Letter to the Weekly Worker – slightly edited and expanded:

1936 – “socialism has now been fully achieved in Russia”

In his letter in WW 1461 Andrew Northall claims the “indubitable reality that socialism was indeed built within the Soviet Union”. Stalin proclaimed socialism on its way in the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 and on November 25, 1936, proclaimed that “socialism has now been fully achieved in Russia”. Of course, that what existed in the USSR in 1936 was socialism is not only the ridiculous lying propaganda of the Stalinists, but it is also well serves all anti-communist imperialist propagandists; “if this is socialism do you want to go there?”

What else was happening in that fateful year? To the absolute horror of the conservative bureaucracy in the USSR a socialist revolution had broken out in Spain. From July in Madrid, Catalonia, Aragon, Andalusia and Levante workers seized control of factories and all workplaces and peasants seized control of the land, in what is wrongly termed the anarchist revolution. The overriding concern of Stalin and his apparatchiks in Spain was to return the factories to the capitalists and the land to the landlords so they could forge a popular front with them against fascists, even though these capitalists had almost all fled in fear of the risen masses.

The political capitulation of the anarchist leadership and the POUM to this popular front government is the story of why that revolution was lost. But suffice to say the Communist party was on the right wing of the entire workers’ movement. In their determination to crush this revolution they assassinated anarchist, Trotskyist centrist and genuine Trotskyist revolutionary socialists. Stalin’s counter-revolution triumphed from 3 to 8 May 1937 in the street fighting in Barcelona, in the infamous Dios de Mayo.

The first Moscow Trial, the “Case of the Trotskyite–Zinovievite Terrorist Center”, the Zinoviev–Kamenev Trial or ‘Trial of the Sixteen’, began in August 1936 as a direct consequence of the revolutionary uprising in Spain. These 16 had endured many months of torture both physical and physiological, including threats to shoot their families if they did not ‘confess’ to crimes they could not possibly have committed.

As Max Shachtman wrote in his Behind the Moscow Trial, on one of the ridiculous ‘plots’ alleged, “the plot of Dreitser-Schmidt-and-Co. to kill Voroshilov (Marshal of the Soviet Union) thus dates from 1933; it also dates from 1934; then again, it dates from 1935. The three pieces of evidence are not scattered throughout the record. One follows right on the heels of the other; they jostle each other and glamorously proclaim their discord”. As Denis Diderot wrote, “If a lie can serve for a moment, it is inevitably injurious in the long run; the truth, on the other hand, inevitably serves in the end even if it may hurt for the moment… We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter”.

Of 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress on 26 January – 10 February 1934, 1,108 were arrested and tried in secret, most of them executed. Of 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were arrested between 1936 and 1938, and mass executed, most without any due process whatsoever. Sergei Kirov was assassinated on 1 December 1934 on Stalin’s instructions because he had got more votes for the central Committee and a more enthusiastic standing ovation for his speech than Stalin got in that Congress (thereby sealing their fate) and had defied him on the Central Committee on a few occasions.

The chief prosecutor in the first Moscow Trail was Andrey Vyshinsky, a Menshevik who had ordered the arrest of Lenin in the Summer of 1917 but who switched sides after the defeat of the Whites in the civil war. This was part of Vyshinsky’s address to the court,

“Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws from the people… Down with these abject animals. Let’s put an end once and for all, to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let’s exterminate the mad dogs of capitalism, who want to tear to pieces the flower of our new Soviet nation”

This from the man who wanted to shoot the “mad dog” Lenin in 1917. The 1923-25 ‘Lenin Levy’ threw the party open to all the careerists and opportunists, half a million, including many thousand Mensheviks who had opposed the October Revolution, and who now sided with the establishment to advance themselves.

Vasily Blokhin was the chief executioner of the NKVD, appointed by Stalin in 1926, under the administrations of secret police chiefs Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolay Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria. He supervised the numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II. Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners personally, including shooting the victims of the Moscow Trials and of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.

The 16 defendants were immediately executed by Blokhin at the end of the farcical trial; almost all the remaining leaders and participants in the October Revolution were murdered by Stalin over the next three years. Of course, the principled Trotskyists were not given a trial or any public platform – they were simply mass executed in the Gulag. They understood that false confessions could never help the cause of the social revolution and those who made these confessions were already political corpses before Stalin’s executioner murdered them.

The Fourth Great Purge was that of the red Army in 1937–1939 and then later in 1941. Alexander Ilyich Yegorov, Vasily Blyukher, Tukhachevsky, three of the top five Marshalls in the Red Army were arrested and tried in kangaroo courts and shot as were thousands of the Red Army officers. Trotsky, as the implicitly inheritor of the internationalist perspectives of world revolution of 1917, was the chief target of all three trials and the Red Army one also. The Red Army was led to victory by Leon Trotsky Northall is too modest to inform us. Lenin described him as “no better Bolshevik” in September 1917 and Stalin praised him in 1918 as the principal organiser of the Bolshevik uprising in October 1917.

The other great event of 1936 was the adoption of a new Soviet Constitution. Previously capitalists, the rich peasants (Kulaks) and the NEPmen (New Economic Programme urban capitalists) were barred from voting. But now, following the success of the five-year plan, all these elements were supposed no longer with us, so the suffrage became universal. Everyone could now vote, moreover in a secret ballot. Only problem was there was only one candidate on the ballot paper for every post, not necessarily a CP member but one approved to stand by Stalin’s men.

The Constitution was drafted by Bukharin, Stalin’s main ally against the Left Opposition and later the Joint Opposition. Bukharin had a few more years to live but he too was executed with 20 others following the third show trial, the “Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’”, the Bukharin–Rykov Trial or ‘Trial of the Twenty-One’, March 1938. The second trial was the “case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center”, the Pyatakov–Radek Trial or ‘Trial of the Seventeen’, January 1937).

Lastly, we must mention the infamous interview given by Stalin on March 1, 1936, to Roy Howard President of Scripps-Howard Newspapers. It puts 1936 and what followed in its correct political context by making clear that the popular front involving alliances with the “democratic capitalists” and an outright rejection of world revolution. It was reported in the New York Times, in Pravda on March 5 and in official Communist journals internationally. This is the relevant exchange:

One can only conclude from Northall’s letter that he has wet dreams of being able to murder all his political opponents like Stalin did. Getting his rocks off on mass executions without the KGB/NKVD secret police to help him is as foolish as you can get. I once heard Gerry Healy recount how the Stalinist threw him in the fountain in Trafalgar Square for denouncing Stalin after Khruschev’s secret speech in 1956. That’s about the best Northall can now hope for against political his opponents.

Gerry Downing Socialist Fight

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