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Beiträge, die mit Stalin getaggt sind


About the length of the working day


After World War II, Joseph Stalin again raises the issue of the urgent need for the widespread introduction of the 6-hour workday norm

...it would be wrong to think that it is possible to achieve such a serious cultural growth of the members of society without serious changes in the present state of labor. For this purpose it is necessary first of all to reduce the working day to at least 6 and then to 5 hours. This is necessary in order to give the members of society enough free time for a comprehensive education. For this it is necessary, further, to introduce compulsory polytechnic education, necessary for the members of society to be able to freely choose a profession and not be chained for life to one profession....
Joseph Stalin, “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR,” September 28, 1952


After Stalin's death, the USSR leadership removed from the agenda the need to move to a six-hour day for the masses.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Шестичасовой_рабочий_день
#USSR #russian #soviet #history #Stalin #communism #socialism #workerrights #humanrights #study for #future



How Khrushchev derailed the locomotive of history



Machine translation from https://histoireetsociete.com/2024/09/29/comment-khrouchtchev-a-fait-derailler-la-locomotive-de-lhistoire/

We are among ourselves... in this blog which has broken ties with social networks and which seeks to build in our small collective a place of collective reflection since this is not permitted in the political-media space which is heading towards war , fascistization, clientelist divisions and the fear of facing both the past and the future. As I tried to explain, we are in a temporal paradox, that of a historical shift. It is clear that what we are facing is new, the solutions are unusual and require experimentation, collective reflection... But at the same time what prohibits this essential cooperation is the way in which we have managed to convince the working class, the youth, all the victims that there was no other alternative than individualist coping... What is happening is abominable and our leaders are leading us towards the apocalypse, but socialism, the collective, is worse. And we will not get through this without confronting this trauma of the past as the Russians and the Chinese do. Once again this translation by Marianne on the “Khrushchevian derailment” represents a contribution and as long as it is ignored there cannot be a revolutionary party and not even a reformist one. Since with the end of the USSR, there is no longer a reformist party, only parties which believe they can more or less control the pace of regression, negotiate it. (note by Danielle Bleitrach translation by Marianne Dunlop historyandsociety)

By Serguei Kostrikov and Elena Kostrikova (1)

This text is actually the conclusion of the book by Serguei Kostrikov and Elena Kostrikova, The locomotives of history: the revolutionary year 1917, a title which alludes to the famous phrase of Karl Marx: “Revolutions are the locomotives of History”. I do not believe I am betraying the authors by attributing a large part of the responsibility for the derailment of the locomotive to Khrushchev, even if he was not the sole cause. (notes and translation by Marianne Dunlop for History and Society).

We are convinced that the materials contained in this book, taken from Russian periodicals of the revolutionary year 1917, convincingly prove that the February bourgeois revolution and the great October socialist revolution were inevitable. Contrary to the predictions of its enemies, not only did Russia not sink into the abyss of oblivion, but it became one of the greatest world powers, it defeated the universal evil of fascism, it led the struggle of the advanced forces of humanity against oppression, for real democracy, for justice, for national and social liberation – this is the historical merit of the working people led by the Bolshevik Party.

Ideological opponents of Marxism will say with philistine sarcasm: "Well, where did your world power go, why did it collapse, where is your Marxism-Bolshevism?" The Soviet system, the socialist economy and the friendship between our peoples withstood the test of strength during the years of relentless war. In the USSR, unlike Tsarist Russia, there were no irreconcilable contradictions, no economic and social problems that could not be resolved within the framework of socialism. Our power has not disintegrated, it has been destroyed. At the end of the 20th century, we all witnessed a monstrous betrayal, the example of which is difficult to find in history. This betrayal was committed by representatives of the ruling "elite", who placed themselves at the service of external forces who had never stopped fighting against the first socialist country in the world.

The roots of the tragedy that occurred lie not in the vices of socialism, but in the fact that at a certain stage the leadership of the Communist Party ceased to rely on Marxist doctrine, did not not realized the need for its development. “Without theory we are dead,” Stalin warned. The world was changing, the international situation posed more and more difficult questions, and at that time the field of ideology in our country gradually stagnated.

After World War II, the authority of the USSR and socialism had reached an exceptionally high level. This is evidenced by the new role of our country in the world, the emergence of new socialist states, the rise to the forefront of communist and workers' parties in many countries, the development of the national liberation movement in the colonial empires. From the point of view of bourgeois ideologists and politicians, it was necessary to disrupt this wave of growth of the authority of socialism and the influence of Marxist ideology. And in the bourgeois camp, it was necessary to find ways to modernize capitalism. This is clearly seen not only in the alternation of conservative and liberal parties in power, the establishment of neoliberalism and neoconservatism in the economy and politics. Reactionary movements, including neo-fascists, have been revived. They also tried to penetrate the sphere of left-wing ideology, not only in their country, but also in socialist countries. Many left-wing organizations appeared. All of them are characterized by petty-bourgeois revolutionism, ultra-leftist phrases, distancing from Marxism-Leninism, its revision, attempts at petty-bourgeois interpretation in relation to new conditions, or a complete rejection of the doctrine and a struggle against her.

These groupings reflected the objective tendencies of Western societies in the conditions of the scientific and technical revolution and the socio-economic processes that it engendered. Engineers, technicians and other intellectuals, previously privileged, inevitably transformed into openly exploited “proletarians of mental work” and became politically radicalized. On the other hand, the many leftists reflected the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the true communist movement, against Marxism as such. It is important that we understand the main thing: in the West there was an active intellectual search aimed at creating ideological constructs that opposed or destroyed Marxism. This was a new major front of ideological struggle. And we had to meet this challenge with all our might.

Why, having created a powerful socialist state, having won the Great Victory, were we not prepared for confrontation in a new form? Why, after making a gigantic breakthrough into the future, were we not able to truly evaluate what we had accomplished and defend it when the time was right? Why did people who were not only dogmatic, who did not develop Marxism, but who were not Marxists at all, find themselves at the head of the party? ?

One of the reasons lies in the changes of people within the state and party leadership that took place in the post-war period, and especially after the death of Stalin. Our victory was dearly paid for. The human losses were heavy and irreplaceable. To a large extent, the war destroyed an entire generation of newly formed Soviets. These were, one could say, people of the future, in good physical and moral health. Children of workers and peasants who, without the war, would have become production managers, scientists, representatives of creative professions, military and political leaders.

They constituted an invaluable genetic heritage for the nation. Today, we miss not only them, but also their children, who would have been raised to become true Soviets, true patriots of their country. Those who were lucky enough to survive performed a true miracle: in a few years they restored what had been destroyed, created a superpower and were the first to make a breakthrough into space.

Unfortunately, while the best representatives of our people were fighting and creating, careerists with Party cards were sneaking into power, skillfully posing as ideological communists. In the mid-1950s, at the top of the party bureaucracy, whose vices had been ruthlessly combatted by Stalin, there was a rush for power. The results are known. First of all, the denunciation and liquidation of Beria, then "the dismantling of the anti-party group Molotov-Malenkov-Kaganovich and others." In the end, Khrushchev, ignorant but skilled in the art of intrigue, prevailed over all others.

Under Stalin, every civil servant, whatever his rank, knew full well that his position did not protect him from the most severe sanctions. With Khrushchev, the apparatchiks received a guarantee of immunity – that is, in effect, irresponsibility – from the party apparatus and bureaucracy. From that moment on, a process of massive and accelerated decay and degeneration of the ruling bureaucracy began. “The cadres decide everything” (2), said Stalin. The “dragon’s teeth” sown under Khrushchev produced poisonous sprouts for a long time. In the 1980s, Khrushchev-era “cadres” rose to the highest level of power. It was Khrushchev who allowed people like Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Yakovlev and their ilk to sneak into the highest ranks of the party. “We had too many 'Khrushchevs',” VM Molotov later recalled with bitterness.

For Khrushchev, the reckless “denunciation of the cult of personality” served above all his own justification and self-affirmation, and not at all the restoration of Leninist norms. He himself easily violated these norms by dismissing from office, dismissing from the capital or retiring all those who did not agree with his adventurist orientation and whom he considered dangerous to himself- even. He did not imprison them or shoot them just because he had cut himself off from this path. But he humiliated them mercilessly. Molotov, Malenkov, Zhukov, Shepilov, Furtseva and many others understood this perfectly. All this has not improved the party. But he undermined his authority, as well as the authority of socialism on the world stage. Like a merchant on the spree, Nikita squandered and squandered the gigantic moral and political capital acquired at the cost of the blood and sweat of our people..

Khrushchev undeservedly reaped the fruits of the victories won under Stalin. The breakthrough into space (3) allowed him for a time to distract attention from the socio-economic problems he had caused. With the arrival of Khrushchev, his line of extensive development of the country and the economy triumphed. The reckless and unbridled expansion of virgin lands at the expense of the restoration and development of the indigenous agricultural areas of central Russia, decimated by the war, is spectacular in appearance, including in terms of propaganda. But it was not justified. At the beginning of the 1960s, we had already drawn on state reserves, then began to regularly buy grain from abroad, financing foreign producers..

The failures of the economy and the rise in prices caused discontent among the population. This is how workers were shot at in Novocherkassk. During the entire Soviet period, no leader of the country had dared to do such a thing !

As a result, Khrushchev's policies translated for the USSR into senseless spending inside and outside the country, adventurous economic and political decisions, demagoguery, ideological swindling and propaganda, the split and weakening of the international communist movement, the loss of world authority, guidelines, ideals and the degeneration of party cadres. His arrogant troublemaking policies almost led to nuclear conflict with America in 1962.

Khrushchev's name is associated with stagnation in the field of ideology. An uneducated man with a petty-bourgeois mentality, he adopted the slogan “catching up with and overtaking the West in all areas” as his basic development strategy. In the very essence of this slogan was the idea not of our identity, not of the already realized benefits of socialism, not of reasonable sufficiency. The idea of ​​our backwardness and even a kind of inferiority was imposed on the Soviet people. Of course, Lenin also spoke of the need for Soviet Russia to “catch up with the advanced countries.” But he spoke about scientific, technical, cultural and industrial progress, about the advanced organization of management and production, on the basis of which a completely different society was to develop. Lenin reasoned from the position of a politician in the 1920s, at the head of a country devastated by wars and interventions and culturally and technically backward. Khrushchev, on the other hand, was the head of a superpower that had achieved enormous successes in economics, science and culture, and had managed to win an unprecedented war thanks to the achievements of socialism. It was necessary to view the pursuit of development dialectically, and not to chase after the bourgeois West. Khrushchev's slogan "catch up and overtake" was deeply philistine and reflected a petty-bourgeois view of development and its goal. We were asked to beat the enemy on their territory and according to their rules. Khrushchev psychologically oriented the population towards a consumer society, without taking into account the traditions of our peoples, economic expediency, state possibilities and probable socio-psychological, ideological and political consequences.

The obvious advantages of socialism, which allowed everyone to develop normally, healthily and creatively, were replaced by petty-bourgeois consumer instincts – “theirs are better, bigger, more beautiful”. The West has transformed itself into a glittering showcase of an infinite quantity of junk, of necessary and less necessary goods – a veritable Ali Baba's cave. Like a savage blinded by glitter from a tin can and abandoning real jewelry for cheap trinkets, Khrushchev's common man was ready to give his soul for chewing gum and Coca-Cola, not doubting not that all the benefits of socialism were guaranteed to him forever. We had lost our ideological “immunity” against capitalism! On a daily basis, the West has surpassed us.

After Stalin, ideology in the USSR stagnated. From Khrushchev onwards, no senior Soviet party leader, unlike his predecessors, wrote anything himself. At the same time, the new party “elite” was terribly removed from the lives of the people. Lenin and Stalin, driven by the desire for a just world order, knew how to ignite the masses with their ideas. In the most difficult hours, they were able to find words that were close and understandable to ordinary people, touching their souls and instilling in them faith in victory. They encouraged work and struggle. But he who does not consume himself will never be able to lead others.

They encouraged others to follow him. The soulless and bureaucratic “agitation” of the era of “stagnation” could only discourage the study of Marxism. Despite the numerous Marxist-Leninist universities, schools and circles where studies were formalized, the mass of the Party became politically and ideologically infantile and easily infected by petty-bourgeois instincts..

Our official ideological propaganda apparatus, headed by MA Suslov, did not find answers appropriate to the times, did not react correctly to the new phenomena brought to the fore by the processes of the scientific and technical revolution and globalization . Foreign ideology began to quietly seep into the vacated space, ideas were borrowed from Western philosophers, sociologists and economists. Certain academic institutions have become sanctuaries of opportunism: the Institute of the United States and Canada, IMEMO, IMRD, etc. A whole layer of intellectuals who did not think in a Marxist way was created. But it was they who found themselves at the time in the roles of advisors, consultants and speechwriters within the Central Committee of the CPSU. “Burlatski-Arbatov-Bovin” and others wrote speeches of leaders, party programs and resolutions on the most important issues.

The famous “thaw”, which made Khrushchev so beloved by our liberals and those of the West, did not occur by his will. He used it as a social backdrop to assert his power by crushing his predecessors and political opponents. Khrushchev and liberalism have little overlap. The character himself embodied petty-bourgeois radicalism. Khrushchev's "thaw" gave birth to the "sixties", these "adult children" of socialism. Why socialism? Because they owe him everything: a life saved from fascism, a better education, and even their creativity. With enchanting siren voices, they led naive novelists to sing about "the fog and the smell of the taiga", while they themselves firmly believed only in money. Like cuckoos, they destroyed and ravaged the nest that sheltered them. Biding their time, they were happy to relax in the houses of creativity and state dachas, gracefully entertaining the nomenklatura when they asked. They did not risk much, because they were firmly convinced that their Western patrons would not let them down. At the first opportunity, they “escaped” abroad. Today they are professors, like Nikita Khrushchev's son, in foreign universities, letting the people get out of the mud into which they have dragged them.

The real heroes of the sixties and seventies were very different. These young people who, following the example of their fathers and older brothers, built new cities and factories, built dams on the Angara and Yenisei, led the Baikal railway through impassable taiga to Love, explored space, made scientific discoveries, and simply worked honestly where the Motherland called them. They were true ideologues, true patriots, whose motto was: “As long as my dear country lives!” » (4). Current authorities try hard not to remember those times. But the monuments of this great era and its heroes are magnificent books and films, truly talented songs and much more..

What about today? Does our country, our people, the whole world have a socialist perspective or has the bourgeois “end of history” arrived? What needs to be done to give workers around the world hope for a better life? ?

First of all, do not deny our great past, draw from it the strength for a new breakthrough towards the future. The revolutionary teachings of Marxism are by no means obsolete. Its founders saw far. It is in their writings that the key to understanding the modern era is found. Let's return to Marxism, let's relearn to think scientifically, dialectically, from the point of view of the class, and not in a philistine way.

A hundred years ago, VI Lenin prophetically declared: “To imagine that world history moves forward smoothly and neatly, without occasional gigantic leaps backward, is undialectical, unscientific, theoretically incorrect. »

Which means: “There will be new victories, new fighters will rise!” » ; “A new October is coming ! » (4)

Notes :

1) The authors of the book “The Locomotives of History: The Revolutionary Year 1917” are two Russian historians specializing in revolutionary movements. Sergei Kostrikov heads the chair of history and political science at the Moscow State University of Management; Elena Kostrikova is a doctor of law, member of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We published on H&S articles by their son, a journalist at Pravda.

2) This famous phrase from Stalin should not be misinterpreted: it simply means that choosing the right leaders (at all levels) is of the utmost importance.

3) 1957 : 1is Sputnik ; 1962 : 1is man in space. These projects were planned and prepared under Stalin.

4) Quotes from Soviet songs : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3KVAByJids

#history #khrushchev #ussr

For more details (in Russian) on the methods and mechanisms of the collapse of the Soviet Union, see S.G. Kara-Murza, Manipulation of Consciousness -
#USSR #soviet #russian #revolutions #Lenin #Stalin #bolsheviks #ideology #communism #socialism #history #study for #future


Anti-Communism Is A Fundamentalist Religion, Now Followed By Billions| Countercurrents


it is not the socialist revolution that provokes mass violence, but the bourgeois counter-revolution, that begins when capital realises that it is losing its property and power.
...

Beyond that, the picture was of a “triumphal procession of Soviet power” (this heading in Soviet textbooks was no accident). In the winter of 1917-1918 the relationship of forces saw half a million members of the workers’ militia, the Red Guard, pitted against a few tens of thousand White Guard members in the south of Russia. Everything was quiet until the counter-revolution received vast sums of money from the Triple Alliance (primarily from Germany) as well as from the Entente, and all these imperialist countries launched aggression against the young Soviet power.
...

And this applies to countless examples, all over the world, where the West first provoked and brutally antagonized socialist or communist countries, then accused them of cruelty, and finally “liberated” them in the name of freedom and democracy, literally raping the will of their people. All this just so European and North American imperialism would survive and thrive.
...

Ask the common men and women of the streets of London, Paris or New York, what they know about Stalin’s era, or the famines in the early years of the USSR, or in Communist China?

99.99% know nothing. Where these famines took place, or why? But they are absolutely certain that they took place. No doubts, whatsoever. No doubts that they happened “because of Communism”. Westerners are intellectually obedient, like sheep. Most of them do not question the propaganda unleashed by their regime. Are they really “free”?

The famine in the Soviet Union actually took place because the young revolutionary country was totally devastated by the Western and Japanese invasions, which tried to break and plunder the country. British, French, U.S., Czech, Polish, German, Japanese invasions, to name just a few.

But ask, for instance, the Czechs, how much they know about their Legions that controlled the Trans-Siberian railroad, on their way from Europe to Vladivostok. Plundering, rape, and mass killing. I tried. I asked, in Prague and Pilsen. They thought I was a lunatic. The Legions are portrayed as heroic, in their history books.
...

In both cases, Western propaganda made people believe that the real cause for the loss of lives in Russia and China was Communism! The brainwashing has been so successful, that even in Russia and China, millions of people have been fully indoctrinated by these countlessly repeated lies coming out of the West.

But ask in London, whether people know anything about the fact that under the British occupation of India, tens of millions of people died from starvation; victims of the famines triggered by London, for many reasons, one of them being an attempt to lower the population. Over 50 million Indian people, cumulatively, died in these famines, between 1769 to 1943, in British administered India.

Should we, as a result, ban the British political system? I am convinced that we should! But that is usually not what the people of the world, including the victims of the British colonialist barbarity, are demanding.
...

The goal of Western propaganda has always been to equate Communism and Fascism, the two most antagonistic systems in history, in the world. It was the Soviet Communist system, which smashed Nazism to pieces, saving the world, at an enormous cost of approximately 25 million human lives.

Only Western imperialism can be compared to German Nazism. The two are made of the same stuff.
#capitalism #imperialism #europe #Western #intervention #mccarthyism #anticommunism #anti-Russia #USSR #Stalin #bolsheviks #socialism #communism #soviet #russian #history #China

Anti-Communism Is A Fundamentalist Religion, Now Followed By Billions| Countercurrents — https://countercurrents.org/2020/06/anti-communism-is-a-fundamentalist-religion-now-followed-by-billions/


Where does peace come from in Europe and Stalin's "bloodthirstiness"?


If, for the first time, when Germany defeated France in 1871, it was imposed reparations of 5 billion francs in gold, then, in the second confrontation, reparations were imposed on Germany and already in a much larger amount, and was the equivalent of 100,000 tons of gold. For comparison, eight thousand tons were stored at Fort Knox. Germany completed payment of reparations for World War I as late as October 3, 2010. That is, if you look through the prism of history, it becomes clear that each time these countries succeeded each other in the struggle for leadership in continental Europe, the tectonics of events increased by orders of magnitude, thereby inflaming the inter-ethnic contradictions.

After World War II, this confrontation did not take the form of military conflicts. Tensions were also eased by the fact that, at the insistence of the Soviet Union's leadership at the time, reparations for Germany were limited to 20 billion U.S. dollars. Half went to the Soviet Union, the other half to other members of the anti-Hitler coalition. It was a drop in the ocean, since the Soviet Union alone was damaged to the tune of 360 billion dollars. Thus, one factor of contradiction was leveled. Europe gained the long-awaited peace.

Откуда в Европе мир и о "кровожадности" Сталина

Если, в первый раз, когда Германия взяла верх над Францией в 1871 году, на нее были наложены репарации в размере 5 миллиардов франков золотом, то уже во втором противостоянии репарации были наложены на Германию и уже в куда большем размере, и составляли сумму, эквивалентную 100 000 тонн золота. Для сравнения: в Форт-Ноксе хранится восемь тысяч тонн. Германия завершила выплату репараций за Первую мировую войну только аж 3 октября 2010 года. То есть, если посмотреть через призму истории, то становится понятно, что с каждым разом, когда эти страны сменяли друг друга в борьбе за лидерство в континентальной Европе, тектоника событий увеличивалась на порядки, разжигая таким образом межнациональные противоречия.

После Второй мировой войны это противостояние не вылилось в форму военных конфликтов. Напряжение было снято и благодаря тому, что по настоянию тогдашнего руководства Советского Союза репарации для Германии были ограничены 20 миллиардами долларов США. Половина пошла в пользу СССР, вторая половина – остальным участникам антигитлеровской коалиции. Это было каплей в море, так как одному только Советскому Союзу был нанесен ущерб в размере 360 миллиардов долларов. Таким образом, один из факторов противоречий был нивелирован. Европа обрела долгожданный мир.


#lang_ru #СССР #Germany #France #war #WWII #экономика
#lang_en #WWII #germany #france #war
#WW2 #USSR #Stalin #history #economics #europe #eu #reparations


About GULAG

Bild/Foto

Prison Conditions

A 1957 CIA document entitled “Correctional Labor Camps in the USSR: Transferring Prisoners Out of Camps,” on pages two through six, reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag:

‒ Until 1952 prisoners were given a guaranteed amount of food, plus extra food for exceeding the norms.

‒ From 1952, the Gulag system operated on the basis of “economic calculation,” so that the more prisoners worked, the more they were paid.

‒ For over-fulfillment of standards by 105%, one day of imprisonment counted as two, which reduced the time spent in the Gulag by one day.

‒ Also, when the Soviet government had more funds as a result of post-war socialist reconstruction, it increased the food standards for prisoners.

‒ Before 1954, prisoners worked 10 hours a day, while free laborers worked 8 hours a day. Since 1954, both prisoners and free laborers worked 8 hours a day.

‒ A CIA study of a standard camp sample found that 95% of the prisoners were habitual criminals.

‒ In 1953, 70% of the “common criminals” of the sample camp studied by the CIA were granted amnesty. Within the next 3 months most of them were re-arrested for new crimes.



Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, while according to declassified Soviet archives it was 2,369,220 up to 1954. When compared to the population of the Soviet Union at the time, as well as statistics In a country like the United States, the percentage of the Gulag population in the USSR throughout its history has been lower than in the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, according to a study by Souza (1998), the United States had a higher percentage of prisoners (relative to the total population) than the USSR ever had:

"In a small news report that appeared in newspapers for August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that the United States had never before had as many people incarcerated as it did in 1996-5.5 million people. This represents an increase of 200,000 since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the U.S. is 2.8 percent of the adult population. This data is available to anyone who works for the North American Department of Justice… The number of people convicted in the U.S. today is 3 million more than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, no more than 2.4% of the adult population was incarcerated for their crimes, but in the U.S. the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release issued by the U.S. Department of Justice on January 18, 1998, the number of people convicted in the U.S. in 1997 increased by 96,100.


#USSR #history #soviet #gulag #Stalin #USA #CIA #lang_ru #lang_en


December 21 is the anniversary of the birthday of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin

Bild/Foto

#USSR #soviet #russian #history #Stalin #СССР #история


If you were Stalin, what would you do when your Plan A is dead? You know war is coming, you believe Hitler when he says his aim is to seize lebensraum to the east. Your potential allies don’t get it. What would you do? While London and Paris dither and Warsaw dreams dreams (what dreams? Hitler just tore up the non-aggression pact you were counting on: you’re next) Hitler strikes. How about a non-aggression pact? Stalin seizes the chance, the agreement is immediately signed. Stalin knows perfectly well that Hitler is going to attack the USSR and so he starts to grab as much territory to the west as he can and put off the day as long as possible.

#WW2 #history


The EU Is Rewriting WWII History to Demonize Russia


Bild/Foto

Last month (october 2019), on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament voted on a resolution entitled “On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” The adopted document:

“…Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of influence; Recalls that the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in human history, and recalls the horrific crime of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime; condemns in the strongest terms the acts of aggression, crimes against humanity and mass human rights violations perpetrated by the Nazi, communist and other totalitarian regimes.”

For 75 years, we have been told that the war started on September 1st, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, even though the Pacific Theater between Japan and China began two years earlier. Now we are to understand that it actually began eight days prior when the German foreign minister visited Moscow. Take no notice of the inherent doublespeak in the premise that a war could be the consequence of a peace agreement, which without any evidence provided is said to have contained “secret protocols”, not provisions. You see, unlike the other pacts signed between European countries and Nazi Germany — such as the Munich Betrayal of 1938 with France and Great Britain to which the Soviets were uninvited while Austria and Czechoslovakia were gifted to Hitler for the courtesy of attacking Moscow — Molotov-Ribbentrop was really a confidential agreement between Hitler and Stalin to conquer Europe and divide it between them.

This is pure mythology. The fact of the matter is that neither the Soviets or even Germany drew the dividing line in Poland in 1939, because it was a reinstatement of the border acknowledged by the League of Nations and Poland itself as put forward by the British following WWI. Even Winston Churchill during his first wartime radio broadcast http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1939/1939-10-01a.html later that year admitted:

“Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.”

Yet according to the EU, even though Moscow was the last country to agree to a peace deal with Hitler, it was all part of a hidden plot between them. In that case, why then did Germany choose to invade the USSR in 1941? The EU leaves this question unanswered. Forget about its racial policies of enslaving slavs or that Hitler openly declared in Mein Kampf that Germany needed to conquer the East to secure the Lebensraum . Nevermind that in the Spring of 1941, less than two months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin gave a speech to the Kremlin at a state banquet for recent graduates of the Frunze Military Academy to give warning of an imminent attack:

“War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two or three months through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our forces.”

The EU has redacted that the entire reason for the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 had been to buy time for the Red Army’s attrition warfare strategy to adequately prepare its armaments against a future invasion by the Wehrmacht. The Soviet leadership well understood that Germany would eventually renege on the agreement, considering that in 1936 it had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy directed at the Communist International. For six years, the USSR was thwarted in its attempts to forge an equivalent anti-fascist coalition and to collectively defend Czechoslovakia by the British and the French, whose ruling classes were too busy courting and doing business with Germany. It had been the Soviets alone who defended the Spanish Republic from Franco in the final rehearsal before the worldwide conflict and only when all other recourses had run out did they finally agree to a deal with the Hitlerites.

Just a week prior to the signing of the neutrality treaty, Stalin gave a secret speech to the Politburo where he explained:

“The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual assistance treaty with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off of Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would thus be prevented but future events could take a serious turn for the USSR. If we accept Germany’s proposal to conclude with it a non-aggression pact, Germany will then attack Poland and Europe will be thrown into serious acts of unrest and disorder. Under these circumstances we will have many chances of remaining out of the conflict while being able to hope for our own timely entrance into war.”

This latest resolution is part of a long pattern of misrepresentation of WWII by the Anglo-Saxon empire, but is perhaps its most egregious falsification that truly desecrates the graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were 80% of the total Allied death toll. Earlier this year, for the commemoration on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Russia and its head of state were excluded from the events in Portsmouth, England. As if the ongoing absence of Western European leaders from the May 9th Victory Day ceremonies held annually in Russia weren’t insulting enough, while it’s true that the Eastern Front was not involved in Operation Overlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously been in attendance at the 70th anniversary D-Day events in 2014. No doubt the increase in geopolitical tensions between the West and Moscow in the years since has given the EU license to write out Russia’s role in the Allied victory entirely with little public disapproval, though many of the families of those who volunteered in the International Brigades were rightly insulted by this tampering of history and voiced their objection.

The EU motion‘s real purpose is to fabricate the war’s history by giving credit to the United States for the liberation of Europe while absolving the Western democracies that opened the door for the rise of fascism and tried to use Germany to annihilate the USSR. History itself should always be open to debate and subject to study and revision, but the Atlanticists have made this formal change without any evidence to support it and entirely for political purposes. Like the founding of the EU project itself, the declared aim of the proposal is supposedly to prevent future atrocities from taking place, even though the superstate was designed by former Nazis like Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission, who was a German lawyer in several Nazi Party law organizations and fought for the Wehrmacht in France until his capture as a POW after the invasion of Normandy.

Rather than preventing future crimes, the EU has committed one itself by deceptively modifying the historical record of communism to be parallel with that of the Third Reich. Even further, that they were two sides of the same coin of ‘totalitarianism’ and that for all the barbarity committed during the war, the Soviets were equally culpable — or judging by the amount of times the text cites the USSR versus Germany, even more so. It remains unclear whether we are now to completely disregard the previous conclusions reached by the military tribunals held by the Allies under international law at Nuremberg of which all 12 war criminals sentenced to death in 1946 were German, not Soviet. The document doesn’t even attempt to hide its politicized direction at the current government in Moscow, stating that:

“Russia remains the greatest victim of communist totalitarianism and that its development into a democratic state will be impeded as long as the government, the political elite and political propaganda continue to whitewash communist crimes and glorify the Soviet totalitarian regime.”

This accusation does not stand up to critical observation, as Russia has since erected official memorials to those executed and politically persecuted during the so-called ‘Great Terror.’ However, the stark difference between the EU resolution and the Wall of Grief in Moscow is that the latter is based on evidence from the Soviet archives. It has become a widespread and ridiculous belief in the West that Stalin somehow killed as much as five times as many people as Hitler, an absurdity not reflected in the now disclosed and once highly secretive Soviet archives, which after two decades of examination show that over a period of three decades from the early 1920s to his death in 1953, the total recorded number of Soviet citizens executed by the state was slightly less than 800,000. While that is certainly a horrid number, how does it even begin to compare to an industrial scale extermination based on the race theory?

How can anyone believe Stalin killed tens of millions of people when even the most simple analysis of a population demographics chart shows that the Soviet population rate consistently increased each decade with the only reduction taking place during WWII as a result of their casualties? Socialists, who perhaps more than any other political tendency seem to suffer from autophobia, should defend their own history from such falsification. It is only when flaws occur under communist states that the entire political and economic system is to be denounced outright, but never capitalism which for five centuries has colonized half the world while enslaving and killing entire nations.

Most of the wildly exaggerated death figures stem from falsities written in The Black Book of Communism by a group of right-wing French academics in 1997 ,who did not conceal their apologism hfor the Nazi collaborationist self-proclaimed Russian Liberation Army (ROA) commanded by Gen. Andrey Vlasov who defected to Germany during the war:

“A singular fate was reserved for the Vlasovtsy, the Soviet soldiers who had fought under the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was the commander of the Second Army who had been taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942. On the basis of his anti-Stalinist convictions, General Vlasov agreed to collaborate with the Nazis to free his country from the tyranny of the Bolsheviks.”

The other highly cited work by the West for its overestimated portrayal of Soviet repression is the equally unreliable The Gulag Archipelago volumes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who as historian Ludo Martens noted also attempted to provide justification for Vlasov’s treason in his best-selling 1973 work:

“And so it was that Vlasov’s Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitulating the fate of Samsonov’s Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into encirclement. Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin’s. Treason does not necessarily involve selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one’s own marshal’s uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?”

The truth is located in the Soviet archives which indicate that Stalin’s successor, the Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev, was as intent on absolving the entirety of the Soviet leadership as himself from any culpability in the purges of the 1930s so that blame for its excesses were placed squarely on his predecessor. In succession, Western historians like the British Foreign Office propagandist Robert Conquest followed his example and this account quickly became official doctrine. In hindsight, Khrushchev’s infamous 1956 secret speech, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”, was what planted the seeds of self-doubt in the Soviet system that would eventually lead to its undoing decades later. To the contrary, what the historical records show is most of those who were purged in that period were not necessarily perceived as political threats to Stalin himself, but were targeted because of an overall systemic paranoia held by the entire Soviet government regarding internal sabotage and counter-revolutionary activity by a real fifth column getting inspiration from a certain traitorous former Bolshevik in exile and a potential invasion originating from outside the country.

Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when the Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side of the Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not entirely unreasonable. Not to mention, the rapid industrialization of the entire nation in a single decade while in preparation for the growing threat of war with Germany. When Hitler began his Masterplan for the East, their worst fears came to fruition when tens of thousands of Banderite turncoats enlisted in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) in Ukraine to collaborate with the German occupiers in the slaughter of their fellow countrymen and after the war ended, continued their treasonous struggle during the 1950s with assistance from the CIA. So the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…

As for the accusation of “whitewashing”, it is true that recent polls indicate that 70% of Russians today hold a favorable view of Stalin — but just as many are nostalgic for communism itself and regret the breakup of the USSR on the basis that the socialist system ‘took care of ordinary people.’ Putin did once remark that despite Stalin’s legacy of repression, he doubted that the native Georgian statesman would have been willing to drop two atomic bombs on Japan like the United States, an atrocity that killed 225,000 innocent civilians (most of them instantly) which is more than a quarter of those capitally punished during the entire Stalin era. Was he wrong to say so? A significant amount of deaths also occurred in the Soviet-wide famines of the 1930s, but there is significantly more evidence to suggest that the British deliberately starved 3 million Bengalis to death then there is to support the Holodomor fraud concocted by the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora. If the West wants to talk about deliberate starvation, it should take a look at what the U.S. did with its economic sanctions in the 1990s killing half a million Iraqi children which former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described as “worth it.”

This isn’t the first time the Anglosphere has historically omitted the Soviet role in the Allied victory or conflated the USSR with the Third Reich. On previous occasions the European Parliament has issued resolutions declaring August 23rd “a European day of remembrance of the victims of the Nazi-Soviet alliance.” This is all an attempt by the Atlanticists to depict communism as somehow worse than fascism while disconnecting the Nazis from the lineage of European settler colonialism whose racism was its source of inspiration. Why is that which befell the Jews not considered an extension of what was already done to the Herero-Nama tribes for which Namibia is now suing Germany a century later?

The neoliberal political establishment in Europe and its anti-EU populist opponents are fond of appearing dead-set against one another, but it seems they share the same fairytale beliefs about WWII that the Nazis and Soviets were equivalent evils as inscribed in this latest decree. It has always been ironic that the liberal billionaire “philanthropist” and currency manipulator George Soros is so derided by right-wing populists when it was his Open Society Institute NGOs which engineered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Soros may be averse to the anti-immigrant brand of right-wing nationalism currently on the rise in Western Europe, but as a fanatical Russophobe he is willing to make strange bedfellows with ultra-nationalists in Kiev to undermine Moscow’s sphere of influence and that includes revising WWII history to a version favored by the Banderites which took power during the pro-EU 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine.

The Nazi junta regime in Kiev has since instituted Russophobic ‘de-communization’ laws erasing the remaining traces of Ukraine’s Soviet past while replacing them with memorials to their wartime foes. A recent example was the city of Vinnitsa renaming a street that paid tribute to the Soviet spy and war hero Richard Sorge to that after Omelyan Hrabetsk, a commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which cooperated with Germany during the war and killed thousands of Poles and Jews. Sorge posed as a German journalist in Tokyo and famously provided timely intelligence to Moscow that Japan did not plan to attack the USSR, allowing Stalin to transfer essential reinforcements to the Battle of Moscow which proved to be a major turning point in the war. He was executed by the Japanese in 1944 and posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.

Now the EU is ‘decommunizing’ history in its own legislation. Meanwhile, Soros’s influence over the EU cannot be overstated as his lobbying power has enabled him to provide direct council to its executive branch more than any official head of state in the political and economic union. The hedge fund tycoon made a fortune as an investor during Russia’s mass privatization in the 1990s after enlisting Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF to apply ‘shock therapy’ to its economy as it did in Poland and his native Hungary. Under Putin, however, Soros’s NGOs have since been barred from Russia. Perhaps the reason he can so cynically provide support to fascist elements in Ukraine to undercut Moscow is that he did so personally in his upbringing in Hungary.

Born Gyorgy Schwartz, during WWII he was a teenager from an affluent Jewish family which survived the Axis occupation by using their wealth to bribe a government official from the collaborationist Arrow Cross government who provided the Soros’s forged documents identifying them as Christians, while the adolescent by his own admission delivered deportation notices to other Jews. A short time later, the young Soros impersonated the adopted gentile son of an official who inventoried the stolen valuables and property from Jewish estates and even accompanied him during his work. One would assume as a Jew he would have been haunted by these experiences, but Soros has repeatedly stated he has no regrets and even disturbingly compared it to his future work as an investor.


[video]SHOCKING: George Soros, a chief financial supporter of Antifa, was himself a Nazi collaborator and to this day has no regrets

Like Soros, the EU has no ideology except an unquenchable thirst for greed and is fond of Nazis when they are the kind that hate Russia. For its own political interests, it is willing to dangerously foster a version of history invented by a rebranded far right where the quislings who collaborated with the Axis powers elude guilt and the Soviets who courageously defeated them are maliciously slandered. Fascism was never fully eradicated only because the West continued to nurture it during the Cold War and even now that capitalism has been reinstated in Eurasia, it continues to do so to undermine a resurgent Moscow on the world stage.

As the world appears increasingly on the brink of WWIII, one is reminded of the expression by Karl Marx who famously stated that “history repeats itself…first as tragedy, then as farce” in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, when comparing Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in the French Revolution with the coup by his nephew half a century later which brought an end to the French Revolution. Equally fitting is the humorous line by the legendary writer and noted anti-imperialist Mark Twain who reputedly said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Both are applicable to the unquestionable tragedy of WWII and the farcical mockery of its history by the EU whose policies continue to make another global conflict that much more likely.

Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, American Herald Tribune and more. Max may be reached atmaxrparry@live.com


#nato #fascism #western #media #lie about #history #WWII #WW2 #russian #soviet #USSR #poland #germany #europe #eu #ukraine #blameRussia #Russia #Stalin


The secret of the success of the Stalinist economy


"If we take profitability not from the point of view of individual enterprises or branches of production and not in terms of one year, but from the point of view of the entire national economy and in terms of, say, 10-15 years, which would be the only correct approach to the question, then the temporary and fragile profitability of individual enterprises or branches of production can in no way be compared with that higher form of lasting and permanent profitability which is given us by the actions of the law of the systematic development of the national economy and the planning of the national economy, sparing us from periodic economic crises, which destroy the national economy and cause enormous material damage to society, and ensuring the continuous growth of the national economy with its high rates.""
Economic problems of socialism in the USSR
I.V. Stalin

Bild/Foto

Well, and then came the Trotskyists, led by Khrushchev, the theory of Convergence, the Kosygin-Lieberman reforms, with dismal attempts to cross the hedgehog with the hedgehog, and the planned economy with self-calculation, when the plan in pieces and units of production began to be replaced by indicators in rubles - and the world's best socialist economy, the rate of growth and development of which no one has ever been able to overcome - sadly and surely came to an end.

And by the way -

mega-corporations, including transnational ones, work exactly the same way - according to socialist, planned methods of economic management. And individual divisions of TNCs do not pay each other in rubles, dollars or other currencies, but only in units of production. And some production units will turn out to be loss-making if they are transferred to self-sufficiency and self-financing. But the sly-ass bourgeois, who tricked the Khrushchev-Trotskyites into Convergence, did not tell them about it.

Well, and the current uneducated dilettantes, advocates of so-called liberal economics, who ruined the USSR in the "holy" 90s, were tricked like suckers - with manetarist theories, the invisible hand of the market, competition and the international division of labor. They forgot to tell the neophyte-school that all this shit hasn't worked for a long time - since the end of the 18th century, approximately. And the methods suitable for Liechtenstein or Burkina Faso are fundamentally unsuitable for ruling a superpower.

Do you know why today's faggots in power so zealously and everywhere install memorials to the so-called "victims of Stalin's repressions"? I didn't get it the first time either. Do you think they really suffer for the sheer number of great human sacrifices? They don't give a fuck a hundred fucking times over - just remember the cannibal quote about 30 extinct millions of those who didn't fit into the market.

Fuck no! All these monuments to the victims of socialist abortion, all these "walls of shit", they put up for themselves - under the sole slogan of inadmissibility of repetition. And they see perfectly well that on the memorial slabs their names are clearly visible through the surnames of these "victims", who are actually enemies of the people. And they are the first in line for the firing cellar.

The damned Communists left you a superpower and the world's second largest economy. Where is it, by the way? And what have you achieved in 30 years? Have you surpassed the Soviets in anything? Except for the presence of dollar billionaires, the number of officials and cops per capita?

You have a government that is an inefficient owner? And it should withdraw from economic management as much as possible. The invisible hand of the market will come and ruin everything by itself, and a kind uncle from the IMF will give money for it - that's your whole fucking paradigm. And the main thing is that you unpleasant bitches, schoolboys and dilettantes, do not know how, cannot and do not want to manage the state entrusted to you by the trusting people.

Everyone knows what happens when some cannot and others do not want to.
...

https://norg-norg.livejournal.com/457762.html
#USSR #soviet #russian #history #economy #Stalin #socialism #СССР #история