On one question, however, there is still disagreement, namely, when did the domination of the CPSU by revisionists begin?
These days, most people date it from the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, when Khrushchev threw off his false Marxist-Leninist mask.
However, there are good grounds for believing that for many years prior to Stalin's death in 1953, a majority of the Soviet leadership were either concealed or latent revisionists.
The fact of the existence of
a revisionist majority in the leadership of the CPSU was effectively concealed
by the 'cult of personality'
that was built up around Stalin.
Stalin himself criticised and
ridiculed this 'cult' on numerous occasions. Yet it continued.
It follows that Stalin was either an utter hypocrite, or he was unable to put a stop to this 'cult'.
The initiator of the 'cult of personality' around Stalin was, in fact, Karl Radek, who pleaded guilty to treason at his public trial in 1937.
A typical example of the 'cult' is the following quotation from 1936:
It was Khrushchev too who introduced the term 'vozhd' for Stalin -- a term meaning 'leader' and equivalent to the Nazi term 'Fuehrer'.
Why should the revisionists
have built up this 'cult of personality’ around Stalin?
It was, I suggest, because it
disguised the fact that not Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists, but they
-- concealed opponents of socialism -- who held a majority in the leadership.
It enabled them to take actions -- such as the arrest of many innocent
persons between 1934 and 1938 (when they controlled the security forces)
and subsequently blame these 'breaches of socialist legality' upon Stalin.
Stalin himself is on record as
telling the German author Lion Feuchtwanger
in 1936 that the 'cult of his personality' was being built up by his political
opponents (I quote:)
On one allegation both Stalin and the revisionists are agreed -- that in Stalin's time miscarriages of justice occurred in which innocent people were judically murdered.
The revisionists, of course,
maintain that Stalin was responsible for these miscarriages of justice.
But there is a contradiction
here.
Krushchev himself said in his
1956 secret speech (and I quote):
However, the contradiction resolves itself if these judicial murders were carried out, not at the behest of Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists, but at the behest of the revisionist opponents of socialism.
At his public trial in 1938, the former People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Genrikh Yagoda, pleaded guilty to having arranged the murder of his predecessor, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, in order to secure his own promotion to a post which gave him control over the Soviet security services. He then, according to his own admission, used this position to protect the terrorists responsible for the murder of prominent Marxist-Leninists close to Stalin -- including the Leningrad Party Secretary, Sergei Kirov, and the famous writer Maksim Gorky.
And in order that the security services should not appear idle, Yagoda arranged for the arrest of many people who were not conspirators, but had merely been indiscreet.
After Yagoda's arrest, the conspirators were successful in getting him succeeded by another conspirator, Nikolai Yezhov, who continued and intensified this process.
It was because of the suspicions of Stalin and the Marxist-Leninists that the security services were acting incorrectly -- were protecting the guilty and punishing the innocent -- that they began to use Stalin's personal secretariat, headed by Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, as their private detective agency.
And it was on the basis of the evidence uncovered by this Secretariat and submitted directly to the Party -- that the concealed revisionists, to maintain their cover, were compelled to endorse the arrest of genuine conspirators, including Yagoda and Yezhov.
And it was on Stalin's personal initiative that in 1938, his friend, the Marxist-Leninist Lavrenty Beria, was brought to Moscow from the Caucasus to take harge of the security services.
Under Beria, political prisoners arrested under Yagoda and Yezhov had their cases reviewed and, as Western press correspondents reported at the time, many thousands of people unjustly sentenced were released and rehabilitated.
Marxist-Lenininists in Britain, in particular, should have no difficulty in accepting the picture of a Marxist-Leninist minority in the CPSU.
How many members of the Communist Party of Great Britain came out in opposition to the revisionist 'British Road to Socialism', which preached the absurd 'parliamentary road to socialism' when it was adopted in 1951? I know of only four.
The question arises, of course:
if revisionists had a majority
in the leadership of the CPSU from the 1930s, why did they not take any
steps to dismantle socialism until 1956, after Stalin's death?
The short answer is that they tried and failed.
In the early 1940s, the economists Eugen Varga and Nikolai Voznsensky both published books openly espousing revisionist programmes, and both were quickly slapped down by the Marxist-Leninists.
Of course, it is important not to exaggerate the extent of these miscarriages of justice.
In the 1960s, anti-Soviet propaganda originally published in Nazi Germany, was republished by a former British secret service agent named Robert Conquest under the more respectable cloak of Harvard University. In his 1969 book 'The Great Terror' Conquest puts the number of 'Stalin's victims' (in inverted commas) at 'between 5 and 6 million'.
But by the 1980s, Conquest was alleging that there had been in 1939 a total of 25 to 30 million prisoners in the Soviet Union, that in 1950 there had been 12 million political prisoners.
But when, under Gorbachev, the archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU were opened up to researchers, it was found that the number of political prisoners in 1939 had been 454,000, not the millions claimed by Conquest.
If we add those in prison for non-political offences, we get a figure of 2.5 million, that is, 2.4% of the adult population.
In contrast, there were in the United States in 1996, according to official figures, 5.5 million people in prison, or 2.8% of the adult population.
That is, the number of prisoners in the USA today is 3 million more than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union.
In January 1953, less than two months before Stalin's death, nine doctors working in the Kremlin were arrested on charges of having murdered certain Soviet leaders -- including Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 -- by administering to them deliberately incorrect medical treatment.
The charges arose out of an investigation into allegations by a woman doctor, Lydia Timashuk, The accused doctors were charged with conspiracy to murder in conjunction with the American Zionist organisation 'JOINT'.
Western press correspondents in Moscow insisted that some of the most prominent Soviet leaders were under investigation in connection with the case.
But before the case could be brought to trial, Stalin conveniently died.
The Albanian Marxist-Leninist Enver Hoxha, a tireless oppponent of revisionism and not a man given to indulging in unfounded gossip -- insists that Soviet revisionist leaders admitted -- nay, rather boasted -- to him that they had murdered him. And we know that Stalin's son was himself arrested and imprisoned for having declared that his father had been killed as part of a plot.
Be that as it may, the arrested doctors were immediately released and officially 'rehabilitated'.
Then Lavrenti Beria -- a scourge of the revisionists second only to Stalin -- was arrested in a military coup, tried in secret, and executed.
The way was open for the revisionist conspirators to throw off their masks, expel the remaining Marxist-Leninists from leading positions in the Party, and take the first steps towards the restoration of a capitalist society.
Conclusion
This, then, is the picture of Stalin that emerges from an objective examination of the facts.
We in all countries who have taken on the task of rebuilding the international communist movement must see the defence of Stalin as a part of the defence of Marxism-Leninism.
There can be no greater compliment for anyone who aspires to be a Marxist-Leninist than to be called a Stalinist.