 31 per cent. Some died of natural causes, others were expelled, others were executed. It is clear that if `Old Bolsheviks' fell during the Purge, it was not because they were `Old Bolsheviks', but because of their political behavior.
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Ibid. , p. 176.
We conclude with the words of Professor J. Arch Getty who, at the end of his remarkable book, Origins of the Great Purges, writes:
`The evidence suggests that the Ezhovshchina --- which is what most people really mean by the ``Great Purges'' --- should be redefined. It was not the result of a petrified bureaucracy's stamping out dissent and annihilating old radical revolutionaries. In fact, it may have been just the opposite. It is not inconsistent with the evidence to argue that the Ezhovshchina was rather a radical, even hysterical, reaction to bureaucracy. The entrenched officeholders were destroyed from above and below in a chaotic wave of voluntarism and revolutionary puritanism.'
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Ibid. , p. 206.
The Western bourgeoisie and the Purge
By and large, the 1937--1938 purge succeeded in its purpose. There was also a lot of damage and many errors were committed, but these could probably not have been avoided, given the internal situation of the Party. Most of the men and women in the Nazi Fifth Column fell during the purge. And when the fascists attacked the USSR, there were few collaborators within the State and Party apparatus.
When we listen to Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, liberals and other bourgeois speaking of Stalin's `absurd terror', of the `bloody despot', we would like to ask them where they and people like them were in 1940, when the Nazis occupied France and Belgium. The great majority who, here at home, denounced Stalin's purge, actively or passively supported the Nazi rйgime as soon as it was set up. When the Nazis occupied Belgium, Hendrik de Man, the President of the Socialist Party, made an official declaration to praise Hitler and to announce that the arrival of the Hitlerite troops meant the `liberation of the working class'! In `The Manifesto to the Members of the POB (Belgian Workers' Party)', published in July 1940, de Man wrote:
`The war has led to the debacle of the parliamentary regime and of the capitalist plutocracy in the so-
called democracies. For the working classes and for socialism, this collapse of a decrepit world, far from being a disaster, is a deliverance .... the way is open for the two causes which sum up the aspirations of the people: European peace and social justice.'
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Peter Dodge, Beyond Marxism: The Faith and Works of Hendrik de Man (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 196--197.
In history courses, they beat our eardrums with all the scandalous lies about Stalin, but they do not tell us that the President of the Belgian Socialist Party, great critic of the Stalin purge, hailed the Nazis in Brussels! It is a well established fact that not only Hendrik De Man, but also Achille Van Acker, future Prime Minister of `democratic' Belgium, collaborated with the Nazis as soon as they arrived. When we hear these people say that the purge organized by Stalin was `criminal' and `absurd', we understand them. Those who were preparing to collaborate with the Nazis were of the same family as most of the `victims of the purge'. In France too, the vast majority of the parliamentary Socialists voted full powers to Pйtain and helped set up the collaborating Vichy rйgime.
Furthermore, when the Nazis occupied Belgium, resistance was almost non-existent. The first weeks and months, there was no significant resistance. The Belgian bourgeoisie, almost to a man, collaborated. And the masses were subject to and passively accepted the occupation. French author Henri Amouroux was able to write a book entitled Quarante millions de pйtainistes (Forty million Petainists).
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Henri Amouroux, Quarante millions de pйtainistes (Paris: Йditions Robert Laffont, 1977).
Let us make a comparison with the Soviet Union. As soon as the Nazis set foot on Soviet territory, they had to confront military and civilians prepared to fight to the death. The purge was accompanied by a constant campaign of political and ideological preparation of workers for the war of aggression. In his book about the Urals, U.S. engineer Scott described well how this political campaigning took place in the factories of Magnitogorsk. He described how the Party explained the world situation to the workers, in the newspapers, in seminars, using films and theatre. He talked about the profound effect this education had on the workers.
It is precisely because of the purge and the education campaign that accompanied it that the Soviet people found the strength to resist. If that steadfast will to oppose the Nazis by all means had not existed, it is obvious that the fascists would have taken Stalingrad, Leningrad and Moscow. If the Nazi Fifth Column had succeeded in maintaining itself, it would have found support among the defeatists and the capitulationists in the Party. If the Stalin leadership had been overthrown, the Soviet Union would have capitulated, as did France. A victory of the Nazis in the Soviet Union would have immediately helped the pro-Nazi tendency in the British bourgeoisie, still powerful after Chamberlain's departure, take the upper hand from Churchill's group. The Nazis would probably have gone on to dominate the whole world.
Trotsky's rфle on the eve of the Second World War
During the thirties, Trotsky literally became the world's expert on anti-Communism. Even today, right-wing ideologues peruse Trotsky's works in search of weapons against the Soviet Union under Stalin.
In 1982, when Reagan was again preaching the anti-Communist crusade, Henri Bernard, Professor Emeritus at the Royal Military School of Belgium, published a book to spread the following urgent message:
`The Communists of 1982 are the Nazis of 1939. We are weaker in front of Moscow than we were in August 1939 in front of Hitler.'
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Bernard, op. cit. , p. 9.
All of the standard clichйs of Le Pen , the fascist French Front National leader, are there:
`Terrorism is not the act of a few crazies. The basis of everything is the Soviet Union and the clandestine network of international terrorism.'
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Ibid. , p. 121.
`Christian leftism is a Western wound.
`The synchronicity of `pacifist' demonstrations shows how they were inspired by Moscow.'
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Ibid. , p. 123.
`The British commandos who went to die in the Falklands showed that there still exist moral values in the West.'
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Ibid. , p. 11.
But the tactics used by such an avowed anti-Communist as Bernard are very interesting. Here is how a man who, despite despising a `leftist Christian', will ally himself with Trotsky.
`The private Lenin was, like Trotsky, a human being .... His personal life was full of nuance ....
`Trotsky should normally have succeeded Lenin ... he was the main architect of the October Revolution, the victor of the Civil War, the creator of the Red Army ....
`Lenin had much respect for Trotsky. He thought of him as successor. He thought Stalin was too brutal ....
`Within the Soviet Union, Trotsky rose up against the imposing bureaucracy that was paralysing the Communist machine ....
`Artist, educated, non-conformist and often prophet, he could not get along with the main dogmatists in the Party ....
`Stalin was nationalist, a sentiment that did not exist either in Lenin or Trotsky .... With Trotsky, the foreign Communist Parties could consider themselves as a force whose sole purpose was to impose a social order. With Stalin, they worked for the Kremlin and to further its imperialist politics.'
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Ibid. , pp. 48--50.
We present here a few of the main theses that Trotsky put forward during the years 1937--1940, and that illustrate the nature of his absolute anti-Communist struggle. They allow one to understand why people in the Western security services, such as Henri Bernard, use Trotsky to fight Communists. They also shed some light on the class struggle between Bolsheviks and opportunists and on some aspects of the Purge of 1937--1938.
The enemy is the new aristocracy, the new Bolshevik bourgeoisie
For Trotsky, the main enemy was at the head of the Soviet State: it was the `new Bolshevik aristocracy', the most anti-Socialist and anti-democratic layer of the society, a social layer that lived like `the well-to-do bourgeois of the United States'! Here is how he phrased it.
`The privileged bureaucracy ... now represents the most antisocialist and the most antidemocratic sector of Soviet society.'
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Trotsky, Thermidor et l'antisйmitisme (22 February 1937). La lutte, pp. 143--144.
`We accuse the ruling clique of having transformed itself into a new aristocracy, oppressing and robbing the masses .... The higher layer of the bureaucracy lives approximately the same kind of life as the well-to-do bourgeois of the United States and other capitalist countries.'
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Trotsky, The World Situation and Perspectives (14 February 1940). Writings, vol. 12, pp. 148--149.
This language makes Trotsky indistinguishable from the Menshevik leaders when they were leading the counter-revolutionary armed struggle, alongside the White and interventionist armies. Also indistinguishable from the language of the classical Right of the imperialist countries.
Compare Trotsky with the main anti-Communist ideologue in the International Confederation of Christian Unions (CISC), P. J. S. Serrarens, writing in 1948:
`There are thanks to Stalin, once again `classes' and rich people .... Just like in a capitalist society, the йlite is rewarded with money and power. There is what `Force Ouvriиre' (France) calls a `Soviet aristocracy'. This weekly compares it to the aristocracy created by Napoleon.'
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P. J. S. Serrarens, La Russie et l'Occident (Utrecht: Confйdйration Internationale des Syndicats Chrйtiens, n.d.), pp. 33, 37.
After World War II, the French union Force Ouvriиre to which Serrarens was referring was directly created and financed by the CIA. The `Lambertist' Trotskyist group worked, and still works, inside it. At that time, the CISC, be it in Italy or Belgium, worked directly for the CIA for the defence of the capitalist system in Europe. To mobilize the workers against Communism, it used a revolting `anti-capitalist' demagoguery that it borrowed from the social-
democrats and the Trotskyists: in the Soviet Union, there was a `new class of rich people', a `Soviet aristocracy'.
Confronting this `new aristocracy, oppressing and robbing the masses',
.
Trotsky, The World Situation, p. 148.
there were, in Trotsky's eyes, `one hundred and sixty millions who are profoundly discontented'.
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Ibid. , p. 149.
These `people' were protecting the collectivization of the means of production and the planned economy against the `ignorant and despotic Stalinist thieves'. In other words, apart from the `Stalinists', the rest of the society was clean and led just struggles! Listen to Trotsky: