Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 22: Some Final Notes to Part I
For a closer look at reports of first-hand, eye-witness information that is ignored by the purveyors of the dominant totalitarian paradigm, consult Felix Dzerzhinsky by A. Tishkov, and chapters 7 and 9 of Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Biography, translated by Natalia Belskaya. Chapter 7 of Belskaya’s book, "At the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD)," explains that the NKVD existed in October, 1917, much earlier than most Westerners think, existing simultaneously alongside the CheKa. The CheKa and later the GPU (the State Political Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation) were merged into the already existing NKVD. The CheKa was not the "parent organization" of the NKVD, nor was the NKVD the CheKa’s "successor organization," any more than this was later the case, as many believe, between the NKVD and the better known KGB. Chapter 9 of Belskaya’s book, "Guarding the Security of the Soviet State," deals with events following the Civil War. During this conflict, the Western powers joined with White Tsarist forces to attempt to destroy the nascent Soviet State. The entirety of both books is of great value for understanding the economic situation in the Soviet Union for the period starting from the strife preceding and continuing through the Civil War, up to the Yezhovshchina, and how economics and politics are uniquely blended in a state seeking to build socialism. Incredibly, both rarely read books are readily available through interlibrary loan systems participated in by almost every U.S. library, no matter how provincial.
As mentioned in NKVD-INFO, which, like Part I of this essay, relies almost exclusively non-Marxist sources, the VeCheKa (CheKa) was a multiparty organization. A great deal of sabotage, first fomented openly and merely vocally, but later conducted violently and secretly, was perpetrated by both Right and Left Social Revolutionaries along with the Mensheviks and anyone else willing to assist, including little known agents working on the payrolls of Western powers wishing to restore the plumed and palsied institution of Tsardom, which had acted as the pivot of their economic interests in the East. Many details of the mischief directed at the newly organized socialist institutions in the early Bolshevik State are outlined in the Dzerzhinsky-related books mentioned above.
The machinations of better known individual Western spies against the Soviets can be found in many sources. Master spies from Great Britain are among the best known of such would-be spoilers of the fledgling Bolshevik state, such as the colorful master of disguises Sir Paul Dukes, K. B. E., who was wanted by the CheKa at one time as five separate saboteurs until meticulous spy-diagramming by early CheKa think-tankers identified all of them as one and the same agent of the British Intelligence Service. Photographs of Dukes and a number of his convincing alter egos can be seen on formerly rare film excerpts from the Film Archives of the Soviet Union now available to the public on the video "Dzerzhinsky," a film by Simeon Zenin and Alexander Novodgrudsky (see Bibliography).
The above-mentioned sources bring to the foreground of attention the ultra-leniency of the original NKVD-CheKa, whose agents were prohibited from physically striking any criminal suspect - or even being "rude" to him. Their code of conduct was so humane and novel for its time that if students of Kremlinology were not so severely blinded by the repeated, purportedly authoritative asseverations of the dominant paradigmists of Lenin’s vehemence and Stalin’s cruelty, these restrictions on the behavior of NKVD-CheKa agents would be held up as the landmarks of humaneness they really were, as significant in their time as the abolition of human slavery had been three generations earlier. This was in a world in which incarcerated American felons were still routinely whipped, and English school children still subjected to sometimes permanently scarring and disabling physical punishments for minor infractions of school order. The NKVD-CheKa code stands in stark contrast to the tormenting physical and verbal abuse routinely applied by the anti-Bolshevik White officers to soldiers and civilians with whom they came into contact, both during the Civil War and later in the workplace, wherein former Whites had assumed many important managerial and administrative positions, as previously noted. Their social aggrandizement was made possible - once again - only by the extreme leniency of the new Bolshevik rulers toward former Civil War enemies. Parole and other forms of grace were regular responses of early Soviet power even for former White generals such as Gen. Krasnov and former Provisional Government Members who had vehemently plotted against and battled the new regime.
Dzerzhinsky’s reasons for such temperance? Some of them are of a kind that only sincere apostles of tolerance would think to offer. He said that arrested people are "people deprived of freedom" who "cannot defend themselves and are in our power." He also stated that prison "maims" people. He knew this very well because he spent a great deal of his own life in the Tsar’s penal institutions prior to the Revolution’s victory. These institutions were so filled and bursting to overflowing, more so than over-burdened American prisons are now, even with the more expedient and inexpensive Russian gulag system of "imprisonment/exile" to supplement actual incarceration, that the Tsar’s ministers were at a loss what to do. Few students of history or other interested parties are aware of this because most books and studies on the era have been written by authors who fear to be mistaken for Stalin apologists or Communist "fellow-travelers." Therefore, these writers lecture instead on the ruthlessness of Stalin, Yezhov, and even Yagoda, Yezhov’s predecessor as NKVD chief. The failure of this generous consideration and humane treatment accorded to common criminals and former White enemies is reminiscent of today’s well-aired complaints of "law and order" types about the failures of the current American criminal justice system’s "revolving door" policy wherein "contrite, rehabilitated, and reformed" murderers, armed robbers, and rapists are repeatedly set free by judges (censured for being "bleeding heart liberals") to inflict the same crimes on the public again and again.
The neglected information in the above-mentioned sources is crucial for seeing the overall picture of the daily struggle faced by the victorious Bolsheviks against both internal and external enemies of the new Soviet regime. This battle involved encounters with ever more original and subtle variations of subversion created by oppositionists in their effort to overcome the wide, ever growing popular support for the new regime, as well as its increasing police strength (due to Dzerzhinsky). The new leaders dealt intelligently and humanely - at first - with "wreckers" of economic plans. Many Westerners think the "wreckers" later so doggedly hunted down by Stalin and especially Yezhov were primarily figments of their paranoiac imaginations. They think this due to ignorance of the early years of the new proletarian government under Lenin. As mentioned previously, only days after the new government was set up, numerous government officials and ministers did the most direct and open form of "wrecking" possible: they openly and brazenly declared a boycott of their posts, refusing any work or assistance for the new Soviet state. This cost them nothing because their salaries were paid for months in advance by counter-revolutionary organizations subsidized by foreign powers (Tishkov, p. 31). These defiant officials are known to have gathered at the Contessa Panina’s mansion, using it as headquarters. There appears to be only one existing photograph of her in company, and it is a fair bet that this is a photo that David King, who is reputed to have the world’s largest private library of rare photos from this period and of the Stalin era, does not have. The new government had already tried many of these officials for subversive acts that went well beyond the withholding of their expert services. The most powerful and best organized among them had been involved in cruelly derailing the routing and supplying of food and other provisions sorely needed by the people living under the new regime in an effort to stall the government and bring it down. Starvation became their opening gambit, their first "plot" of resistance. They acted in concert and open company with former Tsarist generals and monarchists, many of whom had formerly organized massacres against liberalizing influences under the Tsarist autocracy. Life was cheap to them. Their efforts to bring down the new regime were shameless and open. They deliberately altered accounts, concealed food, and refused to act on orders of the Soviet Government, such as employees of the Food Ministry, many of whom refused to hand over business records and correspondence to the People’s Commissariats. (Imagine if, in the parallel situation of an audit by the present day U.S. Internal Revenue Service or the Office of Economic Opportunity, a self-employed businessman under tax investigation, or who had been accused of not hiring enough minority group members, defiantly refused to hand over records of his accounts.)
The CheKa was set up by the Council of People’s Commissars (SOVNARKOM) to be the All-Russian Commission to Fight Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. Such sabotage was not yet done in secret. It was explicit and transparent because these boycotters and spoilers did not believe Lenin or any of the Soviets could organize any kind of organized police strength or sanctions against them. They believed that the new government would fail in a week or so. There were no names that would later strike fear in their hearts, no "Dzerzhinsky," no "Stalin," no "Yezhov," not even a "Beria." There were as yet only positive words: the proper names of the new, well-loved "heroes of the revolution." Whiteguard terrorists, in advance of the force of the White Army that surrounded Moscow at this time, fearlessly rode into Moscow on Ku-Klux-Klan-like expeditions to burn and lynch anyone or anything they believed cooperated with - or would be useful to - the worker, peasant, and soldier Soviets. For these reasons, Lenin created the CheKa and appointed Dzerzhinsky as its first head. Dzerzhinsky became known as the "Champion of the Revolution." Lenin referred to him as a "Proletarian Jacobin." Under Dzerzhinsky, robbers, White terrorists, and other saboteurs were routed and disarmed by the early CheKa men, refuting the views in Russia and abroad that the Soviets had no law and order. As Dzerzhinsky put it, "We shattered the current illusion abroad that we stood on the brink of collapse." This work of the CheKa in the new Soviet capital of Moscow freed the Red Army to devote its energies to engaging the Whites on battlegrounds on the city’s outskirts where the Whites were blowing up warehouses and trainloads of provisions as they closed in for what they believed would be the end of a short-lived revolution.
Due to the starvation and famine the Whites were inflicting on Moscow, as time passed, the CheKa and Dzerzhinsky became less and less lenient. As the CheKa’s measures became more and more harsh, slander in the West of Dzerzhinsky, the CheKa, and the Soviet state became more and more shrill, hysterical, and monstrous, ignoring that these were once the men who - with the consent of Lenin - had abolished the death penalty as inhumane long before the penalty was even the subject of serious debate in Western parliaments. Atrocities by Whiteguard generals and Americans who committed mass killings of Communists in Archangel were never mentioned.
The first Draconian measures the Bolsheviks employed did not rise to the level of what might be called terror against terrorists but may be identified as the confiscation of grain to avoid the starvation and famine the Whites conspired to create to overthrow the new regime. Such confiscatory measures finally led, with the inevitability of a Sophoclean drama, a generation later to the foredoomed Yezhovshchina, which could more aptly and insightfully be called "The Great Climax," rather than "The Great Purge." This early era of Soviet history is so poorly documented and studied due to the chaos and the fighting, that the names of people in the "Food Detachments" of the CheKa who sought to combat starvation and round up homeless children on the streets of Moscow to feed them are lost to history. A few photos remain. The history of the early CheKa personnel comes from Dzerzhinsky’s recommendation that commanding officers write down the history of their units. To this end, Dzerzhinsky promoted literacy among them.
At the height of all this, Lenin was shot, Uritsky assassinated, and Dzerzhinsky kidnapped. In the forefront of much of this were dissident counter-revolutionary Socialist Revolutionaries and a ring of English and French foreign ambassadors who operated outside Moscow to overthrow the Soviets in what has come to be variously known as the "Conspiracy of Ambassadors" or the "Lockhart" or "Lettish" conspiracy (previously described). Each of these groups - foreign agents, right socialists, wreckers, former Whites, et. al. - are the same "types" said to have been "imagined" by Stalin and Yezhov a generation later. However, they were not new to them, as they were - and still are - to most Westerners. In fact, the Show Trials were not even a novelty - except to the ignorant and puzzled Western public and their leaders - because numerous counter-revolutionary socialists were tried during this earlier period, and, just as in the later, better known Show Trials, foreign solicitors were invited to attend, as did the former Prime Minister of Belgium, to witness the proceedings. There was nothing really new about the Yezhovshchina. As pointed out above, it was, in the first place, a continuation of the Civil War. The phenomenon that so shocked Westerners not in attendance at the Show Trials themselves, the "notorious" open confessions to the court of acts of sabotage by the perpetrators themselves being used as the primary evidence to convict them, was not new either. In the earlier trials, Savinkov, after detention by the CheKa, wrote a bitter confession and report of his own - and the counter-revolution’s - "moral bankruptcy." There is every reason to believe it was sincere. The CheKa did not torture, hit, smack or threaten him - or anyone - at this time. Most CheKa men had not as yet thought of doing these things. There are records of those who did having criminal charges leveled against them - under Dzerzhinsky’s direction.
The charges brought against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the Show Trials did not come out of the blue. Lenin, himself a notorious international operator, had said all along that the counter-revolution in Russia "operates chiefly abroad." Remnants of the Civil War’s defeated White armies and its former officers were sought after and recruited by the intelligence networks of many capitalist countries, including ones which had granted formal diplomatic recognition to the victorious Soviet government, such as Great Britain. The accusations of the Show Trials were made against those accused of being part of the "New Opposition," but the claim was made all along in the West that the accused were simply "Old Bolsheviks." These opponents were in fact part of the aforesaid ongoing conflict that reached back to the Civil War and its Western (imperialist) intruders, such as the above mentioned intrigue organized by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, head of the British ambassadorial mission in Moscow, and to continuing disagreements within the various Socialist-semi-capitalist type parties who favored perpetuation of the NEP. Important is the rarely mentioned fact that many of Lenin’s original supporters, who were enemies of the Tsar, had connections with large Western banks. These supporters were not poor peasants or outlaws of the Tsar like Stalin, nor were they working class people like Yezhov. When they later disagreed with and opposed Lenin, they were roundly criticized for it by his most loyal supporters. Many apologized, but these apologies by Europeans to Russians, Jews, Slavs, and Tatars were not made in the same spirit, nor did they carry the same moral weight, as an apology given, say, by a Ukrainian peasant or a Moscow worker. They apologized and then continued to repeat their offenses, but using more stealth. Kamenev, Zinoviev, Piatakov and others accused of being Trotskyites did in fact support Trotsky’s open opposition during Party debates as late as 1925, when Trotsky was still a member of the Supreme Economic Council. At this time Dzerzhinsky and others who opposed importing metallurgical manufactures accused Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov (a Trotskyite People’s Commissar of Finance) of not even being aware that much of what they wished to import and pay for in Russian rubles was rubbish sold to them instead of good engines, motorcars, and heavy metal spare parts needed for the restoration of production. (The suspicion that they did know this exists. This implies there were capable of a very subtle and ingenious form of sabotage.)
In the early USSR, sabotaging social programs that were created for the benefit of the people was considered a far more grievous offense than it has ever been regarded in the West, where, to begin with, few such programs existed at that time having heavy sanctions behind them. Obstructers of affirmative action programs, or health care programs in the U.S. today, though certainly regarded as morally derelict or uncaring, are not considered anywhere near so heinous, much to the detriment of the designated beneficiaries of these programs. In the USSR, underminers of social and economic programs were considered "enemies of the people." The possession of knowledge that an oppositionist was working underground, establishing links with other active enemies, was also considered criminal. This offense is similar to "misprision of felony" in Anglo-Saxon legal codes, wherein a felony is committed "merely" by concealing a felony another has committed when one had no previous concert with the felon or provided no subsequent assistance as to qualify the concealer as an accessory before or after the fact. This accounts for often disparaged Soviet prosecution of family members of oppositionists and saboteurs. There were almost always protecting members in a wrecker’s family. Students of current affairs might be aware of the recent case in Florida in which an automobile driver ran over a married pair of elderly bicyclists. He fled the scene of the accident, leaving his victims to die on the hot pavement, wallowing in their own pain and blood. He made no effort to make even an anonymous "911" (emergency) telephone call to bring help. Instead, he drove directly home and telephoned his sister, requesting her to allow him to conceal his damaged vehicle in her nearby rented storage facility. After secreting his vehicle there, he left the state to live with other relatives for a while. From this much alone, it is clear that he had some sort of "plan" for which he needed the involvement of these relatives. It is probable that at least one of those who helped him knew what he was doing, especially since an interstate hunt for the "mystery hit-and-run driver" was well publicized, especially in local news. No family members were prosecuted after he was finally apprehended. Even if all of them could honestly deny any knowledge of his crime, they could still have been held to a legal standard of awareness in which they are required, as a matter of law, to have been apprised of his doings. This is a matter of public policy, not an idea to be ridiculed and stigmatized as "totalitarian." Everything depends on how strongly policy makers wish to discover and apprehend hit-and-run drivers, drunk drivers, wreckers, or, say, unqualified physicians.
Yezhov’s thesis was that opposition to the Soviet State turned by degrees into terror and counter-revolution. He realistically confronted a fact readily acknowledged by many police authorities but ignored by most academics and idealists: this is the fact that adversaries of the Soviet system easily found - or were found by - other opponents of the Stalinist regime, who were eager to enlist their aid, as in the case of the bicycle killer and his family members. Due to the prevalence of such acts of wrecking and sabotage, and the seriousness with which they were regarded, acts which were suffocating efforts to build socialism, the CheKa resorted to increasingly severe methods. Stalin openly announced the new severity to the world, which then later claimed it was shocked, the same world which took so very long to be shocked by the Nazi’s brutal treatment of Jews and Communists. Nor was the same world as hot tempered toward the treatment of inmates of the worst U.S. prisons, like Alcatraz, wherein beatings and other abuse of prisoners continued unabated well after World War II.
One cannot walk into a theater during the middle act of a long stage drama and expect at a glance to understand the plot development or the character motivation. The play has to be seen from the beginning and antecedents of the climax comprehended - all of what went before. It would be just as unreasonable to walk onto the scene of the recent Los Angeles Riots, or the Watts Riots of the 1960’s, and claim to know from what one observes then and there that one comprehends what is going on among Blacks and non-Whites of crowded U.S. cities. This could not be done until what transpired for several generations before these events is known. Only then can reasons, motives, and actions of involved parties be understood. Coming suddenly upon a man beating another half to death in the street, is it sensible to assume that the beaten man is the victim and the beater morally reprehensible? Only a pacifist has a rational and consistent - albeit absolutist - standpoint from which he can claim these things. What if, 30 minutes prior to the beating, the ostensible victim had murdered the other’s wife, children, and parents in cold blood? And then, further back, what had transpired before which led to this multiple homicide? Was the killer a victim of severe physical and mental abuse by his own father? The "blame" gets more and more diffuse as one traces the train of events backward in time, and more and more avenues for the moral exculpation of one or the other party open up, at the same time that understanding deepens. In other words, the moral issues get foggier, while the real causation and generation of events becomes more complex yet clearer. The pacifist’s point of view is consistent, but its absolutism bars real understanding. He eschews being a "scientist" in these matters. He immediately puts his foot down in the sand, circumscribing a moral field, the only one in which he is willing to think about and discuss the hypothetical beating. He needs to know no more. The analytical historian should do the opposite. He should draw no absolute lines in the sand, and for this reason will be accused of moral indifference. Somewhere in between these outlooks, but closer to the pacifist’s, is the conventional totalitarian paradigmist. His judgements are almost as easy and ready-made for him. But, unlike the pacifist, whose moral concentration is evident, these paradigmists fraudulently misrepresent their "analyses" as results having little or no moral input, as being factual, empirical, and historical, when they are quite the opposite. They are often pure propaganda.
Likewise, it is impossible to understand the Yezhovshchina without knowing what occurred immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and under Dzerzhinsky after the Civil War. Did Yezhov consider it significant, when there were reports of explosions or failures to meet production requirements in the principal coal-producing region in Donbas, that the administration there was almost completely staffed by former Whites? Most certainly. Then those events would seem more likely a result of infiltration. Did Yezhov think it important to note that Kirov, who replaced Zinoviev as one of the heads of the Leningrad Party organization, was later assassinated, just as Uritsky had been and nearly Lenin himself? He must have. Does this sound like paranoia or a perspicacity that challenged even Stalin’s view of what we going on? For reasons suggested previously, the brain-aged Stalin began to behave as if the "good fight" was over, and vigilance could be somewhat relaxed. What had happened openly in Stalin’s youth then continued to happen in secret, until finally, under Khrushchev, the Old Opposition prevailed at last.
The totalitarian paradigm demands that students of history do the equivalent of walking in on rioting inner city Blacks in the 1960’s and concluding from what they see only then and there that "Blacks are villainous, violence-prone criminals, inclined to riot and tear up their own domiciles when they do not get their way." If one reached this conclusion, what would one then make of the volumes of "scientific" literature published prior to such outbreaks of urban violence that "scientifically" studied American Negroes and adjudged them to be a "passive, docile, non-violent people, warm-natured, with close family bonds, and easily governed?" Walk in on the common scenes of another era, during the hey-day of slavery in the U.S. South and massive American Indian "relocation." What did the apropos standard, shared paradigm of the era say about these things? It said that Black Africans were born to be slaves. It said that American Indians, who, in comparison with the denizens of filthy, overcrowded English cities, only very thinly populated a vast and rich continent, and were meant to be cleared out of the way, which could be done "easily." It said that Christian Anglo-Saxons had a Manifest Destiny to own and populate the American continents. Such ideas may be deplored or ridiculed today, or even considered lunatic. But the dominant paradigmists of the era (that is, the Robert Conquest’s and David King’s of that time) said this was so, and all "men of reason" agreed. It was all "self-evident" to all of them.
There must be a rule of human cognition that makes it difficult to frame a paradigm against one’s own interests, such as a paradigm which would have viewed Manifest Destiny as really Patent Genocide, or a paradigm in which White men are "killer sapiens" - exploitive, imperialistic, brutal monsters - while Blacks and American Indians (or 95% of the Slavic and Turanian peoples living in what became the USSR, Polynesian peoples, and any others) are pacific, overpowered "docile sapiens." When the conquered dared to stage a rebellion, "the world" was shocked. "The world" here refers to White Christendom’s Empires, demographically a tiny minority of the world. Alternate paradigms to these widely held exculpatory paradigms were framed and shared by "reasonable men" on the American continents only later, too late, i.e. well after most practitioners of slavery and genocide and their victims had passed away, just as Max Planck pointed out above in regard to the final passing of scientific paradigms. However, the Bolsheviks, half a world away from the Americas at the time, already had such an alternate paradigm - as these events were happening. Marx, Engels, and Lenin initiated the paradigm war alluded to previously: the followers of Marx vs. the followers of Locke. It was a grievous insult to any of the "good, Christian" citizens of Europe and America who sanctioned slavery and believed in Manifest Destiny that anyone could view them as exploiters and killers who invented elaborate systems of ideas to exculpate themselves. It is a tenet of Marxist theory that those who treat others in these ways frame such paradigms (which Marx called "ideologies") in order to consolidate and strengthen their rule. Marx did not dwell on what individual psychological needs would be satisfied when individuals formulate and contemplate such paradigms. That subject was pursued by Freudians and others later. A psychological role for these paradigms seems just as important as their utility for social control and seems necessary for them to function socially.
There are more reasons now than ever before for the generally more tamed and tempered contemporary capitalist ideologues to distort fact and strain reason to further the defamation of Stalinism. Today these ideologues are less reluctant to admit that socialism has humane intent and communism humane ends. The new apologists for rulers of regions formerly governed by Moscow are defending a kind of Wild West capitalism that now prevails in what was once the Soviet Union, expecting cold, hungry people who have not received a paycheck for a year to believe that the misery in which they now find themselves is still "better than Stalin" because they are now part of an "open society" with the promises of a "free market." The new rulers of these fiefdoms have turned formerly developing regions of the Soviet Union back into Third World countries.
The well-publicized "persecution of the kulaks" by the NKVD under Stalin is difficult for Westerners to understand. The totalitarian paradigmists have led them to think that the kulaks were regarded as criminals merely for practicing capitalism. They do not hear that "kulak" means "fist," not "wealthy landowner," for which there is a different Russian word. They do not hear about the unconscionable extremes to which kulaks practiced usury and the collection of rents. An accurate and informative comparison of kulaks and the muzhik victims who worked their land, with plantation owners in the ante-bellum South and their cotton-picking Negro "boys," is never made. When kulak crimes are mentioned, corporate policy makers desperate to uphold profits by inflicting similar treatment of "valued" employees (increasingly referred to in the industry today as "associates") are obliged to remain silent. While it may be claimed that the governments of nations organizing socialist economies frequently act without restraint, trampling people and folkways in their paths, capitalist apologists can find little objection to anything that can make a profit and thereby turn a faltering business around. It is no revelation to many that great profits can be made from disease; a practice considered heinous behavior by Soviet officials. In communist societies, such physicians are apt to be put on trial, treated like war criminals or industrial saboteurs, charged with wrecking the public hygiene. From the start, Dzerzhinsky set about the task of organizing the "NarKoms" or NK’s. These were economic and social in nature, and were veritably of, by, and for The People. In its early days, the NKVD can clearly be seen as an economic police force, not a KGB, CIA, or Gestapo-type political patrol. Virtually all economic bureaus or management operations were set up under its aegis - all connected to the NK of Internal Affairs - i.e. to the NKVD. Think of any economic practice and it had its NK - a People’s Commissariat. It is not a surprise that this is so little publicized and recognized when the concept of a "Soviet" is even unfamiliar and puzzling to Westerners, most of whom appear to think it means something like "United States of..." or some such. The word means a counsel - of workers, peasants, and soldiers. These organizations spearheaded the actual fighting in the Bolshevik Revolution, so the newborn society became fundamentally organized around them. Hence "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
The New Economic Policy, which was a retreat from socialism, as stated above, gave new life, hope, impetus, and strength to the opposition that Yezhov later ruthlessly hunted down. Lenin instituted NEP as a temporary recovery act from the ravages of the Civil War. It was capitalism all over again. Under NEP, the kulaks seized opportunities to hold onto grain for higher profit at a time when urban factory workers were malnourished and starving. Kulaks thereby did not violate the letter of the new NEP laws, and it is "good capitalism" to hold for higher a sale price. However, they violated the spirit of NEP, which was to reconstruct a social system severely damaged by Civil War. Therefore, Stalin used what the totalitarian paradigmists present as illegal, naked, and even "arbitrary" force to seize and distribute the kulak-held grain. Comparisons are never invited with military dictatorships set up in Third World countries in which produce and harvests need to be seized to uphold profits (not feed starving factory workers) or even just to cut losses when a natural disaster occurs. There is a real difference between this and what Stalin did, however: Stalin did not enrich himself by seizing crops. Greed was not his motive, but rather the very idealism impugned by David King, an idealism especially strong in Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, and many in the NKVD.
By 1937, the Soviet people’s great success in rapidly industrializing a backward country was widely praised by enthusiastic foreign witnesses such as well-known writers H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. These achievements could not even be ignored by the bourgeois press of the time: in France, La Temps, January 1932, said: "the Soviet Union has won the first round by industrializing itself without the aid of foreign capital." Actually, it was the "second round." The "first round" was the CheKa’s conquest of vandals and spoilers of the early Bolshevik Revolutionary Government.
Not even the most severe critics or enemies of Communism can deny that under the guidance of Josef Stalin and the other Soviet leaders, the Soviet people achieved incredible successes. When Stalin emerged as the central leader of the Soviet Union in 1926, the country was backward, practically without industry, and militarily weak. Agriculture was primitive. In most places there was no electricity and most of the people were unable to read or write. Large areas of Siberia, on the far side of the Urals, were still untamed country whose hinterlands belonged to tribes run by Shamans. Wind-driven snow "smashed straight on the eyeballs and froze in cakes to eyelashes and cheeks so that in five or ten minutes one was blind..." (British historian Christopher Dobson, quoted in "America’s Adventure in Siberia," V.F.W., Feb. 1991, p. 14). Members of the French Colonial Battalion who were part of the Allied expedition (to assist Czech and Cossack troops in their war with the Red Army) dubbed Siberia the "land of the Devil" (op. cit., p.15. See also Turania. See Bibliography). The Bolsheviks were still at the mercy of the Western capitalist nations who openly hated the Bolshevik Revolutionary Government. Their society was at least a hundred or more years behind the advanced countries and, as Arthur Koestler noted in Darkness at Noon, in some areas their vast country was even more primitive, "on the level of New Guinea savages." They either had to make good this lag or they would be crushed.
Not one person who saw it or lived during those times, neither friend nor enemy, could deny or would deny now that from a primitive agrarian society the Soviet Union had become a World Power with a space program. From a country of small, individually farmed, hand-and-sickle crops, it had become a country of collective, large-scale mechanized agriculture. From an ignorant, illiterate and uncultured country, it had become a literate and cultured country covered by a vast network of higher, secondary and elementary schools teaching in the languages of the many nationalities of the Soviet Union.
The capitalist world was not idle in the face of the colossal achievements of the Soviet people.
END - PART I
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
