Harpal Brar: Soviet victory over fascism – a festival of progressive humanity
The Soviet Union’s colossal contribution to the second world war cannot be overstated – it is up to us, communists, to protect this legacy.
Harpal Brar
Thursday 15 May 2025
Above: Russian Soldiers in the Victory Day parade, 9 May 2025.
‘Once again, Mama, I must tell you that I consider it an honour and a source of pride that I have the chance to fight in the ranks of the great and invincible Red Army against the tyrant of humankind. I am sure that here we will smash his teeth in, for, as I told you, here in every woman and in every man there lives a hero, a Bolshevik. These people are really amazing. I can tell you that sometimes I am moved to the depths of my soul. Such people just cannot be beaten.’ – Soviet soldier Reuben Ibarriera
This article was written to mark the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Victory Over Fascism in May 1945. It is available as a party pamphlet in our shop.
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Table of contents
1.Falsification of history
2.Reasons for Soviet victory
3.Initial Soviet reverses
4.Why no second front
5.Attempts to belittle Soviet contribution
6.Anti-Soviet plots smashed
7.Stalin and the Great Patriotic War
8.Conclusion
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The second world war, like the first, was the product of the growth of interimperialist contradictions. It began as a war for redivision and domination of the world. The crash of 1929, and the depression that followed it, made an interimperialist war a certainty. At the same time, all the imperialist countries were united in their hatred of the socialist Soviet Union, seeking for any opportunity to crush it. In this complicated situation, the Soviet Union, through building her economic and military strength, as well as through some very deft diplomatic footwork, made sure that the then-coming war, instead of being a war waged against the USSR by the combined forces of imperialism, would be a war between two groups of imperialist bloodsuckers.
Only after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 did the war assume an antifascist character. Even then, as the narrative below clearly demonstrates, it was the Soviet Union alone (with the support and sympathy of hundreds of millions of people around the world, including the peoples of the imperialist countries) that fought against fascism, whereas her allies, Britain and the USA, were throughout determined to defend their respective imperialist interests and ready to come to terms with Nazi Germany. Only the advance of the Red Army frustrated their schemes.
Sunday 8 May this year (2005) marked the 60th anniversary of the victory against Hitlerite German fascism, which victory is popularly known in western Europe as VE (Victory in Europe) Day. It is indeed a festival of progressive humanity, to bring about which tens of millions of people all over the world paid with their lives.
While people everywhere fought against Adolf Hitler’s fascist Germany, made sacrifices and contributed to the final victory against it, the most outstanding contribution was without doubt made by the peoples of the USSR under the victorious banner of Marxism-Leninism and the leadership of the Bolshevik party headed by the legendary Josef Stalin who, smashing all imperialist plots and conspiracies against the Soviet Union, led the Soviet people – indeed, the people of the world – in the successful fight against the Hitlerite plague.
To rid mankind of the menace of fascism, and in the interests of socialism and democratic liberty, the Soviet people lost no fewer than 27 million men, women and children.
Falsification of history
This 60th anniversary, this festival of progressive humanity, has become the occasion for the bourgeois falsification of history. Western bourgeois ideologists, from Trotskyist slanderers to penny-a-liner journalists, are busily engaged in juggling facts and falsifying events. There is a kind of division of labour between the Trotskyist variety of bourgeois ideologues on the one hand, and the ordinary (‘ordinary’ because shorn of ‘Marxist’ and ‘left’ terminology and therefore more easily recognisable and less dangerous) bourgeois ideologists on the other.
This 60th anniversary, as was the case with the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings last year, has been greeted with a torrent of nauseatingly unctuous and hypocritical cant in the imperialist print and electronic media, with the sole purpose of hiding the real meaning, content and causes of the second world war, and to belittle the decisive contribution of the socialist USSR in smashing the seemingly invincible Nazi war machine.
Ten years ago, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the victory against fascism, we were treated to headlines such as ‘Germany’s fate settled in the Atlantic’, ‘How Hitler was defeated by his own madness’ etc, when the fact is, as every well-informed person knows, that the fate of Nazi Germany was sealed on the eastern front, in the titanic battles of Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk. Here is one example, which typifies the thrust of the entire imperialist propaganda machine, of precisely the kind of falsification of history alluded to above:
“British democracy is alive and kicking. That is the message from the people of this country on this anniversary weekend. For those who fought to destroy Hitler’s Third Reich 50 years ago were inspired by more than a love of country, passionate though that was. They went to war and won the victory over fascism for a greater cause. This infused their patriotism and earned them immortal greatness.
“Ordinary folk knew in their hearts that what was at stake was no less than the survival of simple, decent values: their right to be heard, to speak their minds without fear of the knock on the door at dawn, to run their lives according to their own lights. To live and let live, to go about their daily business in freedom under the law. Above all, to make and unmake governments elected in their name.
“The struggle and sacrifice of those who fought in the European war enabled Britain to remain a sovereign nation. Let us never forget that the red, white and blue Union flag we fly this weekend flew alone in the face of an all-conquering Nazi tyranny before the tide turned in 1942. We were fighting for our own freedom and to free Europe from despotic rule.” (Leading article, Sunday Times, 7 May 1995)
Of course, no one except the most malicious person would deny that ordinary British people, and the British soldiers who fought in the second world war, were inspired by the ideal of ridding humanity of the menace of fascism. That, however, is not at issue. What is at issue is the cause for which the ruling classes of Britain, France and the United States went to war against Germany.
All objective observers agree that British imperialism went to war against Nazi Germany not in the interests of freedom and the fight against fascism but to protect its own colonialist and imperialist interests after all the attempts of safeguarding the same through appeasement (that is through bartering other people’s freedom in return for saving its own skin and material interests) had resulted in an ignominious and scandalous collapse.
Here, briefly, are the facts that led to the Union flag flying alone ‘in the face of an all-conquering Nazi tyranny before the tide turned in 1942’.
1. Imperialism’s hatred for the USSR
All imperialists, of the Nazi and ‘democratic’ variety alike, and all imperialist politicians, social democrats no less than Conservatives, were fired by an intense hatred of the USSR, the only socialist state at the time, for the simple reason that through planned socialist construction, she was building a new life for her people, free of exploitation, oppression, unemployment, misery and degradation. And this at a time when the entire capitalist world was in the iron grip of the hitherto worst slump, which had forced 50 million working people on to the scrap heap, rendering them jobless, homeless and hungry.
The Soviet Union alone stood as a shining beacon and an example to the world’s workers of how their lives, too, could change qualitatively for the better if only the state power was in the hands of the working class. Encircled as it was by bloodthirsty imperialists, the USSR was well aware of the dangers confronting it. Its leadership followed an extremely complicated, and singularly scientific policy on the question of war with imperialism, which may be summarised as follows.
2. Soviet position on war with imperialism
First, it was the endeavour of the Soviet Union not to embroil herself in a war with imperialism.
Second, since it was not entirely up to her to avoid such a war, then, if imperialism should impose a war on the Soviet Union, the latter should not find herself in the position of having to fight alone, let alone having to face the combined onslaught of the principal imperialist countries.
Third, to this end, divisions between the fascist imperialist states on the one hand and the ‘democratic’ imperialist states on the other should be fully exploited. These divisions were real, based on the material interests of the two groups of states under consideration. Uneven development of capitalism had seen to it that Germany, Italy and Japan, having spurted ahead in the capitalist development of their economies (a development that had rendered obsolete the old division of the world), were demanding a new division, which could not but encroach upon the material interests of the ‘democratic’ imperialist states. There was thus real scope for this conflict of interests to be exploited by the socialist USSR.
Fourth, to this end, the USSR, pursuing a very complicated foreign policy, did its best to conclude a collective security pact with the ‘democratic’ imperialist states, providing, in the event of such aggression taking place, for collective action against the aggressors.
Fifth, when the ‘democratic’ imperialist states, overcome by their hatred of communism, refused to conclude a collective security pact with the USSR and continued their policy of appeasement of the fascist states, in particular that of Nazi Germany in an effort to direct her aggression in an eastwardly direction against the Soviet Union, the latter was forced to try some other method of protecting the interests of the socialist motherland of the international proletariat. Addressing the 18th party congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1939, Stalin exposed the motives behind the policy of non-intervention adopted by the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries, particularly Britain and France, thus:
“The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire … not to hinder Germany, say … from embroiling herself in a war with the Soviet Union, to allow all the belligerents to sink deeply in the mire of war, to encourage them surreptitiously in this; to allow them to weaken and exhaust one another; and then, when they have become weak enough, to appear on the scene with fresh strength, to appear, of course, ‘in the interests of peace’, and to dictate conditions to the enfeebled belligerents.
“Cheap and easy!” (Report on the work of the central committee to the eighteenth congress of the CPSU(B) by JV Stalin, 10 March 1939)
Further, referring to the Munich agreement, which surrendered Czechoslovakia to the Nazis (the leader writer of the Sunday Times cited above, displaying monumental ‘forgetfulness’, studiously avoided any reference to this pact, correctly fearing that such a reference would at once expose the hypocritical assertion that Britain’s ruling class went to war against Nazi Germany in the interests of the fight against fascism and for ‘decent values’), Stalin continued: “One might think that the districts of Czechoslovakia were yielded to Germany as the price of an undertaking to launch war on the Soviet Union …”
By way of outlining the tasks of Soviet foreign policy, as well as by way of a veiled warning to the ruling classes in the ‘democratic’ imperialist countries, Stalin went on to stress the need “to be cautious and not allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull chestnuts out of the fire for them”.
Thus it was that in the face of intransigent refusal on the part of Britain and France to conclude a collective security pact, and in the aftermath of the Munich agreement, about which the Soviet Union was not even consulted, that the latter turned the tables on the foreign policy of Britain and France by signing, on 23 August 1939, the German-Soviet non-aggression pact.
Sixth, in signing this pact, the USSR not only ensured that she would not be fighting Germany alone, but also that the latter would be fighting against the very powers who had been trying, by their refusal to agree on collective security, to embroil the USSR in a war with Germany. On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, the Anglo-French ultimatum expired, and Britain and France were at war with Germany.
Of course, it is understandable that imperialism even today should attack and accuse the USSR and Stalin of ‘betrayal’ for concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany (conveniently ‘forgetting’ that the real betrayal had taken place at Munich a year earlier), for this pact advanced the cause of socialism and the liberation of humanity from the yoke of fascism. But those sorry Marxists who still, taking their cue from imperialism, continue to criticise the USSR for concluding the German-Soviet non-aggression pact need to have their heads examined. They could do far worse than listen to the right-wing Austrian Professor Topitsch.
Professor Topitsch, whose anticommunist credentials and pro-imperialist sympathies are impeccable, and who cannot therefore be accused of harbouring any soft corner for Stalin or the USSR that he led, has this to say on the issue under consideration:
“Thorough analysis of the interplay of the main events has led me to the conviction that … Stalin was not only the real victor, but also the key figure in the war; he was, indeed, the only statesman who had at the time a clear, broadly-based idea of his objectives.”
Further: “The events of the summer of 1939 show the fateful consequences of Hitler’s lack of statesmanlike qualities and a world-oriented political vision, and make him look very inferior to his Russian counterpart. With regard to political intelligence and political style, their relationship is like that of a gambler to a chess grandmaster, and the assertion that the Führer fell like a schoolboy into the trap set for him by Moscow can hardly be called exaggerated.”
On the Hitler-Stalin pact the same author writes:
“After the conclusion of this treaty, Hitler and Ribbentrop may have regarded themselves as statesmen of the highest calibre; instead their actions betrayed a frightening lack of political intelligence. Whereas Stalin had thoroughly pondered over the content and phraseology of the agreements, his opposite numbers were obviously incapable even of carefully reviewing the consequences which might result for Germany from those fateful documents. In point of fact, the two treaties fitted in perfectly with Soviet long-term strategy, to involve Germany in a war with the British and the French, make it dependent on Russia and, if the opportunity should arise, bring about its extinction as an independent power. Far-sighted as he was, Stalin was already thinking at this early stage of obtaining a favourable starting point for the realisation of such plans.” (E Topitsch, Stalin’s War, 1987, pp4-7)
Through its April 1941 Treaty of Neutrality with Japan, the Soviet Union successfully managed to achieve in the east that which it had achieved in the west through the non-aggression pact with Germany.
Seventh, the provisions of the additional secret protocol went far enough to safeguard the Soviet ‘spheres of interests’, which proved vital to Soviet defences when the war actually reached her.
Finally, the German-Soviet non-aggression pact bought the Soviet Union an extremely valuable period of two years for strengthening her defence preparedness before she entered a war she knew she could not stay out of forever.
When the war was finally forced on the Soviet Union, she made the most heroic contribution in the crowning and glorious victory of the allies against Nazi Germany. The Red Army and the Soviet people showed their tenacity, and the tenacity and superiority of the socialist system, by defeating the Nazis in the USSR and pursuing them all the way to Berlin, liberating in the process country after country from the Nazi jackboot occupation and bringing socialism to eastern Europe.
All revolutionary and honest bourgeois historians and politicians agree on the above summary. Only the most die-hard anticommunists, particularly the Trotskyites, ever dare to dispute it.
3. Bourgeois predictions of Soviet collapse
By the summer of 1941, through a combination of luck and some bold strokes, Hitler’s armies had chased the British off the continent of Europe and thus become the masters of western and central Europe, whose people groaned under fascist occupation. Hitler was at last in a position to wage war against the USSR, which he launched under the codename Operation Barbarossa at 3.30am on 22 June 1941.
When, on that fateful day, the German army crossed the border into the USSR, most western bourgeois politicians and military strategists gave her no more than six weeks before what they regarded as her inevitable collapse in the face of the mighty German armed forces. Their judgement had obviously been coloured by the fate of countries such as Poland and France, each of which lay prostrate within less than two weeks of being invaded by the German army. They were affected too by the fate of the British army, so humiliatingly expelled from the continent in the May 1940 fiasco, which goes by the name of the ‘Dunkirk spirit’.
Furthermore, the bourgeois ideologues believed in their own anti-Soviet propaganda to the effect that the Soviet army had been ‘decimated’ and ‘decapitated’ as a result of the trial and execution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other army officers on treason charges, and was therefore in no position to wage war; that the Bolshevik party had been ‘denuded’ of leadership consequent upon the three Moscow trials of the leading Trotskyites and Bukharinites on charges of treason, murder, sabotage and wrecking; that as a result of ‘forced’ collectivisation the peasantry was sullen and therefore most likely to revolt against the Soviet regime in the conditions of war. In all this, the bourgeois ideologists were cruelly deluded.
Even before the war against the Soviet Union started, the chief imperialist ideologue, namely, Leon Trotsky, made, with malicious glee, a number of predictions about the “inevitable” defeat of the USSR in the then coming war. In his Revolution Betrayed, he wrote: “Can we, however, expect that the Soviet Union will come out of the coming great war without defeat? To this frankly posed question we will answer as frankly; if the war should only remain a war, the defeat of the Soviet Union will be inevitable. In a technical, economic and military sense, imperialism is incomparably more strong. If it is not paralysed by revolution in the west, imperialism will sweep away the regime which issued from the October Revolution.” (Revolution Betrayed, p216)
In 1940, nearing the end of his life – a life full of irreconcilable hostility towards Leninism – Trotsky, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, again predicted the defeat of the USSR and triumph of Hitlerite Germany:
“We always started from the fact that the international policy of the Kremlin was determined by the new aristocracy’s … incapacity to conduct a war …
“The ruling caste is no longer capable of thinking about tomorrow. Its formula is that of all doomed regimes ‘after us the deluge’ …
“The war will topple many things and many individuals. Artifice, trickery, frame-ups and treasons will prove of no avail in escaping its severe judgement.” (Statement to the British capitalist press on ‘Stalin – Hitler’s quartermaster’)
“Stalin cannot make a war with discontented workers and peasants and with a decapitated Red Army.” (German-Soviet alliance)
“The level of the USSR’s productive forces forbids a major war … the involvement of the USSR in a major war before the end of this period would signify in any case a struggle with unequal weapons.
“The subjective factor, not less important than the material, has changed in the last years sharply for the worse …
“Stalin cannot wage an offensive war with any hope of victory.
“Should the USSR enter the war with its innumerable victims and privations, the whole fraud of the official regime, its outrages and violence, will inevitably provoke a profound reaction on the part of the people, who have already carried out three revolutions in this century …
“The present war can crush the Kremlin bureaucracy long before revolution breaks out in some capitalist country …” (The twin stars: Hitler-Stalin)
4. Bourgeois predictions belied
Not only Trotsky, but also the imperialist bourgeoisie (which paid Trotsky so well, and for whom it opened the columns of its press, to write such rubbish and to spew out so much anti-Soviet venom) believed in these baseless assertions. It therefore came as a total surprise to the imperialists when the Soviet Union, far from collapsing under Nazi attack, proved to be the only force, not only to withstand but also to defeat and smash to smithereens the Nazi war machine.
As usual, and happily for humanity, all Trotsky’s predictions were totally belied. After initial reverses in the first few weeks of the war, attributable in the main to the Nazi surprise attack, the Soviet defences stiffened. Before long they struck back.
The rest of the world, like Trotsky, had given the USSR only a few weeks before collapsing in the face of the onslaught of the allegedly invincible Nazi war machine. The Red Army and Soviet people, united as one under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and their supreme commander Josef Stalin, exploded this myth of Nazi invincibility. Soviet victories in the titanic battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, Leningrad and Berlin will forever be cherished not only by the peoples of the former, great and glorious Soviet Union, but also by all progressive humanity.
Each of these battles involved upwards of a million men on each side, and, in the words of Harrison E Salisbury: “Each inflicted on the Germans the kind of casualties which leave a lasting mark not only on an army but on a nation.” (Introduction to Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles, MacDonald, London, 1969, pp12-3)
“The Battle of Moscow had been an epic event … It had involved more than two million men, 2,500 tanks, 1,800 aircraft and 25,000 guns. Casualties had been horrifying in scale. For the Russians it had ended in victory. They had suffered the full impact of the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ offensive and, notwithstanding their losses … they had been able to mount an effective counterattack. They had begun to destroy the myth of German invincibility.” (Ian Grey, Stalin – Man of History, Abacus, p344)
This is how Marshal Zhukov evaluated the significance of the Battle of Moscow: “The final results of the Battle of Moscow proved to be inspiring for the Soviet side and depressing for the enemy.
“A German general, Westphal … has acknowledged that the German army, once considered invincible, was on the brink of destruction … The Germans lost a total of more than half a million soldiers, 1,300 tanks, 2,500 guns, 15,000 trucks and a great deal of other equipment …
“The Soviet counter-offensive of the winter of 1941-2 was conducted under difficult conditions of a snowy, cold winter and, what is most important, without numerical superiority over the enemy …
“For the first time in six months of war, in the Battle of Moscow the Red Army inflicted a major defeat on the main forces of the enemy. It was the first strategic victory over the Wehrmacht since the beginning of World War 2 … The skilled defensive operations [by the Soviet army], the successful launching of counter-attacks and the swift transition to a counter-offensive greatly enriched Soviet military art and demonstrated the growing strategic operational-tactical maturity of Soviet military commanders and improved military mastery of Soviet soldiers in all services.
“The defeat of Germany at Moscow was also of great international significance. The people in all the countries of the anti-Nazi coalition received the news of the outstanding victory of the Soviet army with great enthusiasm. All progressive mankind linked that victory to its hopes for an approaching liberation from fascist slavery.
“The failures of German forces at Leningrad, at Rostov, near Tikhvin and the Battle of Moscow had a sobering effect on the reactionary circles of Japan and Turkey and forced them to assume a more cautious policy toward the Soviet Union.
“After the defeat of Germans before Moscow, the strategic initiative on all sectors of the Soviet-German front passed to the Soviet command … After the defeat of the Nazis at Moscow, not only ordinary Germans but many German officers and generals were convinced of the might of the Soviet state and recognised that the Soviet armed forces represented an insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of Hitler’s objectives.” (Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles, pp100-2)
Marshal Zhukov concluded his account of the Battle of Moscow with the following question, and his answer to it: “I am often asked the question: ‘Where was Stalin at the time of the Moscow battle?’
“Stalin was in Moscow, organising the forces and means for the defeat of the enemy. He must be given his due. As head of the State Defence Committee, and with the members of the Supreme Headquarters and leaders of the People’s Commissariats, he carried on major work in the organising of strategic reserves and the material-technical means essential for the military struggle. With his harsh demands, he achieved, one might say, almost the impossible.” (Ibid, pp102-3)
Here is another evaluation, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, of Soviet strength, which the Hitlerites, intoxicated by their own deceptive propaganda and easy victories in the west, had failed properly to take into account.
Topitsch correctly points out that Operation Barbarossa was based on an overestimation of German and an underestimation of Soviet military might, as well as other assumptions, which began to come apart from the moment the German army crossed the Soviet frontier.
“When the Germans crossed the border into the east the feeling often came over them – from the Führer down to the common soldier – that they were thrusting open a door into the unknown, behind which Stalin had wicked surprises in store for them, and that in the end doom might be lurking in the endless wastes beyond.” (Topitsch, ibid, p103)
After their initial successes, gained through the tactical advantage of their surprise attack on the USSR, the Nazis began to believe that victory was already theirs and indulged in fantastic plans for the future. “But gradually it became clear that the Soviet Union was anything but a ‘Colossus with feet of clay’. In spite of enormous losses, this vast empire could keep hurling new masses of men and material at the invader, and soon increasing numbers of the new types of tanks and the dreaded rocket-launchers appeared on the battlefields. The 14-day victory developed into a war lasting at least four years, fought with the greatest bitterness on both sides, and the dramatic victories of the first weeks turned out to be the beginning of the end for the Third Reich.” (p113)
“Stalin’s ruthless energy made sure that all reserves within the depths of the country were mobilised. Indeed, during the course of this frightful struggle the Soviet Union extended itself and took a decisive step towards becoming a superpower. By contrast, Germany was effectively diminishing itself with every step in its exhausting campaign in the east.” (p115)
The surrender on 1 February 1943 at Stalingrad, by the fascist General Von Paulus and 23 other generals, mesmerised the world. The victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad was as incredible as it was heroic. The Nazi losses in the Volga-Don-Stalingrad area were 1.5 million men, 3,500 tanks, 12,000 guns and 3,000 aircraft. Never before had the Nazi war machine, which was accustomed to running over countries in days and weeks, suffered such a humiliating defeat, a defeat “in which the flower of the German army perished. It was against the background of this battle … that Stalin now rose to almost titanic stature in the eyes of the world.” (Isaac Deutscher, Stalin – A Political Biography, Pelican, London, 1966, p472)
From now on, nothing but defeat stared the Germans in the face, leading all the way to the entry of the Red Army into Berlin and the storming by it of the Reichstag on 30 April 1945 – the same day that the Führer committed suicide. Six days later, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, acting on behalf of the German high command, surrendered to Marshal Zhukov.
Reasons for Soviet victory
How was it possible for the USSR to succeed where others had failed so miserably? There are several reasons for this success.
1. Elimination of the fifth column
First, because the CPSU and the Soviet regime ruthlessly purged the party, the government and the armed forces of the fifth column elements.
In addition to the testimony of the accused at the above-mentioned trials – and for this testimony there is no substitute – impeccable bourgeois sources, who cannot be suspected of the least partiality towards the Soviet regime, are on record confirming the guilt of the accused at these trials. Joseph E Davies, at the time the American ambassador in Moscow, who, accompanied by an interpreter, attended and carefully followed the proceedings at the Moscow trials, was profoundly impressed.
On 17 February 1937, a month after the second trial, in a confidential dispatch to Cordell Hull, the US secretary of state, ambassador Davies reported that almost all the foreign diplomats in Moscow shared his opinion of the justice of the verdict: “I talked to many, if not all, of the members of the diplomatic corps here and, with possibly one exception, they are all of the opinion that the proceedings established clearly the existence of a political plot and conspiracy to overthrow the government.” (Joseph E Davies, Mission to Moscow, Victor Gollancz, London, 1942, p39)
Powerful anti-Soviet forces saw to it that this truth about the fifth column in the USSR was not made public in the USA or elsewhere in the western world.
Again, on 11 March 1937, ambassador Davies recorded in his diary: “Another diplomat, Minister [redacted], made a most illuminating statement to me yesterday. In discussing the trial, he said that the defendants were undoubtedly guilty; that all of us who attended the trial had practically agreed upon that; that the outside world, from the press reports, however, seemed to think that the trial was a put-up job (facade, as he called it); that while he knew it was not, it was probably just as well that the outside world should think so.” (Ibid, p83)
One week into the third Moscow trial (that of Bukharin and others), ambassador Davies wrote on 8 March 1938 to his daughter Emlen thus: “The extraordinary testimony of Krestinsky, Bukharin, and the rest would appear to indicate that the Kremlin’s fears were well justified. For it now seems that a plot existed in the beginning of November 1936 to project a coup d’état, with Tukhachevsky at its head, for May of the following year. Apparently it was touch and go at that time whether it actually would be staged.
“But the government acted with great vigour and speed. The Red Army generals were shot and the whole party organisation was purged and thoroughly cleansed. Then it came out that quite a few of those at the top were seriously infected with the virus of the conspiracy to overthrow the government, and were actually working with the secret service organisations of Germany and Japan.” (Ibid, p177)
Far from weakening the Soviet regime or the Red Army, these trials helped to eliminate precisely those elements who would have collaborated with the Nazis and acted as a fifth column. In the summer of 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of the USSR, Davies wrote the following appraisal of the historical significance of the Moscow trials:
“There was no so-called ‘internal aggression’ in Russia cooperating with the German high command. Hitler’s march into Prague in 1939 was accompanied by the active military support of Henlein’s organisations in Czechoslovakia. The same thing was true of his invasion of Norway. There were no Sudeten Henleins, no Slovakian Tisos, no Belgian De Grelles, no Norwegian Quislings in the Russian picture.” (Ibid, p179)
“The story had been told in the so-called treason or purge trials of 1937 and 1938 which I attended and listened to. In re-examining the record of these cases and also what I had written at the time … I found that practically every device of German fifth columnist activity, as we now know it, was disclosed and laid bare by the confessions and testimony elicited at these trials of self-confessed ‘Quisling’s in Russia …
“All of these trials, purges and liquidations, which seemed so violent at the time and shocked the world, are now quite clearly a part of a vigorous and determined effort of the Stalin government to protect itself not only from revolution from within but from attack from without. They went to work thoroughly to clean up and clean out all treasonable elements within the country. All doubts were resolved in favour of the government.
“There were no fifth columnists in Russia in 1941 – they had shot them. The purge had cleansed the country and rid it of treason.” (Ibid, pp179-184)
An authoritative bourgeois correspondent concluded that the “purge eliminated Russia’s fifth column. I found no British or American correspondent in Russia who thought that the famous confessions made by Radek, Tukhachevsky, Rykov, Krestinsky, Pletnov, Rozengolts and others had been extracted by torture.” (Quentin Reynolds, Only the Stars Are Neutral, New York, 1943, p93)
Let George Sava be our final bourgeois witness. In his War Without Guns, having stated that “Russia’s splendid resistance surprised many a diplomat of the democratic countries, who were convinced that Russia could not resist more than ten weeks,” he went on to make the following perceptive, nay penetrating, observation:
“We may not understand the intricacies of Marxism, but we should have known that the grave Hitler has been digging for conservatives and democrats alike was intentionally made big enough to bury the Russians as well. Fortunately, unlike our diplomats, the Russians did realise the dangers and that is the reason for their ruthless suppression of fifth columnists. The executions which so horrified us and were termed enigmatic and barbaric, should have been seen in a different light by an intelligent diplomacy, particularly if they considered the fate of Norway and France and the role which fifth-columnists played in those two countries. A clever diplomat could have willingly admitted that a little well-directed shooting in France and Belgium on the Russian model might have saved Brussels, Oslo, Amsterdam and Paris.”
Thus it can be seen that once the western countries had become locked in a mortal conflict with Nazi Germany and became allies of the USSR, they had to overcome their deep-rooted anti-Comintern and anti-Bolshevik prejudices and speak the truth in public on the Moscow trials as on many other issues; they had to admit publicly that these trials, far from weakening the CPSU(B), the Soviet government or the Red Army, had, by liquidating the fifth column in the USSR, strengthened the party, the government and the Red Army. In making this belated admission they were only confirming the historical significance of these trials as being an integral part of the USSR’s struggle – indeed, the struggle of the world as a whole – against the menace of Nazi world domination.
Stalin, in his report to the 18th party congress, answered the rubbish uttered on this question by the bourgeois press in the imperialist countries thus:
“Certain foreign pressmen have been talking drivel to the effect that the purging of Soviet organisations of spies, assassins and wreckers like Trotsky, Zinoviev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Bukharin and other fiends has ‘shaken’ the Soviet system and caused its ‘demoralisation’. All this cheap drivel deserves is laughter and scorn. How can the purging of Soviet organisations of noxious and hostile elements shake and demoralise the Soviet system?
“The Trotsky-Bukharin bunch, that handful of spies, assassins and wreckers, who kow-towed to the foreign world, who were possessed by a slavish instinct to grovel before every foreign bigwig and were ready to serve him as spies – that handful of individuals who did not understand that the humblest Soviet citizen, being free from the fetters of capital, stands head and shoulders above any high-placed foreign bigwig whose neck wears the yoke of capitalist slavery – of what use that miserable band of venal slaves, of what value can they be to the people, and whom can they ‘demoralise’?
“In 1937, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were held. In these elections, 98.6 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government. At the beginning of 1938, Rosengoltz, Rykov, Bukharin and other fiends were sentenced to be shot. After that, the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics were held. In these elections 99.4 percent of the total vote was cast for the Soviet government. Where are the symptoms of ‘demoralisation’, we would like to know, and why was this ‘demoralisation’ not reflected in the results of the elections?
“To listen to these foreign drivellers one would think that if the spies, assassins and wreckers had been left at liberty to wreck, murder and spy without let or hindrance, the Soviet organisations would have been far sounder and stronger [laughter]. Are not these gentlemen giving themselves away too soon by so insolently defending the cause of spies, assassins and wreckers?
“Would it not be truer to say that the weeding out of spies, assassins and wreckers from the Soviet organisations was bound to lead, and did lead, to the further strengthening of these organisations?”
Referring to the bloody but undeclared war at Lake Hassan on the Manchurian-Maritime provinces frontier, fought between the USSR and Japanese imperialism – a war in which the Japanese got a bloody nose, which restrained them from attacking the USSR again – Stalin went on to add: “What, for instance, do the events at Lake Hassan show, if not that the weeding out of spies and wreckers is the surest means of strengthening our Soviet organisations?” (Report to the 18th party congress)
Thus the convergence of honest bourgeois and proletarian views alike compels us to the only conclusion possible, namely that the accused at the Moscow trials were justly tried and justly punished and that the liquidation of the accused eliminated the fifth column in the USSR, which in turn strengthened the ability of the Soviet regime and its armed forces to withstand, defeat and smash the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht.
If we are to believe the bourgeois-Trotskyist drivel – that after the trials the USSR’s armed forces were left bereft of a general staff – how, then are we to explain the existence in the Red Army of such brilliant and legendary generals, whose exploits are known the world over, as Zhukov, Chuikov, Shtemenko, Yeremenko, Timoshenko, Vasilevsky, Sokolovsky, Rokossovsky, Koniev, Voroshilov, Budenny, Mekhlis, Kulik and many, many more?
2. Socialism
Second, the USSR was successful because she had been building up her industry and collectivising her agriculture on the lines of socialism. The implementation of such a programme, in addition to endowing the USSR with material strength, brought a resurgence of proletarian pride in their achievements, an ardent faith in the bright future of socialism, and a grim determination to defend the gains of socialism against external and internal enemies alike.
But this programme did not fall from heaven by itself, fortuitously as it were. It had to be fought for tooth and nail against its ‘left’ (Trotskyist) and ‘right’ (Bukharinite) opponents; it had to survive the wrecking, sabotage and treasonable conspiracies of the Trotskyite and Bukharinite capitulators and despicable lackeys of imperialism. In a word, it was a programme born out of, and amidst, conditions of fierce class struggle.
Although the Soviet Union would have dearly loved to have been left alone in peace to continue the task of socialist construction, her leadership was well aware of the dangers, of the fact that imperialism would drag her into the war. It was not, therefore, within Soviet power to avert involvement in a war with imperialism, for, as a Chinese saying has it, ‘The tree may prefer the calm, but the wind will not subside.’ Precisely for this reason, with the impending war in mind, the leadership of the CPSU had refused, in the teeth of opposition from the camp of the Bukharinite capitulators, to slow down the tempo of industrialisation. Speaking at the conference of leading personnel of socialist industry on 4 February 1931, Stalin stressed this point in his characteristically frank and unambiguous manner:
“It is sometimes asked whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo somewhat, to put a check on the movement. No, comrades, it is not possible! The tempo must not be reduced! On the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and possibilities. This is dictated to us by our obligations to the workers and peasants of the USSR. This is dictated to us by our obligations to the working class of the whole world.
“To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons.
“All beat her because of her backwardness, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness. They beat her because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity. You remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia.’ Those gentlemen were quite familiar with the verses of the old poet. They beat her, saying: ‘You are abundant,’ so one can enrich oneself at your expense. They beat her, saying: ‘You are poor and impotent,’ so you can be beaten and plundered with impunity.
“Such is the law of the exploiters – to beat the backward and the weak. It is the jungle law of capitalism. You are backward, you are weak – therefore you are wrong; hence you can be beaten and enslaved. You are mighty – therefore you are right; hence we must be wary of you.
“That is why we must not lag behind.
“In the past we had no fatherland, nor could we have had one. But now that we have overthrown capitalism and power is in our hands, in the hands of the people, we have a fatherland, and we will uphold its independence. Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its independence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its backwardness in the shortest possible time and develop a genuine Bolshevik tempo in building up its socialist economy. There is no other way. That is why Lenin said on the eve of the October Revolution: ‘Either perish, or overtake and outstrip the advanced capitalist countries.’
“We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.” (Stalin, Collected Works, Vol 13, pp40-1)
As a result of this gigantic effort, in 1940 gross output of Soviet industry was 8.5 times greater than the industrial production of tsarist Russia in 1913, whereas the output of large-scale industry had increased 12-fold and machine-building 35-fold.
Thoroughly biased as he was against Stalin, the Trotskyite Isaac Deutscher, in his biography of Stalin, was obliged to make the following admission as to the decisive factors that underlay the Soviet victory in the second world war:
“The truth was that the war could not have been won without the intensive industrialisation of Russia, and of her eastern provinces in particular. Nor could it have been won without the collectivisation of large numbers of farms. The muzhik of 1930, who had never handled a tractor or any other machine, would have been of little use in modern war. Collectivised farming, with its machine-tractor stations scattered all over the country, had been the peasants’ preparatory school for mechanised warfare.
“The rapid raising of the average standard of education had also enabled the Red Army to draw on a considerable reserve of intelligent officers and men. ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us’ – so Stalin had spoken exactly ten years before Hitler set out to conquer Russia. His words, when they were recalled now, could not but impress people as a prophecy brilliantly fulfilled, as a most timely call to action. And, indeed, a few years’ delay in the modernisation of Russia might have made all the difference between victory and defeat.” (Deutscher, ibid, p535)
Deutscher also dispelled any notion of popular hostility to the Soviet regime and correctly painted a picture of a Soviet people possessed of strong moral fibre, a strong sense of economic and political advance, and a grim determination to defend its gains:
“It should not be imagined that a majority of the nation was hostile to the government. If that had been the case no patriotic appeals, no prodding or coercion, would have prevented Russia’s political collapse, for which Hitler was confidently hoping. The great transformation that the country had gone through before the war had … strengthened the moral fibre of the nation. The majority was imbued with a strong sense of its economic and social advance, which it was grimly determined to defend against danger from without.” (Ibid, p473)
3. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik)
The third reason for Soviet victory was that it was led by such a revolutionary proletarian party as the CPSU(B), whose leadership as well as lower ranks were characterised by an unreserved spirit of dedication to the cause of the proletariat, and a self-sacrificing heroism, and commanded the respect of non-party masses. Of 27 million Soviets who died in the war, three million belonged to the Communist party. David Hearst of the Guardian, in an article written in connection with the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of VE Day, and filled with the customary anti-Stalinism (without which no bourgeois journalist can hope to keep his job and have his wallet stuffed), was compelled to make this admission:
“All contemporary accounts by war veterans testify to a high degree of ideological commitment by all sections of society in volunteering for action after June 1941, the educated and uneducated alike. Why? In what name did so many Communist party faithful go forward to meet certain death? In the name of the motherland? In the name of the Soviet Union, somehow dissociated from Stalin’s evil guiding hand, of which they themselves were among the first victims?” (Coming to the aid of the party, The Guardian, 1 May 1995)
Having satisfied the moneybags who own the Guardian, and the editor, by a reference to ‘Stalin’s evil guiding hand’, and having thus established his impeccable bourgeois journalistic credentials, Mr Hearst nevertheless found himself stumbling on the truth when he continued thus, by way of answering his own question:
“Contemporary eye-witness accounts point to the contrary. A typical reaction is the veteran Ivan Martinov’s: ‘Every one of us knows that it was the Communist party which led everything at that time. The party formed the basis of the state machine. Everyone knew that when our servicemen were captured, the Nazi order would be, “Communists, jews and commanders take one step forward”, and they would be shot. Therefore the massive joining of the party during the war, meant only one thing – heroism and belief in the party cause.’”
It may not be to his liking, but the fact of the matter is, as David Hearst must know, millions of Soviet soldiers, partisans and civilians went to their deaths with the slogan: “For the motherland and for Comrade Stalin” on their lips – such were the love and affection with which the Soviet masses cherished their socialist motherland and its helmsman, such was the charisma (‘evil guiding hand’, if it pleases bourgeois scribblers and such other anti-proletarian gentry) of Josef Stalin, who inspired the Soviet people to unprecedented feats of heroism.
By November 1942, the Germans occupied 700,000 square miles of Soviet territory and a pre-war population of 80 million; millions of Soviet citizens were compelled to abandon their cities, villages, factories and plants and move eastward to avoid enemy occupation. Soviet troops were compelled by the extremely difficult military situation to retreat into the interior with substantial losses in men and material.
“But even during that difficult period neither the Soviet nation nor its armed forces lost faith in the prospect of the ultimate defeat of the enemy hordes. The mortal danger helped to rally our people even more closely around the Communist party, and, despite every hardship, the enemy was finally stopped in all sectors.
“The mass heroism of Soviet soldiers and the courage of their commanders, reared by our party, were demonstrated with particular force during the fierce fighting of that [November 1942] period. A positive role was played by the personal example of party members and Young Communists who, when necessary, sacrificed themselves for the sake of victory.” (Marshal Zhukov’s Greatest Battles, p152)
4. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
The fourth reason for the victory of the Soviet Union was the existence of this unique institution in the history of humanity, namely the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) – a multinational state established by the victorious proletariat consequent upon the Great October Socialist Revolution, which had outlawed exploitation of one human being by another within each of its constituent parts, and exploitation of one nation by another. In truth, this was a free and fraternal association of dozens of nations who lived together to construct a common bright future, and where injury to one was regarded as an injury to all.
David Hearst, in the article referred to above, cited Professor Yuri Polyakov, a historian and a member of the Academy of Science, who brought together all the reasons that inspired the Soviet people to heroic resistance and victory in the Great Patriotic War. Here is what Professor Polyakov had to say:
“The workers and peasants were fighting for their socialist state. A Kazakh or Kyrgyz, who under the Soviet empire got for the first time in their history his own statehood, was fighting for his motherland, Kazakhstan or Krygyzia.
“The German invasion brought with it a very strong sense of danger to the Soviet Union. Everyone understood that the union would be destroyed under German occupation. But ideology also played its part … The generals and officer class came from simple people who believed in the justice of the struggle and the state they were defending. In great measure this belief was linked to the belief in Soviet power, as the power that had brought economic development to the whole Union.” (Cited in The Guardian, ibid)
And these are the words of a professor in Yeltsin’s fiercely anticommunist Russia, where ‘historians’ were given large bribes to write ‘histories’ that painted the former Soviet Union and its leadership in the darkest colours, where, let alone poor Stalin, biographies of the great Lenin were brought out that described him in these flattering tones: “Lenin was the anti-Christ … All Russia’s great troubles stemmed from him.”
Have we not always maintained that anti-Stalinism was only a cover for anti-Leninism? Since the Soviet state has been destroyed and capitalism restored, Khrushchev’s successors no longer have to speak in coded Aesopian language.
Having quoted Professor Polyakov, David Hearst concluded his article with this pertinent observation: “If this explanation is correct, the motives behind the immense effort and huge cost of pushing the Germans back have disquieting resonances for today’s post-communist leadership: the Great Patriotic War is a monument to the three institutions that Yeltsin has destroyed – the Communist party as an organising body, socialism as a state ideology, and the Soviet Union as a working collective entity.
“Even the decision to celebrate the 50th anniversary of VE Day with a grandiose state occasion is a change of policy. Four years ago not one state leader attended the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Moscow. Last year it was the humble city of Novgorod’s turn: a relatively minor liberation compared to the massive losses at Moscow, but Yeltsin was careful to send his greetings to the inhabitants. The 1995 campaign to reclaim the Great Patriotic War for Russia’s, rather than the Soviet Union’s history, had begun.
“Today’s debate is, as all these debates are, more about the present than the past … the events of 50 years ago are still being lived through today. Russia’s industrial decline under its painful transition to a market economy is being likened to the effect on industry of the German invasion. To Yeltsin’s opponents the war effort creates an inverted image of Russia today. ‘If we could do it then, we can do it again today,’ is the constant assumption of any war nostalgia.
“There are too many parallels, too much undigested matter, and the state of Russia, shorn of its fraternal republics and its international influence is too young a state. The veterans are still an important electoral block: with their families they can muster about 20 million votes. They are disciplined voters, and highly politicised. So when Yeltsin mounts the podium in Red Square to take the official salute of the Veterans’ Parade on 9 May, he is not just thinking of the past but this year’s parliamentary elections, and possibly next year’s presidential elections. Like all his predecessors, Yeltsin has good reason today to be cautious about the past.” (Ibid)
It is unquestionably true that the present-day peoples of the former Soviet Union, in marking the 60th anniversary, as indeed ten years ago on the occasion of the 50th anniversary, of their victory in the Great Patriotic War, in paying tribute to the valour, heroism, sacrifice, steadfastness and single-minded sense of purpose of their Soviet fathers and grandfathers (tens of millions remembering their own part in it) in that titanic struggle, cannot but be haunted by the memories of their socialist motherland and cannot help comparing their present-day misery (courtesy of the wonders of capitalist restoration with its mafia economy, prostitution, drug-trafficking, street crime, killing of old people to get hold of their apartments, unemployment, homelessness and subservience to foreign imperialism) with the life under the former glorious Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
All this cannot augur well for the present-day tsars of Russia.
(Much, much more at link.)
https://thecommunists.org/2025/05/15/ne ... rpal-brar/
