I remember the communist idealism of my youth, when I believed in the cause handed down to me from my parents. I felt in the early 80s as a teenager that something was wrong with the "socialist system" as it was then called by its supporters.
Then came Gorbachev, and the brief hope that the inherent goodness of the system could be revitalised by a democratic reformist leadership. That hope lasted a short whole but, as I listened to people recently returned from the Soviet Union, it became apparent that things were very, very far from the cooperative socialist society that was once proclaimed.
So I turn now to the reality of the bloody birth and gradual deformation of that system, and why it could not be reformed. Personally speaking, I suffer from a terrible dilemma that I still believe that the goals of the socialist and communist movement were sound and I don't wish to constantly defame all hope of change.
And here and now, the reason why I am writing about the crimes of Stalinism is simply that I believe only by shedding all the illusions of communism, and facing the fact that the Bolsheviks of 1917 were essentially obliterated by Stalin and his regime, and whatever was glorious of the first decade or so of the revolution was remorsely crushed in the decade from 1930 to 1940. This occured not just in the Soviet sphere but also in the Spanish revolution, which like the Soviet revolution was crushed from 1936-39.
Fascism was defeated but what remained after 1945? We need to fully understand this, because in the 21st century there may yet be an opportunity to build an alternative system to capitalism. But that possibility requires a crystalline understanding of what can replace capitalism, which I believe is revolutionary, popular democracy, and what can't, which is a reconstitution of what failed in the 20th century.
Here are some very tough facts on Stalin and the nazis crimes in this balanced essay from Timothy Snyder in New York Review of Books. A sober assessment backed up by the most recent archive data. Snyder shows how the cold war led to exaggeration of death tolls caused by Stalinism - the 20m or 30m often quoted is replaced by 9.5 million based on the Soviet archives, including half a million who died of starvation in the Gulag due to the war. (Snyder asks, who was responsible for those war deaths? Well, yes, mostly the nazis, but not exclusively.)
What is most difficult for those who still persist in believing in communism / Marxism-Leninism, is the fact that Soviet deaths occured before the Nazi genocide began by a decade.
Of course the Soviet Union was isolated and surrounded by enemies in 1930, when forced collectivisation began. So it wasn't in any sense a normal peacetime. The nazis killed 12 million but another 20 million plus died due to the Hitler's war, raising the nazi death toll to 32 million. For some reason Snyder does not give us the grand total for Hitler's war, including those murdered on the eastern front and in the camps. War is the pre-eminent crime, according to Nuremberg, so this number should be included.
Snyder's key argument is the following: "Apart from the inaccessibility of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility. In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. By the end of 1941, after the Germans had attacked the Soviet Union and Japan the United States, Moscow in effect had traded Berlin for Washington.
By 1949, the alliances had switched again, with the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany together in NATO, facing off against the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies, including the smaller German Democratic Republic. During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets. Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies.
Stalin too had killed millions of people: but some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side.
We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust. It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom."
Snyder also says that Stalinism must take responsibiity in part for the 30 million deaths from Mao's Great Leap Forward, which followed Stalin's template on collectivisation.
Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? Read the full essay here.
