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From Socialist Worker, No. 103, 4 January 1969, pp. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
So I ask our government
To double
To treble
The guard
Over this tomb
— Yevgeni Yevtushenko
WHEN DID the Russian revolution begin to degenerate?
There are plenty of theorists who can give an exact date to it: Kronstadt or the death of Lenin or the defeat of the Left Opposition.
But what is more important is to remember what it meant to the millions imprisoned by order of the secret police.
In two recently published books we can taste the oppressive atmosphere of Stalin’s Russia and decide ourselves what madness saw 12 million Russians murdered in the process of industrialisation.
One is a novel by Victor Serge, a member of the Left Opposition deported to Siberia in 1933: The Case of comrade Tulayev (Penguin 7s 6d).
The other is an autobiographical account by an orthodox communist caught up in the purges in 1937, Evgenia S. Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind (Penguin 6s)
Serge’s novel is a great work of fiction. We move among the elite in 1939, the uncertain prelude to war with the trials and purges in the Red Army officer corps after the execution of Marshal Tukachevsky and a second Kirov affair with the murder of a high-ranking bureaucrat named Tulayev.
We see the net closing on a number of victims: a provincial official, an old Trotskyist still alive in internment, a Comintern functionary who glimpses the final treachery in Spain and even by the inexorable pull of terrorist methods, the prosecutors themselves.
None are safe from the Chief, a paranoid figure, who alone of the men of 1917 remains to decimate the old Bolsheviks in order to insert his new men.
Serge gives a searing and heart-searching picture of the nightmare world the Stalinists held out as the triumph of ‘scientific socialism’.
Into the Whirlwind is three years in the life of an orthodox communist who at 30 was torn from her family on the utterly baseless charge of Trotskyism.
We see not only the way in which she was tortured and starved in the prisons of the NKVD but the slow realisation that the man responsible for this state of affairs was her beloved leader, Stalin.
She met old oppositionists, Trotskyists, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries condemned first by the Tsarists and then by the Stalinists to the selfsame prisons to which the monarchy had sent generations of revolutionaries.
Her suffering and that experienced by her companions is beyond belief. She was arrested and sentenced before physical torture became legal in the prisons of Russia, but she heard the screams of those who were and saw slow death from scurvy and starvation overtake her compatriots.
She found humanity and strength in many strange quarters – the persecuted Old Believers and Baptists and the apolitical peasantry, peasantry.
She saw many crack, others change out of recognition in prison, with her old interrogators suffering the same fate.
She tried to remain true to herself and miraculously survived, to be released in 1955. She remains a communist who ascribed all to the ‘cult of personality’ and thanks God that the ‘great Leninist truth’ has prevailed – but only so much of the truth as Stalin’s heirs would allow.
This is an important document, as important as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, also reprinted by Penguin.
After wading through these pages of despair and suffering we cannot evade the questions raised about the nature of Russian society born out of this pointless brutality. There can be no rational defence of such murderous policy, when the best of the Bolsheviks were destroyed by a paranoid dictator.
The ‘New Men’ are still in control despite semi-liberal gestures in releasing Ginzburg’s story and are even more concerned that the truth shall not be fully revealed to the people.
Read these books for the light they throw on the development of Russia’s state capitalist nm and the high price in human lives and human values. The modern ‘Soviet Union’ was built on the bones of 12 million innocents and still injustice and persecution flourish under the new class of expropriators created by Stalin, hyenas whose only claim to stand by the red banner of internationalism lies in the colour of the blood shed by them and their predecessors.
These books give a clear exposition of the crimes it is all too easy to forget. We cannot despair in the face of such injustice and suffering.
Our only course is to fight to expose it and oppose internationalism and marxism to the crude dogmas of Russia and her satellites, just as we do to the crimes of the imperialist powers.
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Last updated on 30 October 2020