Stalin

Shortly before his death in 1924, Lenin was succeeded by Joseph Stalin. During Premier Stalin's administration, the modern industrial base of the Soviet Union was developed. Toward the end of the Stalin's rule, the Soviet Empire reached its largest extent. Stalin's favorite saying was

His favorite book was Boleslaw Prus’ (1895) Pharaoh, a novel on an archetype of the mechanisms of state power.

One of the best Polish novels, Boleslaw Prus' Pharaoh a novel on mechanisms of political power power, an archetype of the struggle for and the maintenance of political power that goes on within any state, was a favorite of Joseph Stalin. Pharaoh is a metaphor of society-as-organism that Prus had adopted from Herbert Spencer. The protagonist of the novel, Pharaoh Ramses, learns that those who would oppose religion are exposed to

cooption

seduction

subornation

defamation

intimidation

assassination

These conclusions are supported by historical evidence and, among others, by a recent research by Ariel Toaff, professor of Medieval and Renaissance History at Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv, Israel. Professor Toaff describes instances of parents murdering their children facing religious conversion and cases of deeply religious persons resorting to poisoning and assassination when perceiving that their religious beliefs or their religion was thwarted.

The central problem of the Premier Stalin administration was inherited from the Czars who for centuries struggled with the Khazar minority of the Russian Empire. About the time of Charlemagne, the eastern confines of Europe were ruled the Khazar Empire. The Khazar Empire was situated in what is now southern Russia, between the Black and Caspian Seas and extended far northward toward the city of Kiev. It consisted of a people known as the Khazars who adopted Judaism as the state religion. Neighbors of the Khazar Empire were the super-powers of that day: the Moslem empire of the Caliphs to the South, Prince Vladimir's Russia to the north, and the Byzantium Empire to the west.

The Khazars were warlike people and their rule was brutal and oppressive. Finally the allied forces of Prince Vladimir's Russia and Byzantium destroyed the Khazar Empire; Khazar were driven out of their homeland between the seas, many of them into eastern Europe. There they merged to some extent with Jews of the Diaspora from Palestine. Down through the ages, the Khazars dream of regaining their power within the Russian Empire has been passed down from generation to generation; it materialized after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Atrocity Attributions With the passage of time, the magnitude of atrocities ascribed to Joseph Stalin is not diminishing. The anti-Stalin propaganda intensified after the fall of the Soviet Union and the numbers of millions of his alleged victims are reaching absurd magnitudes. These atrocity attributions are characteristics of the religious hate mythology, not accessible to rational arguments.

Voices of the oppressed W.E.B. Du Bois conducted numerous studies of Black society in America and believed that social science could provide solutions to race problems. W.E.B. Du Bois (in Sundquist, 1996, p. 287) describes Joseph Stalin as follows.

"Stalin was attacked and slandered as few men of power have been; yet he seldom lost his courtesy or balance; nor did he let attack neither drive him from his convictions nor induce him to surrender positions which he knew were correct. He was simple, calm and courageous. He seldom lost his poise; pondered problems slowly, made his decisions clearly and firmly. His judgment of men was profound. As one of the despised minorities of man, he first set Russia on the road to conquer race prejudice and make one nation out of its 140 groups without destroying their individuality.

Paul Robeson, best known for singing the Ol' Man River in Oscar Hammerstein's Show Boat, left the bar after a a stenographer refused to take down a memo, saying,

In the Soviet Union, Yakuts, Nenetses, Kirgiz, Tadzhiks were helped to advance. In the development of minorities Stalin had played a decisive role. No empty promises, such as colored folk continuously hear in the United States, but deeds. And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an "American Century" blinds them to see how under the Stalin millions of enslaved people have found a new life.

Voices of those who knew him
In 1931, G. Bernard Shaw visited the Soviet Union and spent an evening in friendly conversation with Joseph Stalin. Eldon C. Hill (1978, p.139) in his biography of George Bernard Shaw writes that after his return, his enthusiasm about the Soviet Union was 'almost unbounded.'

Marshal Zhukov in his (1991) book From Moscow to Berlin, describes his frequent interactions with Marshal Stalin that convey the picture of Stalin as determined, intelligent person with profound knowledge and objective judgment of both of his allies and his enemies.

During its existence and to even greater degree after its fall, the Soviet Union was demonized by the propaganda which bears the main attributes of hate-mongering of religious groups.

- The cognitive systems of its proponents are closed and not accessible to rational discussion.

Dissonant arguments are not permitted in the mainstream media, books containing dissonant facts are removed from libraries, and pressure is exerted on Internet hosts and search engines providers to remove or marginalize articles containing such facts or arguments.

When the Soviet archives opened, the archival research pertaining to number of people incarcerated during the existence of the Soviet Union was ignored by the mainstream media, however, was published in the French academic journal l'Histoire (September 1993). The graph below compares the number of people in Soviet jails and 'gulags' during the Premier Stalin administration (years listed on the left of the first column) and in the jails and prisons of the United States of America (years listed on the right of the first column) during the administrations of Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and the Bush presidential dynasty.

One can compare these numbers with the "estimates" of victims of "Stalin's purges" which frequently range between 20 and 60 millions of people.

Similar discrepancies between fact and fiction also exist with respect to the length of incarceration. The "information" propagated by the mainstream media implies that to be a convict in the Soviet Union involved endless years in prison. However, before 1937, the maximum possible prison term was 10 years. In 1939, 95.9% of prison terms was up to 5 years, 4% from 5 to10 years and 0.1% over 10 years. In subsequent years the length of incarceration increased to 56.8% serving up to 5 years, 42,2% between 5 and10 years and 1% over 10 years.

An emerging view
Claire Bigg (St. Petersburg Times, March 7, 2003) writes that a recent poll over 50 per cent of respondents saw Stalin's role in history as positive and relates an interview with an elderly Russian woman, excerpted as follows.

We had a happy childhood under Stalin. We had good schools, were brought up well and had great teachers. There were no street kids. And now, under the capitalists, you see them everywhere.

In a sequel to her 2003 article, Claire Bigg (2005) reports that Stalin’s popularity is growing at an unprecedented rate. The city council of Volgograd is considering restoring the city's previous name, Stalingrad. Three cities have announced plans to restore monuments to Stalin that were pulled down and nostalgia for the Golden Age of the Soviet Union under the administration of Premier Stalin is receiving an increasingly receptive audience among younger Russians, disillusioned by market economy and Western values.

Recently released Soviet archival materials related to Joseph Stalin were excerpted by Robert Service (2005) in his Stalin: A Biography, where he shows the astonished reader that so much vilified Stalin wrote sensitive poetry, inspired loyalty, and was a caring father. The Publishers Weekly comments that

Most previous biographers have depicted Stalin as a plodding figure whose only distinguishing characteristic was brutality. But Service describes a man who was intelligent and hardworking and who learned from experience. On so many of the complex issues of Soviet history Service provides lucid accounts based on his own research and the most recent scholarship. Stalin was the key figure behind every major development from the mid-1920s onward. He based his policy decisions on a realistic assessment of his own often uneasy position and of the Soviet Union's relatively weak standing in the world.

After President Bush, in 2007, unveiled a monument to the victims of communism in Washington and compared communism to modern terror groups, Premier Putin commented that many of the war crimes of the United States were worse than the abuses of Stalin. "We have not used nuclear weapons against a civilian population," he said. "We have not sprayed thousands of kilometers with chemicals, or dropped on a small country seven times more bombs than in all the World War II."

References
Bigg, C.(2003), Fifty Years On, Russia Still Divided on Stalin. St. Petersburg Times, March 7.
Bigg, C.(2005) Russia: Is the country pinning for Stalin? Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, May12.
Hill, E. C. (1978) George Bernard Shaw. Boston: Twayne Publishers.
Kahan, S. (1987) The Wolf of the Kremlin. New York: William Morrow.Koestler, A. (1977) Thirteenth Tribe. Macmillan.
Prus, B. (2001) Pharaoh. New York: Hippocrene Books. Originally published 1895.Robeson, P. & Foner, P.S. (1978) Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-1974. Brunner-Routlege.
Service, R. (2005) Stalin: A Biography. Belknap Press.
Sundquist, E. J. (1996) The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader. Oxford University Press.
Toaff, A. (2007) Pasque di sangue: Il Mulino, Bologna, Italy.
Zhukov, G. K. (1991) From Moscow to Berlin. Costa Mesa, CA; The Noontide Press.

		Frontispiece
		Prologue
	Chapter I	Voltaire and the Encyclopedists
	Chapter II	The Hegelians
	Chapter III	Heaven on Earth
	Chapter IV	Empire of the Czars
	Chapter V	Llano Estacado
	Chapter VI	Dawn of the New Age
	Chapter VII	Man of Steel
	Chapter VIII	Wolves are Closing In
	Chapter IX	Stalin and Roosevelt
	Chapter X	Shifting Alliances
	Chapter XI	Cold War
	Chapter XII	Lost Empire
	Chapter XIII	Apre le Deluge
	Chapter XIV	Paper Centerfolds
		Postscript