To Defend Stalin Is to Defend Socialism
A balance sheet, a word of thanks, and a warning on the anniversary of Trotsky’s death
A discussion dossier for young comrades
Snow Was Falling on Red Square
7 November 1941. Moscow.
German tank units were thirty kilometres from the city centre. The greater part of the government had long since been evacuated to Kuibyshev. The Western press was counting the days until Moscow fell. Berlin was drawing up plans for a victory parade on Red Square.
That morning snow was falling on Red Square, and on Red Square there was a parade.
The twenty-fourth anniversary of the revolution was marked in a city where the enemy’s guns could be heard — not in hiding, but broadcast live to the whole world by radio. The units marched past Lenin’s mausoleum, turned at the far end of the square, and went straight to the front. This was an army that walked out of a ceremony and into a war.
The man standing at the tribune of the mausoleum was the son of a cobbler from Gori.
Sixty-three years earlier he had been born in the poorest province of the Russian Empire, within an oppressed nation. He had been expelled from the seminary as a Marxist, had organised workers in the oil fields of Baku, had been arrested seven times, exiled to Siberia, and had escaped again and again. He was not the revolution’s famous orator; he was the man of the apparatus, of the cadre, of patient organisational work.
And the country he had behind him as he stood at that tribune was no longer the country of 1917. That country — which had tilled the soil with the wooden plough, more than half of whose population could not read or write, which had no engineers, which had been blockaded and starved — had within thirteen years built its heavy industry, raised literacy above 80 percent, opened universities from nothing in Central Asia, and brought women into the factory, the laboratory and the army.
Even its enemies conceded this. Isaac Deutscher, Trotsky’s biographer and a harsh critic of Stalin, was obliged to write in 1953:
"In the course of a quarter of a century a nation of 160 to 200 million people was carried across the abyss that separates the age of the wooden plough from the age of the atomic reactor."
(Note: In Turkey and around the world this sentence is frequently attributed to Churchill. That is false. The sentence belongs to Deutscher, and it was written not to praise Stalin but to criticise him.)
Four years later, in May 1945, the army that raised the banner over the Reichstag was the army of this country. It was that army that broke open the gates of Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. The price of humanity’s deliverance from fascism was paid principally by this country: roughly 26.6 million lives.
And Then: A Century of Attack
Let us now ask: who attacked this man, when did they attack him, and why?
Look at the list. This is not a list for a historical debate; it is a class map.
- 1918–1922: The first to attack him were the White generals and the fourteen states that landed troops to strangle Soviet Russia. The charge was "dictatorship." The aim was to take back the property of the landlords and the industrialists.
- The 1930s: The Nazi propaganda apparatus became the loudest voice in Europe conducting the campaign against the USSR under the heading of "Bolshevik barbarism." The aim was to legitimise the war of extermination to be waged in the East.
- 1946–1991: The Cold War. A significant part of the apparatus that produced, printed and distributed the accusations to the world — journals, conferences, "cultural freedom" organisations — was financed directly or indirectly by Western intelligence. The aim was to remove socialism as an option in the eyes of the peoples freeing themselves from colonialism and of the West’s own working class.
- 1956: For the first time the attack came from within. And precisely for that reason it was the most destructive of all. Thirty-five years after Khrushchev’s report came 1991.
- After 1991: The statues were pulled down, the street names were changed, the archives were opened — and the archives that were opened did not confirm the figures of "twenty million" or "sixty million" that had been in circulation for forty years. Yet the campaign did not stop; only its language changed.
- 2008 and 2019: The Prague Declaration and the resolution of the European Parliament. This time the accusation was given legal form: Nazism and socialism were officially equated. Thereafter communist parties and symbols were banned in many countries, and monuments to those who had fought fascism were torn down.
A hundred years, six distinct periods, actors utterly unlike one another. What could a White general have in common with the European Parliament?
One thing only: they all stand on the same side of the class line.
In no period were those who attacked this man the working class. They were not the miner on strike, not the peasant who took up arms to be rid of colonial rule, not the partisan who went to the mountains against fascism. Each time the attackers were the owners of property, their states and their intellectuals. And each time the target of the attack was not a man’s personality but the possibility he represented: the possibility that the propertyless might take power and build a country with their own hands.
Let us open an honest parenthesis here, because this dossier will be built on honesty from beginning to end: to say "the attackers were bourgeois" is not to say "everything they said was a lie." Real injustices occurred in that period, real mistakes were made, real prices were paid. Within this dossier we count them one by one and conceal none of them. But to understand the purpose of a campaign, one must look at who conducted it, when, and out of what need. Had the purpose been historical accuracy, the figures would have been corrected when the archives were opened. They were not.
Come, Let Us Analyse the Process
To defend in anger is easy, and it is useless. To reject the accusations by rote is no better.
What we shall do is something else: we will open up the process from the beginning, step by step, with the facts.
First we will get to know two men — who Stalin was, who Trotsky was, where the problem between them came from, why the camps formed. Then we will lay the chronology from 1878 to the present before us, date by date, without adding commentary. Only when these are finished will we make our assessment: what we defend, what we do not defend, what lessons we draw.
Young comrade, take this order seriously. The most common error in this debate is to pass judgement before learning the facts — and both sides commit it. Your advantage must be that you know the facts better than the person across from you.
Let us begin.
PART I — TWO MEN AND THE PROBLEM BETWEEN THEM
Who Is Stalin?
Iosif Vissarionovich Jughashvili was born on 18 December 1878 in the town of Gori in Georgia. His father was a cobbler, his mother a laundress. He came from an oppressed nation of the Russian Empire and from a poor family — unlike the urban-intellectual type that made up the majority of the Bolshevik leadership.
He was sent to the seminary in Tiflis; he came out of it a Marxist and was expelled in 1899. By 1901 he was inside the social-democratic organisation in Tiflis. When the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, he took his place alongside the Bolsheviks and remained there for the rest of his life.
His life between 1903 and 1917 is the ordinary life of a professional revolutionary: organising among the oil workers of Baku, strikes, the underground press, arrests, Siberian exile, escapes. He was arrested seven times and escaped six. Lenin brought him into the Central Committee in 1912. That same year he took part in the founding of Pravda, and in 1913 he wrote Marxism and the National Question — a work Lenin valued highly, and which made him the party’s specialist on the national question.
In February 1917 he returned from exile. During the October Revolution he was a member of the Central Committee and of the organs that directed the insurrection. In November 1917 he became People’s Commissar for Nationalities. In the civil war he was assigned to the Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), Petrograd and Polish fronts.
In April 1922 he was elected General Secretary of the party. At that date this was regarded as a technical-organisational post; no one imagined it would become the most powerful office in the party.
In short: Stalin was not one of the revolution’s famous orators. He was the man of the apparatus, of the organisation, of cadre work. This would later become the source both of his strength and of the criticisms directed at him.
Who Is Trotsky?
Lev Davidovich Bronstein was born on 7 November 1879 in the village of Yanovka in Ukraine, the child of a well-off farming family. He studied in Odessa, entered the revolutionary movement at a young age, was arrested in 1898, exiled to Siberia, and escaped in 1902. The name "Trotsky" is the name on the false passport he used while escaping.
In the split of 1903 he took his place alongside the Mensheviks. In September 1904 he broke with them as well, and until 1917 he attached himself fully to no faction; he stood in an independent position, trying to unite the two wings. Lenin opposed sharply the "August Bloc" he attempted to build in 1912. These fourteen years would form a file brought before him again and again in the later disputes.
In 1905, at the age of 26, he became chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. This is an extraordinary achievement, and it made him at a stroke one of the recognised names of the revolution.
In May 1917 he returned to Russia and joined the Interdistrict Organisation (Mezhraiontsy); in July–August 1917 this organisation joined the Bolshevik Party and Trotsky was elected directly to the Central Committee. That is to say, he became a Bolshevik only three months before the revolution.
On 8 October 1917 he was elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. At the head of the Military Revolutionary Committee he took charge of the military-technical direction of the October insurrection. In November 1917 he became People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, and in March 1918 People’s Commissar for War, a post he held until January 1925. The founding of the Red Army belongs to this period.
In short: Trotsky was the revolution’s most brilliant orator and its most visible military leader. But his party history was not Bolshevik. These two truths must be held together if the whole of the story is to be understood.
Where Does the Problem Between Them Come From?
The most widespread account in this debate runs as follows: "Two men fought over power." This account is both lazy and false. There really was a problem between the two men — but that problem has four real sources, and not one of them is personal.
a) Different party histories (1903–1917)
Stalin was an uninterrupted Bolshevik from 1903 onward. Trotsky was not until 1917, and moreover in those years he had written harsh polemics against Lenin. After the revolution, most of the party’s cadres were people who had lain in the underground together and escaped together. Trotsky stood outside this shared past.
This was not a matter of personal jealousy but a matter of organisational trust. When a dispute arises, a party cadre trusts one of its own. Trotsky’s brilliance was not enough to close this disadvantage — at times it even widened it.
b) Practical conflicts of the civil war years (1918–1921)
The first real friction between the two was not theory but the conduct of the war. In 1918 they clashed over military methods on the Tsaritsyn front. Trotsky defended the use of former tsarist officers in the army; Stalin and a group of cadres opposed it.
But the great dispute was the trade union debate of 1920–1921. Trotsky argued that the post-war economy could only be put right through "the militarisation of labour": compulsory labour obligation, the subordination of the trade unions to the state, and the driving into production, as "labour armies," of units demobilised from the army. In his own words, "the element of state coercion will play an exceedingly large role."
In this debate the man opposite Trotsky was not Stalin but Lenin. And Trotsky lost. Young comrade, note this: the clearest theoretical defence of the accusation levelled today at Stalin — that he "imposed discipline on the working class" — was made by Trotsky in 1920 and rejected by Lenin.
c) Lenin’s illness and the question "who will carry on?" (1922–1924)
In May 1922 Lenin suffered his first stroke. In March 1923 he lost the power of speech. In January 1924 he died.
This was not a personal tragedy but an institutional crisis. The party that had made the revolution had lost the leader who settled its disputes, who arbitrated, whose authority was beyond question — and there was no mechanism for who would take his place.
In this period Lenin dictated the notes later known as the "Testament." In these notes he criticises all of the leaders; in the addendum dated 4 January 1923 he says that Stalin is "rude" and that his removal from the General Secretaryship should be considered. In the same notes there is also criticism of Trotsky for "excessive self-confidence" and "excessive preoccupation with the administrative side of affairs."
This document is genuine and we do not deny it. But we also say this: Lenin’s advice was a proposal made to the Central Committee, not the provision of a will; and the Central Committee discussed that proposal and kept Stalin in his post. Between the collective decision of the party and the note of a single person, what is binding according to the Leninist principle is the former.
d) And the real question: "What do we do now?" (after 1924)
All of the above prepared the ground. But the real division of camps formed around a concrete and urgent question:
The revolution did not come in the West. Under the NEP the economy recovered, but a stratum of enriched peasants (the kulaks) formed in the countryside and began to withhold grain from the towns. The country had no industry, its army was primitive, its enemies were strong. What is to be done?
- Trotsky and the Left Opposition: Industrialisation through rapid and severe transfer of resources from the peasantry; but the real hope lay abroad — if the world revolution does not come, this will not work.
- Bukharin and the Right: Let the NEP continue, let the peasantry grow rich slowly, let industry grow slowly on its back.
- Stalin and the party majority: The building of socialism in a single country can be begun. Industrialisation will be carried out by central plan, rapidly, and with our own resources.
This is where the division of camps came from. It was not a matter of the temperament of two men but a matter of a country’s strategy for survival. And when the grain crisis broke out in 1927–28 — that is, when the towns really began to go hungry — this dispute ceased to be theoretical and became an urgent question of state.
Why Did the Division of Camps Grow So Bitter?
Why, then, did a debate over programme turn into a rupture that went as far as expulsions and exiles? The plain reasons:
- The ban on factions. In March 1921, meeting in the middle of the Kronstadt rising and a profound crisis, the 10th Congress banned the formation of factions within the party. This decision was taken under Lenin, for extraordinary conditions. But it became permanent. The result: the line between opposing and forming a faction blurred, and opposition easily became a "crime against the party."
- The sense of encirclement. In 1927 Britain broke off relations, the revolution in China was bloodily defeated, and the expectation of war rose. In such periods every leadership hardens against internal opposition. This is not an excuse but an explanation.
- The opposition also changed its methods. In 1926–27 the United Opposition turned to methods that spilled beyond the party; on 7 November 1927 it appeared with separate banners at the demonstration for the anniversary of the revolution. This strengthened the other side’s hand.
- The absence of an institutional guarantee. This is the most fundamental reason. There was no mechanism by which a view left in the minority within the party could survive without being crushed and liquidated. This deficiency will confront us again and again in the later sections of this dossier.
PART II — CHRONOLOGY
The chronology below is without commentary. The assessment is in Part III.
Up to the revolution
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| December 1878 | Stalin born in Gori |
| November 1879 | Trotsky born in Yanovka |
| 1903 | 2nd Congress of the RSDLP: the Bolshevik–Menshevik split. Stalin a Bolshevik, Trotsky alongside the Mensheviks |
| 1905 | Trotsky chairman of the Petersburg Soviet |
| 1912 | Stalin brought into the Central Committee; Pravda founded. Trotsky’s "August Bloc" initiative |
| May 1917 | Trotsky returned to Russia, joined the Mezhraiontsy |
| July–August 1917 | The Mezhraiontsy joined the Bolsheviks; Trotsky became a member of the CC |
| 8 October 1917 | Trotsky elected chairman of the Petrograd Soviet |
| October 1917 | The October Revolution |
Power and civil war
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| November 1917 | Stalin People’s Commissar for Nationalities, Trotsky for Foreign Affairs |
| December 1917–February 1918 | The Brest-Litovsk negotiations. Trotsky’s "neither war nor peace" position rejected by Lenin |
| March 1918 | Trotsky became People’s Commissar for War |
| 1918–1922 | Civil war; the intervention of fourteen states; blockade |
| 1918 | Stalin–Trotsky friction at Tsaritsyn |
| March–April 1920 | 9th Congress: Trotsky’s thesis of "the militarisation of labour" |
| 1920–1921 | The trade union debate. Opposite Trotsky, Lenin. Trotsky lost |
| March 1921 | 10th Congress: the NEP adopted, factions banned. The Kronstadt rising suppressed (Trotsky chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council) |
The party left without Lenin
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 1922 | Stalin elected General Secretary |
| May 1922 | Lenin’s first stroke |
| December 1922–January 1923 | Lenin’s "Testament" notes; in the addendum dated 4 January 1923, the proposal to remove Stalin from his post |
| March 1923 | Lenin’s third stroke; he lost the power of speech |
| October 1923 | Trotsky’s letter to the CC and the "Declaration of the 46": the Left Opposition was born |
| 21 January 1924 | Lenin died |
| 1924 | Trotsky published Lessons of October, Stalin Foundations of Leninism |
| December 1924 | Stalin formulated the thesis of "socialism in one country" |
| January 1925 | Trotsky removed from the Commissariat of War |
The rupture
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1926 | The United Opposition formed (Trotsky–Zinoviev–Kamenev) |
| October 1926 | Trotsky removed from the Politburo |
| 1927 | The defeat of the Chinese revolution; Britain broke off relations; the expectation of war |
| 7 November 1927 | The opposition staged a separate demonstration on the anniversary of the revolution |
| November–December 1927 | Trotsky expelled from the party; the 15th Congress confirmed the decision |
| January 1928 | Trotsky exiled to Alma-Ata |
| 1927–1928 | The grain crisis: the peasantry withheld grain from the market, scarcity in the towns |
| 1928 | The First Five-Year Plan began |
| February 1929 | Trotsky deported from the USSR. He settled in Turkey, on Büyükada (Prinkipo) |
| November 1929 | Bukharin removed from the Politburo: the Right Opposition was liquidated as well |
Exile and construction
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1929–1933 | Trotsky on Büyükada. My Life and The History of the Russian Revolution were written here |
| 1929–1933 | Collectivisation and rapid industrialisation |
| 4 February 1931 | Stalin: "We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years." |
| 1932 | A "bloc" of opposition groups was formed (confirmed by the archival work of Broué and Getty) |
| 1932–1933 | The great famine; millions of deaths |
| July 1933 | Trotsky moved to France |
| January 1933 | Hitler came to power in Germany |
| 1935 | Trotsky to Norway |
| January 1937 | Trotsky settled in Mexico |
Terror, war, assassination
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1936–1938 | The Moscow Trials |
| 1937 | The Dewey Commission cleared Trotsky of the charges of the trials |
| 1937–1938 | The mass operations (including NKVD Order No. 00447). Archival record: approximately 1.5 million arrests, approximately 680,000 executions |
| January 1938 | The CC plenum adopted a severe criticism regarding unjust expulsions |
| September 1938 | The Munich Agreement: the West handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler; proposals for collective security were rejected |
| September 1938 | The Fourth International was founded |
| November 1938 | The mass operations were halted, Yezhov was removed, the files were re-examined |
| August 1939 | The Molotov–Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact (including its secret protocol) |
| September 1939 | The Second World War began |
| 1939–April 1940 | Trotsky argued within his own movement against the Burnham–Shachtman wing, which abandoned the defence of the USSR; the movement split |
| 24 May 1940 | The first assassination attempt, in which Siqueiros took part, failed |
| 20–21 August 1940 | Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky |
The war and after
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 22 June 1941 | Nazi Germany attacked the USSR |
| 1941–1945 | The USSR suffered approximately 26.6 million losses (approximately 8.7 million of them soldiers) |
| 1941–1945 | The party took in approximately 5 million new members over the course of the war; the greater part of the pre-war cadre remained at the front |
| 27 January 1945 | The Red Army liberated Auschwitz |
| May 1945 | Berlin fell; fascism was defeated |
| March 1953 | Stalin died |
| February 1956 | The 20th Congress of the CPSU: Khrushchev’s "secret report" |
| November 1960 | The Moscow Meeting: Enver Hoxha condemned revisionism before 81 parties |
| October 1961 | By decision of the 22nd Congress, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum |
| 1961 | Mercader was given the Order of Lenin and the title Hero of the Soviet Union |
| 1991 | The USSR was dissolved |
| June 2008 | The Prague Declaration |
| 19 September 2019 | Resolution of the European Parliament: Nazism equated with "Stalinism" |
PART III — ASSESSMENT
There Is No Such Thing as "Stalinism"
Young comrade, at the very outset of the debate there is a word you must watch for: "Stalinism."
This is not the name of a doctrine. There is Marxism, there is Leninism — because these are names that added a new stage to the science of the working class. Marx uncovered the law of exploitation. Lenin founded the theory of the epoch of imperialism and of the power of the proletariat. Stalin, for his part, founded no new doctrine; he defended, applied and built what had been founded.
The very titles of his works show this: Foundations of Leninism, Problems of Leninism. In Enver Hoxha’s words, Stalin "won his place among the great classics of Marxism-Leninism through the stern and principled struggle he waged for the defence, the consistent application and the further development of the ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin."
Why, then, was this word invented? Because it works. In a single move it does three things at once:
- It separates. It tears Lenin away from Stalin. It says "good Lenin, bad Stalin." Appearing to defend the revolution, it condemns the period of construction.
- It personalises. It reduces thirty years of a social order to the temperament of one man. It puts psychology in the place of class struggle. Thereby nothing remains to be learned from history — the explanation is "the man was like that."
- It opens the door. Whoever condemns Stalin today will condemn Lenin tomorrow. And so it went: the grandchildren of those who attacked Stalin in 1956 were the ones who pulled down the statues of Lenin in 1991.
For this reason we are not "Stalinists." We are Marxist-Leninists. We defend Stalin not as a separate banner but as the continuation of Lenin’s work.
The Conditions of the Period: What Was in Their Hands, What Stood Against Them?
It is easy to look back from today and say "it should have been done this way." But history is not a laboratory in which the options are unlimited.
The Bolsheviks did not inherit a ready-made country: a country that had come out of a world war, that had been torn apart by civil war and the intervention of fourteen states, that had been blockaded, whose industry had fallen far below the level of 1913, and that had suffered a great famine in 1921. The overwhelming majority of the population were peasants, could not read or write, and had no engineers.
And the clock was running. Stalin’s words of 4 February 1931 give the whole logic of the period:
"We are fifty to a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us."
Ten years and four months after this speech, on 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany attacked.
Young comrade, the point here is not a prophecy. The point is this: if industrialisation had not been undertaken in 1928, with what would they have faced the enemy in 1941? Whoever says "it should not have been done this way" is also obliged to answer the question "what should have been done instead, and what would have happened in 1941?"
The Wiping of Fascism from the Face of the Earth
This is the point most attacked today, so let us speak plainly.
The overwhelming majority of the Nazi army’s losses were suffered on the Eastern Front. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. The gates of Auschwitz were broken open by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. It was the Red Army that entered Berlin. The price, by the official figure based on the 1993 study of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was approximately 26.6 million human beings.
And this victory is the product of the 1930s:
- Had heavy industry not been built, the T-34, the Katyusha and the Il-2 could not have been produced.
- That hundreds of factories could be dismantled and moved east of the Urals in the first months of the war was a possibility created by central planning.
- The rise of literacy from roughly 51 percent in 1926 to above 80 percent in 1939 meant a generation that could operate a tank and repair an aircraft.
That is to say, the debate over industrialisation is not an abstract debate about development but a debate about the defeat of fascism. If we do not live today in Europe under a fascist flag, if the Jewish, Roma and Slavic peoples were not wiped from the map, the price for that was paid principally there.
An honest note on Molotov–Ribbentrop: The pact is real, its secret protocol is real, and the USSR denied it for decades; we do not defend this. But we recall the chronology: for years the USSR proposed collective security to the West and was refused; in September 1938 at Munich, Czechoslovakia was handed to Hitler. The pact was signed after these refusals and bought roughly 22 months. To divide the responsibility for the war between the attacker and the attacked is not history but politics.
The Price of Victory: The Breaking of the Party’s Cadre Backbone
This is the least known but most important section of the dossier. An important part of the answer to the question "if socialism was so strong, how did it collapse?" lies here.
In the war the communists went first. This was not a phrase but a practice. At the front the hardest tasks were given to party members and to the Komsomol. The call "Communists to the front!" was really shouted in the trenches. Political commissars belonged to the category that, by special orders of the Nazi army, were shot rather than taken prisoner. To be a party member in the war was not a privilege but an increased probability of dying.
The result: the party, which before the war had approximately 3.9 million members and candidate members, took in approximately 5 million new members over the course of the war and entered 1945 with roughly 5.8 million. Consider this arithmetic for a moment. The majority of the post-war party consisted of people who had been taken into the party at the front during the war.
Let us not construct a single sentence about them that could be misunderstood: they were heroes. We are speaking of people who enrolled in the party as they went to their deaths. But the strength of a revolutionary party is not measured by sacrifice alone; it is also measured by theoretical formation. And that is exactly what was lost:
- The generation that had lived the revolution itself, that had seen 1905 and 1917,
- The cadres tempered in the great inner-party debates, who had defeated both Bukharin and Trotsky by reading them,
- The middle ranks equipped to say "stop" to an error coming from above.
When we add to this the communist cadres lost in 1937–38, the picture grows heavier.
The result: when Stalin died in 1953, there was no broad stratum of cadres, ideologically armed and able to supervise the leadership, standing before him. Had there been, Khrushchev’s report in 1956 could not have been read out in a hall and passed over; it would have been debated, refuted, and its author called to account.
But let us stop here and be honest: This is an explanation, not an excuse. If a socialist system is left defenceless upon the loss of its cadres, then there is a structural problem there. Socialism cannot be an equilibrium dependent on the existence of good leaders; it needs an institutional guarantee resting on the supervision of the masses. That guarantee was not established.
Enver Hoxha and the Resistance Against Revisionism
When Khrushchev launched the attack in 1956, the greater part of the world communist movement either fell silent or looked on.
One of those who did not fall silent was the Party of Labour of Albania and Enver Hoxha. At the Moscow Meeting of November 1960, before eighty-one parties, he condemned revisionism to Khrushchev’s face. He paid the price in embargo, isolation and hostility.
Hoxha’s contribution was not an emotional defence of Stalin but the diagnosis of revisionism as a class phenomenon. His thesis is this: Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin is not a historical debate but the ideological preparation for the return from socialism. The target is Stalin, because Stalin is the living proof that socialism can be built.
From his works With Stalin (1979) and The Khrushchevites (1980):
"The Nikita Khrushchev gang were encouraged and supported in their slanders against Stalin by the renegade Josip Broz Tito."
"The Khrushchevites, headed by Khrushchev, while condemning the cult of Stalin in order to cover up their subsequent crimes against the Soviet Union and socialism, raised the cult of Khrushchev to the skies."
"The name of Comrade Stalin is the banner of all the victories of the Soviet people, the banner of the struggle of the working people everywhere in the world."
Grasp the logic here: Hoxha defends Stalin not as a person but as the symbol of a line; and he says that the target of the attack, too, is not a person but that line. Looking back, the correctness of the diagnosis is plain — from the road opened in 1956 there came, thirty-five years later, 1991.
The ideological genealogy of CIPOML comes from here: from the international current that did not surrender in 1956, that resisted revisionism.
We Do Not Make Idols: Deficiencies, Errors, Lessons
The weakest way of defending a historical period is to declare it flawless. Everything declared flawless collapses entirely at the first flaw found. Marxism is not a religion but a science; and science is the name of the method that records and corrects its errors.
1. The injustices of the mass operations. For 1937–38 the archives give a record of approximately 1.5 million arrests and approximately 680,000 executions. These data, which do not confirm the Cold War’s figures of "20 million," are by no measure small. The assignment of "quotas" to regions, the encouragement of denunciation, and extraordinary procedures led to the loss of a great many innocent people — and a great many communists. The first to establish this was not an outside critic but the party itself (the plenum of January 1938, the decisions of November 1938).
2. Theoretical inconsistency. The tension between the assessment of 1936 that class struggle had in the main been resolved and the extraordinary measures escalated in those very same years points to an inadequate grasp of the forms of class struggle under socialism.
3. The method of collectivisation. Historical necessity is one thing; the speed of implementation and the element of coercion are another. Millions died in the famine of 1932–33. The claim that there existed a premeditated "plan of genocide" is not supported by serious historians; but it is clear that a heavy administrative responsibility was borne.
4. Serious errors on the national question. The wholesale deportation of peoples such as the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and Ingush, the Meskhetian Turks and the Volga Germans is an approach that holds an entire people collectively responsible, and it is incompatible with Leninist national policy.
5. The cult of the individual. Collective leadership is a fundamental principle of the Leninist conception of the party. Its erosion did not strengthen the defence but made it fragile: when a system rests upon a single name, the system wears away as that name is worn away. This is exactly what Khrushchev did in 1956 — and, as Hoxha pointed out, in condemning the cult of the individual he established his own cult.
6. The greatest deficiency: the failure to establish an institutional guarantee. This is the problem underlying all the rest. Socialism is not completed by the nationalisation of the means of production. The real question is the mechanisms by which the working class can genuinely supervise the state apparatus. It is because these were not established that in 1956 the counter-revolution could be carried out not by an uprising from below but by a decision from above.
This is the real lesson: Socialism must rest not on the quality of leaders but on the supervision of the masses. If we do not take this lesson, what we defend is not history but nostalgia.
Trotsky: Thanks and Parting
The first condition of criticising a revolutionary is to give him his due.
Thanks. In 1905, at the age of 26, Trotsky was chairman of the Petersburg Soviet. In 1917, as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in the military-technical organisation of the October insurrection. In the civil war he stood at the head of the cadres who organised the Red Army. In exile he did not surrender to the bourgeoisie, did not become an informer for imperialism, did not repent of his past. He died poor, he died in exile, he died still counting himself a revolutionary. We acknowledge this, and for this we give thanks.
Parting. Our criticism concerns not intentions but results. The value of a political line is measured not by its subjective good intentions but by which camp it strengthened. In a period when fascism was crushing Europe and the movement’s single need was unity, to establish a permanent anti-Stalin centre on an international scale divided the front, whatever the intention behind it.
Let us be honest: Trotsky defined the USSR as a "degenerated workers’ state" and called for its defence in the war; in 1939–40 he fought within his own movement against the wing that abandoned this, and he died leaving that fight unfinished.
But through that crack there entered things Trotsky never wanted. After his death, the critique of "bureaucracy" was carried to a place he himself never reached: to the thesis that the USSR was a new exploiting class society, or even a variety of fascism. James Burnham — the chief theoretician of the American Trotskyist movement — broke away in 1940 over precisely this question, wrote The Managerial Revolution a year later, worked in the orbit of the US intelligence apparatus, was among the founding editors of National Review in 1955, and in 1983 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Reagan’s hand. The road of Max Shachtman, too, brought him at the end of his life to a point of supporting the Vietnam War.
It would be wrong to derive from this a law such as "every Trotskyist becomes a neoconservative"; there are a great many honest people who came out of that tradition and struggled against imperialism all their lives. But this much is plain: the first systematic theoreticians within the left of the idea that "socialism was never there in the first place, what was there was a kind of totalitarianism" came out of that milieu. For the bourgeoisie this was priceless: to have communism condemned from the mouth of a communist.
On the assassination. We said it at the beginning of the dossier and we repeat it here: Mercader was an NKVD agent, and this method was wrong. Individual assassination is not a Marxist method; Marxism conducts its struggle between classes and programmes. Its practical result is plain as well: instead of being defeated politically, Trotsky won a martyr’s crown. To say this is not a weakness but the strength of a movement able to sit in judgement on its own history.
Today: 23 August and the Lie of the "Two Totalitarianisms"
Do not suppose that this debate was left behind in 1940. Look at the calendar.
Two days after the anniversary of Trotsky’s death, 23 August, is the date the European Union has declared a "Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Stalinism and Nazism." It is the product of a campaign that began with the Prague Declaration of 2008 and reached its peak with the European Parliament resolution of 19 September 2019.
Let us say plainly what it means:
- It means putting the one who built Auschwitz and the one who broke open the gates of Auschwitz in the same scale.
- It means identifying the country that defeated fascism at the cost of 26.6 million of its people with the very thing it defeated.
- And finally: it means declaring, as though it were a law of history, that the taking of power by the working class leads inevitably to the concentration camp.
This last item is the real target. Because once this thesis is accepted, what is under discussion is no longer Stalin but socialism itself. That is why, following these resolutions, communist parties and symbols have been banned in many countries and the monuments of those who fought fascism have been torn down.
It is precisely at this point that to say "I do not defend Stalin, I am a Trotskyist" is not a position. Because the other side is not making that distinction. Their target is not a person but a possibility.
Conclusion: The Torch of Socialism’s Honour
Let us gather it together.
To defend Stalin is not to defend a man. It is to defend a claim: the claim that the working class can take power, that it can transform a poor and backward country in a single generation, that it can defeat fascism, and that it can do so while facing up to its own errors as well.
Today the bourgeoisie does not conduct a historical debate in order to refute this claim; it constructs history. What it gains when it seats Stalin beside Hitler is not a judgement about the past but a prohibition regarding the future: "Do not try; this is where it ends."
And it is precisely for this reason that we defend. In spite of everything, Stalin is the torch of socialism’s honour. Together with his errors, the prices paid and the deficiencies; but at the same time, his is the name of a period that fed a hungry country, that taught an illiterate people to read, that smashed the order which shut women in the home, and that wiped fascism from the face of the earth.
And we defend honestly. Because a movement that can look honestly at its own history can learn from it; neither the one who idolises nor the one who denies can learn.
On the anniversary of Trotsky’s death, what falls to us is neither to spit on his grave nor to kneel before it. What falls to us is to look at the test both lines have undergone in a hundred years of practice, and to ask the question a young communist ought to ask:
Which of them left a real power in the hands of the working class? And what must we do today so as never to lose that power again?
The answer to this question lies not in the past but in the struggle before us.
Appendix 1 — Notes
"Stalin killed millions of people." → Which figure, which source? For 1937–38 the archives give a record of approximately 680,000 executions. This is not a small number and we do discuss it. But the figure of "20 million" comes not from the archives but from Cold War estimates, and it has not been confirmed.
"You are a Stalinist." → There is no doctrine called "Stalinism." There is Marxism-Leninism. Stalin founded no new doctrine; he carried on Lenin’s work. To use this word is the way of dragging the debate from science down to the person.
"Even Lenin, in his testament, wanted Stalin removed." → True, that document is genuine. But it was not the provision of a will; it was a proposal made to the Central Committee. The CC discussed it and kept Stalin in his post. Moreover, Trotsky is criticised in the same notes. According to the Leninist principle, what is binding is the decision of the collective organ.
"Trotsky was right, the USSR collapsed." → The USSR dissolved not through foreign invasion, as Trotsky had said, but through a revisionist transformation from within that began in 1956. Moreover, the Fourth International was not able to lead a single revolution marching to power in any country.
"Stalin was just like Hitler." → One built the concentration camps, the other broke open their gates. One drew up a plan for the annihilation of peoples, the other stopped that plan at the cost of 26.6 million losses. Whoever equates these two serves not history but the politics of today.
"What will you say about Molotov–Ribbentrop?" → Both the pact and its secret protocol are real; we do not defend them. But the chronology is this: for years the USSR proposed collective security and was refused; in September 1938 at Munich, Czechoslovakia was handed to Hitler; the pact was signed after this and bought 22 months. Those who signed Munich are in no position to lecture today.
"So there are no errors at all?" → There are, there are many, and we count them: the injustices of the mass operations, the deportations, the cult of the individual, the erosion of inner-party democracy, the failure to establish an institutional guarantee. The difference with us is this: we take these up not as part of the enemy’s narrative but as our own lesson.
Appendix 2 — Bibliography
Primary sources
- J. V. Stalin, The Tasks of Business Executives (4 February 1931)
- J. V. Stalin, Foundations of Leninism; Marxism and the National Question (1913)
- V. I. Lenin, "Letter to the Congress" (Testament), December 1922 – January 1923
- Enver Hoxha, With Stalin (1979); The Khrushchevites (1980)
- L. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism (1920); The Organisation of Labour (1920); My Life (1930)
Secondary sources and archival studies
- J. Arch Getty & Oleg Naumov, The Road to Terror
- R. W. Davies & S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger
- Pierre Broué, Trotsky and the Bloc of the Oppositions of 1932 (1980)
- T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917-1967 (1968)
- Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks (memoirs — to be read critically)
- Russian Academy of Sciences, 1993 study of war losses
Current documents
- The Prague Declaration (June 2008)
- European Parliament, resolution of 19 September 2019 on "the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe"
- CIPOML, Thirty Years of Struggle for Revolution and Socialism
This dossier was written to open a discussion, not to close one. We await your objections, additions and corrections.
