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On the Stalin Mythology

By an activist, 11 July 1998

Received this note from a friend and political activist who participated in the struggles for social security and industrial unionism and is in today's struggles against racism and the corporate rulers.

Dave Silver

Stalin murdered twenty million Russians. That is what we're told. What we do know--because U.S. Ambassador Strauss testified before Congress—is that the "U.S. spent trillions of dollars to roll back communism," that is, the Soviet workers state. So if destroying the world's first socialist state meant that much to U.S. capitalism, don’t you think that they would work day and night to demonize Stalin, the symbol of that successful working class state? Stalin did make the USSR a superpower, destroyed Hitler, opened up the space age and brought socialism to eastern Europe. So what better weapon to make Americans hate Communism and never bring it here than to say STALIN MURDERED 20 MILLION OF HIS OWN PEOPLE. The "Big Lie" is more powerful than the "Big Gun."

Its absurd on its face that Stalin killed 20 million. That would mean one person out of every other Soviet family dead by Stalin's hand. Would such a population have fought successfully to save the USSR and defeat German Fascism? Ridiculous. It would have laid down arms and revolted as did the Czar's army in 1917.

They tried bringing communism down many times. Fourteen capitalist countries sent armies in 1919 to, as Churchill said "TO STRANGLE THE COMMUNIST INFANT IN ITS CRADLE." They failed. Then, in 1937-38, they spread the Big Lie of the "Show Trials." That is the traitors being tried by Stalin were innocent, being framed in his mad quest for power. This was a story spread throughout the world by William Randolph Hearst, the yellow journalist and one of the richest men in the world. He wasn’t anywhere near the trials.

However Joseph Davies, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, attended all of the trials and reported back to Secretary of State Cordell Hull that "he heard all the testimony, watched all the body language," and that in his opinion "the defendants were guilty as charged" (i.e. plotting to overthrow the U.S.S.R.).

So yes, Stalin "killed" if you will, not 20 million but quite a few traitors who were intent on bringing down the U.S.S.R. And if he were alive today there would have been no traitorous Gorbachevs, Yeltsins and born again Russian capitalists who have turned the Soviet union into a Mafia run third world country with a return to prostitution, drugs, crime, homelessness, unemployment and millionaires and all the other ills of capitalism. (thanks to the counter revolution, aided and abetted by imperialist destabilization). It's no longer a state run for the interest of the working class but rather for the International Monetary Fund. All brought about by the kind of traitors Joseph Stalin smelled out. tried and liquidated in his time.