Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part II: crushing antisemitism
Well, I was going to just repost what I had posted on Facebook, but as it turns out the racist cretins running Facebook deleted it when they deleted the Marxist page that made it. So I'll do my best to explore the same issues that post did.
So let's start with the obvious: this is one of those charges that gets levelled at Stalin from time to time, in the same way and for the same reasons as it gets levelled at Palestinians who like living in their own houses, or people who get upset that the Palestinians can't. In the current material conditions of occupied Palestine, the Zionists have power, the Palestinians do not, and they justify their oppression by dismissing all criticism as antisemitic. The Holocaust was a great evil, and in remembrance of that great evil our society now justifies other great evils. This has gone so far as to try to tarnish the guy that ended the Holocaust with its taint. Because the people that have power in our society (capitalists) have a need to discredit the most successful guy who did not (Stalin) and this is an easy weapon at hand for the lazy bourgeoisie.
But is it true? Was Stalin antisemitic? The answer is more nuanced than any laymen may have guessed.
The Russian Empire at the close of the 19th century was a pretty godawful place. The Tsars had been losing their grip on power for a while: the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War made plain that they needed railroads or they would lose their empire to foreign invasion. But equally plain was the revolutionary implications of the railroads: allow the construction of railroads, and heavy industry will crop up in the newly-linked towns and cities. Heavy industry requires an urban working class to man the factories, and an urban working class has a lot of spare time and ability to organize. The Tsars perceived correctly that the formation of such a class was a risk to their crown, but after the defeats of those wars they considered it was a necessary risk, as the risk from foreign conquest grew greater otherwise.
To balance this risk, the Tsars reversed course on a policy they had borrowed from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth they had conquered in times past. That vanquished state had invited Jews to its country to serve as tax collectors. It was a subtly evil arrangement - the harsh taxes of the state could be blamed on the Jews, and the common people would regularly initiate pogroms of their own accord. There were undoubtedly unscrupulous Jewish tax collectors who abused their positions, as undoubtedly there were others who understood the precariousness of their position and endeavored to do their duty and nothing more.
The Russian Empire had retained the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the "Pale of Settlement" for Jews, and kept alive some of these institutional approaches. But instead of an alliance with Jewish people to shore up their rule, they aligned with their enemies. The Black Hundreds can be thought of as half-Tea Party, half-Brownshirts, but their goals were to uphold the tsarist motto of "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality." The first implied their support for the Russian Orthodox Church, the second their support of God's chosen agent in Russia the Tsar, and the third their support for the many nations of the Empire against the Jews. Jewish people became scapegoats as the Tsars embraced protofascism and antisemitism as a way to keep the workers loyal with hatred and retain their rule.
It is this environment in which a young Iosif Dzhugashvili was raised.
As a Bolshevik and a comrade of Lenin, Stalin was sworn to fight for the equality of all humanity, and as General Secretary of the Communist Party he enacted that in policy. The remnants of the Black Hundreds had joined up with the White Army, and several of their generals would as soon beat up Jews as accept their military aid when offered (as it was once by the anarchist Nestor Makhno, who had Jews in his Black Army). White Army propaganda regularly characterized the Bolsheviks as Jewish and therefore evil, as this poster literally depicts the Jewish Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky as the Devil. Stalin and Trotsky worked together, not very amicably but nonetheless effectively, to bury these antisemitic threats during the Russian Civil War. If anyone but the Bolsheviks had won that war (and for the West's part, we were doing our best to ensure they didn't), the Holocaust would have come two decades early and probably never stopped until it succeeded. In this way, Stalin saved the Jewish people of eastern Europe for the first time in his career. (Interestingly enough, while Stalin saved the Jews, Winston Churchill's own efforts on their behalf amounted to asking General Denikin to dial back the pogroms a tad so it would be easier to get anti-Bolshevik bills through Parliament. What a hero.)
The second time Stalin saved the Jews, it was the Jews of all Europe, not just of the east. And of course, he was attacked for it in Nazi propaganda, like pic related. Stalin's actions in WWII are famous and hardly bear extensive explanation; he threw a million-man army at Hitler and kept the meat grinder grinding until it reached Berlin. The USA endured 200,000 casualties in the fight against Hitler; the Red Army endured ten million. Fifty times more fighting, by death tolls alone, went on on the Eastern Front; the Western Front was a mere distraction by comparison. The Western Allies were not prepared to do more than the minimum to stop Hitler, so it fell to Stalin. Were it not for his resolve, the Third Reich would probably still exist today in some form, because we can be sure that the Western Allies would never have bothered to crush it so thoroughly if it meant ten million dead Americans or Brits.
That doesn't mean Stalin was perfect when it came to the Jews; just that when it came down for actual support and not rhetorical support, he was there for the Jews when we Westerners were prepared to abandon them to the gas chambers. But like a white person raised in America today who nonetheless dedicates themselves to the cause of anti-racism, Stalin would discover latent bigoted attitudes and privileged notions within himself and work through them. This unfortunately shines through in two incidents and a pattern.
He was fond of Jewish jokes, an unfortunate aspect of the casual bigotry he was raised with. His daughter Svetlana married a Jewish man, and Stalin raged about it for a while but eventually accepted the young man into his family. (She ended up divorcing him in the end, but not because of his faith, making the matter moot.) And then there was the Doctor's Plot.
The way Stalin came to power was an extension of Lenin's insistence that the opponents of communists were not specifically the bourgeoisie, but anything that impeded the revolution. I've attached a Youtube video of Lenin Picardsplaining exactly this to Trotsky because it may in fact be the best thing ever. But the difference is crucial; when Stalin in power saw that his enemies were the moderate and utopian Bolsheviks on the Central Committee, he purged them. This consolidated state power behind his revolutionary program, but together with the premise that everyone must do whatever the Party asks of them, it made it literally impossible for him to retire. Nobody would dare suggest Stalin went senile or ought to enjoy his last days in retirement, in order to ensure that their own last days would be very far in the future; and Stalin having been formally asked by the Party to lead could not disregard its instructions.
So when a longstanding comrade of his died under the operating knife, Stalin in his grief and senility suspected a plot among the doctors. Now, having been one of the few demographics to regularly get an education in the Russian Empire, Jews were greatly overrepresented in the medical field in the Soviet Union. So by accusing doctors of plotting to kill leading Bolsheviks, functionally Stalin placed many Jews under a cloud of suspicion. This was wrong of him, but also entirely predictable when a senile man wracked with grief has absolute state power. In any case, not much came of it, because Stalin died himself not too long afterwards.
So there's the facts. In the balance, I have to conclude that Joseph Stalin was one of the strongest allies of the Jewish people in the 20th century, and combatted some ugly bigotry within himself and the nations he commanded to do so.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Spam and arrogant posts get deleted. Keep it comradely, keep it useful. Comments on week-old posts must be approved.