Reconstructing the Historical Joseph Stalin
and Revealing Khrushchev’s Treachery During WWII
Research by Adrian Chan-Wyles PhD
‘On August 7 – the day after Hiroshima – Stalin summoned to the Kremlin five of the leading Russian atomic scientists and ordered them to catch up with the United States in the minimum of time, regardless of cost. Beria was placed in charge of all the laboratories and industries which were to produce the atom bomb. Contrary to American expectations, the first Soviet A-bomb was exploded in the Ust-Urt Desert, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea on July 10, 1949; two further A-bombs were exploded within the next week. The Soviet H-bomb followed four years later.’[1]
The reputation of Joseph Stalin has come under attack from at least three different (but related areas) of historical analysis. The first is from the ideologues that represent the capitalist system of the West. These thinkers are paid to defend the capitalist system that has produced their bourgeois mentality, and have been engaged since at least 1945 in the highly focused objective of sullying the reputation of the Soviet Union and arguably its strongest leader – Joseph Stalin. Antagonism existed between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union prior to WWII, but this was of a fairly low intensity, as it was after WWII that the United States of America began its intensive vendetta against Soviet Communism (through such policies as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshal Plan that served as the basis for America’s Cold War offensive). The second attack against Joseph Stalin originated from a disgruntled Leon Trotsky who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 (for treasonous activities). Even before this date, Trotsky was working to undermine the authority of Lenin (until Lenin’s death in 1924), which eventually involved a direct clash with Joseph Stalin about how the Soviet Union should be directed, and who should be leading that direction. Trotsky died in 1940, but his 1938 call to his followers to assist the rising fascist countries of the world led to disquiet in the capitalist West, and ensured that prior to WWII, Trotskyism was not the influential ideology it was to become after WWII. Following the defeat of fascism, the Western powers encouraged the dissemination of Trotskyite ideology throughout the capitalist working class, as a means to turn the masses away from any positive association with the Soviet Union. This policy has worked very well, and has provided the theoretical framework for the disparaging of the reputation of Joseph Stalin. This has led to the mainstreaming of the angst against Stalin which existed nowhere else, except in the interior of Trotsky’s mind. The third attack upon Joseph Stalin arose from the rise of Nikita Khrushchev as premier of the Soviet Union, and his 1956 ‘secret speech’ which accused Stalin of all kinds of crimes. The content of this speech has been deconstructed by academics such as Grover Furr, and proven to be a fabrication, but even before this research, writers such as Alexander Werth were questioning not only Khrushchev’s ramblings, but the entire edifice of the US Cold War propaganda. Once this distinctly ‘anti-Stalin’ narrative was established, the media and academic establishment in the West, perpetuated its mythology as ‘fact’ throughout capitalist society.
The perpetuation of religious ignorance is an important element of a liberal, bourgeois, capitalist society. On the one-hand, a pampered and educated elite control the parameters of (materialist) scientific endeavour, whilst on the other, the exploited masses are left to mindlessly toil to enrich this system, whilst being provided with the most basic of educations, and left to wallow in the inverted imaginations that define theistic religion, superstition and the so-called ‘paranormal’. Such a society is easy to control and manipulate. The (minority) educated elite pursue an academic agenda that purports to represent the cutting-edge of scientific research, whilst never ‘challenging’ the status quo, or revealing the illogicality of ‘capitalism’. Bourgeois universities (and the societies such entities serve) must not pursue developmental (research) trajectories that would expose the inherent hypocrisy of the capitalist system, but rather must strive to remain within the artificial (theoretical) boundaries of ‘defined’ bourgeois existence. A limited bourgeois educational agenda is utilised to progress a limited bourgeois science, with the compliant masses kept excluded from this process, and encouraged to seek-out different modes of expression and enquiry. Traditional religion is one method, whilst the bizarre speculations of the paranormal is another. Even bourgeois secularism might be described as a post-modern religionism, whereby the essence of religion (together with its inverted mind-set) is retained, whilst simultaneously jettisoning its overt belief in a theist construct and the requirement to formally worship its apparent existence. This is an important observation, as the ability of the masses to remain cognitively ‘trapped’ in this medieval religious mind-set, has served the post-WWII US Authorities well in its ideological attacks upon the Soviet Union. Since 1945, the US Government has orchestrated a mass experiment in mind-control, perpetuated against its own citizens. People in the West have been told what to believe, and by and large this narrative has been accepted without question, despite the lack of any objective evidence. Like the religious system US Cold War rhetoric attempts to mirror, its ideological underpinnings have no basis in material fact. Such an ideology, therefore, is premised upon ’faith’, illogicality and the generation of strong (negative) emotion. This fictitious narrative has been constructed so thoroughly within the Western mind, that to question its validity has become tantamount to ‘blasphemy’, and a sure sign of ‘insanity’. However, questioning this counter-narrative is not difficult to achieve, but it is dialectically necessary. Those with a precise and non-inverted mind-set already understand that the popular media is awash with false propaganda regarding the life and work of Joseph Stalin, but just as the hegemony of medieval Christianity had to be questioned as a means to progress human scientific progress, the hegemony generated by the US Authorities must also be questioned and exposed for the false paradigm it unquestionably represents.
The concept of a ‘historical’ Stalin is designed as a corrective to counter the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin that is popular in the modern imagination of the West, and in those parts of Asia (and elsewhere) that still psychologically (and in many cases ‘physically’) labour under the yoke of Eurocentric (imperialist) domination. The ‘ahistorical’ Stalin stems from the machinations of the angst-ridden mind of Leon Trotsky, and those Western (i.e. ‘US’) anti-Communist ideologues whose job it was to make Trotsky appear ‘correct’, and in so doing encouraged the Western working class to treat the Soviet Union with suspicion, and believe the fairy-tale that Joseph Stalin was a mad dictator prone to the occasional (or even ‘sustained’) campaign of mass murder. This corrupting of the academic process must rate as one of the darkest eras in Western thought, which saw political bias and ignorance take the place of objective study and rational thought. A historical presentation of Stalin is not a ‘defence’ of Stalin, as this would play into the hands of the revisionists and disinformers, and would suggest that the followers of Trotsky (or the CIA) have a point, when in fact the propagators of the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin possess no objective academic point whatsoever. The historical Stalin is the man that guided the development, growth and defence of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924, until his own passing in 1953, whilst the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin is the product of myth, rumour, fabrication and falsification. This manufactured Stalin can be studied from inception down to the present time, whereby all the elements of the myth can be identified and clarified, and a logical (and chronological) schematic of its fabrication developed, but this is a different and distinct study compared to the purpose of this present essay. Furthermore, the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin contains all the hallmarks of a fanatical religion driven by faith and sustained by the denial of objective facts. This is an image of Stalin sustained by a religious-like belief, whereby bigots and zealots dominate the market place, and coerce the weak-minded and the easily-led into accepting their ‘faith’ without question. Like the theistic religions it mimics, his ‘ahistorical’ Stalinesque imagery has spread far and wide throughout the world, but it possesses a fatal flaw in as much that the real Stalin was a staunch historical materialist who wrote no words, made no speeches, or took no action that was not directly important for the development of the proletariat, and sustenance of the Soviet Union.
Rejecting the ‘Stalin as religion’ narrative, the true ‘historical’ Stalin quite naturally shrines through. This is a honest man who loyally followed Lenin, and applied himself fully in perpetuating and developing Lenin’s revolutionary ideas, and unlike Trotsky, (when criticised by Lenin), Stalin openly admitted his dialectical mistake and publically made amends through self-criticism. Stalin understood the value of dialectical education and censure, a process that Leon Trotsky did not, and would not submit himself too. The differences between Trotsky and Stalin can be assessed in another manner, one that is both simple and yet shocking in its implications. Whereas Trotsky made it clear throughout the 1930’s that he and his followers must collaborate with the forces of international fascism, Stalin, as a Marxist-Leninist and a Communist, also made it clear that the Soviet Union ideologically opposed all forms of fascism. None of this mattered, of course, to Nikita Khrushchev, a person that Stalin had had issues with even prior to the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Stalin had industrialised and electrified the USSR following the death of Lenin, and had prevented a Trotskyite take-over of the country during the 1920’s and 1930’s (a threat that remained even after the 1929 expulsion of Trotsky). If Trotsky and his followers had succeeded in over-throwing the Marxist-Leninist regime of the USSR, then in all probability a Trotskyite Soviet Union (if it had not already collapsed into a capitalist State), would surely have ideologically and militarily aligned itself with the fascist policies of Nazi Germany, and turned its military might upon an unsuspecting West.
Contrary to popular belief in the West, Joseph Stalin was not a ‘dictator’, but as General Secretary of the (Soviet) Communist Party (an elected post), was responsible for co-ordinating several advisory committees, with each committee comprised of elected individuals, or containing ‘special’ (temporary) members who possessed ‘expert’ knowledge about contemporarily important matters at hand. As the Soviet Union had rejected the socio-economic ideology of exploitative capitalism, it also (logically) rejected any notions of bourgeois, liberal democracy. As every worker voted in elections from the local to the national level (through the appropriate State organ), all workers were empowered to an extra-ordinary degree, but just as ‘capitalism’ cannot be ‘voted out’ in the bourgeois West, within the Soviet Union, the Socialism established by the 1917 October Revolution could also not be ‘voted out’. Whereas in the Western countries a certain (usually ‘minority’) proportion of the electorate votes every four or five years to decide which bourgeois, liberal political party should represent the oppressive forces of capitalism, in the Soviet Union ALL the workers simultaneously took-part in elections that sought to improve, develop and evolve a scientifically progressive Socialist society that existed for the betterment of the entirety of its many different types of people. To borrow a term coined by Karl Marx, this is the Socialist principle of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Individuals ‘earned’ their right to be elected to positions of authority and power in the Soviet Union, but ‘Trotskyites’ like Nikita Khrushchev misused this process to destabilise the USSR and to discredit the ideology of Marxist-Leninism.
As matters transpired during the Great Patriotic War, Stalin experienced trouble with Nikita Khrushchev in the Ukraine (following the Nazi German invasion of 1941). Khrushchev continuously misused his political authority to hinder the coherent application of strategic battle orders at the ground level, issued from the Kremlin by the Soviet Military Authorities. Khrushchev was a member of the War Council attached to the staff of (Red Army) Marshal Budienny, but the British BBC correspondent – Alexander Werth – states whilst writing in the early 1960’s (with Khrushchev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union) the official Soviet history of WWII was being re-written to give the false impression that Khrushchev had assisted greatly in the defence of the Ukraine (and Kiev). Alexander Werth describes the fallacious nature of this post-WWII assumption, and how elements of the Ukrainian people were far less (historically) ‘loyal’ to the Soviet Union than Khrushchev suggests:
‘Present-day histories are untiring in their praise of Khrushchev who, as a member of the Politburo and as a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, aroused everywhere, they say, the patriotic fervour of the people of the Ukraine, and of Kiev in particular – even though, lacking the great proletarian and revolutionary traditions of Moscow and Leningrad, the levele en masse seems to have been considerably less spectacular there than in the other two cities. Moreover, Kiev had a peculiar mentality. Only some twenty before (during the Russian Civil War 1918-1921), it had been occupied in quick succession by the German and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoropadsky, at the head of the Ukrainian “state”, by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in 1920, even by Pilsudski’s Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 and not been so terrible as all that.’[2]
By September 9th, 1941, the Nazi Germans were advancing through northern Ukraine towards Nezhin (whilst other Nazi German forces advanced through southern Ukraine toward the Dnieper bend). Stalin had ordered that no matter what successes the Nazi Germans achieved in their offensive through the Ukraine, the city of Kiev must be held at all costs, and that Red Army units must be diverted from other areas to hold this capital city. Far from Khrushchev organising the defence of Kiev to the last soldier and last round, on September 11th, 1941, he actively misused his authority to conspire with Marshal Budienny to oppose Stalin’s orders on the grounds that the Red Army had been weakened through weeks of fighting in the Ukraine, and that Soviet forces should be pulled-back (giving ground to the Nazi Germans).[3] After speaking to General Kirponos (on the same day), Stalin relieved Marshal Budienny of his Command, and replaced him with Marshal Timoshenko, who arrived in Kiev on September 13th, 1941, to take up his new Command. However, the ‘defeatist’ attitude propagated by Khrushchev was apparent at this time, and proved very difficult to reverse. Stalin understood that the holding of Kiev was crucial (regardless of material cost) to the defence of the Ukraine inparticular, and the Soviet Union in general. If the Ukraine was sacrificed without a fight (as Khrushchev wanted), then the Nazi German war-machine would gain an added momentum, and advance with ever greater vigour and brutality. As matters stood, Khrushchev and Budienny had not issued orders for the Red Army to dig-in and prepare to defend fixed positions – as required by Stalin. This undermining of Stalin at the local level was the responsibility of Khrushchev who used his political authority to unduly influence Marshal Budienny. The reality was that gaps in the Nazi German lines on September 13th (a bottle-neck just 20 miles wide situated between Lokhvitsa and Lubny) could have been used by the four Soviet Armies in the Ukraine to withdraw eastward – had that been the intention of Joseph Stalin. Learning of the unfolding catastrophe, the Soviet Supreme Command finally authorised the withdrawal of the Red Army from Kiev late on September 17th, but said nothing about a complete military withdrawal from the Ukraine. By September 17th, however, the Nazi Germans closed the bottle-neck and the Red Army was trapped in the Ukraine whilst suffering from poor local leadership. Khrushchev, the architect of this military disaster, encouraged a noble retreat for the soldiers of the Red Army on foot, whilst he and Budienny (together with Timoshenko) escaped from the area by aeroplane.
Despite Khrushchev’s obvious cowardice (and Marshal Budienny’s poor judgement), the four sections of the Red Army (now cut-off from one another and the High Command), did continue to fight on in a disjointed and poorly co-ordinated manner, falling piecemeal to the highly organised Nazi German encirclement, but examples of Soviet bravery continued up until the last minute. General Bagramian led 2000 men on foot, for example, and successfully fought his way through the Nazi German lines. The Soviet 37th Army, knowing of Stalin’s orders to defend the city (ignoring Khrushchev’s defeatist attitude), and probably unaware of the subsequent orders to withdraw, demonstrated a dogged determination in its defence of Kiev, whilst all around it disintegrated. Only after a few days of no orders, reinforcements or supplies, the Soviet 37th Army gave-up its defensive positions in Kiev and attempted what developed into a disastrous retreat. As a result, tens of thousands of Soviet troops were killed and wounded in the fighting, including high-ranking officers and equally high-ranking members of the Communist Party. The Nazi Germans claim they captured 665,000 Soviet prisoners, whilst Soviet sources claim that the total number of Red Army troops in the Ukrainian theatre amounted to 677,085 personnel, and that only 175,000 Soviet troops were captured (with a further 150,541 Red Troops fighting their way out of the encirclement). This was an obvious military defeat that could have been prevented had Khrushchev and Budienny strictly followed Stalin’s orders for the Red Army to dig-in and defend Kiev and other parts of the Ukraine – whilst waiting for a relief effort. This would have bogged-down the Nazi Germans into a protracted war that would have also prevented a minority of Ukrainians collaborating and being formed into a fascist paramilitary force (a Nazi problem in the area that would continue until 1947, and which probably forms the historical backbone to the current neo-Nazi ‘Madan’ regime currently ensconced in Western Ukraine). This analysis suggests that Stalin was correct to order the Red Army to hold its positions, whilst Khrushchev (who treated the Ukraine as his personal fiefdom) was wrong in his reading of the situation and his defeatist attitude.
This is one historical incidence that serves to demonstrate the problems Stalin had experience with Khrushchev prior to his rise to power in the Soviet Union, and probably explains Khrushchev’s attack upon Stalin in his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’. Khrushchev had to discredit Stalin’s good judgement during WWII as a means to hide his own Trotskyite tendencies in the Ukraine, and what looks very much like his working from the inside to assist the Nazi German invasion of the Ukraine. This withdrawal of the Red Army allowed the Nazi Germans a free-hand to unleash the ‘holocaust’ with little opposition. Khrushchev’s hypocrisy probably reached its zenith when long after the war he had ‘Kiev’ added to the existing list of ‘hero cities’ (i.e. Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Odessa), when the reality was very different. Khrushchev’s defeatist attitude had polluted the Ukraine, whereas the 37th Army defended Kiev simply because its commanders chose to ignore Khrushchev’s orders and instead follow what they knew to be Stalin’s orders. Furthermore, although there undoubtedly were individual Ukrainians loyal to the Soviet Union, nevertheless, many more openly collaborated with the Nazi German invaders, and happily participated in the unfolding holocaust committed in the region. Kiev as a city did not resist the Nazi German invasion to any great level of commitment. The extent of Khrushchev’s corruption is revealed in Grover Furr’s ‘Khrushchev Lied’, and it must certainly be the case that Khrushchev had developed a vendetta against Stalin, which led the Soviet Union on a Trotskyite trajectory that would eventually lead to the treachery of Mikhail Gorbachev (and the subsequent 1991 collapse of the USSR).
1] Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945, Barrie and Rockliff (London), [1964], Page 1038
[2] Ibid Page 203
[3] Ibid Pages 203, 204
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2017.
Further Reading:
Axell, Albert, Stalin's War Through the Eyes of His Commanders, Arms and Armour, (1997)
Alexander, Andrew, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance: US Foreign Policy Since 1945, Biteback Publishing, (2011)
Carr, EH, The History of the Soviet Union – The Bolshevik Revolution (Vol. I, II, & III), MacMillan, (1950)
Furr, Grover, Khrushchev Lied, Aakar Books for Asia, (2011)
Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945, Barrie and Rockliff (London), [1964]
Werth, Alexander, Russia - The Post-War Years, Taplinger, (1971)
Zhukov, Georgy, Edited by Geoffrey Roberts, Marshal of Victory: The Autobiography of General Georgy Zhukov, Pen and Sword, (2013)
The reputation of Joseph Stalin has come under attack from at least three different (but related areas) of historical analysis. The first is from the ideologues that represent the capitalist system of the West. These thinkers are paid to defend the capitalist system that has produced their bourgeois mentality, and have been engaged since at least 1945 in the highly focused objective of sullying the reputation of the Soviet Union and arguably its strongest leader – Joseph Stalin. Antagonism existed between the capitalist West and the Soviet Union prior to WWII, but this was of a fairly low intensity, as it was after WWII that the United States of America began its intensive vendetta against Soviet Communism (through such policies as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshal Plan that served as the basis for America’s Cold War offensive). The second attack against Joseph Stalin originated from a disgruntled Leon Trotsky who was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 (for treasonous activities). Even before this date, Trotsky was working to undermine the authority of Lenin (until Lenin’s death in 1924), which eventually involved a direct clash with Joseph Stalin about how the Soviet Union should be directed, and who should be leading that direction. Trotsky died in 1940, but his 1938 call to his followers to assist the rising fascist countries of the world led to disquiet in the capitalist West, and ensured that prior to WWII, Trotskyism was not the influential ideology it was to become after WWII. Following the defeat of fascism, the Western powers encouraged the dissemination of Trotskyite ideology throughout the capitalist working class, as a means to turn the masses away from any positive association with the Soviet Union. This policy has worked very well, and has provided the theoretical framework for the disparaging of the reputation of Joseph Stalin. This has led to the mainstreaming of the angst against Stalin which existed nowhere else, except in the interior of Trotsky’s mind. The third attack upon Joseph Stalin arose from the rise of Nikita Khrushchev as premier of the Soviet Union, and his 1956 ‘secret speech’ which accused Stalin of all kinds of crimes. The content of this speech has been deconstructed by academics such as Grover Furr, and proven to be a fabrication, but even before this research, writers such as Alexander Werth were questioning not only Khrushchev’s ramblings, but the entire edifice of the US Cold War propaganda. Once this distinctly ‘anti-Stalin’ narrative was established, the media and academic establishment in the West, perpetuated its mythology as ‘fact’ throughout capitalist society.
The perpetuation of religious ignorance is an important element of a liberal, bourgeois, capitalist society. On the one-hand, a pampered and educated elite control the parameters of (materialist) scientific endeavour, whilst on the other, the exploited masses are left to mindlessly toil to enrich this system, whilst being provided with the most basic of educations, and left to wallow in the inverted imaginations that define theistic religion, superstition and the so-called ‘paranormal’. Such a society is easy to control and manipulate. The (minority) educated elite pursue an academic agenda that purports to represent the cutting-edge of scientific research, whilst never ‘challenging’ the status quo, or revealing the illogicality of ‘capitalism’. Bourgeois universities (and the societies such entities serve) must not pursue developmental (research) trajectories that would expose the inherent hypocrisy of the capitalist system, but rather must strive to remain within the artificial (theoretical) boundaries of ‘defined’ bourgeois existence. A limited bourgeois educational agenda is utilised to progress a limited bourgeois science, with the compliant masses kept excluded from this process, and encouraged to seek-out different modes of expression and enquiry. Traditional religion is one method, whilst the bizarre speculations of the paranormal is another. Even bourgeois secularism might be described as a post-modern religionism, whereby the essence of religion (together with its inverted mind-set) is retained, whilst simultaneously jettisoning its overt belief in a theist construct and the requirement to formally worship its apparent existence. This is an important observation, as the ability of the masses to remain cognitively ‘trapped’ in this medieval religious mind-set, has served the post-WWII US Authorities well in its ideological attacks upon the Soviet Union. Since 1945, the US Government has orchestrated a mass experiment in mind-control, perpetuated against its own citizens. People in the West have been told what to believe, and by and large this narrative has been accepted without question, despite the lack of any objective evidence. Like the religious system US Cold War rhetoric attempts to mirror, its ideological underpinnings have no basis in material fact. Such an ideology, therefore, is premised upon ’faith’, illogicality and the generation of strong (negative) emotion. This fictitious narrative has been constructed so thoroughly within the Western mind, that to question its validity has become tantamount to ‘blasphemy’, and a sure sign of ‘insanity’. However, questioning this counter-narrative is not difficult to achieve, but it is dialectically necessary. Those with a precise and non-inverted mind-set already understand that the popular media is awash with false propaganda regarding the life and work of Joseph Stalin, but just as the hegemony of medieval Christianity had to be questioned as a means to progress human scientific progress, the hegemony generated by the US Authorities must also be questioned and exposed for the false paradigm it unquestionably represents.
The concept of a ‘historical’ Stalin is designed as a corrective to counter the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin that is popular in the modern imagination of the West, and in those parts of Asia (and elsewhere) that still psychologically (and in many cases ‘physically’) labour under the yoke of Eurocentric (imperialist) domination. The ‘ahistorical’ Stalin stems from the machinations of the angst-ridden mind of Leon Trotsky, and those Western (i.e. ‘US’) anti-Communist ideologues whose job it was to make Trotsky appear ‘correct’, and in so doing encouraged the Western working class to treat the Soviet Union with suspicion, and believe the fairy-tale that Joseph Stalin was a mad dictator prone to the occasional (or even ‘sustained’) campaign of mass murder. This corrupting of the academic process must rate as one of the darkest eras in Western thought, which saw political bias and ignorance take the place of objective study and rational thought. A historical presentation of Stalin is not a ‘defence’ of Stalin, as this would play into the hands of the revisionists and disinformers, and would suggest that the followers of Trotsky (or the CIA) have a point, when in fact the propagators of the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin possess no objective academic point whatsoever. The historical Stalin is the man that guided the development, growth and defence of the Soviet Union after Lenin’s death in 1924, until his own passing in 1953, whilst the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin is the product of myth, rumour, fabrication and falsification. This manufactured Stalin can be studied from inception down to the present time, whereby all the elements of the myth can be identified and clarified, and a logical (and chronological) schematic of its fabrication developed, but this is a different and distinct study compared to the purpose of this present essay. Furthermore, the ‘ahistorical’ Stalin contains all the hallmarks of a fanatical religion driven by faith and sustained by the denial of objective facts. This is an image of Stalin sustained by a religious-like belief, whereby bigots and zealots dominate the market place, and coerce the weak-minded and the easily-led into accepting their ‘faith’ without question. Like the theistic religions it mimics, his ‘ahistorical’ Stalinesque imagery has spread far and wide throughout the world, but it possesses a fatal flaw in as much that the real Stalin was a staunch historical materialist who wrote no words, made no speeches, or took no action that was not directly important for the development of the proletariat, and sustenance of the Soviet Union.
Rejecting the ‘Stalin as religion’ narrative, the true ‘historical’ Stalin quite naturally shrines through. This is a honest man who loyally followed Lenin, and applied himself fully in perpetuating and developing Lenin’s revolutionary ideas, and unlike Trotsky, (when criticised by Lenin), Stalin openly admitted his dialectical mistake and publically made amends through self-criticism. Stalin understood the value of dialectical education and censure, a process that Leon Trotsky did not, and would not submit himself too. The differences between Trotsky and Stalin can be assessed in another manner, one that is both simple and yet shocking in its implications. Whereas Trotsky made it clear throughout the 1930’s that he and his followers must collaborate with the forces of international fascism, Stalin, as a Marxist-Leninist and a Communist, also made it clear that the Soviet Union ideologically opposed all forms of fascism. None of this mattered, of course, to Nikita Khrushchev, a person that Stalin had had issues with even prior to the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Stalin had industrialised and electrified the USSR following the death of Lenin, and had prevented a Trotskyite take-over of the country during the 1920’s and 1930’s (a threat that remained even after the 1929 expulsion of Trotsky). If Trotsky and his followers had succeeded in over-throwing the Marxist-Leninist regime of the USSR, then in all probability a Trotskyite Soviet Union (if it had not already collapsed into a capitalist State), would surely have ideologically and militarily aligned itself with the fascist policies of Nazi Germany, and turned its military might upon an unsuspecting West.
Contrary to popular belief in the West, Joseph Stalin was not a ‘dictator’, but as General Secretary of the (Soviet) Communist Party (an elected post), was responsible for co-ordinating several advisory committees, with each committee comprised of elected individuals, or containing ‘special’ (temporary) members who possessed ‘expert’ knowledge about contemporarily important matters at hand. As the Soviet Union had rejected the socio-economic ideology of exploitative capitalism, it also (logically) rejected any notions of bourgeois, liberal democracy. As every worker voted in elections from the local to the national level (through the appropriate State organ), all workers were empowered to an extra-ordinary degree, but just as ‘capitalism’ cannot be ‘voted out’ in the bourgeois West, within the Soviet Union, the Socialism established by the 1917 October Revolution could also not be ‘voted out’. Whereas in the Western countries a certain (usually ‘minority’) proportion of the electorate votes every four or five years to decide which bourgeois, liberal political party should represent the oppressive forces of capitalism, in the Soviet Union ALL the workers simultaneously took-part in elections that sought to improve, develop and evolve a scientifically progressive Socialist society that existed for the betterment of the entirety of its many different types of people. To borrow a term coined by Karl Marx, this is the Socialist principle of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Individuals ‘earned’ their right to be elected to positions of authority and power in the Soviet Union, but ‘Trotskyites’ like Nikita Khrushchev misused this process to destabilise the USSR and to discredit the ideology of Marxist-Leninism.
As matters transpired during the Great Patriotic War, Stalin experienced trouble with Nikita Khrushchev in the Ukraine (following the Nazi German invasion of 1941). Khrushchev continuously misused his political authority to hinder the coherent application of strategic battle orders at the ground level, issued from the Kremlin by the Soviet Military Authorities. Khrushchev was a member of the War Council attached to the staff of (Red Army) Marshal Budienny, but the British BBC correspondent – Alexander Werth – states whilst writing in the early 1960’s (with Khrushchev at the height of his power in the Soviet Union) the official Soviet history of WWII was being re-written to give the false impression that Khrushchev had assisted greatly in the defence of the Ukraine (and Kiev). Alexander Werth describes the fallacious nature of this post-WWII assumption, and how elements of the Ukrainian people were far less (historically) ‘loyal’ to the Soviet Union than Khrushchev suggests:
‘Present-day histories are untiring in their praise of Khrushchev who, as a member of the Politburo and as a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, aroused everywhere, they say, the patriotic fervour of the people of the Ukraine, and of Kiev in particular – even though, lacking the great proletarian and revolutionary traditions of Moscow and Leningrad, the levele en masse seems to have been considerably less spectacular there than in the other two cities. Moreover, Kiev had a peculiar mentality. Only some twenty before (during the Russian Civil War 1918-1921), it had been occupied in quick succession by the German and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoropadsky, at the head of the Ukrainian “state”, by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in 1920, even by Pilsudski’s Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 and not been so terrible as all that.’[2]
By September 9th, 1941, the Nazi Germans were advancing through northern Ukraine towards Nezhin (whilst other Nazi German forces advanced through southern Ukraine toward the Dnieper bend). Stalin had ordered that no matter what successes the Nazi Germans achieved in their offensive through the Ukraine, the city of Kiev must be held at all costs, and that Red Army units must be diverted from other areas to hold this capital city. Far from Khrushchev organising the defence of Kiev to the last soldier and last round, on September 11th, 1941, he actively misused his authority to conspire with Marshal Budienny to oppose Stalin’s orders on the grounds that the Red Army had been weakened through weeks of fighting in the Ukraine, and that Soviet forces should be pulled-back (giving ground to the Nazi Germans).[3] After speaking to General Kirponos (on the same day), Stalin relieved Marshal Budienny of his Command, and replaced him with Marshal Timoshenko, who arrived in Kiev on September 13th, 1941, to take up his new Command. However, the ‘defeatist’ attitude propagated by Khrushchev was apparent at this time, and proved very difficult to reverse. Stalin understood that the holding of Kiev was crucial (regardless of material cost) to the defence of the Ukraine inparticular, and the Soviet Union in general. If the Ukraine was sacrificed without a fight (as Khrushchev wanted), then the Nazi German war-machine would gain an added momentum, and advance with ever greater vigour and brutality. As matters stood, Khrushchev and Budienny had not issued orders for the Red Army to dig-in and prepare to defend fixed positions – as required by Stalin. This undermining of Stalin at the local level was the responsibility of Khrushchev who used his political authority to unduly influence Marshal Budienny. The reality was that gaps in the Nazi German lines on September 13th (a bottle-neck just 20 miles wide situated between Lokhvitsa and Lubny) could have been used by the four Soviet Armies in the Ukraine to withdraw eastward – had that been the intention of Joseph Stalin. Learning of the unfolding catastrophe, the Soviet Supreme Command finally authorised the withdrawal of the Red Army from Kiev late on September 17th, but said nothing about a complete military withdrawal from the Ukraine. By September 17th, however, the Nazi Germans closed the bottle-neck and the Red Army was trapped in the Ukraine whilst suffering from poor local leadership. Khrushchev, the architect of this military disaster, encouraged a noble retreat for the soldiers of the Red Army on foot, whilst he and Budienny (together with Timoshenko) escaped from the area by aeroplane.
Despite Khrushchev’s obvious cowardice (and Marshal Budienny’s poor judgement), the four sections of the Red Army (now cut-off from one another and the High Command), did continue to fight on in a disjointed and poorly co-ordinated manner, falling piecemeal to the highly organised Nazi German encirclement, but examples of Soviet bravery continued up until the last minute. General Bagramian led 2000 men on foot, for example, and successfully fought his way through the Nazi German lines. The Soviet 37th Army, knowing of Stalin’s orders to defend the city (ignoring Khrushchev’s defeatist attitude), and probably unaware of the subsequent orders to withdraw, demonstrated a dogged determination in its defence of Kiev, whilst all around it disintegrated. Only after a few days of no orders, reinforcements or supplies, the Soviet 37th Army gave-up its defensive positions in Kiev and attempted what developed into a disastrous retreat. As a result, tens of thousands of Soviet troops were killed and wounded in the fighting, including high-ranking officers and equally high-ranking members of the Communist Party. The Nazi Germans claim they captured 665,000 Soviet prisoners, whilst Soviet sources claim that the total number of Red Army troops in the Ukrainian theatre amounted to 677,085 personnel, and that only 175,000 Soviet troops were captured (with a further 150,541 Red Troops fighting their way out of the encirclement). This was an obvious military defeat that could have been prevented had Khrushchev and Budienny strictly followed Stalin’s orders for the Red Army to dig-in and defend Kiev and other parts of the Ukraine – whilst waiting for a relief effort. This would have bogged-down the Nazi Germans into a protracted war that would have also prevented a minority of Ukrainians collaborating and being formed into a fascist paramilitary force (a Nazi problem in the area that would continue until 1947, and which probably forms the historical backbone to the current neo-Nazi ‘Madan’ regime currently ensconced in Western Ukraine). This analysis suggests that Stalin was correct to order the Red Army to hold its positions, whilst Khrushchev (who treated the Ukraine as his personal fiefdom) was wrong in his reading of the situation and his defeatist attitude.
This is one historical incidence that serves to demonstrate the problems Stalin had experience with Khrushchev prior to his rise to power in the Soviet Union, and probably explains Khrushchev’s attack upon Stalin in his 1956 ‘Secret Speech’. Khrushchev had to discredit Stalin’s good judgement during WWII as a means to hide his own Trotskyite tendencies in the Ukraine, and what looks very much like his working from the inside to assist the Nazi German invasion of the Ukraine. This withdrawal of the Red Army allowed the Nazi Germans a free-hand to unleash the ‘holocaust’ with little opposition. Khrushchev’s hypocrisy probably reached its zenith when long after the war he had ‘Kiev’ added to the existing list of ‘hero cities’ (i.e. Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Odessa), when the reality was very different. Khrushchev’s defeatist attitude had polluted the Ukraine, whereas the 37th Army defended Kiev simply because its commanders chose to ignore Khrushchev’s orders and instead follow what they knew to be Stalin’s orders. Furthermore, although there undoubtedly were individual Ukrainians loyal to the Soviet Union, nevertheless, many more openly collaborated with the Nazi German invaders, and happily participated in the unfolding holocaust committed in the region. Kiev as a city did not resist the Nazi German invasion to any great level of commitment. The extent of Khrushchev’s corruption is revealed in Grover Furr’s ‘Khrushchev Lied’, and it must certainly be the case that Khrushchev had developed a vendetta against Stalin, which led the Soviet Union on a Trotskyite trajectory that would eventually lead to the treachery of Mikhail Gorbachev (and the subsequent 1991 collapse of the USSR).
1] Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945, Barrie and Rockliff (London), [1964], Page 1038
[2] Ibid Page 203
[3] Ibid Pages 203, 204
©opyright: Adrian Chan-Wyles (ShiDaDao) 2017.
Further Reading:
Axell, Albert, Stalin's War Through the Eyes of His Commanders, Arms and Armour, (1997)
Alexander, Andrew, America and the Imperialism of Ignorance: US Foreign Policy Since 1945, Biteback Publishing, (2011)
Carr, EH, The History of the Soviet Union – The Bolshevik Revolution (Vol. I, II, & III), MacMillan, (1950)
Furr, Grover, Khrushchev Lied, Aakar Books for Asia, (2011)
Werth, Alexander, Russia at War 1941-1945, Barrie and Rockliff (London), [1964]
Werth, Alexander, Russia - The Post-War Years, Taplinger, (1971)
Zhukov, Georgy, Edited by Geoffrey Roberts, Marshal of Victory: The Autobiography of General Georgy Zhukov, Pen and Sword, (2013)