Why Stalin did nothing wrong, and how, part III: the Conquest of Robert

Why am I talking so much about Stalin in the first place, you may reasonably wonder? Who my favorite dead Soviet is and why seemingly has nothing to do with the struggle against capitalism in the here and now, right? The answer is that I am forced by capitalist lies against Stalin's character to defend Stalin, because once they get you to believe lies about Stalin, they can then generalize those lies to the entire rest of the Marxist-Leninist movement, and from there to the rest of the communist movement, and from there to the rest of the socialist movement. And if the capitalists learn they can get away with this trick with Stalin, they will use it against any leader we dare advance just as readily. Surely some of you Bern-feelers have already seen this in action.

So what is their biggest line of attack against Stalin? "Communisasim sounds good on paper, but in reality it kills eleventy billion people! Just look at what Stalin did! Here, I've got a history book that proves it!" It's a very neat lie, because people are predisposed to trust experts, especially experts that agree with one another. But it doesn't work on historians, who are taught to look for evidence, for primary documents, for attribution to facts and figures cited.

There was once a man named Robert Conquest. Robert Conquest was once a communist, but followed his good friend and fellow social democratic bootlicker George Orwell out of the movement for the same reasons (personal advancement, liberal aversion to fighting back against class enemies). He even gave Orwell a list of communists to pass on to the British intelligence services, one of the first gasps of McCarthyism in the post-WWII West. He went on to divorce his first wife when she succumbed to mental illness, married the daughter of an Air Force colonel, became a fellow at Harvard, and wrote an open letter supporting the Nicaraguan Contras, which committed human rights abuses against indigenous peoples organizing against capitalism. Naturally, game recognize game, and mass murderer of Iraqis George W. Bush gave him a medal for all this.

Sidenote here, but it's remarkable just how static class interests are. The life stories of George Orwell and Robert Conquest have an echo in modern-day Venezuela's opposition forces. The old Venezuelan capitalists were vicious and didn't care who knew; they compared oppressed nationalities to monkeys and openly supported the economic system that kept their compatriots miserable. But after the success of Chavismo, they have learned better, and now pretend that they're socialists, just socialists of a kinder, gentler sort than Chavez or Maduro. They're only red in tooth and claw, but capitalism has always loved and will always love a fake socialist who will do their work against us.

Anyhow, I mention this creep's personal life because I need to establish that he had sound motives rooted in his petite bourgeois class interests for telling his great lie. He also as a public intellectual had the means, and his book "The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties" was his opportunity. In this book, he claimed without evidence that 20 million people died in Stalin's purges. His petite bourgeois class interests were so strong, and blinded him so hard, that when the Soviet archives were opened after the Cold War and directly contradicted his figures, he nonetheless wanted to reprint his book and call it "I Told You So, You Fucking Fools."

The problem with this lie is that there is all sorts of evidence that it was a lie. The aforementioned Soviet archives list roughly 1 million people who died in the Soviet gulag system under Stalin's rule, out of 3 million people that were processed through it. We can trust the archives because Stalin was proud enough of the gulags that he printed in English translation an anthology called "Belomor" or "White Sea" explaining the good work the gulags were doing to develop the country - building canals and railroads to ease famine relief and deploy the Red Army to defend its furthest frontiers. Stalin did not see the gulags as a crime to hide, but as an accomplishment to be proud of. Therefore unlike the Nazis who tried to hide all records of the Holocaust, his archives can be relied on to be a basically accurate accounting of the gulag system. But what did this honesty and openness get the Soviets abroad? Nothing but contempt and liberal crocodile tears. So Stalin had the books destroyed when he realized he was printing propaganda being used by the West to endanger them all, and so extant copies are rare.

Besides this most direct evidence, we have another bit of evidence, mentioned in the meme below - even though the Red Army suffered 10 million casualties destroying the Nazi regime, the Soviet population nonetheless grew under Stalin's tenure. 1 million dead in the gulag system can be accounted for by this fact. 20 million dead cannot. Moreover, the fact that the Soviet population grew despite fighting two world wars in its front yard can only be taken as a sign of Stalin's excellent care of the Soviet population during his tenure. If this was a chess game, his administration would have been a brilliancy.

So Robert Conquest was a liar, and he demonstrably pulled that 20 million figure out of his hindquarters. There's all kinds of crackpots in academia peddling nonsense, from climate change denial to antivaxxer conspiracy theories to even creationism. What makes Conquest so special is that he wasn't treated as a crackpot by the rest of academia - he got more citations than Jesus. Otherwise serious historians cited his figure. Why would they risk their credibility to spread these lies? If you follow the historical method and look into their own biases and the biases of the culture they lived in, it becomes obvious. Conquest published his figures at the height of the Cold War. McCarthyism wasn't a distant memory, and these historians had seen the careers of their fellows ruined when they refused to denounce "The God That Failed" (the title of an anti-communist book from the period). Besides the threat of another anti-communist witch hunt breaking out in Congress, there was also the more salient threat of being denied research funding by the bourgeoisie that typically endow universities. However, speak out against communism, and these same bourgeoisie would endow a departmental chair with your name on it, you could get paid speaking engagements all over the Western world, whatever you like. Many historians chose to sacrifice Clio on the altar of Juno Moneta.

Still, despite the cravenness of historians of bygone eras, a reasonable person might interject, isn't 1 million dead still 1 million too many dead? Unless you're the sort of hopelessly utopian liberal that thinks punching Nazis makes you as bad as the Nazis, it really depends on who's in that 1 million. In this case, it was antisemitic reactionaries, bourgeois and petite bourgeois reactionaries, all of whom had supported the White Army's attempted counterrevolution against the Soviets and threatened at any time to renew civil war upon them. It was grain-hoarding kulaks (rich peasants) who burned grain during a famine rather than accept prices offered by the Soviet state that they considered too low. (Stalin actually got onboard this train a little late; the kulak purges were begun by the starving peasants and workers and Stalin retroactively gave them the stamp of approval before moderating their harshness because, above all, he wanted to protect grain production to prevent further famines.) It was utopian Bolsheviks who let their liberal impulses get in the way of necessary action, who had opposed Lenin too before Lenin became too popular to oppose. It was careerist Bolsheviks who figured they could ride this revolution to a sweet little sinecure on the people's ruble.

If you ask me, 1 million dead was too little. Stalin went way too easy on them all. The utopians and the careerists combined forces under Khrushchev and afterwards to be the revisionist establishment that ruled the Soviet Union and ran it into the ground. The kulaks survived and regrouped and created an underground black market that led to the mafia state that ruled Russia under Boris Yeltsin. (The Chinese version of the kulaks would do the same after Mao, but even harder.) The antisemites bided their time and increased their numbers under revisionist rule, and they discovered that they hated gays just as much as Jews, and now they're one of the pillars of Putin's government.

If Stalin had been willing to be a bit less lenient, the Soviet Union might still exist today in some form, and the Russian people could lead dignified lives instead of scraping and begging for the means of existence. But because Stalin let his liberal demons override his proletarian conscience from time to time, it only lasted 70 years. All the same, 70 years was a world record compared to the last attempted workers' state, the Paris Commune that had ruled Paris for less than a year and fell because they refused to seize the banks to pay the soldiers guarding them from the advancing Prussian armies. Stalin at least had the good sense not to follow their baneful example, but he didn't follow it far enough.

So the next time some neoliberal shitgibbon gets red in the face and calls you a Nazi because Stalin killed people too, correct them with the facts.