totalitarianism - daniel bonevacphilosophical.space/303/stalin.pdf · 2019-10-28 · hitler and...

TotalitarianismAdolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

Monday, October 28, 19

The Rise of Stalin


The Rise of Stalin

• “Moral relativism in monstrous incarnation”

• Trotsky: “Problems of revolutionary morality are fused with the problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics.”


The Rise of Stalin

• Lenin died in 1924; Stalin had already taken power


The Rise of Stalin

• Lenin died in 1924; Stalin had already taken power

• Posed as a moderate


The Rise of Stalin

• Main competitors: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kaminev, Bukharin


Stalin, Rykov, Kamenev, Zinoviev


The Rise of Stalin


• Trotsky out of the end of 1924; exiled 1928; murdered 1940


The Rise of Stalin


• Trotsky out of the end of 1924; exiled 1928; murdered 1940

• Kaminev, Zinoviev out in 1926; Bukharin, 1928


Cult of Personality

• Stalin: “Man of Steel,” “Granite Bolshevik,” “Universal Genius”

• Corruption of Soviet science: “Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws.” (S. G. Shumilin)


Stalin’s Short Course• Materialism: the world is material, real, and knowable

• Dialectic

• everything is interconnected

• everything is in a state of movement

• quantitative changes produce qualitative changes

• unity and struggle of opposites: everything contains contradictions


Collectivization• Industrialization required taking from the

countryside

• Poor harvest in 1927; peasants would not accept paper money for their crops

– Hoarding; no food in towns

– Stalin sent 30,000 armed party workers into the fields, stole the peasants’ food


Collectivization• 1928: planted less, harvest even

worse

– Desperate for cash, Russians sold art treasures

– Many went to Andrew Mellon, who created the National Gallery as a testament that private philanthropy can outperform government


Collectivization• 1929, impulsively, against the words of Lenin,

with no debate: Forced 105 million peasants into collectives (3/4 of the Russian population)

• “All-out offensive against the kulak…. We must smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class.” “Liquidate the kulaks as a class!”

• Leszek Kolakowski: “probably the most massive war-like operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens.”


Collectivization• More than 10 million slaughtered

• More than 10 million transported to Siberia

• 10 million in concentration camps

• Serfdom: Rest lost all property, enslaved in “grain factories”

• Man-made famine: more than half of all farm animals slaughtered


Eyewitness account

• "Barefooted and poorly clad peasants were jammed into railroad cars and transported to the regions of Murmansk and the like. Peasants were unloaded into snow about two metres deep. The frost stood at 75 degrees below zero. Without even an axe or a saw we began building huts from tree branches. In two weeks all the children, the sick and the elderly had frozen to death."


Show Trials

• 1929: Mining engineers charged with sabotage

• 12-year-old son testified and demanded execution of his own father

• Carefully scripted and orchestrated

• Stakhtyites (wreckers): “Arrest! Try! Shoot!”


Ukrainian Famine

• 1931-1933—Stalin demanded large quantities of grain from Ukrainian farmers, refused to release grain stores

• Massive famine—Holodomor—estimates range from 5 to 40 million dead


Hitler and Stalin

• Hitler’s methods inspired Stalin

• 1934: Stalin had more than 5,000 opponents murdered, including Kirov, Zinoviev, and Kaminev

• 1935: Began secret negotiations with Hitler


Show Trials• 1936: Zinoviev, Kamenev, and 14 others

• 1937: Radek and 16 others

• 1938: Trial of the 21—Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda (former NKVD head)

• Confessions extracted under torture—Krestinsky recanted on the 1st day of the trial, reinstated on the 2nd (with a dislocated shoulder)

• Almost all executed; a few sent to prison camps—they soon died

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Destruction of the Party


Other Victims

• 1,500 writers and artists

• 27 astronomers (Stalin decided sunspots were contrary to Marxist theory) many meteorologists (for inaccurate weather predictions)

• “Ex-kulaks, anti-Soviet elements”—376,202 executed, plus 111,091 Poles

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Victims• Soviet archives: 1,548,366 imprisoned; 681,692

shot—an average of 1,000 per day in 1937 and 1938

• Some historians believe this to be an understatement; estimates range from 950,000 to 2 million

• Killing fields at Kurapaty and Bykivnia (Ukraine) contain 200,000 corpses

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Victims

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Great Terror

• André Gide: “In my opinion, no country today [in 1936] not even in Hitler's Germany is the spirit more suppressed, more timid, more servile than in the Soviet Union.”


Hitler and Stalin

• 1937: killed 3,000 senior police officers, 90% of prosecutors, 30,000 army officers, 80% of colonels and generals, 1 million party members—maybe as much as 10% of population—who knew history of revolution

• Probably more than a million per year murdered


Hitler and Stalin• Purges in the Red Army in 1937 claimed as

victims: – 3 out of 5 field-marshals, – 13 out of 15 army commanders, – 8 out of 9 admirals, – 50 out of 57 army corps commanders, – 154 out of 186 divisional commanders, – all 16 army corps commissars,


Hitler and Stalin• Purges in the Red Army in 1937 claimed as victims:

– 58 out of 64 divisional commissars, – all 11 vice-defence commissars and – 98 of the 108 members of the supreme military

council. – In the Communist Party, 98 of the 139 members

and candidate members elected to the of the Central Committee in 1934 were executed in 1937-38.


Gulag Archepelago

• System of hundreds of prison camps

• At the end of the 1940s, between 5.5 and 6.5 million prisoners were held in the Gulag Archipelago; at high point there may have been as many as 10-15 million

• More than 1.5 million died


The Gulag Archipelago


Kolyma


Great Terror

• Anna Akhmatova: “I have seen faces consumed, glimpsed horror under lowered eyelids, cheeks etched by pain.”


Great Terror• Her husband was murdered in 1921

• She was prohibited from publishing

• Her response to the Great Terror: Requiem

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Anna Akhmatova• "One day somebody in the crowd identified me.

Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):" 'Can you describe this?'"And I said: 'I can.'"Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face."

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Great Terror

• Brigade commander S. P. Kolosov: “I am afraid to open my mouth. Whatever you say, if you say the wrong thing, you're an enemy of the people. Cowardice has become the norm.”


Rewriting History

Where did Kamenev and Trotsky go?


Mykhaylo Dray-Khmara• Ukranian poet was seized in

the middle of the night and sent to Kolyma, where he died

• Crimes: writing White Swans, in Ukranian

• His NKVD file is at http://philosophical.space/303/DrayKhmara.pdf


http://philosophical.space/303/DrayKhmara.pdf






Mykhaylo Dray-Khmara• On the quiet lake where willows faint,

• The swans splash and paddle, floating in silence,

• Crossing the waters in summer and autumn,

• Their necks bent like lush vines.

• When the frosts come, resounding like plate glass,

• And the river glazes over, diving into crystal dreams,

• The swimmers shatter the sheets of ice,

• Suddenly, fearlessly, the threat of winter.


Mykhaylo Dray-Khmara• O fivefold cluster of unconquerable choristers,

• Through snow and thunder you chant your victory,

• That breaks the ice of despair and unbelief.

• Be bold, Swans! From bondage, from obscurity

• A sparkling constellation leads you to a world

• Where foams a whirling ocean of life.


Universal Paranoia


Why?

• There was no credible threat, and it weakened the State

• Why did no one resist?

• Why go after millions of underlings?

• Why did Western intellectuals defend this?


Intellectuals

• Western intellectuals often defended Stalin’s tactics

• E.g., Lincoln Steffens, George Bernard Shaw, Andre Malraux, Bertold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Harold Denny and Walter Duranty of the New York Times (won Pulitzer Prize in 1932)

• Their writings were often used to break down NKVD prisoners


Walter Duranty• Reports of corpses: “All bunk, of

course.”

• “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine.”

• “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”


Bertold Brecht

• “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die.”


Intellectuals• American intellectual class corrupted itself

attempting to defend Stalin

• Lionel Trilling: “In any view of the American cultural situation, the importance of the radical movement of the Thirties cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual class as we now know it in its great size and influence. It fixed the character of this class as being, through all mutations of opinion, predominantly of the Left.”


Heroic Lies• Westerner observers (other than

Muggeridge) who observed Stalin’s Russia wrote about it and him in glowing terms

• Some of this was credulity or deception

• But some was mendacity: “The heroic lie”


Malcolm Muggeridge

• “The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering.”


Muggeridge• You published Winter in Moscow when you got back

from the Soviet Union, and you were attacked in the press for your views.

• Very strongly. And I couldn't get a job.

• Why was that? Because people found your reports hard to believe?

• No, the press was not overtly pro-Soviet, but it was, as it is now, essentially sympathetic with that side and distrustful of any serious attack on it.


Muggeridge• How do you explain this sympathy?

• It's something I've written and thought about a great deal, and I think that the liberal mind is attracted by this sort of regime. My wife's aunt was Beatrice Webb, and she and Sidney Webb wrote the classic pro-Soviet book, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. And so one saw close at hand the degree to which they all knew about the regime, knew all about the Cheka (the secret police) and everything, but they liked it.


Muggeridge• This will be one of the great puzzles of posterity in

looking back on this age, to understand why the liberal mind, the Manchester Guardian mind, the New Republic mind, should feel such enormous sympathy with this authoritarian regime.

• You are implying that the liberal intelligentsia did not simply overlook the regime's brutality, but actually admired and liked it.


Muggeridge• Yes, I'm saying that, although they

wouldn't have admitted it, perhaps not even to themselves. I remember Mrs. Webb, who after all was a very cultivated upper-class liberal-minded person, an early member of the Fabian Society and so on, saying to me, "Yes, it's true, people disappear in Russia." She said it with such great satisfaction that I couldn't help thinking that there were a lot of people in England whose disappearance she would have liked to organize.


Kolakowski

• “Hypocrisy and self-delusion had become the permanent climate of the intellectual Left.”


totalitarianism - daniel bonevacphilosophical.space/303/stalin.pdf · 2019-10-28 · hitler and...

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