By
Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
A lesser known fact (or at least
under-researched) is that the Soviet Union, on the eve of its collapse, was committed
to the concept of an unappeasable conflict, or as Foreign Minister Andrey
Gromyko described in his 1975 book The Foreign Policy of the Soviet Union:
"The Communist Party of the Soviet Union subordinates all its theoretical
and practical activity in the sphere of foreign relations to the task of
strengthening the positions of socialism, and the interests of further
developing and deepening the world revolutionary process." In fact until
abandoned and denounced by then Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in
1981 the general Soviet intention was to advance its borders when and if
possible.
A Briefing paper summarizing "Soyuz
81" (turned over to the CIA during the 1980's by Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski
at the time living in Poland) made this clear when it stated that along with a
planned crackdown in Poland, Moskau put in place a rapid advance force to break
trough NATO.1
After creating his own (be it smaller
than Hitler's) Jewish Holocaust (leading to today’s expansion of Israel),
Stalin after World War II turned to the new 'international problems', this was
clearly the perspective in which he saw them.
In fact faults already made at the
Nuremberg trial's was not only to impugne the
attitudes or records of any of the attorneys or appointed judges, but more
particularly the point that one of the Allies-the USSRhad
been expelled from the League of Nations a few years previously on the grounds,
it had colluded with the Nazis in the first aggression of World War II, against
Poland. (See our explosive coverage of hidden aspects of the WWII era in our
article series "The Hidden War Among The WWII Allies", below).
For example the appearance of Iona Nikitchenko as the Soviet-appointed judge at Nurenberg
should also have raised questions and provoked objections. He had been one of
the "judges" in the notorious Zinoviev trial of 1936-which was widely
believed, even then, to have been a gigantic fraud. Now, of course, this is
indisputable, and we know of other, more secret fake trials in which he took
part. So even if not proved at the time, we might agree that, at least
retrospectively, Nuremberg can be pronounced defective on this basis alone.
On the Soviet prosecutorial side we find
not only Nikitchenko but Lev Sheinin, who had also
already been associated in public print as having the prosecutor's role in
various faked trials, together with several others on the panel. (And we now
know that the secret Soviet commission for manipulating the trial consisted of
Andrey Vyshinsky,'lead prosecutor in the show trials,
three civilians, plus three leading secret police officers-the latter all shot
later-while their organization was represented at Nuremberg by the later
notorious interrogator and torturer Colonel M. T Likachev,
also eventually shot.)
The indictment included a charge that
the Nazis had murdered the Polish officers found in 1943 in the mass graves at
Katyn. The documents fully proving Soviet culpability were released in
Gorbachev's time. But even in the 1940s, there was considerable evidence
casting much doubt on the Soviet story. Meanwhile, the Soviets produced to the
court much evidence faked, to prove the Nazis' responsibility. If Katyn was
indeed to be regarded as a crime within the competence of the court, it should
have been properly examined and other witnesses presumably called. In fact, the
accusation against the Germans was simply dropped from the verdict-an
unconscionable anomaly.
It is worth adding that Moscow had under
arrest and was about to "try" a group of leaders of the Polish
political and military underground, that is, a group of leaders of another
Allied state. They had been promised safe conduct....
The initial "dekulakization"
and the collectivization of the peasantry into state-controlled farms need
little further analysis as it has been sufficiently documented by the end of
the 20th century. But there is much useful and decisive information about the
even more devastating "terror-famine" of 1932-33, Ukrainians going
north into Russia in 1930-33 to seek bread and being arrested or sent back. A
secret telegram, dated January 21, 1933, from Stalin and Molotov to the party
and police chiefs orders the blocking of peasants trying to enter Russia from
the Ukraine or Kuban; they are to be sent back and the ringleaders arrested.
This is followed by a report from Genrikh Yagoda, at the OGPU, that over two
hundred thousand have been sent back and several thousand arrested. The
Stalin-Molotov telegram blames the influx of peasants on Social Revolutionaries
and Polish agents wishing to start a famine scare-not an evidential point but
one revelatory of the Stalinist mind-set.
For example when reading the 1991 book
by E. N. Golod Oskolkov, 1932/1933 where these and
other documents we refer to next are published, one could possible conclude
that the leadership knew famine would follow if their plans were met.
The registration of death had been
largely suspended in the Ukraine after October 1932. Golod Oskolkov
documents that in the Kiev Medical Inspectorate, 9,472 corpses were noted, only
3,997 of which were registered, and similar things were reported from other
districts. On another point, a report to the Central Committee from the deputy
head of the North Caucasus Political Section of the Machine Tractor Stations
alleged that kulak bodies were being left near the railways to "simulate
famine".
To gain some general idea of the extent
of the transformation that took place in Soviet agriculture, it is useful to
remember that before World War I, Russia was by far the most important
grain-exporting country in the world: its grain exports were well more than
double those of the United States and constituted nearly one-third of the total
world grain market. Collectivization was, right from the start, carried out in
a thoroughly irrational manner. Yet it is possible to finance industrialization
out of the productivity of the peasantry, if handled properly. In
nineteenth-century Meiji Japan, despite having the disadvantage of a far
smaller existing industrial base than twentieth century Russia, incentives were
provided which improved agricultural production, and productivity in fact
doubled between 1885 and 1915, in complete contrast to the results obtained in
the USSR.
Yet the enserfment
or dispersal or deaths of the free peasantry were designed not merely to
destroy any independent economic forces but also to finance socialist
industry-so that millions of tons of grain were exported to pay for foreign
machines while the famine raged.
After reading Golod Oskolkov’s
1991 book, Cold War: An Illustrated History, 1945-1991, by Jeremy Isaacs
and Taylor Downing published shortly afterwards appears as an example of
what could be called ‘Historiography’ (where books about history follow
in the path of the ‘entertainment’ industry).
Not only did CNN’s “Cold War” view of
Lenin and others of his persuasion contrasted markedly with its treatment of
Western leaders. When it comes to the Soviet spies for example Burgess,
Maclean, and Philby, we are told in the book Cold War that "they acted
from political conviction. They believed what they were doing was right."
The same could be said of agents of Nazism like John Amery. But in any case,
this is (again) a simplistic point.
As to the ‘Rosenbergs'
motives, we are told that they were part of "a network of spies who felt
uncomfortable that the United States was the sole owner of the key to atomic
warfare." This gives an arguably acceptable motive for their espionage
activity, though since they never confessed and thus never advanced such a
motive, it is a constructed one.
The Rosenberg case was indeed highly
divisive of American opinion, but fact remains that Julius Rosenberg's
allegiance to Communism dates from before the war, and he entered a Soviet
espionage ring in 1942 in connection with technical secrets (radar systems,
bombsights, naval gunnery, etc.) and was not until later involved in nuclear
matters at all. And what the CNN book also does not mention is that the CPUSA
was not a political party in the ordinary sense, it was (with several million
dollars and until the late 1980s) heavily financed by Moscow.
Of course Joseph McCarthy
disgraced and distorted the real concern, and one can only conclude
that both WWII and the years that followed where marred by confusion when
once considers that at one point the US and England
fought a War alongside Stalin instead of refusing to comply with both Hitler
‘and’ Stalin as we point out in the article series ‘War of the Allies’.
In the CNN book those disillusioned
members of the CPUSA who thought that true accounts should be given and
"named names" are simply presented as the equivalent of school
snitches. But they too thought they were carrying out a moral duty and were
themselves the subject of various persecutions over the years.
Arthur Schlesinger. Jr. has pointed out
that such criteria would not have been applied to similar "betrayals"
by former members of American Nazi movements.
In fact along with the conspiracy
theories of Governor McCarthy, the foreign policy mistake to enter
the Vietnam War only added to the confusion. But it is a mistake of the CNN
production in to mention that when four students were killed at Kent
State by National Guards, that "a nation driven to use the weapons
of war upon its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos." In this
case it was not a "nation" that was responsible, a phrase that
might be more applicable to Tiananmen Square.
Yet Ted Turner in defense
of the book and the film, later said that Kent State and Tiananmen Square
are indeed comparable. Of course this doesn’t make Ted Turner any worse
historian then many popular author’s of high fame
today, 2 that present simplistic (but under-researched) points of view.
Cold War's presentation of another
central theme is also different from that advanced in its leading U.S.
historical adviser's book on the subject, We Now Know, by John Lewis Gaddis, in
which he describes the attempts by prominent Soviet officials to persuade
Stalin to initiate at least a period of comparative cooperation with the West.
The book implies, and this in a shallow and superficial fashion, that all
Stalin wanted was a buffer area between him and the West, contrary to
Litvinov's clear understanding.(1)
On a broader scale, the conflict is
represented in Cold War as one between two "ideologies"-sometimes
defined as capitalism versus Communism-that is, in a sort of balance. But this
is to misuse the word "ideology" and thus to avoid the difference
between the pluralist and totalitarian viewpoints.
"Totalitarianism," to be sure, is a word largely avoided by the CNN
book when it deals with Stalinism, though it was used of the Soviet order by
both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and found adequate by such famed scholars as Leszek
Kolakowski and Giovanni Sartori, and by many others of major repute, such as
the French historian François Furet.
The foreign policies of the West are
also subjected by the CNN book to what can only be called misrepresentation
from very early on, when Allied "interven
Lion" in Russia in 1918-19 is presented as a major effort to overthrow the
Soviet regime and one that had a permanent impact on Moscow's attitudes. Now,
first of all, the American "intervention" was minimal, and American
troops only had one minor skirmish with local Bolsheviks. The British intervention,
employing a couple of brigades, was larger. Asked in by the Soviets to block
German presence in the far north, the British were briefly in action against
the Bolsheviks, but their total casualties were a few hundred, some of them
against non-Bolshevik forces. It is true that history as taught under Stalin
made much of this "intervention," though the American component was
scarcely mentioned until it became politically suitable, in the 1940s. And no
serious scholar accepts the view presented in the CNN book.
It is true, of course, that the Allies
supported the anti-Bolshevik regimes in the Civil War, including those based on
the majority of the elected Constituent Assembly that Lenin had forcibly
dissolved. It is equally relevant that Lenin regarded the whole struggle as
part of an international revolution to be exported as and where possible, with
attempts to capture Warsaw, the crushing of the Social Democratic Georgian
Republic, and so on.
The book is also simply ridiculous, even
at its own level: (for example, a half page on Beria as Stalin's "evil
genius".) As with a photograph of an American and a Soviet soldier meeting
as the armies crushed the Nazis in 1945, with a note about the horse-drawn
Soviet army beating the motorized Germans. The opposite, if anything, is true.
The Germans had been largely horse-drawn, even in 1941. In 1945, the Soviets
were incomparably more mechanized, mainly with American trucks-as I saw myself
in the Balkans and as also emerges in Solzhenitsyn's poem of his own war
experience in Prussian Nights. (Nor does the book mention that the Russians who
then contacted the Americans were as a result later arrested.)
When it comes to the Cold War period, we
continually find such expressions as, in reference to U.S. actions after the
Communist seizure of power in Prague, "Washington deliberately fanned the
flames of anti-Communism." Or, to put it another way, expressed opposition
to the action. Intemperate remarks by Western politicians and others are
prominently figured. The far more pervasive and continual Soviet denunciations
of bloodthirsty Western imperialism, with endless cartoons of Uncle Sam and
John Bull-Tito too-wallowing in blood and with teeth like bayonets, which
persisted right into the 1980s, hardly figure. And as to revealing remarks, it
is odd not to find Stalin's telling the Yugoslav leaders in April 1945,
"The war will soon be over. We shall recover in fifteen to twenty years,
and then we'll have another go at it."
More than once, the CNN book uses
expressions like "left-leaning governments" as the targets of
American policy. This is an evasion. Many left-leaning governments, such as the
Socialist ones in Britain, Norway, Germany, and elsewhere, were among America's
stoutest allies. "Leftleaning" is
therefore a code word for "pro-Soviet"-quite a different thing.
Much space is devoted to American
support for the anti-Communist parties and trade unions, left and right, in
Italy, France, and elsewhere with, again, the Communists represented in a
favorable light. We are told that though the Italian Communist leader Palmiro
Togliatti had "spent the war years in Moscow, he was no stooge of the
Kremlin," and sought to develop a form of Communism suited to Italy and
opposed to tyranny, a program that appealed to many. This is followed by an
account of the American financial and other assistance provided to the
non-Communist democratic parties in Italy's 1947 election.
As to facts, Togliatti had been in
Moscow not merely in the war but in the early 1930s as one of the half dozen
top, leaders of the Stalinist Communist International, and he sponsored many of
its lethal purges. After Stalin's death in 1953, he occasionally developed a
rather independent stance but remained generally committed to the Soviet Union.
The program Togliatti put forward in 1947 did indeed appeal to a large public.
So did the program of the Czechoslovak Communist Party before it took power,
when it imposed one of the worst of the Stalinist dictatorships. The
implication that Togliatti could simply be trusted is a strange one. And we may
add to our view of the matter a detail that has recently emerged from Hungarian
archives and has been published in The First Domino, by Johanna Granville. In
Moscow on November 7, 1957, opinions of all the Communist leaders about
executing Hungarian premier Imre Nagy were taken. Only Wladyslaw Gomulka, then
head of the Polish United Workers' Party, disapproved, but Togliatti, while
approving, asked that it be put off until after the Italian elections! The
Americans are nevertheless presented as putting unfair pressure on or exerting
unfair influence on the Italian electorate-mainly by financial means. It is not
mentioned that the Italian Communist Party was itself heavily financed by the
Soviets.
A further point is that after the
elections, the Italian Communist Party remained free to operate, while in every
country where a Communist regime had come to power, whether through elections
or otherwise, parties had all been suppressed and their leaders killed or
jailed. They too had promised liberty; indeed, liberty for all anti-Fascist
parties was guaranteed in the Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian peace
treaties.
A constant theme is that Moscow had a
legitimate fear of Western aggression. We are told, for example, that a million
U.S. troops abroad were "all threatening the Soviet Union." They
were, of course, much outnumbered by the Soviet army. More telling yet is the
fact that right up to the end of the Cold War, the Communist armies in East
Germany were on short notice to invade the West, while NATO troop deployment
was wholly defensive.
There is notable inadequacy too on the
issue of nuclear weapons. For example, it might have been thought evidential to
include the fact that in 1948, although the United Nations Scientific and
Technical Committee (to which the question of atomic development was referred
and which included Russian and Polish scientists and the French Communist
professor Frédéric Joliot-Curie) reported unanimously in September 1946 that
inspection and control over the whole process of production was desirable and
technically possible, the Soviet representatives rejected all plans
incorporating this view as "an assault on State sovereignty." 3 They
also insisted on such limitations as were incompatible with the report of the
Scientific Committee. As Vyshinsky put it in the Political Committee on
November 10, 1949, "We are not obliged to subordinate ourselves or to
render an account in this matter to any international organs."
More strikingly, on the development of
the hydrogen bomb, we are told that Truman's decision to go ahead with it
"fired the starter's pistol for the ultimate arms race." But as the
USSR's leading nuclear physicist, Andrey Sakharov, pointed out, the USSR was
going ahead with the development of the bomb regardless of American work on it,
and the CNN book itself notes that in fact Moscow achieved a deliverable bomb
before the United States did.
There is much more to be said on the
distortions in this book, including on muddled or misleading passages on Soviet
internal matters, but more especially on such issues as Cuba, where Turner
personally tips the balance even further. It would be appropriate here to
mention that the most dangerous attitudes to nuclear war, as Sergei
Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev's son, puts it in his chapter on the Cuban
missile crisis of 1962, were those of "Castro and Guevara," a point
worth making when the latter is again being The confrontation with the West
was, like the ruin of the economy, a product of the mental distortions of the
Soviet order. The "insane militarisation"
Gorbachev spoke of was a symptom of the mind-set that prevailed, which required
an unceasing struggle with all other cultures. And, above all, it was a
militarization the Soviet economy was unable to make decisive, even through ruining itself in the attempt. So the only way the
West could have been put in an impossible position was if it could have been
prevented from responding with adequate armament. And since this was not
physically possible, it would have to have been secured by other means-that
is, by inducing the West not to respond to the real threat. This could only be
done by in some way destroying or radically weakening the West's will to
respond adequately. And this was, of course, the aim of Soviet propaganda and
diplomacy and the general effort to mislead the Western peoples and
governments.
This was undertaken, with a
long-drawn-out production of false claims of devotion to peace and,
unbelievably, to freedom, goodwill, and all the other amicable evidence of
progress and liberty. Though some elements in the West were sweetened, or
silenced, by this ploy, it failed, just as the economy had failed to outmatch
the West's response. The main reason for this failure was, of course, that the
realities of Soviet actions and intentions could only be concealed by an
enormous and, as it turned out, inadequate effort.
This big question remains. In the Soviet
bloc itself, all who reached any reasonable level of knowledge or judgment were
aware of and repelled by the actualities. It was outside that zone that the
Soviets had a measure of success. And this is, above all, fearful evidence of
the murky mental atmosphere we have tried to analyze and detoxify in these
pages.
This was in part owing to the whole
Stalinist heritage, but most of all to the brain-numbing atmosphere; in
addition to being the product of an abnormal mental setup, the Soviet
establishment was, or the larger part of it was (at the highest level), stupid.
It was the product of a party that had well under ten thousand members in 1910
and over the post revolutionary years had been purged
of all tendencies to see reality in terms other than dull fantasy.
It is not our purpose here to examine
the current and future state of Russia. It is clear that the huge mental and
physical distortions inflicted A Collapse of Unreality in 1991, Russia was not
in the position that Germany-West Germany was in 1945, when a democratic
or open society could be built almost from scratch. One result of the less
complete and more gradual changes in Russia is that a huge burden of both
physical and mental trappings and actualities of the past remain. (See more
about that in our next article)
So we have a Russia with thousands of
warheads and a chauvinistic tinge. We coped, the world coped, with a much worse
Russia. It has been, and will continue to be, a long hard slog.
facts that impugned the attitudes or
records of any of the attorneys or appointed judges. On trial for, amongst
other things, wars of aggression, they were thus unable to make the point that
one of the Allies-the USSR had been expelled from the League of Nations a few
years previously on just those grounds or that, indeed, it had colluded with
the Nazis in the first aggression of World War II, against Poland.
The indictment included a charge that
the Nazis had murdered the Polish officers found in 1943 in the mass graves at
Katyn. The documents fully proving Soviet culpability were released in
Gorbachev's time. But even in the 1940s, there was considerable evidence
casting much doubt on the Soviet story. Meanwhile, the Soviets produced to the
court much evidence-faked, of course-to prove the Nazis' responsibility. If
Katyn was indeed to be regarded as a crime within the competence of the court,
it should have been properly examined and other witnesses presumably called. In
fact, the accusation against the Germans was simply dropped from the verdict-an
unconscionable anomaly.
It is worth adding that Moscow had under
arrest and was about to "try" a group of leaders of the Polish
political and military underground, that is, a group of leaders of another
Allied state. They had been promised safe conduct.... This gross offense to
justice and to democratic politicians was thus an immediate background to
Nuremberg.
To gain some general idea of the extent
of the transformation that took place in Soviet agriculture, it is useful to
remember that before World War I, Russia was by far the most important
grain-exporting country in the world: its grain exports were well more than
double those of the United Stthe Politburo in July
1932, when Molotov, just back from the Ukraine, ates
and constituted nearly one-third of the total world grain market.
Collectivization was, right from the start, carried out in a thoroughly irrational
manner. Yet it is possible to finance industrialization out of the productivity
of the peasantry, if handled properly. In nineteenth-century Meiji Japan,
despite having the disadvantage of a far smaller existing industrial base than twentiethcentury Russia, incentives were provided which
improved agricultural production, and productivity in fact doubled between 1885
and 1915, in complete contrast to the results obtained in the USSR.
Yet the enserfment
or dispersal or deaths of the free peasantry were designed not merely to
destroy any independent economic forces but also to finance socialist
industry-so that millions of tons of grain were exported to pay for foreign
machines while the famine raged.
1. See Benjamin Weisser, A Secret Life,
2004.
2. Examples are The Lexus and the Olive
Tree, by Thomas L. Friedman, Samuel Huntington The Clash of Civilizations,
Robert Kaplans Balkan Ghosts, Dinesh D'Souza's Virtue of Prosperity.
3. Andrey Vyshinsky in the UN General
Assembly, November 9, 1948.
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