Rev Left Radio - Stalin: A Marxist-Leninist Perspective

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Justin and Jeremy from Proles of the Round Table join Breht to elucidate the Marxist-Leninist perspective on Joseph Stalin. Listen to Proles of the Round Table here:  http://prolespod.libsyn.com/  Support Proles of the Round Table here: https://www.patreon.com/prolespod Sources for this episode include, but are not limited to, the following: "Another View of Stalin" by Ludo Martins "Fraud, Famine and Fascism" by Douglas Tottle "Khrushchev Lied" by Grover Furr "Class Struggles in the Soviet Union" by Charles Bettelheim  "Stalin" by Ian Grey "Stalin" by Isaac Deutscher "Origins of the Great Purges" by J. Arch Getty, "Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti   Submit your logo design by emailing us here: [e-mail] Outro: "The Red Flag" by Billy Bragg Find and support their work here: http://www.billybragg.co.uk/ ------------------ Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today is the day. It is our big, spicy Stalin episode. Now, this is an episode on Stalin from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. We've had many shows in the past. We've had Trotskyist episodes where there's critiques of Stalin. We've had the Spanish Civil War where I and my anarchist guests have made critiques of Stalin. We even have an earlier episode on the Soviet Union and Stalin with a Georgetown professor of Russian history where he's coming from more of a democratic socialist perspective and didn't really criticize but just sort of fleshed out what the Soviet Union was, the differences between Stalin and Trotsky, etc.

So in that long list of different perspectives on the left regarding Stalin, this is our Marxist-Leninist episode. So these are comrades from Poles of the Roundtable, who I love and respect and who are my friends coming on to talk about Stalin from their perspective. as people that basically uphold Stalin and uphold the Soviet Union. I think it's fascinating. They did a fuck ton of work to prepare for this episode and to come to this episode with a lot of facts. So this is a three-hour episode. And there's parts of this episode that are very statistic and sort of citation-driven.

So it's very empirical. It's very well researched. Even if you walk away, not being fully convinced of the Marxist-Leninist perspective, that's kind of the point of the show, right? is to foster dialogue and understanding and critical engagement among the principled radical left. This is a show by and for the radical left, and I make this show that I would want to listen to. It's the only way that I can make an authentic show. It's sort of my anchor.

I make the show that I personally would want to hear because that's the way that I can stay genuine and that I can stay engaged in a way that puts out good, interesting content. And I guess when it comes to any criticism of this episode, not only do you keep in mind all the past episodes that we've had from different perspectives, Trotskyists and anarchist perspectives. But also, you know, in the future, I want to do an episode on Mack now from an anarchist perspective. I have a left communism episode that I'm brewing up in the works currently. So again, you know, you have to understand this show as fostering dialogue among different elements of the radical left. And another thing I want to say up front is that listening to this

episode before we released it, you really get a feel for how deeply rooted anti-Semitism is in the West, in Europe, in the U.S., and how interrelated the histories of the Jewish people and the communist and anti-fascist movements were in the 20th century and still are to this day. You know, those histories are deeply intertwined, and I think the communist and anti-fascist movement has made all the stronger for its huge inclusion and contributions by Jewish comrades. I mean, Marx himself was Jewish, so the Jewish and the communist histories are very much aligned. and some of the tragic, horrific stuff that's mentioned in this episode about the fascist and Nazi, just brutal destruction or attempted destruction of the Jewish people. It really just reminded me about how important it is that we are always aware of that and how important it is that we as radicals are always showing solidarity with our Jewish comrades

and always attacking it by any means necessary those forces in our society who want to dredge up anti-Semitism and make it a core of their political platform. It must be stopped, and it must be stopped, like I said, by any means necessary. So, you know, at times throughout this discussion, you really get into the nitty-gritty of just how oppressed Jewish people were in Europe at this time. And it just sort of kind of broke my heart and also made me just want to shout out and give all my love and solidarity, all my Jewish comrades out there. And all of our ancestors in the past, Jewish or not, who have fought the anti-fascist

and the communist struggle. I mean, it's really sort of inspired. and tragic all at the same time. But again, this is a great episode. I learned a lot and you will learn a lot regardless of what your tendency on the left is. And like I said, my friends from Poles of the Roundtable did a lot of hard work. So please enjoy the episode. Before we go to it, I do just want to reassert that we are having a new logo contest.

We're going to pay money and we're going to put a link of your choice in the show notes of every episode going forward if your logo is the one that we choose. So continue to submit logos for RevLeft Radio at the Revolutionary Left at gmail.com. Me and Dave will pick our favorite and once we do, we'll announce it. We'll change our logo on all of our platforms and we'll send you over the money and find out what link you want to put in the show notes, whether that's a link to your artistic creations or a link to your social media page, whatever. We just want to make sure that you get credit going forward if we do pick your logo. So with all of that said, this is a three-hour episode on Stalin from a Marxist-Leninist, perspective. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you learn a lot.

Yeah, so I am Jeremy. I don't know what else to say about myself. I'm just me. Beautiful. No one's newer than you. No one is newer than me. I don't know. And I'm Justin. And before we get into the questions, you guys want to say a little bit about Proals of the Roundtable. It's become one of my personal go-to political podcasts. And I know there's like increasing overlap between those who listen to Rev. Left and those who listen to Pearls of the Roundtable. So before we get into the episode, you want to talk about that a little bit, what's your approach is, anybody that hasn't heard of you, et cetera? Yeah. So we try to primarily focus on history. We do a little bit of current events if it's relevant to the topic, I suppose. But we also don't take ourselves too seriously. We try to make everything kind of like a discussion among friends.

rather than a lecture or anything of that nature. Also, we get stupid drunk sometimes. Alcohol is always involved. And so, like, as we go along, we get more and more ridiculous, which makes for some quality comedy, sometimes intentional and sometimes not. But, yeah, that's Pearls of the Roundtable. Oh, absolutely. Like, I was talking to somebody on Twitter today who found your show through mine,

and that was one of the things that I mentioned is, like, I laugh. and I learn every episode. And, you know, that's kind of why I wanted to bring you on specifically for this episode. One, because I really respect the empirical objective approach that you take to things. You know, like I say, I learn every episode because it's filled with statistics and lots of things I didn't know. Like, I'll take stuff that I learned from Poles of the Roundtable and then take it into my shows or my conversations with comrades, etc. But also some, a little bit of like the, I don't take myself too serious, I think is important for an episode like this, which, you know, will have, we'll be divisive among the left, depending on what your position is.

But again, you know, the point of RevLeft radio is to facilitate conversations among leftists. Justin and Jeremy are comrades of mine, friends of mine. I've met them before in person, and I'm going to meet them again for the Marxist Center conference in November. So, yeah, I thought you would be the perfect guest to tackle this controversial episode. And I'd like to point out, though, before we get started, that people keep asking us to talk about Stalin. we're like we're as far as pearls of the roundtable goes we're like we don't we don't want to do that we don't want to get into that because it's such a like it's such a mind field uh but then um left media podcast is like hey you want to come and talk about the death of Stalin the movie

and we're like all right and then uh you're like hey you want to come and talk about Stalin yeah all right here we go we're the Stalin podcast we're the Stalin podcast now yeah and that's exactly why because I heard the episode with Left Media Pod talking about the death of Stalin and it veered from film analysis to just like sort of historical analysis and I thought that was awesome and I learned a lot there so I was like that's when the light bulb went off like let's let's have them on and talk about this um so yeah just a quick question though you said that you're you're almost hesitant to touch the Stalin topic on your show but certainly proles of the roundtable is is pretty open about being a Marxist Lenin a show yeah and also spicy but yeah I mean it wasn't it's not

necessarily something that we never wanted to tackle. Yeah. It's something that we wanted to stave off for a while so as not to immediately come out the gate, you know, alienating people. Right. Yeah. And so that's kind of, you know, we're not ashamed to talk about it. Clearly, we're here talking about it. Right. But, but yeah, we didn't, you know, it's just like you said, it's a very divisive topic and it's a lot, as you're going to find out over the course of this podcast. It's a huge endeavor. I spent the last month and a half researching and taking notes to prepare for this thing. So it was, it was just something that we really, you know,

I mean, if we figured at some point we were going to tackle it, but just we didn't know it was going to be so soon. So you'll go on Brett Show and do it instead of your own, I see. Well, yeah. Then you have plausible deniability, and we can just be like, you know, we didn't even want to talk about it. You made us. With that wonderful segue, let's go ahead and let's get into it.

First and foremost, I think it's best of maybe like properly contextualize this overall discussion by doing away with any great man of history nonsense, while also putting Stalin in his proper place as a meaningful and often decisive historical figure. So what do bourgeois histories and approaches to Stalin get fundamentally wrong, and how do you as Marxist-Leninists think of Stalin as a revolutionary in the broadest sense? Yeah, so I guess let's begin with a great man, a great man of history issue, because it doesn't work like that. Right? Like, although he was a central sort of author of what became the Soviet Union and led it from a position of authority, he did not have universal, unilateral power.

People were in charge of various programs operating independently or at least not directly under his thumb. there were people who were able to criticize Stalin directly and indirectly throughout his, you know, career, you know, without the fear that Stalin was going to murder them. like this is sort of this, I don't know where this idea comes from, and we'll kind of touch on this as we go, but this is a large, massive nation of a variety of people that each had regional, you know, leadership and to say that Stalin did everything, and therefore he's responsible for all the things, whether good or bad, is somewhat silly. But having said that because this happened under his leadership, these things happened under his leadership, we have to decide. discuss it in the context of, you know, he at least had some sort of responsibility in some way, I suppose. But again, Great Man of History is a silly concept and we need to get away from it. Yeah, I mean, I would also like to bring up right-wing historian named Stephen Kotkin, who's, like I said, he's a right-winger, he's conservative. He had an important take, I think,

on Stalin, and he talked about how when the Glasnost happened and the opening of the secret Soviet archives, bourgeois historians were foaming at the mouth, just so excited to dig into these, to unravel the mysteries of Stalin and the Soviet Union. They thought...

The mythology. Right. They thought that once they did this, that they would find, you know, that all of the rhetoric of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and imperialism and the betterment of the people, that it was all just that, just rhetoric. And

that behind closed doors, they'd, you know, let their hair down and talk about, you know, power, control, wealth, you know, taking land for themselves, you know, to further their goals or whatever. And the opposite happened. They unlocked these archives. They dug into them. They find all these private meetings that were recorded, all these letters that were sent from person to person and discovered that the rhetoric that they used in public in speeches at the central committee was the exact same rhetoric that they used behind closed doors. Yeah, and that's incredibly interesting And sort of, I did look I mean, whenever you Google Stalin like prepping for this episode, whenever you start searching stuff up, you know, Kotkin's book comes up and his research comes up and it was really interesting to kind of dive into some

of that behind the scene stuff because as you say even as a sort of right wing bourgeois historian, he still dispels with some of the mythology about Stalin that you know, people all over the political spectrum even to this day sort of parrot unthinkingly and uncritically. And as

the great man of history idea. I mean, certainly most people listening, if they're long-time listeners of this show, sort of understand why that's, why that's fallacious. But, you know, it's no accident that Stalin, Mao, Fidel, any big leader of a movement is sort of the whole movement's reduced to that person. It serves a few interests. One, I mean, it plays into the dictatorship narrative, right? It's like one individual with all this power and there's no democracy, et cetera. But also, I think, I think it takes the focus off the fact that behind every single one of these communist leaders, regardless of your feelings on them, were millions and millions of people who led it, who supported it, who undergirded it. There's no Stalin,

there's no Mao, there's no Fidel, without the people of those countries doing the movement work standing up, defending those political projects, coming to the defense of them, etc. And so, you know, this sort of great man of history theory also sort of blinds people to the fact that these were all mass proletarian movements. And leaders did emerge, of course, but Yeah, of course. And I think it also, we should bring up the fact that when Stalin became the general secretary and really through all of his life, after that, the Soviet Union was still extremely rural. The technology level was low. I mean, the technology level in the world was low. So this idea that one human could just blink his eyes and all of a sudden people would start disappearing is absurd because it is absurd because, yeah, is absurd because. it took, you know, sometimes months to get one letter from Moscow out to, you know, Kiev or something. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. Moving on a little bit, I think another good way to start this. We have a lot of starts here. To offer up some criticism of Stalin, because of the controversial nature of the topic,

I think it's important to kind of show people that it's not just some, obviously, blind faith. It's not some great man of history, you know, cult of personality thing we're dealing with here. So as Marxist, as materialist, and as strategic-minded radicals, with the benefit of hindsight, what are your primary criticisms of Stalin as a leader? Okay, so we have three, I suppose, and I'm going to start with the one that is probably the most, hmm, shall we say, contentious issue with anarchists, which is the Spanish Civil War. And I'm going to come down sort of in the middle on this one. Anyway, I'll do some context first.

So, first of all, we need to understand that this was not purely an anarchist revolution. Like, we need to establish that, first of all. There were several different groups involved in, on the side of what was essentially the Republican Spain versus the fascists. So there was the Popular Front, which was kind of a weird liberal left coalition. So you had everything from the P.O.U.M., which was like a Trotskyist, Bukharanist organization. you had liberals and progressives in there. You had pro-Soviet forces within the popular front. And then you had the C&T FAAI, which it was the like bringing together of anarcho-communists,

anarcho-sindicalists, and then labor union members. And then you also have the UGT, which was also union labor leaders with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party. And then you had like this Basque nationalist force. Anyway, my point is lots of different people were formed a coalition. There were the international brigades. So the international brigades were made up of about 10,000 French, about 5,000 German and Austrian, about 3,300 Italians, and then about 1,000 each from the U.S., the UK, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Canada, and the USSR. So this is one of those things

where people will say, oh, well, they desperately needed troops and Stalin refused to send troops, and he didn't send a huge contingent, but he did send about 500 regular troops, and then in addition to those troops, he sent about, well, a few hundred planes, a few hundred tanks,

and then a thousand or more, depends on who you ask, artillery emplacements, about 14,000. thousand guns. He spent approximately 140,000 rubles on supporting the Spanish

Civil War on the side of the Republicans. He sent people who were able to train in guerrilla warfare. He sent tactical leaders, a couple thousand of tactical leaders who were able to sort of guide people and how they went.

One of the only reasons that the nationalists were not able to successfully get into Madrid was that Soviet planes came in and essentially bombed these nationalist positions. So he begins to back off in 1937.

But what's happening in 1937 is that Japan is invading mainland China. In addition to that, Germany is annexing Austria in 1938. Border conflicts began to occur between Japanese troops and Soviet troops on the China border in Manchuria and elsewhere

and this goes on all the way through 1941 so there's I suppose two different ways you can look at this one is he should have continued to support the Spanish anarchists and communists and liberals and whatever in the Spanish Republic because that would have made it more likely that they would succeed and therefore

there would have been a counter to fascist Europe. The other way you can look at this is if he had continued to provide material support and weapons and money and all of this to that uprising

would he have then been able to fight off the Nazis as effectively on the western edge or the Japanese on the eastern. and I think either one of those is a big what-if. I'm going to come down, I think, on the side of at least he could have continued to send material support,

even if he couldn't send money or troops if he needed to pull those back. It's hard to say, though. I mean, what are your thoughts, Justin? I mean, just like you said, it's hard to say which side it would have come down on. And, I mean, it could have been a bad decision. It might have been a bad decision. but I don't think it is the betrayal that it's framed to be as if Stalin was maliciously trying to murder anarchists in the streets or whatever

that is patently false and so I think that that's kind of the important thing to remember here but certainly I think he probably should have kept supporting Spain probably so I would just I would just butt in here for a second to say you know obviously we've done an entire episode on the Spanish Civil War I kind of give sort of passionate voice to my critiques of not only Stalin but but, you know, you don't want to put it down to one person, Moscow's sort of approach, with material benefits. But also, I think, I don't think you can ignore the fact that there was sort of heavy-handed Soviet apparatchiks who operated in the Spanish Civil War and who ended up actually, you know, putting Marxist and Pum and anarchists against the wall. There was that heavy-handedness that I don't think can be denied on that front.

Sure. Yeah, the NKVD was certainly doing some shady stuff. So they trained about 10,000 or 12,000 troops in guerrilla warfare. So great, you know, that was a good thing. But they were also murdering anti-Soviet communists in the background as well. There was also a plot within the NKVD, which we will touch on later when we get to the purges. Yeah. So at that exact time, in which the leadership of the NKVD was essentially trying to undermine the power of the Communist Party. So it's, yeah, it's complicated.

is what we'll say now and we'll get to what was happening then. Yeah, because again, like, there's nothing that's, yeah, there's nothing that says that Stalin was like, kill this guy. It may have, may have just been the NKVD acting on their own. But, you know, who knows? What's the next critique? Okay, so the next critique is, I'm going to say, probably the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Soviet citizens.

This is another one of those, like, big, like, well, what if, you know? I mean, nothing happened without reason, right? There was no, like, decision that was made without. reason. Those reasons may not have been the correct reasons, but there was nothing that was just like a blanket like. Right. He wasn't just like fucking with people to fuck with them. Um, so they peaked in the lead up to World War II, um, in which basically, uh, and again, it depends on who you ask, tens of thousands anyway, of ethnic Germans who were living in the Ukraine and Western Russia were basically relocated to Siberia or

your Kutsk or places that were kind of out of the way because Stalin's fear was that if the Nazis did get into the Ukraine or did get into Western Russia that the ethnic Germans would suddenly side with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. You know, which valid or not, we don't know. I suppose it's better than putting them in concentration camps like FDR did. but it's it's a big like ugh you know you're taking people based on their ethnic background

and assuming what they're going to do in the future you know rather than dealing with them on on the basis of you know their class or their political leanings so you know hard to say on that one but I'm going to come down on the side of that was probably unnecessary or at least could have been handled differently and then the last one is I think the most obvious, the one that there's not much you can defend here, and that is the passage of Article 121, which criminalized specifically male homosexuality. So for background on

this, because there tends to be this like retconning of history where we look back and we say, you know, oh, well, Lenin legalized homosexuality, well, not really. I mean, he just did away with the Tsarist code of laws, which effectively made homosexuality legal, but it wasn't like his intent. He wasn't like, I'm going to, I believe in gay rights. The material conditions for them massively improved, obviously, but neither Lenin nor Stalin dedicated any time to discussing the concept of homosexuality at all. And so to either say that Lenin did it intentionally or Stalin hated gay people. He didn't have the power to do this on his own.

This was something that was passed, you know, through the Central Committee. But anyway, my point here is that this is obviously based on this fallacy that whatever, homosexuality is, is degeneracy. It's a moral failing or some sort of bourgeois decadence or God knows what else. Bullshit, right. Right, bullshit. There were reasons that it happened. There are a few different theories as to why it was done. You know, one is that there was this strange connection that had been made in the Soviet Union

between fascism and homosexuality. And so there's a theory that in criminalizing homosexuality, people who were suspected of being fascist infiltrators but could not be proven to be fascists, could then be arrested on those charges and sent. away. There is this other theory that it has to do with basically child molestation and they were trying to make it easier to put away pedophiles, although that's kind of, that's, I don't know, that's cringy as hell. It's a terrible way to deal with that problem. There's also, there was a former Duke or some sort of basically former royal, you know, lower level royal person who

managed to survive into the Central Committee, and he had a son who was gay and was embarrassing him around Moscow, and that this was sort of a personal favor to that guy. I don't know if I believe this, but anyway, there's a lot of different theories as to why it happened. Regardless, it was a mistake. Yeah, none of it's justified. So none of it's justifiable, regardless. So I think those are, those are the three things that I think were the mistakes of Joseph Stalin. Yeah, and I, I, you know, there's still like you'll see you'll come across it once in a blue moon of these sort of backwards reactionary chauvinistic quote unquote orthodox Marxists who live in this previous time period and they'll say things like being trans or being LGBTQ of any sort

is bourgeois decadence you know I think we just we can all agree that's complete and utter bullshit and those are reactionaries not comrades all over the west all over the world LGBT community was being repressed in in you know a myriad of ways all over I mean all over the world. It was just that horrible time period. And that's by no means an excuse. What happened to LGBT people in any of these contexts is disgusting. And we'll never make those mistakes again. Exactly. Yeah, I think that's an, those are absolutely fair critiques. Yeah. As long as Marxist memes don't get to form the vanguard, we'll be okay. Yeah, fuck that. I guarantee they won't. Fuck them. As I probably mentioned in the intro and

leading up to this, you know, I am sort of still in this area where I'm sort of skeptical about Stalin. And one of my hesitations to fully, you know, embrace or uphold them in any way comes from what I personally perceive to be a sort of a coldness and a cruelty and even paranoia when it came to other Bolsheviks and communists who fought in the revolution and the civil war oftentimes very courageously. We will touch on the purges more later, but how do you think about the killing off or imprisoning of top Bolshevik leaders? And do you think these actions stemmed from Stalin's scheming regarding how he can gain and consolidate more power for it? himself, as the mainstream histories often argue, was it all necessary to protect the revolution, or is the truth more nuanced than either of these options? Yeah, I mean, clearly, you probably know where we're going to fall on this, but it's more nuanced than either of those declarations. But I think that something that, a couple

interesting points, is that this idea of the old Bolsheviks, right, is a bit of a fallacy, because as you'll learn later on when we cover the purge, as well as, you know, really this entire section, is that just because people fought on the side of the Bolsheviks in the Bolshevik revolution did not mean that they were communists in the sense of, you know, what we see or certainly what the Soviet Union saw as socialism, building socialism. many of them went on to try to reintroduce market reforms, many of them had their eyes on a social democracy a la France or Germany, that some of them went on to collaborate with literal fascists. So, again, the idea that people fought in the Bolshevik Revolution were somehow excluded from criticism or being shitty in any way is a fallacy in itself. I think it's also interesting that we talk about, you know, the old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev and Trotsky who literally plotted sometimes to murder the top leadership of the old Bolsheviks, Stalin, Kirov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Zedanov.

So which side of that coin do you fall on? You know what I mean? And on top of that, what about, you know, the old Bolsheviks Khrushchev and McCoyen, who literally set the Soviet Union on the path to capitalist restoration. Yeah. Or fucking

Berea. Yeah. Or Berea. He was also an old bullshit. He was a hero. He was a hero of World War II, but that didn't mean that he wasn't a shitty fucking human being. He deserves all the bullets.

He was a liberal, basically. And so, but... Yes, I think that that's how I'm going to fall on that. Okay. So do you have any thoughts about a sort of, you know, paranoia when it came to this perception of constant internal enemies that, you know, maybe have, maybe, go on. I'm going to deflect away until we get to the purge, because I think without deep diving into it, I'm not going to be able to adequately address what I think was the lack of paranoia for most of

Stalin's career. I will say that here's the thing that I think people forget is that Stalin was a critic of Stalin. he would if he did something which he later was like wow that was not good he was able to criticize himself and his own actions so yeah yeah we'll get to that in the purges but okay yeah consider that question a prelude to the further discussion later absolutely so let's go ahead to move on to some myth busting about Stalin you know a lot of the stuff that you read about Stalin. And even, like I say, preparing for this interview, it is almost fucking impossible to find, like, unbiased. I don't even know if it's, you know, perhaps being unbiased is impossible

in and of itself. But finding information that isn't just racked with, you know, ideological prejudice is almost an impossibility here. So it's very tough to sort of get good information on this. So maybe just from the Marxist-Lennon's perspective, we can sort of tackle some of these big ideas about Stalin that I think permeate our culture and probably the globe when it comes to the name Stalin. So first, let's maybe discuss the Kulaks. Who were they? How does Western history frame them?

And what is the truth regarding them? Okay. So first, let's define what a Kulak is. And Wikipedia plays this fun game where it says that they were peasants who were wealthy enough to hire other people to work on their farms and I'm like that makes them no longer a peasant a peasant is a particular class

that makes them petty bourgeois at best so Kulak the name is essentially a class based slur which was generated by the Bolsheviks against these individuals and it literally it translates

to fist but the implication there being that they were tight-fisted they were greedy you know, keeping things to themselves. But in order to understand where they came from, you have to actually go back to 1906 to what's known as the Stolipin land reforms. So Stolipin was this,

and I apologize, we're probably going to fuck up so many Russian names, Ukrainian names, like, we're bad at this. So he was the chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1906, and what he was trying to do was, basically, he was trying to do a couple of things, but one was to increase the production of agriculture and bring it online with capitalist nations. He was trying to modernize it, but what he was also trying to do was to break up the old-school Russian agrarian society. The thing is that the Stollupin land reforms de-collectivized the Russian agricultural

like basically the landscape altogether. Traditionally, farms were communal in Russia long before the Bolshevik revolution. So the Soviet Union re-collectivized Russian land. So it was under a system known as Obshina, which literally means commune.

They were also known as Mir, which can mean a lot of things in Russian, but society is one of them, the same word in Ukrainian as Translit, but all across this area, communal farming was the norm. And so Stolipin was breaking that up and turning it into individually owned farming properties. So to that end, they sort of performed

what was kind of like the U.S. homesteading. They were like, here, just head out to this land. You know, this will belong to you. you can farm it as you see fit. But what ended up happening, much as the homestead did here in the U.S., is that particular people had more money, more resources, and were therefore able to, you know, hack it better than people who were poor, fewer resources.

And so they were able to gather up and collect more land under their own, you know, private property, which then cut out the actual peasants in the area. And then, Justin, I think you have something on the situation economically for peasants in relation with Kulaks. Right. So before I get into this, I want to start off by saying that I, when I was writing notes for this podcast, I made them very stat and quote heavy because, you know, normally on our podcast, we tend to talk about things anecdotally and conversationally because it's easier to digest and it's more fun. for people to listen to, but knowing that this was going to be so heavily scrutinized talking about it, I wanted to, number one, reference a lot of statistics and numbers in order to kind of lay the groundwork for the realities, and also quote a lot of people so that, number one,

we have experts, not just me, and also to kind of give personality to the actual conversations that were happening at this time in the Soviet Union. So if it comes off a little dry sometimes, I apologize. That's fine, yeah. Anyway, so just for some context like Jeremy was talking about, in 1928, three quarters of the land was still sewn by hand. And 28 is about when the collectivization efforts started. A third of the crops were harvested by sickle and sith still. And a quarter of the peasant household had no draft animals or farming implement, and only half of them had plows.

So this was still very, yeah, this was still basically all done by hand. Conversely, 4% of the rural population or the Kulaks own 15% of the area under Kroc. And the Kulaks in doing so were able to accumulate money, not just to live, but to actually save and accumulate money. And what they would do regularly is buy better equipment and then lease it to the poorer peasants. So they became kind of the feudal lords reborn in those areas

because now the peasants needed to try to keep up with the Koolocks who had nice keeping up with the Kulox. It sounds like a sitcom. I should start that. But in order to try to keep up with them, they had to rent equipment to try to harvest quicker. And in doing so, they indebted themselves to the Kulaks with just further enriched the Kulaks.

And at this point, you know, again, the late 20s, when the collectivization starts. The re-collectivization. Yeah, the re-collectivization. collectivization. The industrialization efforts in the Soviet Union were well in hand, and all of the major cities were already under, you know, communist control. But 82% of the Soviet population was peasant, and there was almost no party presence in the rural areas at all. So, for example, collectivized agriculture at the beginning brought about 500,000 tons of wheat to market. The Kuulaks, brought 2.13 million tons of wheat to market. And this is at a point at which the USSR is already being threatened with war by the UK, who had just broken diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union and was kind of beating its chest, right? Now, Bucheren, who's the name that you'll hear over and

over and over again, at this time, he's Stalin's main ally in the leadership. He stressed the importance of advancing socialism using market reforms. It was kind of his thing. He kind of wanted that social democracy thing. And in 1925, a couple years before, he called on the peasants to quote, enrich themselves. He said that we shall move forward at a snail's pace. This is Bucharan. Again, he was a huge figure. And Stalin sent him a letter in response saying, the slogan enrich yourselves is not ours. It is wrong. Our slogan is socialist accumulation. And that kind of shows you, I think, the beginning. And this really was the beginning of the split in Soviet leadership, which you referenced earlier as the imprisonment and murder of old Bolsheviks.

In 1928, 1927, the grain harvest is about 4 million tons less than in 1926 due to drought, right? So Stalin had no control over that. The Kuulaks took advantage of this by basically hoarding the grain and sold it at a 300% markup. Okay? And so as a result, the the cities start to starve because the communist government can't afford to buy enough grain to support the rapidly industrializing centers of the Soviet Union. And so in January 28, the Politburo unanimously decides to take exceptional measures by seizing wheat from the Kuulaks and the well-to-do peasants to avoid famine in the cities. Stalin said in October, quote,

worker discontent was increasing. There are people in the ranks of our party who are striving, perhaps without themselves realizing it to adapt our socialist construction to the tastes and needs of the Soviet bourgeoisie end quote and let's Jeremy you want to talk about the Soviet bourgeoisie you know why why is that a relevant statement so are we talking about the koolocks here yeah yeah yeah I mean so essentially the koolocks were the it's such a terrible contradiction because you've got this this this nation which is you know nascent like it's just coming into its own and this drought just sets them back so far and they did not go out and

immediately murder all the coolocks right like they didn't go out and kill them all and take their stuff and say this is ours now right they were attempting to maintain this sort of peace and trying to keep this mixed economy but in doing that they allowed this sort of manipulation of markets to occur because the Kulaks had a vested interest in basically banding together as a class to fight against the interests of the peasants and the workers. So they're bourgeois or they're petty bourgeois and that's all that they are. This is not a large peasant subsistence farming group as many people will try to frame it later. talking about, we're talking about capitalists here, who were allowed to continue to exist

within the Soviet Union to the detriment of the Soviet Union. And so in those years, 28 and 29, the communist government has to ration bread and then sugar and then tea and then meat. And so all of these things are starting to kind of fall off the table. And so in 1928, 29, they start these collectivization efforts. And at first, they don't involve the Koolocks. It has nothing to do with the Kulox. It has to do with, hey, if you, you know, to the peasants. If you're a peasant.

If you are a peasant and you get together with other peasants around you and you start this collective farm, the government will give you money, grain machines. They had tractor stations that people could basically rent or not rent because they don't to pay for it, but borrow a tractor to till their land. And they were immediately successful. In 1929, the collectivized agriculture produced 2.2 million tons of wheat, as opposed to the 500,000 they had a couple years earlier. And it was as much as the Kulaks had produced in the two previous harvests.

In 1930, the collectivized farms would bring 6.6 million tons to the cities. And so now the Kulaks are starting to see their, way of life, their extravagant way of life, put to death essentially. They're in their death throws now, okay? And not because they're being murdered, just because no longer can they manipulate the markets by holding a greater share of the wheat that's being produced. Right. And so, just to show you how quickly all of this happened, on January 1st, 1930, 18% of the peasant families were members of a collective farm of colchol is what they called them. A month, later, 31.7%. So almost doubled in one month. And it was very largely a youth-led movement,

much like it would be in China, as you talked about, in your episode with us on the cultural revolution. And as a result, there were excesses, okay? And a student who was working there ended up telling a U.S. traveler who went there, he said, quote, this was war and is war. The Kulok had to be got out of the way completely as an enemy at the front. He is the enemy at the front. He is the enemy of the Kolkos or the collective farm. And so they were already kind of getting to this point of like antagonism with the Kulok's, but it had nothing to do with the government itself, right?

There was no effort to, they hadn't start the what would be called the Duke Huc. decoulocization efforts. Right. So now that this is happening, the Kulaks start to fight with the other peasants. Not the other peasants to fight with the peasants. Yes. The Kulaks start to fight with the peasants. And as a result, start murdering people, the leaders of these collective farms,

and the communist government comes down on the Kulaks at this point. and so they go in to try to break up the Kulaks land and distribute it to the collective farms at this point the Kulaks not only murder the people that come to try to do so but they also sabotage their own land and farms and so in 1930 when this is all happening the Kulaks slaughter their own cattle and horses

they burn their own crops just to put some numbers to it horses, the number of horses in the Soviet Union dropped from 30 million to 15 million. Cattle went from 70 million to 38 million. Sheep and goats went from 147 million to 50 million. Hogs from 20 million to 12 million. And these aren't Soviet statistics to try to level against the Kulaks. This is actually the statistics listed by Frederick Schumann,

who was a Williams College Professor of Government. that was traveling to Ukraine at that time. And so this kind of lays the groundwork for the actual famine that happened. As a result, much more of the Kulak's Civil War than as a result of weather even or certainly of communists intentionally starving the Ukrainian population. A quote from the professor that went there, quote, although it was certainly initiated and endorsed, to a great extent, a series of ad hoc policy responses to the wild initiatives of regional and district rural party and government organs. Collectivization and collective farming were shaped less by Stalin and central authorities than by the irresponsible activities of rural officials.

The experimentation of collective farm leaders left to fend for themselves and the realities of a rural countryside. end quote. In 1930, there weren't even half a million communists among a rural population of 120 million people. So they were vastly outnumbered and had almost no support from the government, really. At this point, it's clear that they are out of hand, you know, just immediately. I mean, it hasn't even been half a year yet. And the Stalin and the Central Committee, they get together and they're like, we got to figure out how to stem this, these successes, and so they sent 25,000 party members to help with collectivization efforts, but many of them were beaten or killed by the Kulox.

But despite all that, it brought stability to the process, and by the mid-30s, 1930, I should say, collectivization was already extremely successful. You know, after all of this happened, the CC decided that, quote, Coco's construction is unthinkable without a rigorous improvement in the cultural standards of the Koko's populace. They decided to intensify literacy campaigns, to build libraries, to intensify Koko's courses, as well as types of study by correspondence, enroll children in schools, intensify cultural and political work among women, organize public daycare centers, public kitchens to reduce their burden, build roads, cultural centers, introduce radio and cinema

to the countryside, telephone and mail services. All of this, as a result of the excesses. So to say that they were like intentionally trying to like create this shit show is as a false premise. And at the time, the Kulawks were kind of the leaders of the countryside, right? They, they were the aristocracy essentially of the countryside. And they were also very heavily embedded in the church. And the church had a very antagonistic relationship with the Communist Party, which we won't get into. But they started these rumors around. collectivization that in a superstitious population right so they said that in these collective farms that women and children would be collectivized that everyone would sleep under a single

gigantic blanket that you know that they would share a toothbrush basically comrades cuddling the bolshevik government would force women to cut their hair so that it could be exported that the bolsheviks would mark women on the forehead for identification They would russify local populations. A special machine would burn the old so that they would not eat any more wheat. Children would be taken away from their parents and sent to orphanages. 4,000 women would be sent to China to pay for the Chinese Eastern Railway. The Caucasians would be the first one sent to war.

And then a rumor that the white armies would return, that believers were told about the next coming of the Antichrist and that the world would end in two years. And these are like the, essentially the propaganda campaigns that revolved around the collectivization efforts, I guess the Kulox pushback against the collectivization efforts. So a proto-infowars, basically. Yeah, basically. Well, so I think most leftists of all tendencies kind of, especially when you lay it all out like that, can certainly sort of understand the antagonisms there and the need to take a firm stance against that. And I think most of us also understand that during a socialist transition, class struggle continues. You have not only the base of class still, you know, trying to be worked through, but also the superstructure, the ideology.

You know, the moment that a socialist revolution of any sort of successful, it doesn't automatically mean that those contradictions and the class struggle ends there. Of course not. And the last thing I'd say about this before we move on is that it's funny because you were mentioning the fighting between the Kuulks and the peasants and resulting famines coming from hoarding grain or, you know, destroying cattle and whatnot, every single one of the, even though it's an inter-soviet fight and people are dying and famine is caused by these, you know, conditions, et cetera, every single one of those deaths and are inflated and laid at the feet of communism. When you hear like communism killed a hundred million people, here's a situation where you have peasants first Kuulaks fighting in the countryside, murdering, you know, fighting whatever,

all these deaths are not because of communism. It's just, it's a process of class struggle that would exist. exist almost in any situation, but certainly is intensified when you're going through a socialist transition. And it's not fair. It's absurd to lay these deaths at the feet of communism and say, this is what communism leads to. Right. Yeah, exactly. So let's go ahead and move on because we're talking about famines and another huge sore spot for people. And perhaps one of the most controversial elements of Stalin's leadership, as it's known globally, was the Ukrainian famine, known as Halladamor by those who wished to insist that it was a purposeful genocide against

ethnic Ukrainians, orchestrated by Stalin himself. Ukraine today is a bastion of far-right political movements and straight-up neo-Nazism, which I think feeds into this discussion and is relevant. But what was the Ukrainian famine? What do reactionary say happened? And what really happened? All these topics kind of bleed into each other and overlap each other. So there's going to be quite a bit of backtracking, you know, at this point.

But just to set up some of the actual numbers. And listen, if there's a main critique against the Soviet Union, and I believe that Stalin fought against it passionately throughout his entire life, but it's that it was very bureaucratic. And that can't be denied in a lot of senses. What also can't be denied is that the records that were taken in the Soviet Union were extremely meticulous, from region to region to everything, you know, having to do with anything, really. So in 1930, I'm just going to set up the dates, and then they will all come, like, fall into place as I go through where this nith, I'll go ahead and say, originated. In 1930, there was an exceptional harvest, 83.5 million tons. In 31 and 32, which is supposedly when this famine genocide is happening, it dropped to 69.5 and 69.9. So clearly not as great of a harvest, but it's also not starving in the streets low.

And this is the point at which they had to ration, but there was no mass famine. It should also be noted that in 1931 and 1932, the leader of Ukraine was a Jewish communist. And this feeds into where the fascist elements kind of take to. him particularly to start, you know, basically these rumors. So in 1933 to 1935, you're talking about an average of 90 million ton harvests. And these are the years at which Thomas Walker, who is the name that you'll come to know very well in the next little bit, visited the USSR, said he visited the USSR and saw these famine conditions. So the lowest harvests in 31 and 32, we're not even the years that this rumor originated. Just a couple quick quotes before I move into the bullshit.

In 1934, an article by Isaac Mazepa, who was the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement at the time. He was a former premier under Petliora in 1918, who was the Ukrainian that led the pogroms. He boasted that in Ukraine, the right had succeeded in 1930 to 1932 in widely sabotaging the agricultural works. He said, quote, at first there were disturbances in the Kolkosi or else the communist officials and their agents were killed. But later, a system of passive resistance was favored, which aimed at the systematic frustration of the Bolsheviks plan for sewing and gathering the harvest. The catastrophe of 1932 was the hardest blow that the Soviet Union had to face since the famine of 1921 to 1922. The Ottoman

spring sewing campaigns both failed. Whole tracks were left. unsewn. In addition, when the crops were being gathered in many areas, especially the south, 20, 40, or even 50% were left in the fields and was either not collected at all or was ruined in the threshing, end quote. So they're basically saying that intentionally the right wing in the Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalists intentionally damaged crops, intentionally damaged harvest grain, left grain out in the fields because they were trying to undermine the Soviet Union. Like, come on, y'all. It's wild. And these same Ukrainian nationalists would go on to say that they were intentionally starved.

Right. They were intentionally starving the Soviet Union, but then came back and said, y'all are starving us. Exactly. And another quote that we'll talk about, just to show, so if Stalin single-handedly starve 20 million people in Ukraine, then how could this ever be true? So Nazi historian Heinz Holn wrote, quote, Two sobering years of bloody war in Russia provided cruel proof of the falsity of the tale about sub-humans. As early as August 1942, in its reports from the Reich, the SD or Cisheir Haidst. Yeah, nice, nice.

Noted that the feeling was growing among German people that we have been victims of delusion. The main and startling impression is of the vast mass of Soviet weapons, their technical quality and the gigantic Soviet effort of industrialization, all in sharp contracts to the picture of the Soviet Union. People are asking themselves how Bolshevism has managed to produce all this. So if he starved 20 million people, how are they coming to these conclusions, right? The USSR at the time had a manpower shortage.

So the idea that they would intentionally exterminate half of the Ukrainian population is absurd. I mean, like, why would they not just relocate these people to a place where they needed them to provide the manpower that they were missing? Like, it's just, it's wild. And this is, this is kind of a what-if kind of thing, but we'll get into the more practical like this couldn't have happened because of this. Exactly. First-hand accounts. Dr. Hans Blumfeld, who worked as an architect in Ukraine in 1933, said that he saw no corpses or people starving in the street. The only person he saw with a swollen belly was a child waiting.

to see a doctor. He said, but there was an outbreak of typhoid fever and dysentery. At the time, Japan has seized Manchuria, and Hitler is in the process of taking power in Germany, and it was well known that, from the beginning, that the Soviet Union was going to be attacked. In Mein Kampf, Hitler, on top of, you know, constantly ragging on Judeo-Bolshevism, targets specifically Ukraine for being essential to, the establishment of the Thousand-Year Reich. The Soviet government in 1933

who's supposedly trying to starve its own population, knowing that the harvester suffering as a result of the Kulak sabotage, sent 35 million seed pods, food stuffs, and thousands of tractors and combines to Ukraine to try to counteract this. So again,

bullshit. Five million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army in World War II, okay? out of a population of 25 million Ukrainians. So if 20 million were exterminated, then the remaining 5 million fought in the Red Army, right? Right. So anyway, those are just some anecdotal pieces, right?

Okay, so it really all starts. The first appearance of the Ukrainian famine genocide, as it is referenced or Halodomor, it started, the first appearance of it was in 1913, Okay. Now, just to lay a little back story, William Randolph Hearst was a newspaper magnate. I think most people know his name, right? He controlled close to a fifth of the American press at the time. He was also a fascist sympathizer, okay? And not in like an anecdotal kind of, you know, oh, he didn't like labor union sort of way, which he clearly didn't. But in a, he hired Mussolini regularly. He paid him 10 times what he would end up making. being head of the Italian state. He waged a press war. Let's stop.

He made a salary from being the head of the Italian state, and then Hearst paid him 10 times that amount to write articles. Damn. All right. I'm going to just consider that. He waged a press war against unions and communists, and his main thing was he was dead set on keeping the USSR out of the League of Nations, which was being established at the time.

And in summer of 1934, Hurst travels to Nazi Germany, and in Munich he met with Ernst Heinzschnigel, who was the press officer for the Reich and a close advisor of Hitler. He was quoted in the New York Times saying, If Hitler succeeds in pointing the way of peace and order, he will have accomplished a measure of good not only for his own people, but for all of humanity. End quote.

He ended up getting, in this trip, a foreign press contract, an exclusive foreign press contract, to Nazi Germany, paid him one million marks a year. Which in today's money is about $47 million a year. And then fast forward a few months later, surprisingly, on October 12th, 1934, Thomas Walker entered the USSR. He spent less than a week in Moscow. He spent a week in transit to the Manchurian border. Then he left the USSR and never returned. Now, bear in mind, this is the year. that had a 90 million ton grain harvest. Regardless, of all of that,

he never passed within hundreds of miles of Ukraine itself. Okay? These are all tracked by his documents that he got... His travel documents. His travel documents that he got starting in London. Four months later, in February of 35, a series of articles are published in the Hearst Papers in Chicago American

and New York Evening Journal, among others by, quote, noted journalist, traveler, and student of Russian affairs who has spent several years touring the Union of Soviet Russia, end quote. And he lays out this dramatic story accompanied by pictures of this massive famine

that claimed the lives of six million people the previous year. The story told by Walker was that his trip was in the spring of 34, even though it was in October of 34. Now let's talk about the photos because you can literally, if you Google, like go to your...

A lot more, yeah, if you Google. Go ahead and go on Google and just Google famine photos a lot of more. Ukrainian famine, whatever. And you'll see these pictures, okay? But let's talk about them. Most of them date back to a 1921 publication of the actual Volga famine during the White Army Civil War, as well as several other famines outside of the Soviet Union. They are clearly from different seasons, right? Which makes sense if you believe her story that he was there for multiple years, but he wasn't. He was there for a couple of weeks. One pictures of a naked boy calmly posing

The same supposed village has a man suffering from cold, despite having a sheepskin coat on. Some are identified from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. They aren't even from the communist Russia. One from the New York Evening Journal portrays an Austrian cavalry soldier standing beside a dead horse following World War I action. He's got a World War I hat on. One is captioned, quote, in a typical peasant's hut, dirt floor, thatched roof, and one piece of furniture, the bench, was a very very, thin girl and her two and a half year old brother. The youngest child crawled around the floor like a frog and its poor little body was so deformed from lack of nourishment that it did not resemble a

human being. Its mother had died when it was one year old. This child has never tasted milk or butter and only has tasted meat, end quote. Now the sister in this picture is wearing a 1920s flapper hat and early 1920s flapper hat. She's perfectly healthy. She looks perfectly healthy. you can see these pictures and is dressed for cold weather despite the fact that he was there in spring and summer according to his story

the bench which is supposedly the only furniture in this peasant hut has a ribbed back like an office style almost like I don't know

they were at a doctor's office and it turns out that this picture actually dates back to the 1920s publication about the actual famine that had occurred in Volga so James Casey

who was an investigative reporter at the time. He wrote, quote, Art Department heads of Hearst's newspapers have been instructed to dig up old war and post-war pictures from the files. Pictures taken 15 to 18 years ago from war-torn areas of Europe. Some of the pictures have been retouched to look new. In other cases, the old war pictures have been refotographed. As a result, many of them look like prints. End quote. In 1934, October 1, 1934, in the herald and examiner, there were articles

by former French premier, Eduardo Harriet, who had recently returned from traveling around Ukraine. He said, quote, the whole campaign on the subject of famine in Ukraine is currently being waged. While wandering around Ukraine, I saw nothing of the sort, end quote. Another journalist, Lindsay Parrott, had traveled to Ukraine in 33, and he said nowhere had he seen signs of effects of famine, and that they had actually had an excellent harvest in 33, which now we know from the Soviet archives, is true. A journalist from the nation, another newspaper at the time, Lewis Fisher, he wrote, quote, The Hearst Organization and Nazis are beginning to work more and more closely together.

But I have not noticed the Hearst Press print Mr. Parrott's stories about a prosperous Soviet Ukraine. Mr. Parrott is Mr. Hurst's correspondent in Moscow, end quote. So he didn't even reference his own correspondent in Moscow on these events because his correspondent. Yeah, because his correspondent wouldn't push that narrative. And so, regardless of all that, a few months after this, Walker is deported from England and arrested in the U.S. It turns out, Thomas Walker was actually an escaped Colorado convict, Robert Green, who was given an eight-year sentence for forgery. He was found to have other convictions spanning three decades, including violating the Man White Slave Act in Texas. And let me tell you about this, did he?

it was a law against trafficking girls across state borders for the purpose of prostitution and debauchery. He was convicted of marriage swindle. Also, it turns out that he worked briefly in the USSR and engineering firm as Thomas J. Burke and was expelled for by his own admission in these courts, attempting to smuggle a white guard out of the country. The trial also brought out the fact that these famine pictures were fake and the entire story was dismissed in the American public. In mass. I mean, it was not something like now, now in 2018, a vast majority of the American public believes that this Ukrainian famine genocide happened. But in 1930s, it was not widely accepted at all. Because it all came out during the trial. Like when he was, when he was being tried for his crimes and for breaking, you know, for the prison break and all of that, all of these things were brought up, that he was fabricating all of these things. And so it was widely. understood that he was full of shit

but anyway we'll get into it I'm gonna really quickly roll through a couple more people the reason being that all of these sources are ones that are referenced in later publications that are taken seriously so just to really quickly roll through some more of these quote unquote sources Hearst hires another

journalist Harry Lang to corroborate his story and this guy he is a right-wing self-proclaimed socialist of the Yiddish paper The Forward and he had already launched this campaign against unions and he wanted to bust workers' unions and promote strike busting because he felt like

by cooperating with the master that they would be able to improve their quality of life and he's immediately denounced by the socialist party itself as well as the Jewish socialist community. After Lang is R.H. Singer who is another quote-unquote source. He comes back with this picture of what he says is him talking to Russian workers in Ukraine about this famine. It's a picture of him and some people.

There's no evidence of famine at all. And his mate that he went to Ukraine with said that the entire story is bullshit because he doesn't even speak Russian, right? So this guy doesn't, he can't even communicate. with these people to come back with these stories on top of the fact that, you know, he said that the story wasn't true at all. Yeah, and he ended up being discharged for loafing, is what happened to saying or discharged from the Soviet Union. After Smith is Fred Beale,

who fled to the USSR to avoid a 20-year jail sentence, but returned incognito for six months in 1933, I believe. And then he went back to the USSR for a couple of weeks, and then came back to the U.S.A. Unemployable, hoping to sell his story for money, and a reduced jail sentence. Again, like the other guy, a fellow American auto worker who had gone with him, Jay Wollineck, who was working with Beale in Ukraine, said that there was no famine condition, and that Wollineck had actually written a booklet entitled Foreign Workers in Soviet Tractor Plant, which he would bring to publicate in the nation, in which Beal himself not only failed to mention this crushing famine that was supposedly happening at the time, but had also written, quote,

it would not be true to say that all foreigners have been satisfied with life in Soviet Union. Most of them came with honest intentions, but there were also a few who expected something for nothing. They were, of course, disappointed and quickly returned, end quote. Shockingly, after he sold his story, he only served three years of his 20-year jail sentence. He got out. He wrote another book called The Proletarian Journey, in which he has pictures, but none of them are of a famine. The story itself is extremely racist with disgusting characters of Jewish folks and others.

And he has this impossible story about this man who had supposedly starved to death with his horse. They star to death simultaneously. Yeah, they both die. He just died right next to his horse. They both star to death at the same time. And in this book, he praises Hearst for being in, in favor of labor.

So, you know, may be a little suspect. Right. Weird. The next source from this time, Dr. Ewold Amende, in 1935, printed a book in Nazi Germany entitled Mass Rusland Hungaran, in which, well, and in 1936, was published in the U.S. as human life in Russia, another heavily quoted book. It would be republished in 84. It not only references Andrew Smith and Harry Lang, but it uses Nazi press.

Mussolini Press, as well as immigrant Ukrainian nationalist travelers and experts are cited, but without names, there's no footnotes, there's no bibliography at all. He uses the Walker photos. He says that a majority of them were taken by an Austrian specialist because Walker's already been debunked, and so he can't really credit Walker. He says that they're supplied by Dr. Ditloff, who for many years was director of German government of agricultural concession in the North Caucus, which, is not Ukraine. They were supposedly taken

in summer of 33, but the position was liquidated in early 33 after the Nazis took power. Seven of the photos credited to Ditloff are Walker photos, including the World War I, Prussian horse one, and the early 20s famine. He does the Frog Child story, but instead of crediting Walker,

he credits Walker again because he uses the 1934 London Daily Express story, which was written under another of Walker's names. Yeah. Just to, I guess, back up and explain what's happening here. We are hitting the point at which the first layer of citations of citations is taking place. So the first group that Justin was talking about there were supposedly people

who saw things firsthand. But we're now in 1935, after all of those sources have been kind of discredited, we're now seeing books and articles which are referencing those originally discredited sources and this is a pattern that's going to continue like there are no new sources of information

well there are mostly no new sources of information about the Ukrainian famine most of these sources if you go back you go okay well this this study here cites this book here and this book here

cites this article here this article here will inevitably lead back to Walker or Lang or one of these people who are very obviously full of shit. And it always seems to be legitimate because they've got these citations. But again, you go back further and further and further. And eventually you'll find that the original source of the information was one of these out and out falsehoods. Yeah. And the story, like I said, it was it was debunked. And the American public and certainly the global public didn't believe in this, you know, a lot of more. They knew that it was fake. They knew that it was false. And the story just dies until after World

War II, when all of a sudden a wave of fascists start showing up in the United States. Now, why are there so many fascists in Ukraine? What's the story of Ukraine? Just very briefly, Jeremy, if you would explain that? It's why there are so many fascists in the Ukraine is kind of, of a difficult question to answer but there there were a lot of them and not just you know during World War II not just in the 30s you know there were there were pogroms that were being conducted by Ukrainian nationalists and other people as well I don't want to get too much into the like ridiculousness of of the of the

Machno situation, but although Machno himself was not an anti-Semite, he had followers or were, and there were Machnavists who committed pogroms. Like, it's just, it's one of those things where this is a deep-seeded, anti-Semitic,

you know, and again, I wish I knew the cultural context that led to this, but it is a huge deal in the Ukraine. The early 20th century pogroms were largely based there, and it was the Soviet Union's invasion of the Ukraine, which ended them.

And it was one of the reasons cited for the invasion of the Ukraine by the Soviet Union was to end the pogroms. So I guess, you know, to the question is why there's so many Ukrainian nationalists. I mean, perhaps, you know, some of it has to do with the response to, because I think the Ukrainians, and this is a long history, you know, they had been sort of, of subject states, or a subject state to, you know, the Prussian Empire, to the Tsarist Empire. I mean, this is like a, it's kind of a back and forth thing where they're somewhat like Poland. They're constantly being taken over by other people, and perhaps that, you know, makes you

angry enough to sort of turn against people who you perceive as subjugating you. but in any case so that's I guess kind of where we're at on that front yep so why why launched this campaign in 1929 the Ukrainian

nationalists published in papers in Ukraine attend commandments which were number one attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it number two do not allow anyone to defame the glory or the honor of your nation number three

remember the great days of our efforts Number four, be proud of the fact that you are an heir of the struggle for the glory of the Lottomor's Trident, whatever the fuck that means. Number five, avenge the great knights. You're starting to see some parallels between like the proud boys and shit? Yeah. Number six, do not speak of the cause with whomever possible, but only with whomever necessary. Number seven, do not hesitate to commit the greatest crime if the good of the cause demands

it. Number eight, regard the enemies of your nation with hate and perfidy. Number nine, neither request nor threats, nor torture, nor death can compel you to betray secrets. Number 10, aspire to expand the strengths, riches, and size of the Ukrainian state, even by means of enslaving foreigners. There it is. There it is. Yeah. Yep.

So let's jump to the U.S., right? So a declassified National Security Council Directive 4A in 1947 said that the campaign against the Soviets would include, quote, primarily media-related activities, including unattributed publications, forgeries, and subsidization of publications. Political action would involve exploitation of displaced persons and defectors, hmm, and support to political parties, paramilitary activities, including support to guerrillas and sabotage, and economic activities consisting of monetary operations. And essentially, what happened was there was a law against Nazis or Nazi collaborators coming into the U.S., in fact, in Europe, most of them were thrown in work camps, right?

If they weren't executed, they were thrown into work camps. And so the U.S. Office of Policy Coordination in the U.S. petitioned the U.S. state saying that, you know, these Ukrainian nationalists, they weren't really Nazis. In fact, they fought the Nazis because they argued sometimes and they, you know, they didn't want the Nazis to take Ukraine. They were just, you know, fighting together heroes against the Bolsheviks and the communists. So really, they're on our side. And so the U.S. State Department says, hmm, okay, sure. And so they allow this wave of Ukrainian nationalists into the U.S. that are then redirected into the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, which is also known as Radio

Liberty. And it, which receives 90% of its budget from the CIA, okay? Now, at the same time as these Ukrainian nationalists are not only allowed into the U.S., but are funneled into the U.S. State Department and covert ops, but the U.S. will not allow any Eastern Europeans or anybody for that matter into the U.S. if they have or ever have been members of the Communist Party. Have you now? Are you now or have you ever been? Yeah, I mean, like, this is, so basically you are getting only one side of the story from people who have a vested interest in telling these lies. Like, it's not like you're getting honest, like what broad spectrum, like, oh, you know, what was this like from a lot of different people? You're getting it from fascists, you know?

I mean, I don't, God damn it. It's wild. Y'all, please. It's wild that leftists believe this shit. Like, like check the sources on this stuff. like yeah and that's why I that's why I go through a lot of these like really kind of repetitious names and stories is because I want the people listening to this if they go bust open you know some great ones like when I'll talk about in a minute called why is one holocaust worse than the others god damn I want you to be able to be able to look at these sources where do these stories come from and be like oh I know that name oh I know that name oh I know that name yeah and be able to be like okay this is entire story's bullshit okay so that's the reason I know it feels repetitive and in and dry, but that's why it's important. But the U.S. wasn't the only one that let in these fucking fascists. In 1950, the Canadian government allows, in mass, the Wafin SS division

from Ukraine into their country. Okay, so these are literal Nazis, not just Ukrainian fascists or Ukrainian nationalists, but actual Nazis. But you see, they had, they changed their name right before the surrender in 45, they changed it to the first division of the non-existent Ukrainian National Army. And so it wasn't blocked on this list of, you know, of SS divisions. They were Vof and SS. Yep. But they just said, oh, actually, no, about that.

We were the first division of the Ukrainian National Army, an entity that did not exist. Wow. In this group is one of the leaders of the 1919 population. And a lot of these people, they changed their name so they couldn't be traced back. For example, the Nazi SS man and propaganda minister and writer, Alexa Hai Halalco, changed his name to Hadjewicz. He ended up being interviewed for a chunk of one of the other heavily quoted books, The Black Deeds of the Kremlin. okay now another like the book that i just talked about why is one holocaust worse than the others which is quoted often right it's a book that's quoted often and certainly that premise is quoted often

oh you know the how is you know the halada more better than than the systematic extermination of the jewish people come the fuck on so this book it downplays what it calls the quote unquote alleged six million jewish deaths and says that the cause that the cause of the cause of of anti-Semitism is, quote, Jewish obstinacy and arrogance, end quote. It also claims that, quote, having a majority in the USSR administration, the Jews were involved in all decision-making, including the settlement of Jews in Ukraine and Crimea, plus the plan to build Zion in Ukraine. Planning of the Ukrainian famine was still a few years into the future, disarming Ukraine with false promises of amnesty and further intimidating the

populace by the judicial process. Russia then took steps. to implement the famine plan. The Jewish farmers were warned in advance, and they left their homesteads moving to nearby cities and villages. The Jewish population did not starve, as the warning enabled them to store food in anticipation, end quote. And this story goes on to explain how the Jew press covered up the massacre. Yeah.

Okay? Yeah. So, again, like, are you, like, if you're not detecting a trend yet, right. If you've got Hearst, who is a pro-fascist, You've got literal Nazis, you've got Ukrainian nationalists, and now we've got Jewish conspiracy theorists. These are your sources, people, like these are the people who are telling you about the Halotomore. Yep.

The New Pathway was an OUN publication, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. And it's a paper, the New Pathway. And in 1939, it publishes an article that says, quote, in Russia, Jew terrorists killed 20, 28 bishops, 1,200 priests, 7,000 teachers, 8,000 doctors, 50,000 village elders, 260,000 soldiers, policemen, police chiefs, intellectuals, workers, peasants, but no one objected. But today, when the Jews are even beaten, aren't even beaten, but only frightened everybody hollers, end quote. And these are the primary sources for your Halada more, okay?

Jesus Christ. So let's bring up some more legitimate sources, right? So if you look into the Halada Moore, probably the most quoted expert is Robert Conquest. And who the fuck is Robert Conquest? Let me tell you. He was a former British Secret Service agent that worked in the disinformation department that's called the Information Research Department. After his career is over, he's asked to write another book about the family because he had written one when he was working for the IRD,

which was entitled Harvest of Sorrow, often quoted. Now, initially after it's published, a third of the copies are, are bought by Prager, who is a publisher that publishes books at the CIA's request. And in this book, he ups his totals from 14 to 14 million from his earlier projection of 6 million. And he extends the date of the famine conditions to 1937. On top of that, he backdates the fake Walker story that has been already disproven in the public from 1935 to 1933. Because he was trying to line it up with the actual, like, low crop yields. Yep.

He legitimizes the Ukrainian nationalist factions that are in Ukraine at the time, and he brushes off the mass slaughter of Ukrainian Jews in 18 and 19 as the, quote, battle for independence for the Ukrainian nationalist. Independence from who, right? Exactly. The not from the Jews. From the Jews, exactly. The Nazi occupation of Ukraine in this book is, is, is, is.

framed as a period of respite from Soviet terror. Okay? He references Walker, Black Deeds of the Kremlin, Fred Beal, Aminde, Nazi Papers, the CIA-funded Refugee Interview Project, McCarthy's U.S. House Committee on Communist Aggression, as well as 13 references from a fictional novel by Vasily Grossman that's called Everything Flows.

Okay? And another, you know, other of his primary sources are like, secondhand information, which is very common in most of these publications, and, quote, a Canadian-Ukrainian top official was told that there was a secret report that detailed 10 million deaths, in quote. Did he also cite animal farm? Basically, yeah. Like, so, you know, there, well, you know what, I don't want to get into it yet.

Yeah, we got a shit ton of cover. But, yeah. So let's talk about the black deeds of Kremlin. It opens with a full page portrait honoring pogromist leader Simon Pett. Liora, who I had talked about earlier, who was martyred by the assassination by Sholem Schwarzbard in Paris in 1926, which was like a retribution

for the mass slaughter of Jews. Another full page pays tribute to the Nazi Iron Cross recipient, Major Wormon Schucovich, and Petro Pavlovich also wrote in this book. He also testified in front of the U.S. Congress a commission of communist aggression in 53,

But he wrote under his earlier name, Apollon Trimovetsky, he wrote what's called Zolichin Iu, Vinicia, in which he wrote about how the massacre, you know, the famine genocide, should unite Ukraine against the struggle with the terrible enemy of mankind, Bolshevism. He said that the Ukrainians should be staled in the greater and cruel struggle against Jew communism. He calls Stalin the Jewish moron and refers to Stalin and his Jew government. in this book and it comes out later you know i guess around this time before that in the nuremberg trials under this previous name that he wasn't testifying under that the mass graves in venizia which pavlovich wrote about um were actually the mass graves of the jewish SS and ukrainian militia victims so yeah so they took their own victims and painted them as being you know dying from the holodomar exactly and just

just to wrap up, you know, this discussion, because there is some math involved in the later publication. So let's talk about the math, right? It was, after 30, 40 years of just secondhand testimony about, you know, the starvation, people started trying to figure out, okay, how can we, how can we justify these numbers? Where do these numbers come from? So Dana Dalrymple wrote in 1964 a book called Soviet Studies, which is the first one to actually try to give math to these numbers. And he determines these numbers by averaging guesses of 20 Western journalists who visited the Soviet Union at the time or spoke to Soviet emigres, sometimes as much as two decades later. And these range from one million in the New York

Carroll Tribune to 10 million in the New York World Telegram. One of them is Walker, who's already been proven a fraud, but Dalryl makes claims such as presumably could speak Russian. He doesn't know anything about him, but he's like, presumably this guy can speak Russian, so he must be an expert. Others include, in this 20, others include Lange,

Nicholas Prishadko, who was a Nazi collaborator in charge of Ministry of Culture and Education in Kiev during the war. Otto Schiller, who's a Nazi functionary, the Archbishop of Canterbury is one of them. And if you trace back to that source, it's a debate in the British House of Lords

in which he cites a Mende, who we've already proven is a Nazi. This same archbishop also has this fantastic quote. The greatest sympathy with the immense undoubted and on the whole beneficial awakening, which has come to German life in every aspect of the remarkable revolution associated with the name Er Itler. William Chamberlain, who served on the OUN-infested Board of Trustees of Radio Liberty,

Eugene Lyons, who got his figure from, quote, estimates made by foreigners and Russians in Moscow, who also served on Radio Liberty. One of them is Amende himself. Frederick Birchhal, who was the Berlin Bureau Chief, who said that the Nazis were not intending, quote, any slaughter of their enemies or racial oppression to any vital degree, end quote. He said that Hitler had no desire to go to war and was certainly no dictator.

Richard Salat, who wrote for the World Telegram, and his are the top, they're the top number, and in it he's citing people's guesses, again, just people that he talked to. And the rest are either Nazis, OUN, or based on, quote, foreign residents. On the other hand, Sir John Maynard, who was a high official of the Indian government, he was a famine expert. They had a terrible famine in India, as we already know.

And that one was caused by Winston Churchill. Yeah, it was absolutely caused by Winston Churchill. But he said that the idea of three or four million dead, so this is a pretty low statistic at this point, has, quote, passed into legend. Any suggestion or a calamity comparable with the famine of 1921 and 1922 is of the opinion of the present writer who traveled through Ukraine in the North Caucus in July of 1933 unfounded, end quote. So Dalrymple, he ends up writing another book after his first one gets shit on called the Soviet famine of 1932 and 1933 further references in which he quotes a Dr. Horsley Grant who claims that the figure is 15 million.

okay and if this is true that's 60% of the population of Ukraine was wiped out and yet somebody nobody really noticed right so later on he tries to like kind of retcon history in this book Dalrymple and he says that the earlier statistics from you know

all these other sources that we talked about these quote unquote experts that were there that are actually referenced were apparently from Dr. Gant which is quite odd because that would mean that Gant didn't even believe his own figures because back then he's saying one to seven million and now he's saying 14 million so what the fuck is happening yeah anyway so in the next the next one to come out

was in the 80s it was called 50 years ago by walter dushnik who was also the editor of ukraine a concise encyclopedia which he did with a nazi collaborator won't get into all that anyway he tries to legitimize the figure using logic and facts at this point you can basically assume that anyone we references either a fascist or work with a fashion. And so what he does, you know, now he's using like actual math, he takes the 1926 census and the 1939 census and he averages out the increased pre-collectivization and post and says it can be calculated that Ukraine lost 7.5 million people, end quote. U.S. sociologist Albert Simanski in criticizing. That's convincing, right? Like if you don't think about it too much,

that's a, oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. The census figures totally like unbiased and you can you can pick the, you can pick the numbers out of this. Exactly, which is why I'm going to quote a U.S. sociologist at the time. And this is in response to the estimate of three million deaths, okay? He says this math assumes, quote, one, even in conditions of extreme famine, instability, and civil war, peasants would conceive at the same rate as in less precarious periods. Two, that abortion and infanticide did not significantly increase, and that three, there were as many women of maximum repriments. reproductive age in 1932 and 1933 as before. All these assumptions are erroneous.

All peasants have traditional techniques of birth control and are thus able to limit their reproduction to a significant degree. It is the economic benefit attendant upon having large families, which is operative, a factor not applicable during the famine, not ignorance of birth control. Further, legal abortion was so widely practiced in this period that in 1936 the state banned it as a campaign to increase population, end quote. so on top of that it doesn't take into account the fact that of the civil war in world war two that create massive birth gaps so those that were born in 14 would have been 16 in 1930 and would have just been entering the period of major reproduction and so the decline of birth rates until through the early 30s accounts for this massive missing population that was born in 1914 to 1922 age groups and what he's saying there essentially is that that lots of people died in world war one and in the

the Civil War, and also lots of people did not give birth during that period. They either had legal abortions or they chose not to have children during this period because it was an awful time to be alive, which means that the people who would then be of childbearing age during the quote-unquote famine would not have been there to have children. And so you cannot just look at the census data and make these broad-based assumptions, you know, based on, oh, well, there should have been this many people. And there's even more than that. There's like more about the,

because they reclassified a bunch of Ukrainians. Yeah, that's what I was going to talk about. So another statistic that's probably the most quote unquote professional comes from Dr. James Mace, who was a Harvard professor and he wrote an article about it. Basically, he does a couple of things. First of all, I take census data before and after, including World War II,

so it doesn't even take into account the number of people that died in World War II. But it also ignores the fact that, you know, the factors that, you know, like Jeremy was talking about, the change in declared nationality, intermarriage, assimilation,

migration. For example, in the late 20s, between these two censuses, Cuban Cossacks were reclassified from Ukraine to Russia, which is three million alone. Yeah.

And these people who formerly had, and this is the fucking weird thing about census data, is that what someone, it's, first of all, it's based on self-identification a lot of the time.

So what do you call yourself, right? But then sometimes it's also based on who's taking, taking the records in what they write down. So that's another factor. But between these two censuses, three million people,

two to three million people had formerly been qualified as being Ukrainian and now they were qualified as being Russian. And so that means that two to three million people just vanished from Ukraine not because they died,

but because they had just been requalified as a different nationality. Right. I mean, but all of these statistics are absurd, because the idea that a population of 25 million Ukrainians could lose six or eight or 10 or 15 million people and then go on to lose another five to 10 million in World War II, putting it at, what, five million people? Yeah. And then somehow it gets to 40 million people in 1939 in that census. Like, what are we even doing? Yeah, they multiplied, you know, eight times their population in a matter of six.

six years, right? Like, how? Yeah. Explain that to me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I literally explain to me, Brett. I want you to tell me now. I can't, I can't.

Yeah, so just transitioning. I mean, that right there was a fucking dissertation. And I do want to call out Justin really quick because at the beginning of this episode, I said, hey, how long do you think this episode is going to take? An hour, an hour and a half. Not just for the Ukrainian. famine part. No, but that's absolutely essential. And I think that's incredibly important in this discussion. One, because it's just a huge part of this discussion of the Soviet Union and Stalin and

communism and the victims of communism and blah, blah, blah. But two is because it's a systematic breakdown of sources. And if you care about objectivity, if you care about being empirical, if you care about sticking to the facts, then following this long convoluted trail of citation after citation is utterly essential to getting to the bottom of where this information came from. And if you're going to be online or in real life talking about this, parroting these ideas, you better fucking know where these ideas come from. And that's what makes somebody a critical, you know, genuine thinker and somebody who just wants to parrot certain lines based on ideology.

So although that was incredibly long, it was, it was necessary. And I hope people replay that over and over again. If you want to get all the facts, clearly, you know, Jeremy and just. and did immense amounts of research before coming on the show, which I deeply appreciate. So that was simultaneously factual and just packed full of information, but also incredibly admirable that you did the work because, you know, I could not find such thoroughgoing analysis of this one topic online. And I think you guys did a wonderful job of it. So this is going to be a 17-hour episode. I'm so sorry. It's going to be good. It's going to be good.

Well, but I would like to say that I don't really like, I'm not like mad or I, and I don't don't blame people for not knowing this stuff because it's not widely available. It's not something that you can just Google and find this information because, and it's, I think it's, part of it is just the nature of the internet and the way that it is constructed and how particular narratives get pushed to the front, but it's also intentional. Like, these sources are bullshit, but because they obfuscate it behind things like a Harvard study, um, that seems totally, you know, legit. but then again you dig into it and it goes back to Nazis and it goes back to fascists and it goes back to nationalists and it goes back to bullshitters you know

a fucking escaped convict convicted of fraud right anyway but like I don't blame people for this I do after they listen to this if they're ignoring stuff yeah right no exactly and I was one of those people that just didn't know I couldn't find

good information I read a lot of you know things that would that would skew in this right wing direction and I just didn't know how to even orient myself to those facts so so that's incredibly important but you know let's go ahead and keep chugging along here um earlier in this discussion we did allude to to the purges um we talked about it a little bit of up top and and we mentioned that we're going to come back to it later so let's go ahead and get into the purges what were the purges why did they happen and and what were their excesses in your opinion okay um yeah okay so i'll just i'll rather than address

what do you mean excesses Stalin did nothing wrong he did three things wrong We did three things right. So, yeah, so I'll explain, I guess, over the course. I'm not going to try to address those questions individually. But I think it's interesting to note that the largest purge ever committed in the Soviet Union or in communist Russia was actually in 1921 under Lenin. Wei-wah! In which 45% of the party members were purged. So that's massive.

The numbers aren't as high, but it was a much higher percentage of the party because the party had grown not very much at that point. But the party grew massively under Stalin. And I think before we get to the purges, I want to reference three individuals who wrote books later in life talking about the way that they tried to. embed themselves or whatever to undermine Stalin or the leadership of the communist government because I think it's important to kind of address what you talked about earlier with was Stalin really paranoid right so the first individual and I'm going to quote heavily here so that there's no no bullshit the first individual is Boris Bezanov who literally wrote a book about it called with Stalin in the Kremlin

and as a young man he had fought against the Bolsheviks in Ukraine but he had managed to stay under the radar and so he ended up infiltrating the party and eventually rose to assistant to Stalin himself okay and he wrote quote soldier of the anti-Bolshevik army i had imposed upon myself the difficult and perilous task of penetrating right into the heart of the enemy headquarters i had succeeded the Bolsheviks seized it in 1919 sewing terror to spit at them in their face would have only given me 10 bullets. I took another path. To save the elite of my city, I covered myself with the mask of communist ideology. End quote.

And this guy, he managed to attend every Politburo meeting in 1923 and 1924 and then bounced from post to post until he fled in 1928. Okay? Part of the purge. George Solomon. He summarized conversations that he had had in 1918, which, with Krasen, who is another one of the old Bolsheviks that we talk about. In his 1930 book, in which he said, quote,

we had understood that the new regime had introduced a series of absurd measures by destroying the technical forces, by demoralizing the technical experts, and by substituting workers' committees for them. We understood the line of annihilating the bourgeoisie was no less absurd. The bourgeoisie was destined to still bring us many positive elements. This class needed to fill its historic and civilizing role. A gradual change took place in our assessment of the situation. We asked ourselves if we had the right to remain aloof.

Should we not, in the interests of the people that we wanted to serve, give the Soviets our support and our experience in order to bring this task some sane elements? Would we not have had a better chance to fight against this policy of general destruction that marked the Bolsheviks activity? We could also oppose the total destruction of the bourgeoisie. We thought that the restoration of normal diplomatic relations, with the West would necessarily force our leaders to fall in line with other nations and that the tendency toward immediate and direct communism would start to shrink and ultimately

disappear forever. Given these new thoughts, we decided, Krasen and myself, to join the Soviets. End quote. These two reached minister and vice minister under Lenin in 1923. Okay. Next up is a name that we're going to reference heavily, yeah, because he was an important figure. He was also an old Bolshevik, Alexander Zinoviev. And in his book, which he published in 1939, he talks about being 17 years old. And he says, quote, I could see the differences between the reality and the ideals of communism. I made Stalin responsible for this difference. I considered myself a neo-anarchist. And he passionately read Buchanan and Krapakken as a student. He says, quote, the idea of killing Stalin filled my thoughts and feelings. I had a penchant for terrorism. We studied the technical

possibilities of an attack during a parade in Red Square. We would provoke a diversion that would allow me, armed with a pistol and grenades, to attack the leaders. Upon entry, I understood that sooner or later, I would have to join the Communist Party. I had no intention of openly expressing my convictions. I would only get myself in trouble. I had already chosen my course. I wanted to be a revolutionary, struggling for a new society. I therefore decided to hide myself for a time, and to hide my real nature from my entourage, except for a few intimate. friends, end quote. And the reason, like I said, that these are important is that these aren't under duress, right? These aren't in trial. There's no pressure here. These are their personal

admissions of people that had literally, especially Zonov, had embedded themselves at the government's right hand. So maybe he was not paranoid enough. That's remarkable, yeah. Right? We were talking about three people, one of whom openly is like, I really wanted to kill that asshole. Yeah, yeah. Like, but was, you know, anyway, sorry, go ahead. You're good. Yeah. So in 1927, Trotsky, he aligns himself with Zinoviev, who we just talked about, and Kamenev and begins organizing underground groups within the party.

Trotsky wrote about the Soviet Thermidor, referencing the French counter-revolution when the right-wing Jacobins executed the left-wing jacobins with Germany at their door, implying that Trotsky and the opportunists would seize the moment if an imperialist army were to attack to topple the government. This was a huge shock to the Soviet government, and there was a major vote, and the opposition being Trotsky and Zinoviev and Kamenev, they received 6,000 votes to 720,000 votes against.

And all of the Trotskyite and Zinoviev leaders were expelled from the party. However, a year later, several of the Zinovites were canted and were reintegrated, along with Zenovi of himself, okay, and Kamenev. A large number of the Trotskyites were also let back in, including Prio Berzhensky and Radik, who will get to later. They would end up waging a campaign against collectivization well after it's already reaping benefits in 1932 and 1933 and then would be expelled again.

So just real quick, Jeremy, do you want to talk about, like, where are they at at this point? Why is the purge beginning to become a necessity? So you're talking about following World War I, you know, you had a brief period of peace, I suppose you could call it, before there was this insurgency of, you know, landlords and bourgeois and petty bourgeois assholes, which then had to be put down. And then you have the Russian Civil War. And so you're talking about this is a nation that has a, this is a nation that has. been around for you know barely half a decade and it's it's it's had to defeat multiple enemies on multiple fronts you have all of these forces even within the bolsheviks who are attempting to retreat back into capitalism or social democracy or something of that nature and not in a

you know leninist new economic plan kind of way but as this is the permanent way we want things to be. And Bukharan, who initially was like hardline left, suddenly swung his politics in the early 20s over to social democracy. So, you know, again, like this idea that the old Bolsheviks were actual communists or even socialists isn't always true. Obviously, it is in some cases, but we're not talking about people who were ideologically pure that Stalin just wanted out of the way because he hungered for power. or something. It was because he felt like

this was a threat to the revolution. Not only did he think that, clearly the party did. I mean, if you're talking about 6,000 votes versus 700,000, that's absurd. That's an absurd number. So moving on, we'll start to talk about

the snowball effect that would lead to what I will admit or some excesses in the purge. So on December 1st, 1934, Kirov, who is number two in the party, is assassinated in his office party headquarters in Leningrad. The man who killed Kirov, Nikolov,

has already been purged from the party, but because of the... Remember we talked about the technological issues and the disorganization at the time, he still had his party badge. So all he had to do was show his party badge. He walked into the party headquarters and assassinated Kirov.

And Kirov was Stalin's right-hand man. He, at this point, he was being groomed. to take over after Stalin died and still somehow there's rumors that Stalin killed Kirov himself in order to secure it's absurd so Tokayev was a member of an underground communist organization and he wrote that Kirov was killed by an opposition group that Tokayev himself had prepared for the assassination and this happens right after as we just talked about 50% of the release of what we didn't talk about this part but the 50% of the release of people jail during collectivization efforts, but also the reintegration of the Zinoviev and Trotskyite blocks

back into the party. So it's already kind of really suspect. And the police end up finding Nikolov's journal, but in it there is no mention of the opposition group. So they conclude that while the opposition, quote, influenced his actions, that they weren't responsible. And if, let's talk about that for a second, because you have, if Stalin or even the communist government is this monster that just kills people left and right, wouldn't the police, the NKVD, say, you know what, actually, I think that this journal says that it was Bucherin. Let's kill Bucharin. But instead, they say that nobody is actually responsible. They haven't found anybody that's responsible for it yet. So after that, things kind of relax a little bit.

There's a party purge of the Zenoviivites, many of them, but there's no mass violence or anything. Six months later, over the course of the investigation that they're still ongoing, they find proof that Trotsky had sent letters in early 1932 to Radik, who we talked about earlier, as well as another internal CC member in Prio Brzynski, which we also talked about, and others to try to incite them to more extreme measures of toppling Stalin and the government. And just in case you think this is more paranoia or Soviet propaganda, U.S. historian J. Archgetti ended up finding traces of these letters in Trotsky's archives. In October 32, the former Trotskyite Goltzman meets with Trotsky's son Setoff,

who is not only allowed to continue life in the Soviet Union, but he's one of the heads of the one of the local party governments okay and so he met with Trotsky's son Setov in Berlin and they discussed a plan by Smyranov to create a united opposition block that would include the Trotskyites and Zenoviovites

Trotsky insisted on quote anonymity and clandestinity end quote Setov wrote to his father that the block was officially created and that they were working on this Saffarov-Takarov group which is just another more CC members

And here's some, like, hot takes from Trotsky himself around this period. I'm not going to spend the podcast shitting on Trotsky, although I could certainly do that. But I do think it's important to note what he was doing at that time. And so he, at the same time as all this is going on, he's writing that Stalin and the Communist Party is responsible for Hitler's rise to power. And to overthrow Hitler, the Communist Party had to be destroyed, quote, mercilessly. quote, Hitler's victory arose by the despicable and criminal policy of the common turn, end quote. Quote, no Stalin, no victory for Hitler. The Stalinist common turn, as well as the Stalinist diplomacy, assisted Hitler into the saddle from either side.

The common turn bureaucracy, together with social democracy, is doing everything it can possibly do to transform Europe, in fact the entire world, into a fascist concentration camp. The common turn provided one of the most important conditions for the victory of fascism. To overthrow Hitler, it is necessary to finish with the common turn, end quote. Jesus. Yikes. Yikes. So all the while, saying that Stalin is a despot, right? That purging was unnecessary.

And Trotsky literally had this position that capitalist restoration was impossible within the Soviet Union. This is part of his argument, is that, you know, all these excesses, by Stalin quote unquote were unnecessary because they had already transitioned into socialism and so they couldn't go back which of course we know

is fucking false because they did so in 1936 there's rumors of infiltration within the NKVD which said of Trotsky's son would actually later admit to and since the loyalty

of the NKVD head Yagoda was in question which we talked about kind of the excesses of the Spanish Civil War Stalin installs Yezhov in number two in control of the NKVD to kind of, I guess, keep an eye on him. And so in September 1936... But why did he not kill him, right? Like if he's this like brutal dictator who can do whatever and kill whoever and he finds that this Yagoda is doing things outside of the realm of what is in the best interest of the Soviet Union, why did he not just kill him?

Sure. this happens a lot in September 36 bombs go off in several Siberian mines killing 12 people and destroying some serious infrastructure and investigations led back to Piatikov who was an old Trotskyist

he was assistant to the commissar of heavy industry in 32 and in January 37 he as well as a number of other Trotskyites admitted to the crime a U.S. engineer just to corroborate. U.S. engineer who was there at the time, John Littlepage, he said that when he arrived there in 28, there were already plans for sabotage being whispered about, not only in Siberia, but in Kazakhstan. And so, Piatikov, in his trial, again confirmed by Little

Page, said, in 1931, I was in Berlin on an official business. In the middle of the summer of 1931, Ivan Nikita Smirnoff, Nikitich? Oh, geez. Anyway, Smirnoff told me in Berlin that the Trotskyite fight against the Soviet government and the party leadership was being renewed with new vigor, that he, Smyranoff, had an interview in Berlin with Trotsky's son Setoff, who on Trotsky's instruction had given him a new line. Quote, Smirnov conveyed to me that Setov wanted very much to see me. I agreed to this meeting. Setov said that there was being formed, or already had been formed, a Trotskyite center, that the possibility was being sounded of restoring the United Organization with the Zenoviavites.

Sedav also said that he knew that, for a fact, the rights also in the persons of Tomsky, Bukhar, and Rikov had not laid down their arms, that they had only quieted down temporarily, and that the necessary connections should be established with them too. Setov said that only one thing was required of me, namely that I should place as many orders as possible with two German firms, Borsik and Demeg, and that he, Setov, would arrange to receive the necessary sums from them, bearing in mind that I would not be particularly exacting as to the prices. If this were deciphered, it was clear that the additions to the prices would be made on the Soviet orders, that would be made on the Soviet orders, would pass wholly or in part into Trotsky's hands for his counter-revolutionary purposes. end quote whew so at this point Trotsky's literally

funneling money through Nazi Germany almost Nazi Germany this is right before the Nazi Ascension yeah Leon damn it

so after that there's more sabotages in Magneteggorsk again confirmed by an American engineer Nailed it. Anyway, moving on to old Bolshevik Bukharin, who we should mention was also the chief editor of the government newspaper, so he used that to kind of spread his ideology.

In early in 37, a CC meeting, it was decided through a vote, a vote, that a purge was necessary after all these terrorist attacks, basically. And so evidence was gathered and leveled at Bukkeren, who it said was aware of these groups that we just talked about. The first thing Stalin did was to warn against over zealous purging. So again, we talk about him as a maniac or whatever is false. And before any action is taken in the purge, he puts all cadres through a four-month education program

to fight ideologically the opportunism. He attacked the, quote, family atmosphere in which there can be no place for criticism of defects in the work or self-criticism by the leaders of work, end quote. Stalin, he's not some dictator, the vast majority of these purges they took place at a local level, and he criticized them immediately, saying, quote, some of our party leaders suffer from a lack of concern for people, for members of the party, for workers, because they have no individual approach in appraising party members and party work. They usually act in a haphazard way. Only those who are in fact profoundly anti-party can have such an approach to members of the party, end quote.

Now, Bukharin's trial starts in 38, and he immediately, he's worn out by this point. He's an old man, and he's been fighting a counter-revolution inside the Soviet Union for years. And so he immediately admits to adopting this counter-revolutionary line, and as well as encouraging younger party admirers to do the same. And in the form of a declaration in 1931, to liquidate Stalin, his role, and his supporters, to reintroduce markets in agriculture and return the land and the possession to the Kulaks. During his trial, Bukharin even admits in front of the tribunal that in 1918, after the Brest-Littopsk Treaty, that there was a plan to arrest Linen, Stalin, and Sferdlov, and to form a new government composed of, quote,

left communists and social revolutionary. So the old Bolshevik Bucheren was literally going to kill Linen. Well, right there, before we move on, you know, reading over Bucheren's trial and stuff, a lot of the counter-argument from perhaps the left opposition side would say that he admitted to things that he didn't actually believe in or do precisely because he might have been worn out or because he knew that it would have been futile anyway. How do you respond to that sort of framing of what's going on here? my response to that is read the fucking transcripts okay these these of the trial you mean of the trial yeah i've read parts of them they're extremely thorough they span days uh the transcripts are 800 pages long and so if basically what we have here is schrodinger's Stalin because you have a a government who simultaneously uh uh you know, install and you can write somebody's name in a notebook and they die the next day but also have to have an 800 page long transcript days spanning trial to get rid of one individual. I mean, if you don't believe, if you think the trials are show trials, knock yourself out and read the damn transcripts. Yeah, I mean, it's, that's sure. Is it possible?

Sure. I mean, anything is fucking possible, but like, it's not like he was short about his explanations of things he was very thorough yeah it's not it's also not like he had a gun to his head like he was being like forced to do this like he's he's being asked questions and he's giving responses i don't know man yeah no i mean i encourage people to go to go read those read those transcripts i mean that's going to the heart of the matter i will also you know at the end of this i'm going to list some references of books people can read and you can dive into that too Okay. Kamenev, Zinov, and Radik,

they testified admitting their involvement in a conspiracy to stage a coup against Stalin and the leadership with the help of Colonel Tokayev. The plan was to abolish the Politburo to grant independence to Ukraine, and the caucuses, which it said would, quote, fight better, divided. Sure, that's how that works. Again, if you don't believe the trials, the trans, the opinions. I have here a quote from the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, who was a lawyer. He sent a confidential message to the Secretary of State in Washington about these trials. He set through them

all. And it says, quote, notwithstanding a prejudice arising from the confession evidence in a prejudice against a judicial system, which affords practically no protection for the accused, after daily observation of the witnesses, their manner of testifying, the unconscious corroboration which is developed, and other facts in the course of the trial, together with others of which a judicial notice could be taken. It is my opinion so far that the political defendants are concerned sufficient crimes under Soviet law. Among those charged in the indictment were established by the proof and beyond a reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of guilty by treason, and the education of the punishment provided by Soviet criminal statutes. The opinion of those diplomats who attended the trial most regularly was general that the case had established the fact that there was a formidable political opposition and an exceedingly serious plot, end quote. So, yeah, I mean, he basically says that although the people who were on trial had very few protections in terms of, like, you know, in the U.S. we have the whole you can't be forced to testify against yourself.

So there's that, they don't have those protections, but that notwithstanding, he thinks that everything was basically above board and that these people were guilty of treason, you know, following the trial. And so on May 26, 1937, Marshal Tuchayevsky and commanders Yakir, U. Boverich, Eidman, Kork, Putna, Feldman, and Primakov were arrested, tried in front of a military tribunal. Their execution was signed on July 12th, and there was a second coupot revealed, which involved even higher-ranking members of the military, and this is the point at which the panic really starts, because now you have two coup plots, you have sabotage across the board. You have Bucharin himself admitting to these plots, all kinds of stuff. And so Molotov, looking back when he was still alive in the early 80s, he said about, this period. Quote, an atmosphere of extreme tension reigned during this period. It was necessary to act without mercy. I think that it was justified. If Tuchayevsky, Yakir, Rikov, and Zinoviev had started up their opposition in wartime, there would have been an extremely difficult struggle.

The number of victims would have been colossal. Colossal, he reinforces. The two sides would have been condemned to disaster. They had links that went right up to Hitler that far. Trotsky had similar links, without a doubt. Hitler was an adventurous, as well. was Trotsky, they had those traits in common, and the rightists, Bukharin and Rikov, had links with them, and of course many of the military leaders, end quote. And now I'm going to quote everybody's favorite Nazi Goebbels, who in his journal made some comments about a conversation he had had with Hitler, about how they understood the importance of taking advantage of the opposition and defeatist currencies within the Red Army, saying, quote, the furor explained

one more time the Chutcheyevsky case and stated that we aired completely at the time when we thought that Stalin had ruined the Red Army. The opposite is true. Stalin got rid of all the opposition circles within the Army and thereby succeeded in making sure that there would no longer be any

defeatist currencies within that army, end quote. All right. That was fucking extensive. Anything else you want to talk about with the purges? Yeah, how about the purge? Yeah, go on. sometimes you stop and I'm like is he does he want to keep going to take it a breath yeah I'm giving you some room to if you want to like jump in or something

yeah no no keep going I'm just listening like I'm saying I'm learning along with everybody else like obviously my knowledge of this shit does not go nearly as deep as yours so I'm just kind of soaking it all in yeah absolutely and so now we can kind of talk about the excesses as well as the reaction to those excesses Zadanov's party revival campaign and Ezov who was the head of the NKVD at the time his hunt for enemies fused to kind of create this cocktail of overzealousness. And the purge started with a cadre decision, which was signed on July 2nd, 1937 by Stalin,

Molotov, and Yeshov, then signed the executive orders condemning about 76,000 individuals to death, consisting of everything from common criminals to Kuulaks, counter-revolutionaries, and spies. All of these cases, you know, even though probably excessive, they had to be examined by a Troika,

which included the party secretary, the president of the local Soviet, wherever these people were, as well as the chief of the NKVD. But starting in September of 37, the leaders of the purge at the regional level and the leadership special envoys were already introducing demands

to increase the quota of anti-Soviet elements to be executed. Regional party secretaries tried to show their vigilance by denouncing and expelling a large number of lower cadres and ordinary members. On top of that, anti-Soviet opportunists that were embedded in the party, of course, used this to get rid of loyal communist cadres. One of them actually testified later saying, quote, We endeavored to expel as many people from the party as possible.

We expelled people where there was no grounds for expulsion. We had one aim in our view to increase the number of embittered people and thus increase the number of our allies, end quote. Three months in, Stalin's already starting to see issues. and in the fourth month, three deputy commissars of the NKVD are fired before the CC meeting had even occurred, which is normally where those sorts of high-level firings and hirings were taken care of. In January of 38, the Central Committee published a resolution. Quote, the Central Committee Plenum considers it necessary to direct the attention of party organizations and their leaders to the fact that while carrying out their major effort to purge their ranks of Trotskyite rightist agents of,

fascism. They are committing serious errors and perversions which interfere with the business of purging the party of double dealers, spies, and wreckers. Despite the frequent directives and warnings of the Central Committee, in many cases the party organizations adopt a completely incorrect approach and expel communists from the party in a criminally frivolous way. It is time to understand that Bolshevik vigilance consists essentially in the ability to unmask an enemy regardless of how clever and artful he may be, regardless of how he dexed himself out and not indiscriminate or on-the-off chance expulsions by the tens of hundreds of everyone who comes within reach. Directions are to end mass indiscriminate expulsions from the party

and institute a genuinely individualized, differentiated approach to questions of expulsion from the party or of restoring expelled persons to the right of the party membership. Directions are to remove from their party posts and to hold accountable to the party, those party leaders who do not carry out the directives of the central committee who expel CPSU members and candidate members from the party without carefully verifying all the materials and who take an arbitrary attitude in their dealings with party members, end quote.

So even after the excesses of the purge that Stalin tried to curb four months in and then a number of months later basically is like throws his foot on the break. Yeah, and later on, they ended up prohibiting the NKVD from conducting any massive arrests or deportations. The CPSU warrants all NKVD and prosecutor office employees that the slightest deviation from Soviet laws and party government directives by any employee, whomever that person might be, will result in severe legal proceedings.

And that was signed directly by Molotov and Stalin himself. Now, even before the 1938 plenum, there were 53,000. 700 appeals against expulsions in august there were a hundred thousand and at that time out of a total of 154,900 and 33 appeals 54% of them were readmitted so even after the excesses of all the arrests over half of them were released now the idea like robert conquest we talked about him right the british secret service propagandist he claims that there were seven to nine million arrests in 1936 in 1938. At that time, the number of industrial workers in the Soviet Union was less than 8 million. And he bases these numbers off of memoirs of ex-prisoners who assert that between 4 and 5% of the Soviet population were incarcerated or deported during those years. Right. And so, like, right here, like, you'll see a little moment of clarity that anybody on the left should be able to kind of understand. Certainly, all of us will agree that

the numbers are often inflated when it comes to how many people, communism has killed, et cetera. So why would those same numbers or why would numbers in this context also not be inflated by bourgeois right-wing sources? Of course they would be. If you're willing to concede that broadly, numbers are often inflated by our class enemies to make the history of communism look way worse than it is, then here's another example of when you look at the amount of industrial workers in the country, all like that number, 8 million, almost that many people, supposedly. you know, we're arrested in this purge. I mean, just the logistics of being able to carry that out

would be incredible. So, and again, no matter what side of this debate you're on, certainly there are points here that we can all agree, like, yeah, that's complete bullshit. Yeah, absolutely. So is there anything else you want to say about the excesses or the purges before we move on? Nope. No.

Okay, so to wrap up this myth-busting segment of the conversation, a good way to end this is kind of like zoom out a little bit because, you know, Stalin has been criticized for being at various times, either anti-Semitic or Orientalist, overly nationalistic or chauvinist, et cetera. So what is your broad response to such charges and how many of these accusations are true? I mean, certainly he was a man of his time. He's not going to be perfect on every front. So maybe just address that broad accusation against him.

So let's, I guess, so we're going to begin, I suppose, with anti-Semitism because that's, that's the most complicated one, I think. first of all anti-Semitic comments anti-Semitic organizing and then obviously you know anti-Semitic actions pogroms and such things were illegal in the Soviet Union

punishable by death punishable by death yeah so we're not talking about a society that tolerated that kind of bullshit where it starts to get muddy is when you get into situations in which Jewish people happen to be involved

you know in which Stalin took actions against or towards people who happened to be Jewish. But as the Ukrainian fascists are so fond of reminding us, there were a lot of Jewish people in the leadership of the Bolsheviks. As Hitler himself made very clear in Mind Conf, where he would just tie Judaism and Bolshevism together as one entity, yeah. Yeah, Judeo-Bulshivism is a long-standing fascist line. Sorry to interrupt, but I always, I know.

never tire of mentioning that the very term cultural Marxist, which you'll hear even come out of the mouth of people like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Sam Harris, that itself is rooted in, I mean, probably goes all the way back to that mind conf tying together of communism and Judaism. So it stems from an anti-Semitic

conspiracy theory. And that's thrown around by people on Fox News, like it's nothing. Yeah. Yeah. But go on. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, no, no worries. So another one of the things that the Ukrainian fascists bring up is the fact that, and it's kind of, we kind of just glossed over it in that portion of the podcast.

But when they said that Stalin was attempting to establish a Zion in the Ukraine, they're referring to an actual event. He, for a while, supported the idea of creating a Jewish ethno state in the Crimea. And this, of course, made all the fascists wet their pants. but this was a thing that was sort of thrown around is like should we do this should we not do this and then they ended up deciding against it but again like I don't I don't know where you can come off saying he was an anti-Semite there's the doctor's plot I don't know we didn't touch it at all yeah yeah if you want to touch on that just briefly like yeah I mean you can if you want to hear more

about it you can listen to that episode on left media podcast where we did the the death of Stalin but basically a doctor came forward and said that there was a plot against Stalin's life, and as a result, they fired eight doctors who were primarily Jewish doctors, and so that's leveled against him as saying that he was anti-Semitic because he jailed these eight doctors out of literally like tens of thousands. Yeah, I guess if you want to read it that way, you can read it that way. You know, there's other situations dealing with, you know, Jewish populations that were, you know, relocated or, you know, or or whatever in particular areas.

You can read that as anti-Semitism if you want to. I don't know that you could make a strong argument that he was an anti-Semite just based on the totality of everything that was going on throughout his life. You know, I don't know. It's a big, massive question mark, but I doubt it.

I sincerely doubt it. And then as for the other charges of Orientalism or nationalism, a chauvinism, etc.? First of all, Orientalism is largely a matter of Western people imposing Western values upon people in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, because they see their cultures as being inferior. Right. I think it stems from Edward Said's work, Orientalism, where it's like this, this patronizing, condescending view of, you know, I mean, just basically every night. non-European country, but specifically when the middle and far east. Yes, but what you have to understand is that Stalin was not European in the sense of like Western Europe, you know, when people come back and say, oh, he was just a white man,

you're speaking from a place of ignorance there. Georgians were an ethnic minority and considered to be sub, like, you know, not subhuman, but a lower race among people who qualified things as. such, you know, and to answer the Marxist-Leninists who spend a lot of time shitting on identity politics, Lenin was 100% engaging in identity politics when he was like, I really need Stalin at my side, because that guy can speak to the Georgians in a way that I can't, right? Sure. Anyway, he cannot therefore be an Orientalist as he himself is one of those people who would be seen as lesser, as culturally less.

And just quickly to kind of show how he was a victim of that mentality, Trotsky actually said that Stalin acted in the brutal nature that is so typical of Georgians. Right. Because, yeah, because again, this is, we're talking about a repressed ethnicity. Which Trotsky was also as a Jew. Yes, of course. You know, Emma Goldman, I think, referred to him as being, as having the, oh, God, what did she say? Oh, he was representative of Asiatic slyness. Jesus Christ.

Right, you know, that comes from that 19th century, you know, where they had subcategories of Homo sapiens. It was like Homo sapiens, Afrikanus, Homo sapiens, Europa, I think. Right. Homo sapiens Asiatica, and Asians were particularly known for being sly and cunning. And so she refers to him as has that Asiatic slyness. But anyway, so I don't think he's capable of being an Orientalist as he would be the victim of that more than the perpetrator. As a nationalist, I find that difficult to believe. I've heard somebody say that Trotsky was the best Stalinist and Stalin was the best Trotskyist in that he, like they

were like they said one thing but like Stalin typically was always involved in trying to um you know he dealt with a national question as being supportive of nationalist movements in terms of being able to bring about communist revolution um within states under the umbrella of nationalism um and so to say that he felt like Russia was superior and obviously he was Georgian so no um but No, I don't think he was a nationalism. And so insofar as nationalism, though, needs to be almost, you know, marshaled in the defense of, you know, Hitler's army coming, you know, like nationalism was often used, but that's not the same as being a nationalist in that sense. Right. Right.

I mean, on top of that, like, Stalin, he actually set forward indigenousization programs in which basically, I mean, so they taught Russian in these schools. But any of these ethnic groups, they were required to maintain the indigenous language within their schooling programs so that they couldn't exterminate that language or culture from those areas. Indeed, unlike the United States and its dealings with indigenous Americans, the Soviet Union, and it was both under Lenin and Stalin, established territories in which, say, the Kalmic. were able to practice traditional methods of hunting, gathering, you know, whatever they wanted to, they were not mandatorily required to assimilate, nor were they pushed into reservations. Wherever their ancestral land was, it was protected,

and they were allowed to be outside of the general, you know, Soviet method of doing things. There was also a requirement for ethnic groups to have representation within, exactly within the Soviet government that sounds like identity politics man you know uh yeah it because yeah no i think it's i think it's one of those like bullshit claims that people will like find a little tiny examples and pull out one little thing and say oh look at this example without examining the totality of everything um you know i don't know um you know just looking back there's no such thing as the perfect human

there were people of all over the revolutionary left tradition as well as just human beings all over the spectrum of being a human being who had really shitty views and really, you know, backwards ideas and even full on bigotry. I mean, whether that's Emma Goldman saying one line or whatever, Stalin, Macknow, Bakun, and whoever, that all fucking sucks. It should be looked at. It should be contextualized. It should be pushed against. But now I think in 2018, in the 21st century, the U.S. left, although we still have some segments that, you know, are. are shitty or reactionary um and those segments should be you know purged pardon the pun but but you know nowadays we've come a long way and so anti-semites bigots racist like they get the fucking wall like

regardless of what's happened in the past um we learn from the mistakes and and the successes in the past but i don't think that that means like oh just because you're an anarchist and an anarchist in the past said some shitty shit that means you're shitty or same for marxist leninist or whatever yeah no it like it doesn't mean that like you can discredit the entire entirety of somebody's works. Like, if you disagree with them ideologically, that's fine. And you can argue against that. But your, your understanding must be that just because somebody was shitty does not mean that their ideas can automatically be like tossed out completely. Right, right. You know, you've got to weigh. Anyway, it's, that's materialism, I guess.

Of course. Absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on to defending a legacy. This segment is about talking about, you know, Stalin's successes, why it's important to defend the legacy of not only Stalin, but the Soviet Union from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, etc. So let's just start with what were Stalin's biggest successes, in your opinion. So we've got a list of accomplishments here. I'm going to start with the very, very obvious that he defeated Adolf Hitler. Like, whi-wee-wee! But, like, here's the fifth.

thing, um, so we, we, we, we're friends with, uh, this, this guy, Mason and he's, he's, he calls himself a Luxembourgist, which is just a boneless Marxist leninist. Oh, um, but, uh, I love, wing, wing, but, uh, anyway, he's, he, uh, he was in a group chat with us and, you know, we're all a bunch of Marxist leninists, and so he's always, like, shitting on us for being assholes, but, um, but he's like, he's like, really, the view I take of Stalin is that you have to you have to weigh what people do which is good and what people do which is bad and you would have to do a lot of really bad things to outweigh beating Hitler like that's like come on y'all like at least you've got to grudgingly admit that this was a major big deal

but you know again trying to get away from the great man thing I guess and I think it's important to address that without probably every one of these major acts that they took from the purge to the collectivization efforts, if they had never done that, they would never, ever, ever have been in a position to defeat Hitler. Yeah. The rapid industrialization was it. And they couldn't have rapidly industrialized if they didn't collectivize first. And they couldn't have pushed this rapid industrialization if they had not had the purges. Because these social Democrats were trying to put them back on the road of capitalism, which would have been a gradual shift to industrialism, and that means you don't beat Hitler. So, like, what do you want me to do about this?

At the beginning of the 1930s, Stalin said something along the lines of, we either sprint to catch up in the next 10 years or we will be crushed. Yeah. I think I was watching a documentary, and something that the quote when he was talking about that was like, if we were to take this this more gradualist capitalist route. It would take 50 to 100 years to catch up to the Western powers. We need to fucking do it in 10. And you're going from a huge underdog

a fully, like a radically underdeveloped coming out of a czarist almost feudal relations situation. And you're catching, not only defeating the Nazi beast, but you're catching up to the leading capitalist powers of the world who took hundreds of years to get to the point where they are

and you're racing them to the fucking stars regardless of your tendency on the left. Like, this is a moment of proletarian, you know, beauty in some sense. Yeah. You're going to make me cry, Brett. Yeah. I'm sorry, guys. Okay. So, anyway, more of Stalin's accomplishments. So he also defeated the Japanese. You know, we like to pretend like it was the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not we. Americans like to pretend that that's what ended World War II. but Stalin had already pushed the Japanese out of Manchuria. He had pushed them out of Korea.

And they were going to be in Japan within a matter of weeks at most. And so really what was going on was the Japanese desperately wanted to surrender to the Americans because they knew that Stalin would not allow them to keep their emperor, and they wanted to keep their emperor. And anyway, whatever. This is not going to go on. We could do a whole episode on that. Yeah.

We've joked about this being our tagline. Like, we say that, like, 50 fucking times. We could do a whole episode on that. But we could do a whole episode on that. Anyway, so as far as party membership participation by women, it was only 5% at the beginning of his term, and 21% at the time of his death, which is not perfect, obviously, you know, should be half, obviously, but an improvement. There was the criminalization of racist speech under Joseph Stalin, so you could not, you couldn't even, you know, use ethnic slurs or, you know, make racialized comments. Well, hold on, hold on, hold on, though.

What about freedom of speech, though? Oh, man, I don't believe in that. I'm sorry. It's not a thing. So, universal access to health care. It gave rise to the first generation free from cholera, malaria, and typhoid. You know, the last typhoid outbreak was in that period of the early 30s and then never again. There was an increased life expectancy from 32% in 1913 to 6.

63% in 1956, so that was an increase in life expectancy. That's actually the world record still of the quickest doubling of life expectancy in a period of that time. Free education led to massive jumps in literacy. It was at 100% in the 50s, which is up from 28% in 1897. So, anyway, he instituted free public transit and bus travel across the USSR, so not just within the cities, but across the nation. So freedom of movement really existed in the Soviet Union, unlike here. And then what we already talked about.

And then I already mentioned the indigenization, but it was from the mid-20s to the late 30s, and it was a development of non-Russian languages within the government, media, and education. So those are some of his major accomplishments. But if you attribute the success of the Soviet Union, the industrialization, the fact that it became like, the competing world power, and then extrapolate from that all of the accomplishments that happened

in the Soviet Union after his death, as well as all of the national liberation struggles that would have never, ever, ever been possible without the success of the Soviet Union, then you're talking about a, I mean, it's a ripple effect that, you know, we sadly are not feeling as much anymore but you know beyond that you've got the fact that there's a reason that the House on American Activities Committee convened in 1957 and it's because you had Khrushchev giving his quote unquote secret speech in 56 it became obvious that the Soviet Union was no longer interested in defending its own legacy because one of the things that Khrushchev needed to do

to get his programs pushed was to discredit the Stalinist quote-unquote road, the path of Stalinism, I suppose. And so in doing that, though, he then opened up the Soviet Union to attack from the outside, and then he opened up communists around the world to attack because it was just a matter of you could say any old wild bullshit you wanted to say

and the Soviet Union was not going to deny you that. They're not going to speak against you because Khrushchev desperately needed to demonize Stalin. I think it's a, that is a ripple effect as well. Like if you allow people to shit on Stalin and shit on the Soviet Union without taking a total like an analysis

of everything together, then you are now opening yourself up to criticism from people who are like, oh, well, you're, you're just, you just want, you know, what Stalin wanted, which may not necessarily be true. But what you need to do is say, okay, here's what really happened. And I don't agree with him ideologically, and I think he went too far here, but this is the reality of what happened. And I think that there were positives, and I think there were negatives. You don't have to believe that he was a hero or that he had the best line on anything, but you do need to look at things realistically and not by the bullshit, not listen to the lies, not listen to actual literal Nazi propaganda. Like, evaluate the merits of the Soviet Union and the mistakes from

your own perspective, but make sure you're being honest, intellectually honest. I think one more thing I'm going to say here is that there is a suggestion that, comes directly from Stalin, that it was his own enemies who built the cult of personality around him. And his theory is essentially that, well, here, I'll just read this here. So Stalin goes on the record with his German author, Leon Fauchwanger, in 1936. And he thinks that the cult of personality, again, is being built up by his political opponents. And here's the quotation, because they want to be able to discredit him at a later date. Because if they make it seem like everything was his responsibility, all of the good

that came out of the Soviet Union, if you can make it look like he did everything himself, then later on when you're criticizing him, you can say, oh, also, all of the bad was his responsibility as well. And we can make things up about him because he's no longer here to defend himself. Right. No, definitely. And, you know, I just want to get my two cents in here. I've talked about this a lot. I've went on your podcast to talk about Mao and the cultural revolution. And one thing I always stress, especially to those who, even if you don't fully embrace the idea of scientific socially, if you're sympathetic to the idea of scientific processes of trial and error, of experimentation, look at the proletarian movements around the world as experiments in socialist projects. You know, the transition from feudalism to capitalism did not happen because of one. beautiful bourgeois revolution. It was a centuries-long sort of development with movements here, big national revolutions here, et cetera, two steps forward, one step back sort of stuff. And so if you look at the broad proletarian movement, and even anarchist and Marxist forms and

all forms, you see a project trying to be built. And here is a situation where you had a lot of successes. You had a socialist fucking powerhouse that made America shake its knees in fear at times. And when you're talking earlier about smaller socialist projects, just take one example. I mean, Cuba. Well, what happened to Cuba after the Soviet Union collapsed? It was put into this horrific position. So even these tiny countries that are squaring off against the U.S. Imperial death machine, having a big socialist powerhouse like the Soviet Union to back them up to help them, even with all of its flaws, even with all of its excesses, is absolutely crucial to the development of further proletarian movements and taking this experiment further. And if you look at this

rapid development of, as we mentioned, a pretty backwards country starting, you know, after the revolution, look what the, look what the U.S. had to do to get where it is. It involves a brutal fucking genocide of like 80 million indigenous people. It involves the horrific slay enslavement of millions of Africans to get that free labor to develop, you know, the economy and that ground that was just stolen in the genocide. And then when you're talking about World War II, you talk about the Soviet Union, you know, pushing back the Japanese, you know, allies of Hitler, etc.

And then the U.S. drops not one, but two nukes on women and children after, even though Japan was already on the ropes, because they wanted to flex their muscles going into the Cold War, right? They wanted to show the Soviets like, okay, yeah, we beat the fascist, but now you're fucking our enemy, and look what we have. And then you have this ratcheting up of tensions

that lasted for decades afterwards. So, you know, this broader perspective needs to really be taken when you're discussing and thinking about these issues, I think. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, let's go on to the next question, which is, I think, related, but also I think distinct in important ways. But from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, why is it important to uphold Stalin specifically

and to defend his legacy? I might have even touched on it a little bit there, but if you want to add anything to that. Yeah, I don't think that you need to hold up Stalin's legacy because he was Stalin or because he was the perfect example that all

proletarian you know, fucking whatever's need to emulate, because that's not materialist, right? Like the reason that we support what Stalin did at the time is because of the situation

that Stalin was in at the time. And because he was so successful, at so many things as a result, but we don't live in those times anymore. Those conditions don't exist now. So what you really need to do with Joseph Stalin is go back and say, okay, what here is the same or similar to what we're dealing with now and what is different, what worked really well here and what didn't, and how can we move forward with a new path

based on this knowledge. I mean, you mentioned it, you know, you look back at these experiments, and that's what they are. You know, whether you think it's the best form of socialism or not, whether you think it's the correct socialism or not, it was an attempt at socialism. And that's the shit you can't deny.

They were not trying to build, quote unquote, state capitalism. They were attempting to build socialism. And you can agree or disagree whether they were successful or not. but the point is you need to look at that and go what did they get right and what did they get wrong and how can I apply that knowledge to what I'm doing today. That's why it's important to not defend the legacy of Stalin but understand the legacy of Stalin.

Yeah, I mean, incredibly well put, you know, understanding as opposed to like upholding because the latter seems like you're just, you know, propping up something to prop it up while the other is like a Marxist materialist approach to the history of proletarian. movements kind of in that vein like how do you think about terms like like stalinism or you know like the tendency quote unquote slur of tankie um do you want to like deal with those really quick before we move on to the last question i got a good joke sort of thing uh so i i was i was on a comrades post or whatever and the discussion of of the genre of music emo comes up and i was like the thing about emo is that like from its foundation in the 80s all the way through its

like death in the late 90s or whatever nobody wanted to call themselves emo but then there was this resurgence that happened in the mid to late 2000s and now everybody calls themselves emo and I was like in this way it's very much like being a tankie like we like nobody like everybody's like don't call me a tankie but now we're like yeah we're tankies I don't I don't really care like it's one of those things that like I think it starts as an insult and then you just take it on and laugh about it. As far as the term Stalinism, it's, it's kind of like Luxembourgism. Like, there's no actual definitive theoretical ground that's being made. It's, it's mostly just an elaboration on an existing ideology. You know, in the case of Rosa Luxembourg, it's

orthodox Marxism, and in the case of Stalin, it is Marxism, Leninism, which is a term he coined, but it was a description of his own ideology, essentially, was to follow the line of Marx and the line of Lenin, you know, and really the main addition that Lenin made was the anti-imperialism, the anti-imperialist bent. But as far as like new theoretical approaches, I mean, he wrote some really fascinating really interesting texts which for the people who think he was just like a mindless brute please go read his his writings they're really well written and very interesting and he makes a lot of great points

so you know I don't know whatever if you want to call it Stalinism call it Stalinism but it's not like a it's not a legit ideology right yeah I mean he certainly wasn't a mindless brute I mean that caricature of Stalin no matter what I mean that's just I mean just not true Okay, last question. Now, clearly Stalin as a person and as a leader is inexorably tied to the history of the Soviet Union. And at certain desperate times in Soviet history, Stalin virtually became the personification of the USSR, both to those who hated him and the Bolsheviks, as well as for those who lived in the Soviet Union during World War II,

and genuinely saw Stalin as a great and powerful leader who saved the Soviet Union and the world from the Nazi beast. So why is the Soviet Union as a whole, something that? that leftists of all stripes should defend, which we already kind of talked on. But maybe the better question is, why is it the best example of actually existing socialism, in your opinion? I don't know that I agree that it's the best example of actually existing socialism, because I don't like to write off the varying struggles that different peoples deal with. I think that the Soviet Union was the best example

of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union, right? Like, it was materially great for what was happening there. Mao's line on Marxism-Leninism was great for China. Ho Chi-Min was great for Vietnam. Fidel Castro was great for Cuba.

I don't think it's a good idea to go okay well this is the best example because x it's certainly the the largest and i think the most um i don't i'm trying to think of the right word basically the most influential but it was because it was the first and because it was so huge like you had these uh you know previous socialist uprisings elsewhere but they never established a long running state um and so for that reason you know you've got It's very influential to the rest of the world, but I'm hesitant to say it's the best example because then you're riding off a lot of individual struggles that happen in other places that did really great things for those people.

All right. And I just wanted to say before we wrap it up here, if you want to see what happened in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, we did an interview, it's one of my personal favorites we've ever done on Rev. Left. It's called The Red Hangover with Kristen Gottzi. She's a university of Penn professor, historian, scholar, et cetera. And she really lays, she wrote this entire book on what happened when capitalism was restored in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc. And just the toll it took on workers, the absolute inequality that immediately came in, the opportunistic privatization from, you know, outside forces that poured into these places.

In some areas, I mean, you could literally measure the difference in the average. birth height of children born in this period because it was so brutal to so many different people. So I think that the way to fully understand that the 20th century and the Soviet Union is to look what happened when it collapsed and what that did to the working classes in those countries and how it also facilitated the rise of neo-Nazism in places like Ukraine. One thing you don't see in Cuba, one thing you don't see in Mao's China, one thing you don't fucking see in the Soviet Union. It's big fucking Nazi movements and there's a reason

for that. There's a reason for that. And if you really like hate yourself and you love like mammoth episodes you can listen to this and then you can listen to our fall of the Soviet Union episode and then you can listen to your

Red Hangover episode and you'll literally get the entire history of the Soviet Union post-Lennon. Post-Lennon, yeah. Yeah, go camping for a week yourself and just listen to all those. Come out of the woods, a new person. Yeah.

All right. Well, I just want to say thank you both for coming on. This has been no doubt our biggest episode, but also just the amount of homework, the amount of detail you added into this, the amount of preparation is really unprecedented on this podcast or many others that I've ever, you know, encountered. It's not only what makes this episode really interesting, but it's what makes your your podcast, Pearls of the Roundtable, so great. Obviously, I don't think you put out fucking four-hour episodes, but that same... We have one. You do? Almost. Almost. With all the Soviet Union.

That same sort of empirical, objective approach and that lighthearted humor is found in Pearls of the Roundtable. So thank you both for coming on. Comrades and personal friends of mine, before I let you go, where can listeners learn more about Stalin, and where can they find your podcast, Pearls of the Roundtable? Just a handful of books. that I would suggest. And any of those listening who are still kind of doubtful about what we've talked about and are, you know, are actually interested in educating themselves. There's a handful of books. One of them is another view of Stalin by Ludo Martins. Another one is Khrushchev Lied by Grover Fur. Socialism Betrayed by Roger Kieran and Thomas Kinney.

And then fraudsters, famine and fascism by Douglas Tottle. And all of these tackle a majority of what I have gone through, we have gone through today, and they're all fantastic. They're all very, very, very heavily sourced for the same reason that I brought information to the desk here because they know how much they're going to be scrutinized. As far as finding us, it's Patreon.com slash Prolspod. There's a link there to the Lib Syn if you want to do that. And also we're on every major podcast.

app. Um, this is the first podcast I've ever recorded sober. So, um, we're way funnier on our podcast. Yeah. But, but the problem is that this three hour episode would have been six hours if we'd be there. So, so we didn't, but it would have been a lot funnier. So I typically, you know, I mean, we had some humor in here, but typically as anybody who listens and I'm sure Brett, you can corroborate, uh, we, we joke a lot. Yeah, we try to joke a lot and make light of, of a lot of our topics to try to kind of first of all make them enjoyable

that's what we do is with our friends and enjoy but also to make it more digestible so that it's not this really kind of dry thing that I just went through explaining all this and so yeah I would encourage you if you enjoy this

if you hate Stalin we do point out other mistakes that Stalin made and just much smaller ones yeah and so we basically yeah we just take history topics that's what we love as a group of friends and we just tackle them while drinking and being stupid.

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely go check it out. If you like this show, you'll like Pearls of the Roundtable. It's different. They take a different approach, so it's not like you're listening to the same shit. We're pretty different podcast, but we're both covering the left in a really important way. And before I go, I know that this was a controversial episode. I know just the mere announcement of this episode, like a month ago, got people blocking me

and throwing shit at me on Twitter and stuff. But I just want to say, like, if you sat through this entire episode and you look back on it, even if you have points of disagreement or points of argumentation, I hope you see that we here at ReveLeft Radio are genuinely trying to foster meaningful conversation among different parts of the radical left. And this is one perspective that is very important and popular on the left. And I think that we should hear it. We should learn from it, critically engage with it.

And I hope that you see here that we did our homework. This is not some fly by the seat of our pants. It's not super sectarian. Like, you know, Jeremy and Justin did not shit on other tend to. It's not like you're going to find these discussions on Twitter or social media where they quickly devolve into just chaos and absurdity. This is a really, hopefully a highbrow, mature approach to a very difficult, huge, and controversial topic. And I really hope that people see that. And I hope people maybe fucking defend us on Twitter when we get the shit that's coming our way.

You can just direct all those ads to proles to press parties. because we are ready for it going in. And we absolutely, you know, if you want to listen to our episode with coffee with comrades, they're anarchists,

they're comrades. We consider them comrades. You know, we've got no hatred for people who are allied for taking down capitalism and fascism. You know,

let's fucking do that and then we can argue about shit after. Definitely. And that's why I have you on and I hope people see it. So yeah, go check out pros of the roundtable. Thanks to everybody

who sat through this huge episode and thank you for coming on. I really appreciated it.