A letter to the editor was received from a North Carolina academic, John Harrington, criticizing the posting of the article “Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union.” A discussion between him and the editor followed:

John Harrington – “I think your publication of the defense of Stalin was an error. One doesn’t have to call oneself a Trotskyist–I don’t–to see that Stalin’s regime is indefensible.

Have you ever read the transcripts of the purge trials, which that regime proudly published? I don’t see how you could read them and find the charges credible.”

Editor’s response – “We are constantly experimenting with the website. One aim we have is to encourage discussion and free speech among the working class. We also like to provide a voice to the voiceless (plagiarized from Democracy Now). Certainly anyone who has anything positive to say about Stalin in this country is suppressed and dismissed as a lunatic, zealot or worse.

Certainly Stalin is one of the most hated figures in history in this country. The bourgeois media has done a very successful propaganda campaign against him since the end of WWII. No doubt many people died unnecessarily and that is unforgiveable. However, I must point out that the same people that attack Stalin don’t denounce Truman for incinerating two cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and they don’t denounce Roosevelt for his participation in the incineration of Dresden. There are numerous other examples of US leaders who committed mass murder both in wartime and in peacetime.

My usual response to people about Stalin is “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” We must not forget that he led the Soviet Union during the early years when the country was going through an incredible economic expansion in spite of multiple invasions by Western countries, and withstood propaganda attacks by many US and world leaders while building the first experiment in socialism. He also led the Red Army to the defeat of the German Nazis with little help from the US. He did this in spite of a number of early tactical errors militarily that he made when the Nazis invaded. If it were not for Stalin, we might be working in a Nazi slave labor camp today. If he had been alive during Gorbachev’s reign, Stalin might have led opposition to the Soviet government’s craven capitulation to capitalism.

Nevertheless, we don’t think Stalin was a saint. On the other hand, we don’t think he was a devil either.

Perhaps posting the article was an error. We make many errors every day.

Nevertheless, we think people in the US need to learn to think outside the box and not accept bourgeois propaganda as the absolute truth. Accepting the received view has not served working people very well.”

John Harrington’s response – “Just as Hitler is popular among white supremacists who are antisocial, so is Stalin among socialists whose real motives are pathological.

Here’s the point that I think you are missing. The bourgeoisie and its intellectuals have slandered Stalin, but that doesn’t make the opposite of the bourgeois line tolerable. Pol Pot was not a hero because Nixon opposed him, to use a more modern example.

We have to base our opinions of him on what our people, the original Bolsheviks, said of him. They didn’t get to say much because by 1941 Stalin had executed all of the members of the old Politburo who were still alive 20 years after the Revolution.

His record is so horrifying that I think defending him as the author of the article did is the same category as Holocaust denial. It requires something like cultism to sustain.

While you are right that Stalin did preside over industrializing the USSR, that doesn’t mean that development didn’t happen despite him. He set quotas for ‘enemies of the state’ in every industry. To fill those quotas, presumably innocent men were executed or sent to Siberia. For more than six months trains didn’t run on time because a shortage of personnel was created by the purge.

The same goes for military affairs. He purged the army of seasoned officers right before the Nazis invaded and made military decisions that even the surviving generals opposed.

I do not think all of this happened because he was paranoid. I think it grew out of the conditions that the Bolsheviks faced during the czarist period, and out of the role that Stalin played as, in effect, the chief of dirty tricks–bank robbery, piracy, kidnapping, murder–for the party. Stalin did not distinguish between tactics appropriate for use on our enemies and those appropriate for dealing with comrades, and indeed, during the czarist period the party didn’t have the luxury of making that distinction.

I also do not think that we have to save Stalin’s reputation in order to save the socialist cause. Oliver Cromwell founded democracy in England, then became a terrible tyrant. The French Revolution had its terror, followed by Napoleon. The wake of social revolutions is often ugly when social revolutionaries bite off more than they can chew.

You should also consider Stalin from the point of view of the Houston club, yours. During the Leninist phase, the Bolshevik party tolerated open factions and open internal disagreements. People weren’t expelled for disagreeing with the party line, so long as they observed it in action–and even then violations were often overlooked. (Look at the lives of Lunacharsky, Zinoviev or Kamenev for examples of that.) The standards under which your followers were expelled are Stalinist. Had your tendency existed in the USSR in 1937, you would be dead.”

Editor’s response – “Some people have commented that although the CPUSA is virulently anti-Stalin, their tactics in dealing with anyone within the party that disagrees with top leadership is ‘Stalinist’ as conceived by Hoover, McCarthy and other anti-communists. Indeed, some say that top CPUSA leadership criticizes Stalin while putting what they criticize about Stalin into action in dealing with their own internal problems.

The Houston Communist Party is neither a pro- nor anti-Stalin organization. We are pro-working class both in this country and around the world. We oppose purges, and expulsions and other Draconian tactics in dealing with membership. We are in favor of free speech and open discussion and try to promote that through our website. We want to build a mass party of workers which eventually will be powerful enough to win elections and make real changes in our electoral system and process. That does not mean tailing the Democratic, Republican or any other bourgeois party. It does mean organizing working people into their own political party to fight and win power and progress for workers and their families. It also means that we may need to work with bourgeois parties, until we have our own party, to win progressive reforms. However, it doesn’t mean that we have to salute anti-worker policies and actions and support imperialism because Democratic and Republican Party candidates do these things.

We encourage other working people to join the discussion. You can either post a comment to this or any article or send submissions to PHill1917@comcast.net .”