| From Unity, 21 May 2005 |
The bitch that bore him is in heat again*Part 2By Marion Baur,1 Hermann Glaser-Baur,2 and Gűnther Judik3 |
| Since the first part of this article was published last week, almost every corner of the world has seen demonstrations and indeed celebrations to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation from fascism. For us who wrote this and who were born in the land of the holocaust, the courageous and successful standing together of 15,000 people in Berlin against yet another attempt by the neo-Nazis to misuse the 8th of May for a show of muscle and fascist propaganda was certainly the highlight of them all.
But Berlin on 8 May 2005 frightened us as well, and made us angry. Once again German policemen, highly armed, and tanks at their command, guarded Nazis, and once again the right-wing media poured filth over anti-fascists, calling them “terrorists,” “Stalin’s heirs,” etc. In the weeks before the sixtieth anniversary, Stalin and his role during Hitler fascism took up a large part of the media reports. It is completely impossible to deal with Stalin in depth in these articles, and it is not our intention to do so. What we are trying to do is to find a few answers to important questions that are being asked by people who are concerned about finding the truth, and by doing this we think we can help to combat the flood of lies and propaganda that is being put forward by large parts of the press. Probably the most asked questions revolve around the “mass killings,” and just now the old theory that Stalin killed more people than Hitler pops up like mushrooms. To repeat a lie doesn’t make it any more true. From the Soviet archives opened in 1991 (far too late, we think) and since then, even the most hard-line bourgeois academics have rejected the allegations of the “millions upon millions” Stalin is supposed to have killed. This is not an attempt to deny any of the terrible deeds Stalin and his clique have done. But to try to lift him to the same level as modern history’s most murderous regime—that of Hitler—is a propaganda lie that is not sustained by any facts. And when new and openly available sources, such as the Soviet archives, are not good enough, old Cold War hacks, like Robert Conquest, are being pulled out of the hat. Conquest’s book The Great Terror has been the source for very liberal quoting during the last few weeks. Conquest (unfortunately many people don’t know this, or don’t want to know it) was not a historian: he was an intelligence agent, who worked from 1948 to 1956 for the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office, a body with the sole job of mongering anti-communist propaganda. The same IRD sponsored the book, which was published by Praeger, a publisher with proven connections to the CIA. About his own method of “finding truth” Conquest said: “Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay . . . basically the best though not infallible source is rumour.” (Quoted by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny in Nature, Society and Thought, vol. 17, no. 3, 2004, page 349.) None of what we said above is trying to whitewash Stalin. Nobody knows better than communists that he perverted every aspect of socialism, that he and his out-of-control clique terrorised and murdered people; and we are not denying the gulags. In fact—and here just as a side remark—it has been communists who have been in the forefront of research about Stalin’s betrayal of the ideas of socialism. For us more than for any other movement it is vital to learn the lessons from the past in order to avoid the mistakes for the future. But digesting lies is not learning. One of the reasons—one of many—for Stalin’s getting away with constant breaches of the principles of socialist democracy can be found in the siege the first socialist country in the world was under; and with the rise of fascism this situation worsened. The German resistance was—despite its heroism—not strong enough to overthrow Hitler, and the fascists never left a doubt that their main aim for expansion lay in the east, as well as their main political enemy, the Soviet Union. Stalin, of course, knew that; the people knew it; and many of the wrongdoings of the Soviet leadership were accepted and justified with the war effort, the need for secrecy, top-down decisions. Military leadership became more important than socialist democracy, if ever it existed under Stalin. We are sure that the completely paranoid behaviour towards “inner enemies” can be valued correctly only if one takes into consideration the siege and the growing fascist threat. In this situation, did Stalin kill communists, and, worse, did he deliver others to the Nazis? This question—more often asked by well-meaning people in search of truth than by reactionaries who don’t like to acknowledge the leading role of communists in the anti-fascist struggle—has to be answered with a clear “Yes.” One of the most famous cases is that of Margarete Buber-Neumann, the wife of Hans Neumann. Hans was a member of the Political Committee of the Communist Party of Germany. In 1932 he was suspended from his party positions because of alleged “ultra-leftism,” and, as in other cases, the decision seems to have come from the Comintern rather than the German party. Margarete Buber-Neumann was arrested in the Soviet Union and taken to the gulag. In 1940 she was handed over to the Nazis and went straight to a concentration camp. Being one of the survivors, she wrote the book Weisse Flecken in der Geschichte (“blank patches in history”). For very understandable reasons, it is very anti-communist, but it contains good and proven facts about other such cases. We who wrote this article have access to other materials, which have yet to be published, and the picture we get from them is quite clear. While it is complete rubbish to say that Stalin killed more communists than Hitler, it is true that in his uncontrolled paranoia he did murder and deliver comrades to the fascists—not only German ones, by the way: the British cases are known over here, and the much-strained relationship between the Austrian communists and the Soviet Union is due to such crimes. It is very important to know and to state such facts, and unfortunately many of the available documents have not been translated into English. We are prepared to discuss every detail of all we know with anyone interested. When trying to give a balanced view of Stalin during the time of fascism, one inevitably has to look at the role of the Red Army during that time. The Soviet Union, its people and the Red Army had to make the major sacrifice to defeat Hitler fascism. One in every three dead during the war was Russian. Ernst Thälmann’s famous message from prison, “Stalin will break Hitler’s neck,” became true, and the flag that was planted over the ruins of Berlin was the Soviet one. No-one can change this historical fact; nobody can take this victory from the Soviet Union, much as they would like to. *A quotation from Bertolt Brecht, referring to Adolf Hitler: “Don’t rejoice in his defeat, you men! For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”—Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941, epilogue added 1958). 1. German-born member of the CPI. 2. German-born member of the CPI. 3. Historian, member of the History Commission of the German Communist Party. |
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