As we’ve previously reported before, Stalin’s popularity keeps rising in the territories of the former USSR with 48 percent of Russians supporting the idea of a monument to Joseph Stalin to mark the next anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II. By comparison, 20 percent of respondents oppose the idea and 29 percent are indifferent.(Meduza, Levada Center: Number of Russians in support of Stalin monument has doubled since 2010, August 4, 2021).
Continual support for commemorating the legacy of Stalin’s leadership amongst the Russian people has various sections of the corporate media, (who strive to meticulously curate journalistic narratives for the benefit of the ruling class) in hysterics.
This gave rise to a recent article in the Moscow Times – lamenting Stalin’s popularity within the Russian Federation specifically. (The Moscow Times, Why Is Stalin’s Popularity On the Rise?, July 23 2021)
The deceptively named “The Moscow Times” is actually owned by a Dutch foundation Stichting Oktober which is both funded by the Dutch government and based in the Netherlands. In short, The Moscow Times is a tool to wash Western political views and present them as native Russian ones.
In context, we can see why the Moscow Times has written the below:
“To people outside of Russia, it might seem deeply shocking and incomprehensible that Stalin’s popularity is growing at such a pace. Yet it is an entirely natural consequence of the policy advanced and sponsored by the Russian state of historical amnesia and the literal rewriting of history.”(Ibid)
The Moscow Times lamentation of the re-writing of history is itself a rewriting of history.
I’m sure the Moscow Times did not raise hue and cry directed at the European Union and it’s declaration that the “Soviets were as guilty as the Nazis” for World War II. (European Parliament, European Parliament resolution on the 80th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe, 17.9.2019)
This immature rewriting of history demands that we “start the clock” at the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, because if we start the clock even a week earlier we see the Soviets offering the French and British an anti-Nazi pact – which they refused.
“The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin’s generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
But the British and French side – briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals – did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.” (The Telegraph, Stalin ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact, 18 October 2008)
A Thorough Analysis Of The Origins Of World War II
The main thrust of the rest of the Moscow Times article rests essentially on this liberal distortion of World War II history.
If we start going back in time from the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact we only find that Britain and France are more condemned – two governments at the time that were riddled with Nazi sympathisers. For instance if we go back a year we find the British and French betraying Czechoslovakia at the Munich Betrayal. The French and Soviets had a military pact to defend Czechoslovakia. Due to the Anti-Communist hysteria at the time the Czech president had demanded that only the French could activate the pact.
Correctly fearing that if the Soviets came to Czechoslovakia’s defence without France the anti-communist liberals alongside the Hitlerites would use this moment to turn the war into an anti-communist war.
France did not go to the defence of Czechoslovakia but carved it up alongside Chamberlain, Hitler and Mussolini.
If we go back even further we see the British and French conniving with the Nazis for the fascist take over of Spain because “England preferred a rebel victory to a Republican victory.” (Sir Anthony Eden, quoted in Arthur Landis, Spain The Unfinished Revolution, P.198].
And that “…each movement of the Non-Intervention committee has been made to serve the cause of the rebellion (the fascists). This committee was the most cynical and lamentably dishonest group that history has ever known” (American Ambassador Bowes, Foreign Relations US diplomatic Papers, Vol II, 1936, P.604)
British Prime Minister Baldwin’s strong stance against the French request to invoke Locarno and as to why it must be left to do as it pleased in the Rhineland is also eye opening.
The Prime Minister thought at some stage it would be necessary to point out to the French that the action they propose would not result only in letting loose another great war in Europe. They might succeed in crushing Germany with the aid of Russia, but it would probably result in Germany going Bolshevik. (Alvin Finkel, The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion, P.88)
Harold Nicolson, the National Labour MP who would be Minister of Information in Winston Churchill’s wartime government, had this to say on why Britain should not respond militarily to a few days after the reoccupation of the Rhineland.
“Naturally we shall win and enter Berlin. But what is the good of that? It would only mean communism in Germany and France.” (Harold Nicholson, Diaries and Letters 1930-39, p.250)
We can continue through this collaboration: from Lord Halifax and Hitlers conversation about Germany being “denied colonies” in 1937 (Documents and Materials Related To the Eve of WW2, P.3, 1948). Showing the war was really about Germany’s inability to oppress and profit off the colonies. Lord Halifax did have some praise for Hitler though: “Germany therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark against of the West against Communism.”(Ibid)
A phrase curiously stemming from Lloyd George as far back as 1934:
“In a very short time, perhaps in a year or two, the Conservative elements in this country will be looking to Germany as the bulwark against Communism in Europe. She is planted right in the centre of Europe … only two or three years ago a very distinguished German statesman said to me: ‘I am not afraid of Nazism, but of Communism’ – and if Germany is seized by the Communists, Europe will follow … Do not let us be in a hurry to condemn Germany. We shall be welcoming Germany as our friend.” (David Lloyd George, House Of Commons, 28 November 1934)
Or that the Bank of England and Bank of America alongside JP Morgan were directly responsible for the 1931 bank crash in Germany which saw the rise of the Nazis, which they then financed (William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, p.79).
Or the American capitalist Henry Ford who disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda that deeply influenced and shaped the Nazi movement. Hitler had a portrait of Henry Ford in his office for a reason after all. (James and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed Hitler?, P. 85)
On The Soviet Diplomatic Victory
Elsewhere in the article it decries the Russian government’s new view of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a victory of stunning diplomacy. But what else can we consider the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to be, in light of the damning evidence of British/American and French collusion with the Nazis?
The liberals that brought Russia to the brink of ruin under USA’s puppet, Boris Yeltsin, have been shown the door. Under such a humiliating era Russia was forced into poverty while economists like Jeffrey Sachs helped loot the country. Why should Russians continue to flog themselves for this “history” – that is little more than propaganda with footnotes?
Certainly not for Dutch liberals.
Litvinov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1930 – 1939, having spent 7 years trying to organise “collective security” with Britain and France was turned down at every conceivable point because defining an “aggressor country” could just as easily apply to Britain and France and their actions in their colonies. Litvinov came to be the human embodiment of collective security and his dismissal in 1939 in favour of Molotov was understood to be the Soviets changing tact.
Stalin called out the “non-aggressor” States as wanting to embroil the fascists with war with the Soviet Union in March 1939 – 6 months before the signing of Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
“How is it that the non-aggressive countries, which possess such vast opportunities, have so easily, and without any resistance, abandoned their positions and their obligations to please the aggressors?
“Is it to be attributed to the weakness of the nonaggressive states? Of course not. Combined, the nonaggressive, democratic states are unquestionably stronger than the fascist states, both economically and in the military sense.
To what then are we to attribute the systematic concessions made by these states to the aggressors?
It might be attributed, for example, to the fear that a revolution might break out if the non-aggressive states were to go to war and the war were to assume world – wide proportions. The bourgeois politicians know, of course, that the first imperialist world war led to the victory of the revolution in one of the largest countries. They are afraid that the second imperialist world war may also lead to the victory of the revolution in one or several countries.
Formally speaking, the policy of non-intervention might be defined as follows: “Let each country defend itself from the aggressors as it likes and as best it can. That is not our affair. We shall trade both with the aggressors and with their victims.” But actually speaking, the policy of non-intervention means conniving at aggression, giving free rein to war, and, consequently, transforming the war into a world war. The policy of non-intervention reveals an eagerness, a desire, not to hinder the aggressors in their nefarious work: not to hinder Japan, say, from embroiling herself in a war with China, or, better still, with the Soviet Union: to allow all the belligerents to sink deeply into 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.” (J V Stalin, Report on the Work of the Central Committee to the Eighteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), March 10, 1939)
Further
“Even more characteristic is the fact that certain European and American politicians and pressmen, having lost patience waiting for “the march on the Soviet Ukraine,” are themselves beginning to disclose what is really behind the policy of non-intervention. They are saying quite openly, putting it down in black on white, that the Germans have cruelly “disappointed” them, for instead of marching farther east, against the Soviet Union, they have turned, you see, to the west and are demanding colonies. 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, but that now the Germans are refusing to meet their bills and are sending them to Hades.”
“Far be it from me to moralize on the policy of non-intervention, to talk of treason, treachery and so on. It would be naive to preach morals to people who recognize no human morality. Politics is politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say. It must be remarked, however, that the big and dangerous political game started by the supporters of the policy of non-intervention may end in a serious fiasco for them.”
“Such is the true face of the prevailing policy of non-intervention.”
(Ibid)
Britain was still flying reconnaissance flights inside the Soviet Union looking for bombing targets as late as March-April 1940. During the “phoney war” period where they were formally at war with the Nazis but the section in the political class (represented by Chamberlain) were still hoping to turn the “bad war” (with nazi Germany) into a “good war” (with the USSR).
“By 1940 London was planning covert intervention against Moscow. Forerunners of the sabotage organisation in London, the special Operations Executive or SOE, prepared for the sabotage of Soviet oil production. Meanwhile an elite group from the Coldstream Guards was undertaking ski training in the French Alps. Its members belonged to a secretive fifth battalion of the famous regiment, formed from volunteers specifically for despatch to fight as an ‘International Brigade’ in Finland. This move was halted only by the surprise Russo-Finnish armistice o f March 1940. However, the Special Operations Executive continued to prepare exotic anti-Soviet schemes while British Military Intelligence looked at fomenting uprisings in Transcaucasia. Remarkably, in preparation, during March-April 1940 Britain undertook secret reconnaissance flights inside the Soviet Union to obtain intelligence on important targets. Britain came far closer to war with the Soviet Union than is commonly realised and it is the Anglo-Soviet alliance of 1942 that represents the aberration, not the onset of post-war anti-Soviet hostility.”
Richard J Aldritch, The Hidden Hand Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence, P.25
The fact that the Soviets were to able to turn the tables on the British and French leading politicians and fascist sympathisers should, rightly, be regarded as a stunning display of Soviet foreign policy. All the more so since Churchill, the man that would take Britain away from formal alliance with the nazis, himself was a ferocious anti-communist that believed in the “superiority of the Aryan race”.
Stalin Taking His Rightful Place In History
By the end of the 1990s and the Yeltsin experiment it had become popular in Russia to use the word “democrat” as an insult and as a way to criticise a national foreign policy which had allowed the USA to acquire a global hegemony, formally ending sovereignty over the globe.
Assuming the mantle of victory, imperialism went on the offensive against the Communist Movement worldwide (and in the Russian Federation particularly) to spread bourgeois ideology everywhere.
During this period history was suppressed and a liberal distortion of this history was put forward.
It is no surprise then to see, with the swing of history, that Communists are re-learning their history and sweeping away the vile propaganda heaped on the Communist movement.
It is no surprise therefore that statues of Stalin are now going up all over Russia in recent years from Yakutia, Sakha, Novobirsk, Bor, city of Kirov and South Ossetia.
Perhaps Kenneth Cameron highlighted why:
“If Stalin had accomplished for the world bourgeoisie what he did for the world proletariat, he would have long been hailed in bourgeois circles as one of the “greats” of all time, not only of the present century. The same general criteria should apply to Stalin’s reputation from the Marxist point of view. Stalin advanced the position of the world proletariat further than any person in history with the exception of Lenin. True, without the base Lenin laid, Stalin could not have built, but using this base he moved about as far as was possible in the existing situation.
In short a new class of world leader has emerged, and Stalin is in its highest rank.”
Cameron, Kenneth Neill. Stalin, Man of Contradiction. Toronto: NC Press, c1987, p. 120
Fuentes:
Winds of time sweep away the rubbish heaped on Stalin’s grave