Covid-19: A Second Opinion
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COVID-19: A Second Opinion
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Big Pharma and health agencies cry, “Don’t take ivermectin!” A media storm follows. Why then, does the science say the opposite?” |
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Ivermectin is a dirty word in the media. It doesn’t work. It’s a deadly horse dewormer. Prescribe or promote it and you’ll be called a right-wing quack, be banned from social media, or lose your license to practice medicine. And yet, entire countries wiped out the virus with it, and more than ninety-five studies now show it to be unequivocally effective in preventing and treating Covid-19. If it didn’t work, why was there a coordinated global campaign to cancel it? What’s the truth about this decades-old, Nobel Prize-winning medication? |
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What the Biden gang did is clearly a crime, but that pales by comparison to what the FBI did, and possibly other branches of the national security blob. Now the question is: Can the Deep State really investigate itself beyond performative sessions in Congress? Clearly, the American people need to push back and dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex. |
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Testifies About Censorship Claims Before House Subcommittee | U.S News LIVE Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy testifies before a House Judiciary subcommittee on the "weaponization of the Federal Government." Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and others, testify on censorship and free speech before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. #robertkennedy #federalgovernment #usanewslive #usnewslive
Telizhenko worked for the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office in Kyiv before moving to Ukraine’s US Embassy in 2015. He went on to work for Blue Star Strategies, a Democrat-run lobbying firm that represented Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that appointed Biden’s son Hunter to a lucrative board seat. Telizhenko, who cooperated with Rudy Giuliani’s effort to dig up information about the Bidens’ alleged corruption in Ukraine, has been sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for “having directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign influence in a United States election.”
Guest: Andrii Telizhenko. Political consultant who was previously a Ukrainian government official and diplomat.
TRANSCRIPT
AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I’m Aaron Maté. Joining me is Andrii Telizhenko. He is a former Ukrainian diplomat who is sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for alleged election interference related to his efforts to detail the record of the Bidens in Ukraine, which we are going to get to.
Andrii, thank you for joining me.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Thank you for having me on, Aaron.
AARON MATÉ: I want to credit Garland Nixon for this interview. He has a channel on YouTube, and he recently interviewed you, and you said a lot of really extraordinary things that I think people should hear. And for people who are not familiar with your record, with your background, just talk to us a bit about your work in Ukraine as a government official.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, right after the Maidan, the coup, I was appointed as a senior policy advisor to the First Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine on security issues, intelligence issues, military issues. Then I was appointed afterwards as an advisor and had a protocol to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, overseeing all the international connections within the Prosecutor General’s office and his personal political issues, and was involved working with US Embassy, Canadian Embassy, all the G7 embassies on working with the Ukrainian government. Afterwards became a diplomat at the Ukraine Embassy and worked very closely with the White House and on the US elections, which, when I saw the corruption involved in the interference of Ukraine in this, I resigned from the Embassy and left, after six months working there, and became a political consultant. Got involved working with Blue Star Strategies, a lobby firm from Washington, worked there for a year—the lobby firm which lobbied Burisma—and that’s how I saw everything on the inside. And when I understood what the shocking results that were happening for my country, for Ukraine—not only for Ukraine, for the corruption that was happening there—I came out with the truth: Ukrainian interference in the elections, the Hunter Biden story, Burisma, Blue Star.
And that’s when I got involved with Rudy Giuliani. And afterwards I got sanctioned when I testified and gave my evidence to the US Senate—Senator [Ron] Johnson, Senator [Chuck] Grassley’s Committee in 2020—which, out of the 87 pages of the committee report, 27 pages are on my evidence and my email communications with the White House, with Blue Star, and what I went through at that time, and what I could provide openly to the Senate at that time, because they tried to subpoena me so I could provide more evidence which was under contract. But Senator [Mitt] Romney blocked the subpoena in the Senate committee, and they didn’t get enough votes to subpoena me and to bring me in officially. So that’s where I am today and why I’m sanctioned.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, so we’re going to get to that. So, it’s really interesting. Senator Romney, a Republican, blocked the efforts of other Republicans just to get you to come testify. Romney, for some reason, really did not want to hear what you had to say. But before we get into that—there’s a lot there—you say, first of all, you resigned over Ukrainian election interference in the US. You’re referring to the period of 2016?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yes, that’s correct. That’s the period of 2016 presidential elections in the US.
AARON MATÉ: And so, you’re working then in the Ukrainian Embassy around the time of the 2016 election in Washington.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah.
AARON MATÉ: And what did you do?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: I was the Third Secretary of the Embassy after being in my high positions in the government. I went to work at the Embassy, got invited to work there, and I was overseeing the elections as every embassy does. And they tried to get me involved because I was part of the Deep State at that time—they thought I was part of the Deep State—and they tried to get me involved into helping them get dirt on presidential candidate Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, General [Michael]Flynn, and I didn’t want to be involved in that. They introduced me to this woman called Chalupa, Alexandra Chalupa, which I talked about in the political article in 2017 which Ken Vogel wrote, and basically, she wanted dirt. I said no, and two months later I resigned from them, so I came back to Kiev.
And that’s how the process worked, that was part of which I’d seen stuff within the White House, meeting through the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, the head of NABU [National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine], where they were talking about people like Paul Manafort, with Eric Ciaramella, and the national security team of Joe Biden—the vice president at that time—and Chalupa meeting in Washington, getting reports on George Papadopoulous and Carter Page weeks before the official investigation into them happened. So, that’s the witnessing I was part of, unfortunately. I came out with the truth on that. That’s when I started to get smeared by the liberal media and by the Deep State officials, the neocons.
AARON MATÉ: So, let me just explain this for people who aren’t familiar with this, that there are documented allegations of Ukrainians interfering in the 2016 election to defeat Trump. And this was actually admitted out in the open. There’s an article in the Financial Times from a few years ago and it’s titled “Ukraine’s leaders campaign against pro-Putin Trump.” And in this article, you had a number of Ukrainian officials admitting that they were trying to stop Trump from becoming president, because they felt as if he would not have their back in what was then this simmering proxy war just contained to the Donbass in Ukraine that began after the 2014 Maidan coup.
So, they were openly trying to prevent Trump from winning, and they worked with a woman who you mentioned, Chalupa, who was a Ukrainian-American. And this started to come out before, that this was this effort to basically interfere in the election, and as a part of this, there was the leaking of a black ledger, a so-called black ledger, alleging these secret payments to Paul Manafort, and that led to Manafort’s resignation. But there’s been questions about whether that ledger or not was even authentic, or whether it was part of the smear effort against the Trump campaign. Do you have any inside knowledge of that?
And from the witnessing of the White House meeting which happened in January 2016, which was also mentioned by Laura Ingraham a couple years ago, and what happened during that meeting, the US officials were asking for the Ukrainian officials to get any information, financial information, about Americans working for the former government of Ukraine, the Yanukovych government. They did not mention the complete name, but the result was the Paul Manafort story and the black ledger book being made up and thrown into the public. Paul Manafort mentions this in his book and mentions me attending that meeting also, which came out this year.
So, this whole story started to bundle up end of 2015, beginning of 2016, and started to progress within the 2016 elections, right around springtime during the visit of [Petro]Poroshenko to Washington, where he met Hillary Clinton, he met every other candidate except presidential candidate Donald Trump, you could see…
AARON MATÉ: And Poroshenko is then, at that time, he’s the president of Ukraine.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: The president, yeah. So basically, he meets everybody that he needs to talk to. He talks with Hillary Clinton and talks to other people, but he doesn’t meet with presidential candidate Donald Trump who has the most possibility to win the elections, and he is the representative of the other side, the Republican side, with the majority [chance]of winning the elections.
So, you can see the bias process going on with this, and while this happened officially, the backstory is happening with people like me. The US government and people from the Democratic National Committee are approaching and asking for dirt on a presidential candidate. And what Chalupa said, she said, ‘I want dirt. I just want to get Trump off the elections. We’re going to have [US Representative] Marcy Kaptur get a committee together, and we’re going to take him off a month before the election.’
AARON MATÉ: Kaptur is a member of Congress.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, from Ohio. And I testified everything on this to the Federal Election Commission. I got subpoenaed by the Federal Election Commission in 2019. There was a full-scale investigation. I testified under oath in Washington DC, and after I got sanctioned—even though I got sanctioned for Hunter Biden, not the election interference story—they still closed the investigation. They said because Telizhenko is a so-called sanctioned person, a Russian spy, alleged Russian spy—without any proof or evidence, they just made me that—we’re going to close the investigation into the DNC story. And that’s how they had the case of Blue Star Strategies/DNC story closed, by just sanctioning one person.
AARON MATÉ: And that’s part of a well-established playbook that anyone can see now with their eyes open, that anytime there are corruption allegations against a preferred politician, especially from the Democratic Party, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden—Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 or Hunter Biden’s laptop of 2020—everything is just dismissed as a Russian plot and that allows it to go away. That’s the established playbook, and you’ve been caught up with that, because you were sanctioned by the Treasury Department for spreading quote “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations involving a US political candidate,” and that candidate refers to Joe Biden.
But before we get to that, because I want to go through your story here, you were also a government official in Ukraine around the time of the Maidan coup in 2014, which is pivotal to understanding this current moment that we’re in, this current war we’re in. So, talk to us about that coup, the forces behind it, and what you see, if any, as the US role.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Unfortunately, I was a big part of it because I was young, I’d just came back from the United States, I wanted Ukraine to be democratic. I took on the hook of this whole full-scale democracy that US is bringing to the world, and I was part of the Ukrainian opposition to [Viktor] Yanukovych at the time. And they offered me to be a coordinator of the international relations of Maidan, the unofficial part where I worked closely with the US Embassy, with the US Ambassador [Geoffrey] Pyatt. I worked closely with US government officials, like the invitation of Senator John McCain, and his security was on my watch, and I coordinated that process. The unfortunate “Nuland cookies” was my idea. In December 2013, when she [Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland] was in Kiev, she wanted to give out bread. I recommended her to divert from that process, you’re not Jesus, you should come out to the people with something more to the ground, and that’s how the cookies process came out.
But I have to tell you, Maidan was fully coordinated and controlled by the US government and the US Embassy in Kiev on the ground. They had the official side with the pro-Soros people who did the PR, but all those things behind closed doors were happening with the involvement of the US Embassy officials. So then came US government officials at the White House like Elisabeth Zentos, who I was continuing to do my work with while I was in the Ukraine Embassy in Washington, and she was part of the national security team of Joe Biden.
So, this process is interconnected very deeply, and this continues till today. The war started, unfortunately for Ukraine, which at that time I did not understand. I understood it only a couple of years later when I came out with the truth, in 2016-17, and started to fight the Deep State to not control my country. But this process started in 2014 when the war in Ukraine and the interference from the outside led to people dying on Maidan, led to people dying in Donbass, and let Ukraine be thrown under the bus and used as a rag for their corrupt scandals and corrupt schemes for Joe Biden, the Deep State, Clintons, Soros, and all you can name. They were all involved in Ukraine and had their money, just went through Ukraine like a Franklin Templeton situation, where the money laundering of several billion dollars went to the US company of Ukrainian loans. So, this process is all interconnected with what we see today, unfortunately.
AARON MATÉ: And when you refer there to George Soros, he is a well-known oligarch who has funded Western-backed efforts in Ukraine to support political movements that the US wants to basically install. That is also on record.
Okay, but keeping with this period of 2013, early 2014, the Maidan coup, is it your belief… I just want to be clear here that the US was actively involved in plotting a coup, or was it more they were just behind the scenes, sort of encouraging events that could lead to that without being fully involved operationally in the plan?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: They’re fully involved financially and operationally. When the US Ambassador comes to Maidan headquarters, the one where the opposition sat, he would make up decisions, and basically, he would officially not give orders, but he would recommend things. But everybody knew if he recommended things, this is how you have to do it. And coordination work on pushing on the Ukrainian government, the Yanukovych government, I witnessed this conversation when Nuland came to Kiev, and it was the first storming of Maidan at that time when the police tried to storm, when the people already gathered on Maidan, and this was mid-December, December 11th, I think, and I called Ambassador Pyatt. I said, ‘You have to stop this. Call the president of Ukraine so there won’t be bloodshed.’ And the meeting in the morning where we met Nuland and Pyatt, she said, ‘I called Yanukovych and ordered him to stop it, but he did not pick up the phone for three hours. But then when he picked up the phone, I told him, stop the process or we will destroy you politically, etc.’
So, they were there, they were controlling this process behind the closed doors. Yeah, it was all done in the hands of Ukrainians, but it was all prepared by the US Embassy, the US government, and US political advisors on the ground in Ukraine who worked there for years, for 20 years before, preparing this whole process, and with Soros-led groups who influenced the PR, who were taught how to influence the PR, and how to make this process likable for the public.
So, it was all interconnected, done with the Ukrainian hands, as it is right now. Ukrainians are fighting with spilling their blood and the Americans are fully behind it, helping Ukrainians financially and with the weapons, which are not leading to anything but just people getting killed. Instead of making peace, the same thing happened there. It was behind the closed doors where they were leading the Ukrainians to overthrow the government and to then have a new government which should be favorable in Washington.
AARON MATÉ: And it’s my understanding that right before Yanukovych was overthrown in February 2014, there was a compromise reached. It was brokered by European states that would leave Yanukovych in power but with limited authority and with earlier elections. But there was a split inside the Maidan leadership. Some Maidan leaders accepted this deal, some didn’t. Did you witness this, because right after this split happened, Yanukovych was basically forced to flee in a flurry of violence.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: It was promised by Yanukovych to step back and let democracy prevail, as you can say about the Maidan politicians leading their people so everybody would save their face. Because at that time the popularity of the leaders of Maidan was very low, and they needed something to boom this whole process, and they agreed on making these, as you said, elections and making change of government peaceful. But because of the popularity of the Maidan leaders being very low, people did not trust them. At the time it was a whole situation where you have all these leaders from within the people who came up on the stage and became more powerful than the political leaders themselves, so they needed some big political explosive to happen. That’s what happened.
We had the bloodshed in February 2013, one on February 18th, and then on February 20th where we had the shootings on Maidan…
AARON MATÉ: 2014.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, that’s what led to this whole political boom, a smokescreen to protect the political leaders of Maidan and to show that somebody, not them are bad, but Yanukovych is bad, and the deal with him was off the table. So, they just basically threw him them under the bus with the deal in Istanbul and Russia, they made Russia back off from Kiev, and then they continued the war. The same thing they did just last year.
So, you can see how it was being done, that you cannot trust the words of political leaders of the West because they will throw you under the bus.
AARON MATÉ: So, the Maidan massacre is a key event, that’s February 20th, 2014, and that’s where you have many people gunned down in Maidan Square. The US government and the Maidan leaders immediately blamed Yanukovych, and as a result of all the events that ensued, Yanukovych then flees, and when the coup was justified, the Maidan massacre is invoked to say, ‘Well, Yanukovych’s forces gunned down these protesters on Maidan.’
But there’s a professor at the University of Ottawa named Ivan Katchanovski who has written a study about this, and he says without a doubt the people behind the Maidan massacre were in fact the people in the pro-Maidan coup side. And he bases this on witness testimony, on video evidence, on forensic testimony. He even cites an interview from some members of the Maidan who say that they were told by some Western officials that they would need a higher death count in Maidan to basically justify increased support for a change of government if I remember that correctly. So, that’s according to his investigation. Do you think there was a Western role in the Maidan massacre?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: What I can tell you is when I went to work in the Prosecutor’s office afterwards, I saw the Maidan case and it was in documents. The first case, because then they changed them a couple of times, and from the original case which I saw, Yanukovych’s involvement in this was barely none. That’s what I can tell you. He was not even in his office or in his house. He was outside of Kiev driving in three Ladas to a secure location with his bodyguards. And this is a testimony by his bodyguards who are working for the Ukraine government as the Security Service of Ukraine, and they testified that they witnessed him not understanding this whole situation at all. I don’t want to protect anybody here, but this is what I read in the official documents by the Prosecutor’s office of Ukraine, and I saw what the professor from the University of Ottawa published, and I agree with him. There are possibilities and there are connections with the West in this process. I personally did not trust them on my own. I can only tell you what I witnessed from the documents. But I agree that there’s the connection to this massacre from the inside of Maidan and from the people who organized this from Maidan and the coup—and not from the people in the Ukraine government because this was the last thing they needed to happen in Ukraine.
AARON MATÉ: So, after the coup, what did you witness about the role of the US in its influence over the new Ukrainian government that came to power?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Oh, full control. The Ukraine government became, within the nine years after the coup in 2014, fully controlled by the US government and by the G7 ambassadors.
When we came to work in the government ministries of Ukraine, in my first government position as an advisor to the First Deputy Prime Minister, we had meetings with the CIA Director [John] Brennan, for example, and I was told we were going to meet, but my boss did not know. The US Embassy told me not to inform the First Deputy Prime Minister who he’s going to meet because he’s not trustworthy, he can leak this information. So, from small things like that, telling us what to do, to big things like telling us who to fire, who to hire, what department to cut, what department to inform, what department to bring more money in, these things would be set in motion, and if the middle process would not listen to those issues, they’d go to the President directly or to the Prime Minister, and then he’d give an order directly to people to hire, to fire, to send more money, and basically they would control everything.
They would start the destruction of the Ukrainian bureaucracy and the administrative machine. That’s what I started to witness and I went against in 2017, when this process led to changes where we saw the unprofessionalism of the Ukrainian police, the unprofessionalism of the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s office, when we had foreigners walking around the government buildings and were placed in positions where they were not supposed to be placed, with clear and full security clearance in the Ukraine government, foreigners without even a Ukrainian passport were put in place and giving orders, not knowing the Ukrainian law, not knowing the Ukrainian language. They would just be there giving orders and doing whatever you have to do, because the Ukrainians would stop listening to the US Embassy officials. I would have times where the US Ambassador would call me and say, ‘I need to meet with the Prosecutor General’s office, or the Prosecutor General himself in 30 minutes,’ and I said, ‘This is impossible. He has a schedule. He’s leaving for other meetings.’ ‘No, I have to meet him now. This is an order.’ And if you told him no, he would call the President, and the President would tell the US Ambassador. So, this is how it worked. The US Ambassador controls the President of Ukraine.
AARON MATÉ: And that president at the time is Poroshenko.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Poroshenko, yeah. And if you have people like Joe Biden and from the outside Nuland call from the State Department, you’re God if you can control everything. If you have connections to those people, and they can call the president and tell them what to do, then you’re in full control of the country. This is what led to people like [Mykola] Zlochevsky putting in people like Hunter Biden and to have the connection to the “big guy,” the vice president of the United States who oversaw Ukraine at that time in the White House.
So, this process led not only to the corruption of Ukraine, my country, it led to the destruction of Ukraine because you would have people, the old school government officials, thrown out of Ukraine government offices who knew what they were doing. Yeah, maybe they were corrupt, they were Soviet, they were old school, but that’s how the system works. You go to the US, you go to Washington, you see all these old guys there because they know what they’re doing, for example. Most of them are with clear conscience. But in Ukraine you have all these people being thrown out, have no jobs, they started working for the other side, and you have the young guys who have no experience, they had no experience even in business, coming in to rule the country. And they were doing that just because they could control these young guys, and they thought they could control me. When I came up and said, ‘No, I don’t want my country to fail as a state,’ I was told by the US government officials, from two Embassy officials—Ken Toko was a political officer and somebody else from his team—that if I continue the stances of going against the US government and criticizing the so-called reforms in Ukraine because of the national security interests of the United States, I’ll be politically destroyed by the US government. This was told to me in 2016. I still continued and they did try to destroy me, as we see, but I’m still continuing the fight, and this process is still continued in Ukraine. We can still save Ukraine. We can still save the United States politics if we at least start getting the truth out and start investigating these things properly.
AARON MATÉ: Before we get to Biden specifically and his role in Ukraine, and the corruption allegations against his son Hunter being appointed to Burisma, why do you think the US was so invested in Ukraine at this time? The way you describe it, the US is heavily involved not just in the Maidan coup but in the period afterwards, and telling people who to hire, who not to hire. What was the US agenda for Ukraine, do you think, at this time?
And because in Ukraine it would be popular for anybody who was pro-Western, who had connections to America, and you just come in and say, ‘Oh, this guy lived in America, this guy has some connections to the US embassy, this guy has connections to somebody in Washington.’ You can get a government position, you can get something done without even paying money for this process, because Ukrainians believe this is somebody powerful, or this is somebody who has powerful connections. This was made to believe, this process, Ukrainians made themselves. We are to blame, Ukrainians who went for this and bought this little process. And we were the ones who were responsible for this because if we would stop or say no to this control of our country, this Ukraine would still be there. We would not have war. We would have officials who would come up and say we can still negotiate peace. But no, it led to put people in place, weaken the government, make money from Ukraine, use Ukraine as a rag, a corrupt rag, and do the dirty work. Ukraine was their dirty work country, which they used to make dirty decisions to make money, to put people in place, and to use it to fight against Russia. Because we know Brzezinski said in his writings that if you have two Soviet countries fight and spill blood, you’re going to have the destruction of Russia. This is what they needed. They needed a country like Ukraine, a country like Belarus.
AARON MATÉ: And [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, just to explain to people, he is a former National Security advisor under Jimmy Carter, very influential in US foreign policy.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, and he also… and this is taught in the US in the universities. When I went to university it was still taught. I don’t know what’s happened now. But this is how they wanted the system to work. They needed a country, a puppet country, to use to destroy Russia. They had already destroyed the Soviet Union. The next result was to destroy this land for Russia as a huge country, make it into smaller pieces. They tried to use Belarus. It didn’t happen for them. Belarus still stands strong and is still an independent country and still is there, but Ukraine fell under the influence of a foreign government, the United States, and now is being used.
So, that’s what they needed, and while using it for their national security interest, as I said, they use it for their small corrupt or big corrupt cases to make money on the side off Ukrainian politicians who were giving their money to Americans. If you’re American lobbyists, you’ll come to Ukraine, to a government official, you’ll get paid a lot just for coming to Ukraine. They’ll pay you to just meet with you. I was a political consultant myself. I know how the government officials and oligarchs said, ‘We will pay money to go to America or to meet with senators, to meet with government officials, congressmen,’ and they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars just for leads. Some paid millions, and this is how this whole process worked. So, everybody was happy. Why would you need to change that? Everybody’s making money, and this is what, as I said, is leading and has led to this bloodshed today.
AARON MATÉ: Have you ever met Zelensky? And what do you make of his transformation? Because he was elected on a mandate of peace, he was going to end the war in the Donbass that began after the 2014 Maidan coup. But ultimately by the end of the period leading up to the Russian invasion, he was refusing to speak even with the leaders of the Donbass rebellion and talking about taking back Crimea. I’ve long argued that he was basically intimidated by Ukraine’s far right who undermined his peace mandate, and they were aided and sabotaged Zelensky’s mandate by their allies in Washington. What do you make of Zelensky and how he was transformed from a pro-peace candidate to basically a pro-war president?
AARON MATÉ: And Kolomoisky is a Ukrainian oligarch who was said to have financed Zelensky’s candidacy.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, there were other people also who financed his campaign other than Kolomoisky. There are businessmen and oligarchs involved. Because everybody wanted peace, everybody wanted after the reign of Poroshenko’s regime and the full control of the West to end, so we could live peacefully with Europe, with Belarus, with Hungary, with Russia, get back our territories like Donbass peacefully, even as an autonomy, just basically support the Minsk agreements and work with them and get our country back together and stop this whole process of bloodshed in Ukraine. Because Ukraine was always a peaceful country.
AARON MATÉ: Let’s explain some of these names. So, Yermak, who you mentioned, that’s a reference to Andrii Yermak. He’s basically Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, plays a very big role in Zelensky’s administration. So, you’re saying he plays an even more prominent role than is publicly known?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, he is basically the president of Ukraine who decides what to do. He’s the one who talks with the US officials, some of them who are behind back doors making all the decisions in the White House. These people are controlling Ukraine. These people are the ones who are responsible for what’s happening here. And they all knew that this war was going to happen two years before the war started, and to properly investigate that, you can find proof.
AARON MATÉ: And you also mentioned another name. So, Kolomoisky is the oligarch publicly associated with Zelensky. You’re alleging there’s somebody else as well? I didn’t catch his name.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: There were numerous. I didn’t mention his name, this person who I worked for. There are numerous people who helped finance the campaign of such person, Zelensky, and they were behind back doors, hoping for peace, hoping for this thing to end in Ukraine. But afterwards they all got sanctioned by the Zelensky regime, being Ukrainians who got sanctioned by their own government. Even I got sanctioned by Zelensky in Ukraine, illegally, and I’m suing him in the Supreme Court of Ukraine today.
AARON MATÉ: On what grounds?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Grounds? Because I got sanctioned by the US government.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, so you’re sanctioned by the US government for alleged election interference, and then the Zelensky government sanctioned you as well?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, just because two days before going to Washington, he wanted to play nice with the White House, and he sanctioned people like me. A couple days before going to Washington, just to play nice with the White House, because they knew they didn’t like people like me, so that’s why they did it. And to show that they’re loyal to them, they sanctioned Ukrainian citizens even though it’s against the law and it’s against the Constitution. I’m suing Zelensky in the Supreme Court of Ukraine. If they fail to process my case and then close the case on any grounds, I’m going to go to the European Court of Human Rights, which 99.9 percent I’m going to win against Zelensky, and they’re going to pay me money because they sanction illegally in Ukraine.
So, this is how bad Zelensky is, he went against the people who helped him. He went against people who wanted peace, and just because he traded off the sovereignty and independence of Ukraine to foreign intelligence and foreign governments, he started going against people like me who wanted to fight against what he was trying to bring: war to Ukraine. Because we supported him, even though I did not believe that, as I said, an actor or comedian can be the president, I supported that he could have a strong team with him and to bring peace to Ukraine. He promised that. That’s what people voted for him for, 73 percent of Ukrainians voted for him because most of them wanted peace. They did not want war. They wanted peace and they wanted the Minsk agreements, which Ukraine had signed by Poroshenko, supported by Zelensky, to be submitted, voted on in Parliament, agreed on, and having back our territories like Donbass as an autonomy, and to live a peaceful life afterwards. That’s what we wanted.
Unfortunately, everybody was played, the Ukrainian public, the Ukrainian people were played by Zelensky, by his team, and by the Deep State, and then just turned this whole process around and were leading Ukraine to war. They knew they were going to have war. They knew they will have this process, they thought they can maybe sell off to the Russians. I think they were making deals with the Russians, but they were not offered so much money by the Russians. They were just continuing to do their role as warmongers and continue to bring Ukraine to war. They were making money on building roads. They knew that there was going to be a total destruction in Ukraine, they knew how this process was going to go, but they were building these roads, they were showing the government getting Ukraine back together. But they started to continue to oppress democracy, throw people in prison, going out against opposition leaders, closing down political TV channels for working with the opposition talking about peace, not war, and this process started, and the West just closed their eyes on this.
AARON MATÉ: Or they cheered. Or they cheered like in early 2021. After Biden takes office, Zelensky shut down some opposition television networks, and the State Department cheered that. Later on, Time magazine reported, based on conversations with Zelensky aides, that shutting down those TV networks was a welcome gift to Joe Biden.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, I was part of those. I was going to those TV channels. They were inviting me constantly to talk about what’s happening in Ukraine, and then just one day they just closed out. We were afraid to go there, even though we went, because we thought every time we go there, there would be provocations outside the TV stations by the Nazis, by the radicals, and they were throwing bricks, eggs at people who just wanted to talk on TV, talking about peace in Ukraine, bringing Ukraine back together. This was the process in Ukraine, this was the process which was supported by the West, financed by the West throughout these last nine years especially, and they were just closing their eyes on this.
There’s no democracy in Ukraine. As soon as I got sanctioned, I called up a friend who was a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs in one of the European countries. I don’t want to name his name, but I called him up and said, ‘Look, if I want to get political asylum in your country right now, if I want to flee Ukraine, will I be able to do that?’ He said, ‘I’ll get back to you in a couple of days.’ So, he called me back and said, ‘Unfortunately, no. Ukraine is in our standards a democratic country, there are no problems with democracy in Ukraine. If you’re a Russian or a Belarussian, yes. If you’re Ukrainian, you cannot get political asylum in Europe.’ That was the answer from one of the Deputy Foreign Ministers of a European country. So, this is how they see it, they just close their eyes on everything.
There’re thousands of cases like this in Ukraine, people are getting kidnapped, people are getting destroyed, people are getting tortured—and this is the “democracy” which has been financed by Washington and the European governments today. And this has to stop. Nobody’s talking about peace, nobody’s talking about peace outside of Ukraine, only some who work for Ukraine. That’s why people in Ukraine are quiet. People would want to come out and talk, but they know they’re going to get shot, killed, beaten, or something happens to their family because they talk about stopping this war. So, that’s why people are quiet in Ukraine. But Ukrainians want peace, a lot of people do want peace. There’s 30, 40 percent maybe of radicals, but the majority wants this to end, this nightmare to end, because they have to survive.
AARON MATÉ: Are you familiar with a Zelensky friend and former aide named Sergei Sivokho? Have you heard of him?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: No, unfortunately, no. Sivokho? Who was he?
AARON MATÉ: He was a former comedy partner of Zelensky’s, and after Zelensky was elected, he was appointed to a commission to basically bring dialogue with the Donbass to promote peace.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Oh, yes, yes. Sivokho. Sivokho.
AARON MATÉ: I’m sorry I mispronounced it. Shortly after he unveiled this new sort of dialogue commission, some members of Azov basically attacked him at his opening speech, and then Zelensky fired him shortly after that, basically, which is sort of one encapsulation of how Zelensky ultimately took the side of the people who wanted to sabotage his own peace agenda.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, yeah, I know who you’re talking about. I know him, I met him a couple of times. We’re not friends, I haven’t talked to him, but I met him years before, and I know what you’re talking about.
When he came out with Sivokho, he came out with this negotiation process and even a small peace plan on how to start talking with the Donbass and the Luhansk Republics and how to bring them back and talk to them with the Ukraine government. He basically got sabotaged by Zelensky. It all happened in front of Zelensky’s eyes, because it all happened in the headquarters of the Party of the Servant of the People, where he was doing this right by the front doors, where you have total security by the government, and they basically threw him under the bus, showed him that Zelensky was not going to continue this whole negotiation process with Eastern Ukraine and basically just changed directions. He changed directions, I said, in June, July 2018 when he, after meetings with the British intel community, he basically got guarantees that he’s going to get protected.
AARON MATÉ: It couldn’t be 2018 because he was elected in 2019.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Sorry, 2019. I apologize.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, yeah, okay.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: June, July 2019.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, right, and he takes office I believe in April or May 2019, so that would have been right after.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, in May he becomes the president officially, because the first round ends in April, second round is in May, and then in June, July, that’s when Pinchuk and Kolomoisky make a deal, that Pinchuk is going to save Kolomoisky from his business dealings with the West and have the US back off. Kolomoisky is under sanctions with the US, but he’s under only visa sanctions, he’s not under financial sanctions, he’s able to use all his bank guarantees, so that’s the deal. He’s able to use all his money, but he cannot travel to the US and go outside of Ukraine. And on the other hand, I am under full sanctions, financial, visa, etc. So, these people made a deal to throw Ukraine under the bus just to save their own lives and financial deals, and this is where we are today.
AARON MATÉ: So, let’s get to why you’re under US sanctions. But before we do, I just want to explain for people who’ve been following this conversation but are hearing a lot of these names and these incidents for the first time, because so much of the details of the facts of the Ukraine crisis are kept from NATO audiences.
So, just to explain one thing, the Minsk Accords, which we’ve now referenced many times, that’s a deal reached in 2015 between the Ukrainian government and the rebels in the Donbass who are backed by Russia, to end the war that began in 2014, the year prior, after the US-backed Maidan coup. And that war began because basically the new coup government backed by the US tried to crack down on ethnic Russian culture inside Ukraine, and Minsk essentially called for granting ethnic Russians inside the Donbass some limited autonomy in exchange for their region being demilitarized and the war coming to an end. But Ukraine’s borders would have remained intact, just giving these Russian-aligned people of Eastern Ukraine some limited autonomy. But the Ukrainian government under pressure from the far right refused to implement it under Poroshenko, who signed it, and then under Zelensky, which brings us to the present moment today.
So, let’s talk about Joe Biden. What did you witness when it comes to this whole controversy which still remains unresolved, and anytime someone tries to discuss it in the US they’re just accused of spreading Russian disinformation. But what can you tell us about Joe Biden’s role in firing this prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, which is the energy company that gave a very lucrative board seat to Joe Biden’s son Hunter right after the US-backed 2014 Maidan coup?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Basically, what the backstory is of Burisma, the company itself was forming in a corrupt way like a lot of things in Eastern Europe, as you may say, but, no, this company was forming in a very specific way. The owner, Zlochevsky, was the Minister of Ecology [and Natural Resources], and he himself gave out his own company certificates for gas development, and that’s how the company became a monopoly based in the gas market in Ukraine, because they got most of the certificates because the owner [minister]was the head of the company.
AARON MATÉ: Just, explain, sorry. Lutsenko is an anti-corruption bureau guy?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: No, he was a politician close to Poroshenko, who became Prosecutor General, attorney general in US terms, of Ukraine without a law degree. They changed the law for him to become Prosecutor General specifically after Shokin got fired. And he closed the cases. Burisma just paid $200,000 of fees for some tax evasion, etc. That’s it.
But Shokin did his job. Shokin, because he was looking not only into Burisma and Zlochevsky, he was looking into Hunter Biden directly. There were red flags of the financial transactions of the payments to Hunter Biden to Cyprus from Latvian financial intelligence, that the money itself was corrupt, the money itself was coming from not legit sources. And Hunter Biden knew this fund was corrupt, because the people who are covering up for him, Blue Star Strategies—that’s the company which I was advising for after I worked in Washington—they were the ones who were basically covering up everything for Hunter Biden, between Joe Biden and Burisma. And Amos Hochstein [United States Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs under Obama Administration] was the person that Blue Star Strategies was working closely to get information to Joe Biden directly, because they cannot go see Joe Biden directly, so they had a person, an intermediary, Hochstein, who was a gas expert, to basically deliver all the official information to Joe Biden himself on Hunter Biden and Burisma, and what has to be done and how to save that company from being prosecuted, from being closed down, or being shaken up. So, this is why Hunter Biden was hired to this firm.
AARON MATÉ: I’m sorry, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Amos Hochstein now works for Joe Biden as a senior official [Special Presidential Coordinator for Global Infrastructure and Energy Security].
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, at that time when Hunter Biden signed the agreement with Burisma and Blue Star Strategies came on board, Amos Hochstein was a State Department energy guy overseeing energy within the State Department, so he had clearance to go to the White House directly. And I was told this directly by Sally Painter and Karen Tramontano, who are the owners and CEOs of Blue Star Strategies—and they’re not only a lobby firm, they’re former advisors and Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton in the 90s. So, these people are connected directly to the Deep State and Hillary Clinton, and the Clintons, and Biden and Obama.
But on the other hand, we see Joe Biden coming in, Porochenko playing a game that he’s not involved in this, he let Shokin also be thrown under the bus, and he changed to even a much closer person like Lutsenko to be heading the Prosecutor’s office, which then was very loyal to the US Embassy in Kiev, even though Lutsenko went against him working through Rudy Giuliani. But he was very loyal while he was working at the Prosecutor’s office to the US Embassy and to the US government.
AARON MATÉ: And Joe Biden later brags when he’s speaking, I believe at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he leveraged US loans, hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, to get Shokin fired.
Joe Biden: I said, ‘I’m telling you, you’re not getting a billion dollars.’ I said, ‘You’re not getting a billion. I’m going to be leaving here…,’ and I think it was, what, six hours? I look, I said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch, he got fired, and they put in place someone who was solid.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, that was the deal. I can tell you, that in itself was the system of how they were working with the Prosecutor’s office. I was still working at the Embassy, and after I left there, I helped Blue Star arrange meetings within the Prosecutor’s office, with the acting prosecutor [Yuriy] Sevruk, after Shokin. He was there for a couple of weeks. Blue Star Strategies’ Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter came to see this acting prosecutor, and then they came to see and met with Lutsenko, also. They were there talking and trying to close the case and negotiating with Lutsenko on how to close the case for their client Zlochevsky. And that’s how the system worked.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, I want to try to catch people up on this part of the interview, because there’s a lot of names here, and I think for some it might be hard to follow. So, correct me if I’ve gotten anything wrong or I’m missing anything.
After you leave the Ukrainian government, you work for Blue Star, right? This Western firm.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yes, after I leave the Embassy.
AARON MATÉ: After you leave the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, you work for Blue Star, and Blue Star is a Western firm that is working with Burisma, this energy company where Hunter Biden got his board seat. And you’re saying that Blue Star officials like the ones you’ve mentioned told you that Joe Biden was actively involved in their various machinations inside of Ukraine.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yes, of course. He knew what was happening, he knew where his son was going, he knew where Hunter Biden would be serving as a board director, and he knew how corrupt [unclear] was from the beginning. And it started, and that’s how they knew how to make money on this, because it was done in this unofficial report, which was given to Joe Biden, the Vice President of the United States at that time, and that’s how it all leads to where we are today.
AARON MATÉ: And it is true, it’s just publicly known that no US official had more influence inside of Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan coup than Joe Biden. That’s why on that recorded phone call between Victoria Nuland, a senior US official, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then US Ambassador, right before the US coup, and they’re talking about who they want to install as the next Ukrainian leader, and they settle on [Arseniy] Yatsenyuk, who went on to become the head of Ukraine after the coup. They say that they needed an “atta boy” from Joe Biden and his then top aide Jake Sullivan. So, it would make sense that then Joe Biden goes on to play this very influential role after the coup, for which there’s plenty of public evidence.
But what do you think Joe Biden’s interest here is? Is he just trying to help out his son Hunter? Do you think he’s personally profiting off of the windfall that Hunter Biden reached? Like, what do you think is motivating Joe Biden here for playing such an active role inside of Ukraine and all this stuff with Burisma?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: I cannot speak for Joe Biden, what he thinks. Nobody can at this moment. But from what I see is, first of all, yeah, he wants to help his son, that’s the clear point. The son just is a drug addict who has no job, just got fired from the military after getting the job there, he gets a position into this big gas company after a coup in Ukraine. Yeah, this gas company is corrupt, but Ukraine is good, so we can cover up with a PR move. Why not do this? Not only Hunter Biden was on the board of this gas company, there was also a former president of Poland, [Aleksander] Kwasniewski, and other officials, former high-ranking CIA officials were on the board of this company. So, why not have his son make some money on the side?
But knowing where his son is going, that this company is corrupt and there’s many problems, that already raises questions for a politician, that he didn’t know about this, and that this is going to lead to problems in the future, or that Lutsenko covered them up, so you don’t care about them. That’s one thing. Second part, making all these big deals and Hunter Biden getting his father involved in making those big deals, as I said as an example, buying one of the biggest drills in Eastern Europe for drawing gas from Texas, United States, and the involvement of Joe Biden after he got involved in this. That raises questions, did he profit off of this? And I think he did. From my information he did profit off of this. He did make money on this, not only because of the whistleblower that came out. There’s more than just the $5 million that they’re talking about, there’s more involved in that, there was more getting paid to the Biden family directly than we know, when we talk about it today, and that’s where his interests are.
And being today the President of the United States and going to the elections in 2020, when I came out with this in the Senate, if I was a politician and I knew that there was nothing on me, I would say, ‘Yeah, sure, investigate me.’ That’s what I am telling today to the US. I’m ready to sit down where they investigate me properly, tell me what you’re accusing me of. I know because there’s nothing to show or nothing to tell. But here he tried to cover it up, he tried to cover it from the beginning because he knew there’s more involvement, not just his son getting paid dirty money, but there was more involvement of him getting paid dirty money in this process by dirty politicians from Ukraine, to cover up dirty work that was done for one of the corrupt companies, large, big [unclear] companies in Ukraine.
So, this whole process smells bad, and if you want to run for presidency you have to talk about this, because this is democracy, this is what we were taught about, right? To talk about, we have to know, the people have to know who they’re going to vote for. But no, they covered it up, they closed people like me down, they tried to destroy people like me, and they’re now running the country, and not only running America down into the ground, but they’re running Ukraine, my country, down into the ground. If we had properly investigated this whole thing and found out that Biden was involved in this and was getting paid before 2020, he would not be president. There’d may be no war today. Maybe, I don’t know, but probably there wouldn’t be. There’d be less chances. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would be saved from our side, and Russians would be safe. People would have not spilled blood, we would have peace in Donbass. But no, this whole corrupt scandal, Ukraine is being used as a rag. We see today led to the bloodshed in Ukraine and the destruction of the United States democracy. The whole world is just laughing after the 2020 elections because the US showed what democracy is. There’s no democracy in the United States, also.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, I mean, whatever one’s opinions on these allegations, and it’s not something I’ve looked into so I’m not endorsing any theory, but what is…
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: This is my point of view.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, I got it. But what is known, what is uncontested fact is that right before the 2020 election, it started emerging that there were some materials on Hunter Biden’s laptop speaking to how he was trading on his family name for business opportunities, including in Ukraine, and rather than letting the public see the contents of that laptop and the reporting based on it and decide for themselves, it was censored on the fake grounds that it was Russian propaganda. Which then raises the obvious question: what else is being denied from the public in the name of combating Russian disinformation? Which itself is an act of disinformation as is undoubtedly clear now from the Hunter Biden laptop.
So, when you tried to speak about this publicly, you worked with Rudy Giuliani, a close aide, a close friend of Donald Trump’s, a close ally of his, and also Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and both of them have been accused of spreading Russian disinformation and baseless conspiracy theories. When you read about the stuff in the media, it’s just all the time portrayed that way or it’s referred to as unsubstantiated claims, which is interesting, because that suggests that they might actually be true. But we’re not allowed to look into it because it’s just dismissed as Russian propaganda. But talk to us about your collaboration with Giuliani and Johnson, and what happened to you when you tried to go through them to speak to the American public.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, Johnson basically almost… they tried to [get Johnson to]lose the election in Wisconsin, just because he collaborated and got information from a witness who sounded like me, and that’s how bad it was. They tried to destroy him in the last election. And they also tried to destroy Rudy Giuliani for working with people like me. Basically, I was already working in Washington as a consultant, and I had a phone call from a friend that Rudy Giuliani wanted to meet with me in Kiev, but he didn’t come to Kiev. I was in Washington a couple of weeks later and he invited me to come see him in New York, and that’s how I met with Rudy Giuliani in May of 2019, and I got invited to see him in the New York office where we sat for a couple of hours. We talked about this, we talked about my testimony, and he asked for me to help him with documents that he was going to get from Ukraine, to basically help him look through this stuff from this whole process and see if there’s something legit or not, because he saw that I was trustworthy at the time.
So, that’s how we started up our friendship and our work together. I didn’t get paid by him. I was just there on a friendly basis and fighting for the truth. And basically, a couple of months later I got invited by Senator Johnson. He heard about my situation, and his staff called me up while I was in Washington DC and arranged a meeting for me in his office on Capitol Hill, where I came to see him in July of 2019, and talked about this. I gave him my information, and he said, ‘We will look into it,’ which they did, and they gave me a call back in December 2019, said, ‘We want to work with you as a witness and you can give us more information.’ That’s how I started working with Senator Johnson and his committee. And while working with Giuliani there were a lot of political problems and pressures from the outside, of course, and one of them was the involvement of people like Derkach, when they came out into the picture one day, and through third parties like Andriy Artemenko, who…
AARON MATÉ: And let’s just explain who that is.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, I don’t want to give people involved too much attention, but basically it was a chain of events, what led to how these allegations of Russian disinformation got onto Giuliani and onto Senator Johnson.
AARON MATÉ: Right, because Andrii Derkach, he is a Ukrainian politician, but he’s been accused by the US of being a Russian agent. Right?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, he officially admits that he worked for the FSB, or he went to the FSB Academy.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, he acknowledges that. Okay, got it.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, got it.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: When Derkach was brought in to the table by a third party, a person who worked and collaborated with the FBI very closely for numerous years—and that’s publicly known, this person talks about it—this investigation got destroyed within the public really fast and by the media. They’re just waiting for something bad to happen, and this bad thing was Derkach. As soon as he gets back to the table, I get mentioned as a Russian agent, a Russian spy. Giuliani gets mentioned as a Russian agent or Russian spy on Hunter Biden’s laptop because of the fact Giuliani has it. That’s probably from Derkach, so it’s Russian disinformation, Russian spy stuff. Senator Johnson, because he works with me and because Derkach mentions Johnson’s name in one of his press conferences in Ukraine, he allegedly gets mentioned as a Russian agent, a Russian spy.
So, this was a deliberate disinformation campaign to destroy people like Senator Johnson, Senator Grassley, Rudy Giuliani, and me and others, and label them as Russian agents. And that’s what legitimized the Deep State to then sanction me falsely, illegally, with connection to people like Derkach with election interference. So, this whole process would have been different if, first of all, the politicians would be loyal and play their part. Like Joe Biden would come up and say, ‘Please investigate me. Yes, I have nothing to hide,’ and other stuff. The Deep State and the media would not go with the orders from the top to destroy people like me, just look and dig for anything they could find even falsely to label us as Russian agents and Russian spies.
So, this whole process, that’s how it worked. We know how it works today because anybody who comes out with the truth is labeled as Russian spies. Soon it’s going to be Beijing spy or Chinese spy because Russia is going to be no longer popular in the media or something else. They’re going to be labeling people Chinese spies, so that’s how nonsense the whole process is.
AARON MATÉ: Right. Okay, so just to summarize this tangent, because we’ve covered a lot in this interview, you bring information to Giuliani and to Ron Johnson, but because Giuliani, during the same period that he’s trying to investigate the Bidens in Ukraine, he also meets with this guy Andrii Derkach who you say actually is a Russian agent. Because Giuliani also meets with him, that gets used to discredit you, and when you’re sanctioned, you’re saying that you have nothing to do with this guy Derkach, so the allegation you’re somehow tied to him, you’re saying that that’s false?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: There’s witnesses like Chanel Rion from OAN Network, who was hosting those videos with Giuliani in Kiev, testified to Congress just recently that she witnessed that I am not connected to Derkach or have any connection to Derkach at all.
AARON MATÉ: Got it. Okay.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: So, it’s not even my word. There’s already witnesses…
AARON MATÉ: Got it.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: …who have testified in all this process. And during this whole time, I worked closely with the FBI counterintelligence unit, giving them information on Blue Star Strategies and on their work with Hunter Biden, and nothing happened out of it. From May of 2019 until November of 2019, I collaborated on a friendly basis, because they offered me to actually work with the FBI officially, not for the FBI but with the FBI, to work officially, but I denied. And I worked on a friendly basis and gave information on Blue Star which led to nothing, and nothing was investigated out of it at all.
And during this whole process also, I was subpoenaed and testified within the FEC on the Ukrainian election interference process, which under oath I did. And if I lie or if I ever was a Russian agent or Russian spy in this whole process, I would be prosecuted and I would be sent to court, not just falsely sanctioned without any possibility to go in front of the jury or in front of anybody to prove my case wrong. So, that’s why they’re just politically trying to destroy me by sanctioning a person like me. I’m not an oligarch, I’m not some politician who has money. I’m just a former political consultant. I cannot even open up a bank account anymore today, anywhere in the world. I cannot get a job anywhere, and so that’s how this process works. They politically destroy you, get you toxified so much that anywhere in the West, if you go, you’re going to be done.
AARON MATÉ: Your story reminds me a lot of Konstantin Kilimnik’s, who is a Ukrainian national, also a Russian national, too. He has dual citizenship. But he worked closely with Paul Manafort. But because he became very convenient to the Russiagate narrative, because they needed somebody from Russia to make Russiagate look somewhat credible, he went from being a very trusted Western source who was meeting regularly with Western officials, translating their interviews, sending emails to them, in close contact meeting with them when he comes to the US. When he became convenient for the Russiagate narrative, all of a sudden, he became branded as a Russian spy by the Treasury Department, not by the FBI, because the FBI knows he’s not a Russian spy, and then also sanctioned as well. He’s been called all sorts of names by different, like, depending on which government agency it is, nobody can figure out one narrative for him because it’s all basically being used to promote a narrative that could make Russiagate look credible. And your story, as you tell it, has a lot of echoes of that.
So, going back to your efforts to speak out on this, you were subpoenaed by Ron Johnson to come testify, but Senator Romney blocks your testimony. Why?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Blocked the subpoena. They tried to subpoena me to get more information on Blue Star, which was under the contract which I had with them, and I said I gave everything to the Senate, which was before and after the contract. But what was happening during the contract with Blue Star Strategies, I said, ‘Look, it’s a US firm and I don’t want to get sued afterward for a million dollars. Subpoena me and I’ll provide everything to you. I’m very interested to give it. I cannot give it without a subpoena.’ And Senator Johnson talked about it numerous times, there’s clips of it on Fox News. He said, ‘If they would just let me subpoena Telizhenko, there would be no problems. I would just come up and get documents from him and investigate him.’ That’s basically a quote. And that time when they tried to subpoena me in March of 2020, Senator Johnson blocks my subpoena. They come up with the story on CNN that I tried to bribe some US senators years before, during my consulting work, and CNN writes this story with some third party from Ukraine who says that I told him all that stuff, and that’s when Senator Johnson said, ‘I’m not going to subpoena him.’ And even though that story never led to anything—there was no case file, it was total nonsense, and just taken out of thin air—they basically blocked my subpoena, and Senator Johnson says, like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to subpoena Blue Star Strategies.’ Then they tried to block the subpoena for Blue Star Strategies, but then, because it’s too obvious, they did let them subpoena Blue Star Strategies. But Blue Star, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter lied in their testimony to the Senate. I know Karen Tramontano because I worked directly for them on Ukraine. They were the ones I would report directly to. I had all these communications which I could provide to the Senate, and I gave them, and that’s in the Senate report, between me and Sally Painter.
And this firm, as I said, is very tough, a very professional firm in what they do. They don’t only work with the Deep State in the US and Joe Biden, they also were lobbyists for Prince Charles at one point in time. I don’t know if they are still today, for the King, but they were helping him become the future King of England. So, these guys are the Deep State. They know what they’re doing, they know how to cover up things around the world, not only in Ukraine or US. So, they did their work and then nothing was done to them. They lied, they registered with FARA seven years later, after they did not register with FARA for working with Burisma, and the case was closed for them, because I got sanctioned. So, there was no case. Nobody can go and testify against them.
AARON MATÉ: Andrii, because you’re saying all the things you’re saying, you’re going to be accused of spreading Russian disinformation, which is, as people now know, it’s a very tried and tested tactic for silencing people. But let me ask you, do you have any connections to Russia, to the Russian state? Have you ever worked for Russia? Do you have any business with the Russian state or with any Russian nationals?
So, they’re just lying about me because there is no Russia connection. And there’s people who testified within the Senate, like George Kent, who everybody knows that name, that person was involved in the Russiagate Congress reports and he testified in Congress. He was working for the State Department, he was a deputy head of the Embassy in Ukraine, now he’s US Ambassador to Estonia. He testified to Senator Johnson, I think ten pages of his testimony on me that I have no Russia connections, and I think if Senator Johnson knew that I had any Russian connections, he would never take my testimony or any information from me as he did, which he did not do from Derkach. So, this whole process just stinks with false testimony from this other side.
I am ready to talk about the truth. They are not. I’m ready to be labeled a Russian spy because I’m not a Russian spy. If I was a Russian spy, I would probably soon be quiet like Derkach. Nobody hears a word from Derkach. He’s staying quiet. He did his job, and he’s out of there. I’m fighting for my life and fighting for the truth. I was put on a kill list. I was written about by the Center for Security Policy. I don’t know if you know this organization. They wrote about me, Michael Waller wrote about me, about how I’m not a Russian spy. Larry Johnson wrote about how I’m not a Russian spy. He’s a former CIA agent. And they talked about how I was put on a kill list because I came out with the truth. People would try to kill me in Ukraine. I had to flee Ukraine not because of the Russian war in Ukraine but because my own government wants to kill me, because I was fighting for peace and fighting for the truth. This is how bad it is, and I’m ready to resume the fight, even though they can name me anything they want. I want to let them show proof. I’m ready to come up and testify under oath. I gave whatever documents I had to give. I have more to provide, and I’m ready to provide those documents. But let them show the documents, what they have on me, and I’m ready to appeal them in any way. I’m not afraid, because there’s nothing.
AARON MATÉ: Is that kill list you mentioned, is that by chance the Myrotvorets list, or is there a second one?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah. Yeah. Myrotvorets.
AARON MATÉ: Okay, yeah, so we’re on the same list. We share that distinction.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Oh, there you go. You’re also a Russian spy. Very good.
AARON MATÉ: Alright, any words you want to leave us with, Andrii? As we’re speaking the US has just announced it’s going to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, which is a considerable escalation when it comes to sending over weapons of death, and it means that this war will go on. As we’re speaking, there’s very little prospects of diplomacy, at least that we can see publicly. Any words you want to leave us with as we wrap?
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Yeah, this whole thing with the cluster bombs, this whole thing with the war itself, why is not the US sending diplomats, why is the US not picking up the phone with Biden talking to Putin? Because they want to continue this war.
This war, as we talked about this whole time, was pre-arranged. They wanted Russia to show and invade into Ukraine and to expose the blood between Ukrainians. They were preparing Ukraine for this war for nine years, because I lived in Ukraine. Ukrainians started to hate Russians every day more and more, even though we are the same blood, we are the same people.
As I said, I’m not a Russian spy, but I’m a Ukrainian who knew how Ukraine was 30 years ago, and what it became today. For me, it’s a total failed state. It breaks my heart to see Ukraine like this, and I want Ukraine to thrive and to be at least saved from what can be saved today. That’s why we need diplomacy. We could have saved it years before. We could have saved it last year. Nobody did anything. Today the US is sending more weapons, sending more money to fight. But why are they not trained for peace?
Things like this, when we investigate this corruption of the Bidens, how Ukraine was used, it may lead to at least a small puzzle of closing this whole case and bringing peace to Ukraine, so people could see why it all happened. Because Ukraine was used unfortunately as a rag to make money for people like Biden and his family. And this whole thing just has to end. We need to make peace because [otherwise] it’s going to lead to more bloodshed. Bloodshed first of all for Ukrainians who are dying, for somebody’s values, for somebody’s pocket to be filled with money. Zelensky, who’s a billionaire, and Joe Biden are profiting from this, and the generals and everybody else who are making money on this from outside Ukraine, and this has to end. I just want peace for my country. I want Ukraine to thrive and Ukraine to be independent and sovereign.
AARON MATÉ: Andrii Telizhenko, former Ukrainian government official, thanks very much for joining me.
ANDRII TELIZHENKO: Thank you.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Orientation
Summary of Part I
In Part I of this article, I contrasted the differences between rising Multipolarism with a declining Anglo-American empire. Taking the side of the multipolarists of the East, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone who bridged the gap between East and West.
His concept of “The American system” defends the Enlightenment as the movement to look to if the west is going to join the multipolar world. I also presented Matthew Ehret’s book The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I The Unfinished Sympathy as a concrete example of the battle between the British System and American system in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the end of Part I I raise questions as to where to place these advocates of the American system on the political spectrum and ask who its enemies are.
Are there times when centrism is unrealistic, ungrounded, and against common sense?
Strange bedfellows? Finance capitalists and the New Left
By the end of World War II, the financial capitalists had two enemies – the liberalism of FDR and the world communist movement. Most of us know the historical differences between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left represented the world communist movement as well as the forces of the Enlightenment. Is it possible that the emergence of the New Left with very different values driven by Romanticism was shaped by the anti-communist finance capitalists?
My claims in Part II
1) The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalists empire is centrism and it must be opposed.
2) The forces of Promethean City builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.
3) For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left, to oppose the development of a communist movement.
The first image at the top of this article includes arch anti-communists Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The second image is the founder of Democratic Socialist of America, Michael Harrington, also an anti-communist.
Poverty of Centrism
As I wrote in my article: Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?
All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description.
Today the fact that liberal and conservative parties are the same is far more significant than their differences. They have at least agreed on:
What this means is that:
The linear political spectrum is too simple for today’s complex politics
Examples include:
Centrism is bankrupt in extreme capitalist crises
The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is compromising, pragmatic, down-to-earth and can never be unrealistic. Supposedly, centrists are moderate and not hysterical like the fascists or communists. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions the center doesn’t hold. It caves in. In certain periods of history being
moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is so overpowering that it would overwhelm its centrist structures. Under the conditions of our time extremes are the only answer because of capitalism’s failure to address its contradictions. It has brought us to the point where neither liberal nor conservative solutions can nor will work. A new model of the political spectrum must be:
How the left and some conservatives might work together is because both are industrializers whose goal is to expand the productive forces. They may fight about how the wealth gets distributed but they agree that real wealth should be produced. By contrast, neo-liberals, fascists, Greens, Social Democrats, and anarchists are de-industrializers who abhor the introduction of new wealth-creation, especially nuclear technologies and city building. They are Malthusians.
We are now at the point where I can reintroduce the distinctions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Part I. I want to show how the Anglo-American empire, finance capitalists and the CIA shaped the New Left into embracing Romanticism.
Forging Promethean Psychology which compares what the Enlightenment stands for as opposed to Romanticism.
Table A Enlightenment vs Romanticism Compared
Enlightenment (1715-1815) | Category of Comparison | Romanticism
(1750 – 1850) |
||
Political – rights of man | Primary Identity | Cultural artistic identity | ||
Against monarchist, aristocratic and religious
authorities. Respectful of scientific authority |
Attitude Towards Authority | Critical of all authorities | ||
Civilization brings out the best in humanity | Relationship Between
Civilization and Nature |
Rebellion against civilization
Wants to “get back to nature” |
||
Value what is modern and adult | Origins and development of culture and individuals | Primitive superstitious stories before humans had science
Myths were also seen as lies told by priests |
What is Myth? | Mythic stories hold the key to what is most important to being human
Grimm’s fairy tales |
Trade was an improvement compared to control of land by kings, aristocrats and the Church | Attitudes Towards Capitalism | Against crass utilitarian commercialism of capitalism | ||
Its predictability and lending itself to measurement | What is Valuable in Nature? | The wild, exotic and untamable | ||
Deist – God is an engineer or watchmaker | Characteristics of Spiritual Presences | Pantheist – god is everywhere in nature. Birth of Neopaganism | ||
Beauty – in symmetry with proportion
No unusual or accidental elements in art |
Art Appreciation | In the eye of the spectator | What is the Arena for Judging Art? | In the creative process of the artist |
Progress
Quantitative gradual change |
How does Change Occur? | Revolutions
Qualitative change through crisis |
||
Deliberation | Planning vs Spontaneity | Spontaneity | ||
Reason should guide emotions | Place of Emotion and Reason | Emotions are valuable in and of themselves and should guide reason | ||
Happiness, serenity, contentment | Types of Emotional States | Storm and stress
Mania and depression as signs of real living Altered states, revelry |
||
Confessing inner depths is bad taste | Self-revelations | Confessing inner depths is a virtue
Sincerity |
||
Republican reformist | Politics | Revolutionary, apolitical
Conservative |
||
Cosmopolitan
Exotic people became a laboratory for expanding theory of universal humanity |
Cross-cultural Expansion | Parochial
Exaggeration of the differences between cultures |
||
Holbach, La Mettrie
Diderot, Voltaire |
Typical Theorists | Rousseau. Vico, Herder, Burke |
The Politics of the Anglo-American Empire, The British System, Romanticism and the New left
The Old Left
As many of you know, soon after World War II capitalists in Mordor set out to destroy the Socialist and Communist parties. But the CIA also wanted to create a relatively harmless alternative to Communism [to pre-empt the space, or as a placeholder—Ed] by recruiting leftists who were critical of the Communist Party but did it in the name of socialist democracy. As many of you know, this began with the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Along the way, it helped to craft an ideology of the New Left that would render it harmless against capitalism while at the same time keep the Communist movement from growing back.
The heart of the Old Left was the defense of countries that were at least part way towards socialism – Russia, China and Cuba. Its economic focus was on the inherent contradictions of capitalism whether it be the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, underconsumption or the profit squeeze. Very importantly, communists were committed to the belief that Communism had to be based on abundance, which meant “developing the productive forces”. If a communist society’s economy stagnated that would introduce the temptation to steal. By producing more than enough stealing would not be an issue. As different as anarchists are from Marxists, even anarchists before the 1960s understood that abundance was the foundation for socialism.
The major social category for political organization was socio-economic class. It was only the working class that had the power to overthrow capitalism. Also, the only real democracy was economic democracy in which workers control what is produced, how much is produced and how it is distributed through centralized planning and workers’ control. In terms of political parties the Old Left advocated a Leninist vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries.
While claiming that the workers were internationalists, in practice the Old Left political organization operated at the nation-state level. Whatever tiny ecology or changes in the climate movement existed it was not on the radar of communists. For communists’ growth of the human population was taken as given since by the second half of the 19th century and into the 1950s it seemed human productivity could easily accommodate a rising population.
When it came to the arts and psychology, the Old Left was fairly conservative. In the arts, socialist realist mural painting was predominant. In painting and music, the focus on working class life was its subject matter. In personal life, Communists usually did not drink and their appearance emulated working class clothes. Their personal life was relatively unimportant and their marriages were traditional. They were generally hostile to psychology, saw it as a bourgeois distraction from their main purpose was to work for the revolution. While most Communists were atheists, they understand that most workers were not, and they had to make relative peace with this “superstition” in order to organize workers. The CIA, and the Rockefellers set out to destroy the values of the Old left and replace with a very different orientation to the world. Table B displays the values of the New Left, and what is equally important, how these values support and are beneficial to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers, and the CIA.
Table B How the Values of the New Left Benefit the Anglo-American
Empire, Finance Capital the Rockefellers and the CIA
New Left (beginning in Early 1950s) | Category of Comparison | Benefit to Anglo-American Empire, Finance capital and the Rockefellers |
Social Democrats, Anarchists
Complaints against excessive State control Lack of worker participation |
Point on Political Spectrum | All anti-communism for different reasons
Against all communist countries, planned economy |
Rejection of Soviet Union, China, Cuba
In favor of Sweden, Norway, Denmark |
Socialist Countries to Emulate | Loss of international identity
with large socialist countries
Even socialist countries need capitalism |
No – capitalism can go on forever | Does Capitalism have Inherent Limits? | Throws push of politics onto voluntarism
Demoralizing people by imagining capitalism is much more flexible than it is and capitalists are more competent than they are |
No – we already have too much
Socialism is based on morals or sustainability: Malthusianism |
Does Socialism have to be Based on Abundance? | Teaching socialists to learn to do with less
Socialism based on “degrowth” |
Race and sexuality: identity politics
Workers have proven to be too interested in material things to be revolutionary |
Social Category for Socialist organizing | Race and sexuality don’t have the work location to organize
Diffusion of focus |
Small is beautiful
Anarchist decentralization or planetary society Rejection of nation-state |
Political Scale | Rejection of the nation states which is the only political unit that can resist global capitalism |
Makes an issue of lack of political party choices under socialism
Minimizes democratic gains under socialism in literacy, education and job security and health care |
Place of Political Democracy | Diverts focus of socialists into focus on tiny political parties that are never strong enough to take power |
Pay attention to Mother Earth
Go back to nature |
Attitude to Ecology | The issue distracts from socialist organizing to overthrow capitalism Imagining ecological problems might be solved under capitalism |
Earth has limited carrying capacity
Earth is overpopulated |
Growth in Population | Rockefeller-inspired Club of Rome report
Blaming the global south for having too many children |
Anti-science | Attitude Towards Science | Anti-science dampens down the possibility that alternative energy sources to oil will be found |
Solar and wind power
Against nuclear power |
Natural Resources | Big oil (also little oil) does not have to compete with nuclear power |
Reject working class culture for Beat poets, happenings, youth culture (white left) | The Arts | Modern art is anti-working class
Drives the working-class away from art museums for inspiration |
Personal is political
(radical feminism) |
Relationship Between the Political and the Personal | Activists become bogged down in attempting to change romance, open marriages and can focus less on political activity |
Pot, LSD, peyote | Alcohol – Drugs | CIA flooded communities with LSD for distraction
|
Expressive hippie clothing
(white left)
|
Clothing | At the beginning this created divisions between middle class and working class: organizational turn-off |
Sympathetic to Freudian left – Fromm, Horney, Reich
(White left) |
Attitude Towards Psychology | Potential socialist organizers become psychotherapists |
Alienated from traditional Christianity
Interest in Eastern mysticism, native religion |
Spirituality | Threatens working class with religions they don’t understand – might consider it Satanic |
Romanticism | Intellectual Movements | Championing primitive and childlike to keep people hostile to science and technology |
Idealism
Cultural, psychological: Frankfurt School Linguistic: postmodernism |
Epistemology | Red herring – draws people away from economics and building a socialist party |
Global warming | Climate | Supports de-indoctrination |
New Left (began in the Early 50’s) | Category of Comparison | Benefit to Anglo-American empire, finance capital, Rockefellers and CIA |
Techniques Used by the Powers that be to Undermine Communism
Distracting people:
Fragmentation by:
Demoralization
Demonization:
Qualifications
I am not suggesting that the New Left was simply a creature of the CIA and the Rockefellers. The New Left was a movement that came out of the middle class which was anti-war, anti-racist, mostly anti-capitalist and a rebellion against a conservative culture. Surely the “powers that be” did not encourage this. What I am saying is that the CIA and the Rockefellers either intervened directly as in the existence of COINTELPRO or threw money at New Left projects that suited their needs.
Conclusion
In Part II I argue that the political philosophy of the Anglo-American empire is "centrism". I argued that political centrists are losing elections all over the world because centrism cannot speak to the extreme crisis that finance capital has created. Also, the linear political spectrum that houses centrism no longer works in depicting political change. I identify five characteristics a new political spectrum would need in order to be workable.
Then I contrasted the multipolar values in the East and the Enlightenment in the West to the Romantic values in depth. The reason for this comparison that Romanticism is the foundation of the Anglo-American empire’s attempt to control the potential forces of Communism in the West by shaping a New Left.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Grover Furr / April – May 2023
In the January – February 2023 issue of Current Affairs there appears an article titled “Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable/” Its subtitle reads:
Stalin was socialism’s worst enemy. History is easily forgotten, so nostalgia for the “Man of Steel” needs to be guarded against.
A person who knows of my long interest in Joseph Stalin and the “Stalin years” of Soviet history alerted me to this article when it appeared online. He wondered what my response to Skopic’s accusations against Stalin might be.
I have been studying the Stalin period of Soviet history for many years nowI decided to write a response to Skopic’s article because it is a brief compendium of many of the allegations made against Stalin not only by overtly pro-capitalist and anticommunist writers, but by persons who are, or wish to be, or think that they are, on the anti-capitalist Left.
I am not “defending” Stalin, much less “apologizing” for Stalin. I am searching for the truth, as determined by the best evidence available.
Every accusation Skopic makes about Stalin is demonstrably wrong. I prove most of them wrong on the evidence. A few are wrong because they are anachronistic -- charging Stalin (and the Soviet leadership, which was collective – Stalin was not a dictator) with failing to act according to knowledge we have today but that no one had at the time.
The present essay sets forth the evidence and my analysis of it. At the end I briefly address the question of how Skopic could be so wrong and the reasons for anticommunism in the first place.
Grover Furr Refutes the Anti-Stalin Falsehoods from Skopic’s article Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable Activist News Network
Jul 22, 2023 #Stalin
We are joined on the show by Dr. Grover Furr to discuss his recent article entitled: Anti-Stalin Falsehoods from a 'Socialist' Writer - refuting Alex Skopic’s article 'Stalin Will Never Be Redeemable.'” (links below). Dr. Furr is a professor, historian and author. Dr. Furr is a professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University. Dr. Furr is also renowned for his extensive research and writing on the Joseph Stalin period of Soviet history. In fact, Dr. Furr has published well over a dozen books and published countless articles on this period. |
* * * * *
In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, the floodgates of state censorship opened, and a seemingly endless series of atrocity stories came out—but some socialists, both in the USSR and the West, simply refused to believe them …
Today we know that those who refused to believe Khrushchev’s talks of Stalin’s supposed “crimes” were correct! They “smelled a rat.”
Khrushchev and his followers produced no evidence to support their accusations. The striking lack of primary-source evidence is what started me on my quest for the truth about Stalin and the Stalin-era Soviet Union years ago.
We Must Defend Not Stalin, But the Truth
Skopic writes:
These are, broadly speaking, the two rationales used by Stalin’s defenders today. Either the murderous nature of his regime was completely fabricated (the theme of Grover Furr’s signature book Khrushchev Lied) …
Skopic repeatedly accuses me of “defending Stalin” and calls me a “Stalinist.” But what is a “Stalinist”? Either it means someone who “defends” Stalin and “apologizes” for Stalin’s “crimes”, or it is simply a term of abuse, of dismissal.
I am not a “Stalinist.” I have been searching for decades for evidence that Stalin committed crimes. If Stalin committed crimes, I want to know about them. We all need to know about them – if they exist. But so far I have yet to find any evidence that Stalin committed even one crime! Every accusation of a crime by Stalin alleged by anyone from legitimated academic “experts” to people like Skopic is false.
Regardless of the evidence, this result is unacceptable, literally “taboo” to anticommunists and Trotskyists, academics included. The most renowned and respectable academic authorities such as Stephen Kotkin of Princeton and Timothy Snyder of Yale have lied and falsified dozens, if not hundreds, of times, rather than accept the results that flow from the study of primary-source evidence about Stalin.
I call this the “Anti-Stalin Paradigm”, or ASP. All academic research on Stalin must confirm to this ASP or it will not be published. That would doom the career of any scholar hoping to teach Soviet history. So, the evidence is ignored and lies and falsehoods, many of them obvious to those who repeat them, are recycled, or, in some cases, new lies and falsehoods are invented.
Stalin and his propagandists never missed a chance to slam the United States for its record on racial injustice, deploying the bitter phrase “А у вас негров линчуют” (“And you are lynching Negroes!”) whenever American diplomats criticized the USSR’s human rights abuses. This was, of course, a cynical ploy …
“Whenever” implies repeated action. Yet Skopic does not cite a single instance of this (I cannot find any either). “Cynical plot” implies – without evidence – that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were not really opposed to racism.
Skopic admits that Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and other Black Americans found the dedication to anti-racism in the USSR inspiring. So how could Skopic possibly know that Stalin’s anti-racism was really “a cynical ploy”? He can’t!
Skopic Confuses “Sources” With Evidence
The Stalinists of the 20th century desperately wanted to believe in the promise of a new society, and they weren’t given the facts they needed to see through the illusion. In the 21st century, though, we have no such excuse. There is ample evidence from dozens of different sources detailing Stalin’s abuses and betrayals …
This illustrates one of Skopic’s central errors: he confuses “source” with “evidence.” A “source” is just where you found some statement or other, regardless of whether that statement is true or false. Primary-source evidence, usually in documentary form, is the only valid basis for truthful conclusions. Skopic has no primary-source evidence of any “abuses” or “betrayals” on Stalin’s part – only fact-claims from anticommunist and Trotskyist writers who themselves have no evidence.
… with the single exception of Hitler—he was the most lethal anticommunist of his time. In fact, the epitaph of virtually every prominent European socialist to die in the years 1928-1945 reads either “murdered by Hitler” or “murdered by Stalin.”
If there were so many, why doesn’t Skopic name even one of them? Since he cites no names, no one can check to see whether Skopic is telling the truth or not.
Skopic:
Soon after he was named General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, Stalin began maneuvering against the other Bolshevik leaders who had organized the October Revolution, packing important positions with his own supporters …
Skopic fails to cite even one example. I have never found any either.
Leon Trotsky made this accusation, also without evidence. Trotsky is probably Skopic’s unnamed source here. Trotsky is the source of a great many false allegations against Stalin of crimes and misdeeds.
and arranging various smears and frame-ups against his rivals.
Again, Skopic cites no examples. There is no evidence to support this allegation.
Skopic:
Leon Trotsky, the leader of the Left Opposition faction, was ejected from the Party in 1927 after he refused to abandon the idea of global revolution (which Stalin opposed) …
False. This is another of Trotsky’s slanders. Stalin did not oppose “global revolution” at all.
In his preface to Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (1996) Robert C. Tucker, an anti-Stalin historian at Princeton University, wrote::
[Lars] Lih raises the question: Did Stalin dismiss world revolution in favor of building up the Soviet state (as Trotsky, for one, alleged at the time), or did he remain dedicated to world revolution? Lib's answer, based on the letters, is that in Stalin's mind the Soviet state and international revolution coalesced, and the letters provide support for this view. (ix)
Lars Lih, the editor of this volume, writes:
Stalin's intense involvement belies the image of an isolationist leader interested only in “socialism in one country.” The letters show us that Stalin did not make a rigid distinction between the interests of world revolution and the interests of the Soviet state: both concerns are continually present in his outlook. (5-6)
Skopic:
… by 1929 he [Trotsky] had been exiled from the USSR altogether, and in 1940 Stalin had him assassinated.
Aren’t the reasons relevant? Of course, they are! But Skopic omits them.
Trotsky was exiled because he repeatedly formed a fraction within the Party after Party fractions had been outlawed at Lenin’s insistence in 1921. Even before Lenin died in January 1924 Trotsky and his followers were actively organizing against the Party. Trotsky was expelled after the opposition organized a counterdemonstration on the tenth anniversary of the Revolution in October, 1927.
Many of his fellow conspirators recanted and promised to be good Party members from then on. It turned out later that some of them were lying and continued to conspire in secret.
But Trotsky refused to recant. Exiled in comfortable conditions to Alma-Ata in the Kazakh SSR – he was able to carry on a wide correspondence and even to go hunting -- Trotsky continued his factional organizing. At length the Party leadership decided to expel him to Turkey, where they arranged a large house for him to stay on a Turkish island.
Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940, probably by Stalin’s order. The general reason was that Trotsky had conspired with Nazi Germany and militarist-fascist Japan to aid them against the Soviet army in the event they attacked the USSR. The proximate reason, according to General Pavel Sudoplatov, was that Stalin believed that Trotsky’s followers would weaken international support for the USSR when war broke out.
“There are no important political figures in the Trotskyite movement except Trotsky himself. If Trotsky is finished the threat will be eliminated,” Stalin said.
Skopic:
Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, close associates of Lenin who were originally supposed to rule with Stalin in a triumvirate, were accused of the murder of Sergei Kirov (for which some historians believe Stalin was also responsible) and summarily executed in 1936.…
False. Zinoviev and Kamenev led a clandestine terrorist group of “Zinovievists” (Party members and former members loyal to Zinoviev when he was head of the Party in Leningrad) whose Leningrad branch murdered Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov, who had replaced Zinoviev. We have a great deal of evidence about their activities. I have carefully studied the evidence against the Leningrad Zinovievists.
In 1935 Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried and sentenced to prison terms. At that time the NKVD stated that there was no evidence that Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves had been involved in Kirov’s murder.
However, by mid-1936 some members of the Zinovievist conspiratorial group had accused Zinoviev and Kamenev of complicity in Kirov’s murder. They confessed inJuly 1936. I have put online a translation of Zinoviev’s confession of August 10, 1936.
The First Moscow Trial was quickly organized in August. Zinoviev and Kamenev repeated these confessions at trial and were sentenced to death. In their appeals to the court for clemency, which were never intended for publication, Zinoviev and Kamenev repeated their guilt. Therefore, it is a lie to say that Zinoviev and Kamenev were “summarily executed.”
Not even mainstream anticommunist historians “believe” that Stalin was involved in Kirov’s death. So where did Skopic get this – what was his “source”? Most important: since “belief” is irrelevant, what is Skopic’s evidence that Stalin was involved? He has none, because no such evidence exists.
Skopic:
With each year, the accusations of treachery grew wilder, and the evidence thinner, often relying entirely on confessions extracted under torture.
There is no evidence of either of“thin” evidence or of confessions “extracted under torture” in the Moscow Trials. No wonder Skopic does not cite even one example! (For Nikolai Yezhov’s illegal crimes, see below).
Skopic:
Trials became farces lasting as little as 15 or 20 minutes.
Trials at which the defendant confesses his guilt, and the court has evidence to confirm it, were often short, as they are in the United States today when an accused confesses guilt before a judge. However, in the next sentence Skopic mentions Nikolai Bukharin. Bukharin was a defendant in the Third Moscow Trial of March 1938, a public trial that lasted twelve days, from March 2 to March 13.
Skopic:
Nikolai Bukharin, leader of the moderate Right Opposition, managed to survive until 1938, but in the end he, too, was sentenced to death for his supposed involvement in a Trotskyist and/or Nazi conspiracy…
There is no excuse for this falsehood. The transcript of the 1938 Trial in which Bukharin was convicted was published in 1938. Several of Bukharin’s pre-trial confessions have been available for years.
At trial Bukharin confessed to some serious crimes while stubbornly refusing to confess to others. A differentiated confession like this suggests that the confession of guilt was genuine. It certainly proves that Bukharin was not threatened with torture or mistreatment of his family.
Skopic continues:
Bukharin’s last message is particularly haunting, using Stalin’s personal nickname in
an appeal to their onetime friendship: Koba, why do you need me to die?
Years ago, my colleague Vladimir Bobrov and I published an article in which we proved that this is a fake. See Furr and Bobrov, “Bukharin's Last Plea: Yet Another Anti-Stalin Falsification.” This article has been available online, in English, since 2010! Couldn’t Skopic have done a Google search?
Skopic:
In the same year, Jānis Rudzutaks, a Latvian revolutionary who had served ten years in Tsarist prisons for his Bolshevik convictions, was executed despite never having voiced the slightest objection to the Party line.
Conspirators always “voiced” agreement with the Party’s position in order to mask their conspiracy.
His [Rudzutak’s] only offense, according to Stalin’s confidante Vyacheslav Molotov, was that he was “too easygoing about the opposition” and “indulged too much in partying with philistine friends,” and was therefore a liability.
Molotov did not say that this was Rudzutak’s “only” offense. Why did Skopic tell this lie? Moreover, in 1938 Molotov had his hands full as head of state – Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. How would he remember, in extreme old age, what the specific accusations and evidence against Rudzutak had been?
Today we have a great deal of evidence against Rudzutak. His NKVD investigation file has long been available to researchers. It contains Rudzutak’s confessions along with much other evidence against him.
Rudzutak was also accused by several defendants at the Third Moscow Trial of 1938. In lengthy statements to the court defendant Nikolai N. Krestinsky named Rudzutak as a conspirator many times. The trial transcript has been available since 1938. Why didn’t Skopic consult it?
Skopic:
As it happens, I have written an article in which I examine this very document (Socialist Appeal was a Trotskyist newspaper). It will be published in a future book. For now let me note that this list was dishonest -- intended to deceive -- when it was published in 1938.
* Eight of the figures whose photos appear in the “gallery” -- Uritsky, Shaumian (not “Shomyan”), Sverdlov, Artem (Sergeev), Lenin, Nogin, Dzerzhinsky, and Ioffe -- were indeed dead by 1938. Stalin had nothing to do with their deaths.
What's the point of including so many people who had died by 1938 except to imply, without evidence, that Stalin was in some way responsible for their deaths?
* Three more lived long after 1938. Alexandra M. Kollontai died on March 9, 1952. Matvei K. Muranov died on December 9, 1959. Elena D. Stasova died on December 31, 1966.
This is a dishonest propaganda technique. It has nothing to do with understanding history. Yet this kind of duplicity characterizes most anticommunist and Trotskyite writing on the Stalin period up to the present day.
In my article I examine the evidence against the eleven, all men, who were indeed executed. Every one of them was convicted at a trial where much evidence against them was produced. In many cases the accused confessed. It is absurd to claim that a person who repeatedly confesses his guilt and is impeached by the testimony of others is nevertheless“innocent.”
Skopic:
With characteristic chutzpah, Grover Furr attempts to justify the purges in Khrushchev Lied, asserting that all of the above really were spies and saboteurs, but the numbers are against him …
I must protest Skopic’s dishonesty here. Most readers of Skopic’s article will not have read my book Khrushchev Lied (2011) or will not have read it recently, and so will not know that his statement here about my research is false.
* I do not discuss “all of the above” in my book Khrushchev Lied.
* I do not assert that “all of the above” were guilty. Indeed, I do not claim that any of the persons named by Khrushchev as innocent victims of Stalin were guilty.
What I do in that book, as in all my other books, is examine the evidence that we now have. In the cases I have examined there is plenty of evidence of the guilt of the people under discussion and no evidence that they were innocent.
Skopic clearly does not understand historical research, so a word about that is relevant here. It is not the job of a historian to assert the guilt or the innocence of anybody. The historian’s duty is to identify, locate, obtain, and examine the evidence and, where possible, to draw logical conclusions from that evidence.
A historian must always be prepared to modify or even reverse his original conclusion if and when more evidence comes to light and demands it, or a more convincing interpretation of the currently available evidence is produced.
Skopic:
… What are the odds, after all, that essentially everyone but Stalin suddenly turned traitor, leaving him the only stalwart?
This is just nonsense. Thousands of “old Bolsheviks” (persons who had joined the Party before the Revolution) and other Party leaders remained. Khrushchev named only a small number of persons whom he wished to“rehabilitate” – that is, to declare innocent while never producing evidence that they were, in fact, innocent. In my book Khrushchev Lied I examine only those whom Khrushchev names in his “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956.
Skopic:
With each new show trial, a ripple effect ran through Soviet society, as anyone who was tainted by association with the “guilty” party—from their family members to people who were merely seen talking to them or reading their books—stood a decent chance of being arrested, executed, or deported to Siberia in turn.
These statements are false. Skopic gives no examples of even a single person to whom any of this happened. And no wonder! I have never found an example of anyone who was executed or deported to Siberia simply because they were “merely seen talking to” or “reading the books” of a convicted person. Not one!
Wives of high-ranking Party and military figures who had been convicted of serious crimes like espionage or sabotage were imprisoned or exiled, on the assumption that they must have known something about their husband’s activities yet did not report them. In some cases, we have evidence that the wife was also guilty.
In other cases, we have no such evidence, although it may still be in former Soviet archives. It is possible that some wives who had been kept in the dark about their husband’s conspiratorial activities were imprisoned. But we don’t have the evidence so we cannot tell whether this occurred or not.
I have never found even one example of a person in any of the categories named here by Skopic who was executed, and Skopic does not cite even a single example.
“Quotas”?
Skopic:
Like American cops today, Stalin’s secret police worked on a quota system, in which officers were required to make a certain number of arrests per month …
This is false. American historian Arch Getty has refuted this “quota system” notion several times.
One of the mysteries of the field [of Soviet history — GF] is how limity [“limits”] is routinely translated as “quotas.”
For more about this specific lie see my book Stalin Waiting for … the Truth, Chapter Ten, “The Falsehood About ‘Quotas’”.
Anticommunist “scholars” continue to lie, claiming that Stalin had “quotas” for arrests. Obviously they want him to have had quotas so they can condemn him!
We must ask: If you need to invent spurious crimes in order to find reasons to condemn Stalin, doesn’t that imply that you could not find any real crimes of which Stalin was guilty? For if you could find real crimes, why not just discuss them without inventing phony ones?
Skopic:
In a typical case, one unlucky woman was arrested as a Trotskyist, then had her charge changed to “bourgeois nationalism,” on the grounds that the local NKVD had “exceeded4 the quota for Trotskyites, but were short on nationalists, even though they’d taken all the Tatar writers they could think of.”
The quotation is from Robert Conquest, The Great Terror. In the revised edition the quotation is on page 284. The reference there is to Evgeniia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, page 105, and this passage is indeed in Ginzburg’s book.
Abuses of this kind, and on a massive scale, were committed by Nikolai Yezhov’s men during the time he was head of the NKVD. But we have no way of verifying what Ginzburg wrote here. She was fiercely anti-Stalin, believed the Khrushchev-era lies about Stalin, and had little motive to be objective.
Ginzburg was arrested in February 1937, on the testimony of some of her co-workers, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Moscow Trial or “Trotskyist” trial of January 16 - 30, 1937. She was accused of being a member of a clandestine Trotskyist group. We have plenty of evidence that such groups did exist.
Ginzburg claims that she was innocent. But we really do not know. It is common for both the guilty and the innocent to claim innocence. The fact that she was “rehabilitated” does not prove that she was innocent because many persons were “rehabilitated” during the Khrushchev and Gorbachev eras without any evidence that they were in fact innocent.
I have examined a number of such cases in Chapter 11 of Khrushchev Lied.In some cases, like that of Bukharin, we know that the Soviet prosecutor and judges falsified evidence in order to declare him innocent.
In the early 1990s two NKVD investigative reports of her case were published. These reports detail the testimony against Ginzburg from co-workers. On the basis of this evidence, she was convicted and sentenced first to prison and later to a labor camp.
The “Yezhovshchina”
In late July or early August 1937, Nikolai Yezhov, chief (“People’s Commissar”) of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), which included the political police that are often called “the NKVD,” began a 14-month orgy of mass arrests and executions. Most persons executed must have been innocent, as Yezhov and his men testified in 1939 when, after replacing Yezhov as head of the NKVD, Lavrentii Beria began to investigate these massive illegal repressions.
Primary-source documents from former Soviet archives prove that Yezhov deceived Stalin and his leadership in order to further his own conspiracy. As I conclude in my book about this period, Yezhov vs Stalin,
The version set forth here absolves Stalin of guilt for the massive repressions. This is what is unacceptable to mainstream Soviet history. But it was certainly Stalin’s responsibility, as the principle political leader of the country, to take decisive action to stop violations of justice, have them investigated, and make sure those responsible are punished. Stalin did this. Tragically, it took him many months to fully realize what was really going on, by which time Ezhov and his men had murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Soviet citizens. (231)
On January 2, 1939, Stalin wrote Prosecutor Vyshinsky: “A public trial of the guilty parties in the NKVD is essential.” Such public trials did not take place. We do not know why. However, there were many non-public trials of Yezhov’s NKVD men, including of Yezhov himself. Many were sentenced to death for their crimes. During the first year after he took office, Beria released at least 110,000 prisoners from the camps (“GULAG”) and prisons.
During the same year [1939] about 110,000 persons were freed after the review of cases of those arrested in 1937-1938.
Lavrentii Beria
Skopic:
Later, others fell victim to the sadism of Lavrentii Beria, a truly vile figure who used his position as head of the secret police to sexually assault hundreds of women and girls, often threatening a loved one under arrest to secure their silence.
These are lies. Skopic cites no evidence. And no wonder! There has never been any good evidence that Beria carried out these sexual assaults.
An article in a conservative Moscow newspaper contains the following passage:
One of the experts who had the opportunity to study the cases of Beria and the head of Stalin's security, General Vlasik, classified to this day, discovered an extremely interesting fact. The lists of women in whose rape, judging by the materials of his case, Beria pleaded guilty, almost completely coincide with the lists of those ladies with whom Vlasik, who was arrested long before Beria, was accused of having relations.
On June 26, 1953, Beria was either arrested or – as it increasingly appears – killed in the act of being arrested, at a Presidium meeting by his colleagues in the leadership of the CPSU. Beria was not present at the Central Committee meeting in July 1953, called for the sole purpose of slandering him. Why not? This was unprecedented for such a high-ranking official – a minister in the government.
Beria was allegedly tried, convicted, and executed at a trial in December 1953. But no trial transcript has ever come to light. A lot of evidence that Beria was murdered at this time or possibly shortly thereafter has been published. Some of it is summarized in a recent study by two Russian historians.
Concerning the conduct of the trial of “Beria” – supposedly present but probably already murdered – and his associates, Colonel-General Aleksandr F. Katusev, Chief Prosecutor of the USSR from 1989 to 1991, during the time of Gorbachev, has written:
Считаю своим долгом отметить, что вновь открывшиеся обстоятельства лишь дополнительно высветили ошибки и натяжки в приговоре по делу Берии и других. В то время как наиболее серьезные из них были очевидны и прежде. Чем же объяснить, что крупнейшие наши юристы под руководством Руденко Р.А. предъявили обвинение, не подкрепленное надлежащими доказательствами.
Ответ лежит на поверхности. Еще до начала следствия были обнародованы постановления июльского (1953) Пленума ЦК КПСС и Указ Президиума Верховного Совета СССР, в которых содержалась не только политическая, но и правовая оценка содеянного»..\
I consider it my duty to note that the newly discovered circumstances only additionally highlighted the errors and exaggerations in the verdict in the case of Beria and others, while the most serious of them were obvious before. How can we explain that our most prominent jurists, under the leadership of Roman A. Rudenko, could have made these charges without proper evidence?
The answer is obvious. Even before the start of the investigation, the resolutions of the July (1953) Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR were made public, which contained not only a political, but also a legal assessment of the deed.
Katusev stated that there was no proper evidence against Beria and the others, and they were accused, convicted, and executed on the basis of the Central Committee Plenum of July 1953 and a decree of the legislature! If, in fact, a transcript and materials of the “Beria trial” of December 1953 exist, Katusev would have had access to them. He does not mention any transcript. This might mean that there is none and no trial really took place. But to draw this conclusion would be an argumentum ex silentio and in this case a logical fallacy.
Skopic continues about Beria:
This statement is contradicted by the very source Skopic cites, a 1993 article in the British newspaper Independent. That article states:
MOSCOW - Building workers digging a ditch in the centre of the city on Friday unearthed a common grave near the mansion once occupied by Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, writes Helen Womack. Since Beria was notorious for carrying out interrogation and torture in his own home, it is reasonable to assume that the bones are the remains of his personal victims.
… it is believed that Beria lured young women there, had sex with them, then had them murdered in the basement.
… The workers had been digging for several hours when they came upon a pile of human bones, including two children's skulls …
So not “at his former home” as Skopic claims but “near” it, plus” children’s skulls.” Was Beria raping children too, and then carrying the remains outside his home to bury them “near” where he lived? Ridiculous!
There is no evidence that these bodies had anything to do with Beria. So why did Skopic distort what the article says? Is he “grasping at a straw” – trying to find something that will make Beria look bad? It sure looks that way.
Executions
Skopic:
Even if we grant the most pro-Stalin interpretation of the facts, counting only the deaths directly recorded in the Soviet archives (799,455 executions, 1.7 million deaths while imprisoned, 390,000 during the forced resettlement of rural peasants, and 400,000 people deported to Siberia and elsewhere), we still get a figure of more than three million.
The source normally cited for numbers of executions from 1921-1953 is Viktor Zemskov, “Pravda o repressiiakh” (The truth about the repressions), 2009, republished several times on the internet.
I quote from one of my essays:
In September 1936 Nikolai Ezhov replaced Genrikh Iagoda as head (Peoples Commissar) of the NKVD. In November 1938 Ezhov was replaced by Lavrentii Beria. According to the widely publicized “Pavlov report” prepared for Khrushchev in 1953 and widely reprinted the number of persons sentenced to death in 1936-1940 were as follows: [6]
1936 – 1,118
1937 – 353,074
1938 – 328,618
1939 – 2,552
1940 – 1,649
In 1939 death sentences under Beria were less than 1% of those under Ezhov. In 1940 they were less than ½ of 1%. No mass political repression occurred during Stalin’s postwar years. The “Ezhovshchina” (=“bad time of Ezhov”) was never repeated. The conclusion is inescapable: It was not Khrushchev, but Stalin and Beria who ended mass political repression, and they did it in late 1938.
Executions during these six years out of 32 ½ years equal 745,523, or 93.3% of the total of 799,455. Executions during 1937 and 1938, the two years of Yezhov’s mass illegal murders, total 85.3% of the total of 799,455.
For more detailed discussion of Yezhov’s conspiracy and his mass murder of innocent Soviet citizens, Beria’s investigations of Yezhov and his men, and a great deal of primary-source evidence--almost completely ignored by mainstream anti-Stalin historians -- see Yezhov vs Stalin.
Deaths in the GULAG
The source used by professional researchers, most of whom are anticommunist and strongly biased against Stalin, is GULAG. (Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei), 1918-1960. (Moscow: MDF, 2000), edited by Kokurin and Petrov of the anticommunist “Memorial” Society. Document No. 103 of this work gives the mortality in the GULAGcamps by year. It can be viewed online as a table. This shows that the higher mortality rates were in 1932 (13,197 or 4.8%),1933 (67,297 or 15.3%), 1942 (352,560 or 24.9 %) and 1943 (267,826 or 22.4 %). The next highest year, 1944, saw a 9.2% mortality, higher than all the remaining years.
Of the total number of deaths in the GULAG from 1930 (the first year we have statistics) till 1953 (Stalin died on March 5 of that year), we get 1,590,384 deaths in the GULAG between 1930 and 1953. Of these deaths, 43.2% of them or 687,683 occurred in the three years 1933, 1942, and 1943. 1932-33 were the years of the great famine of ’32-’33 when mortality was very high throughout the USSR.1942 and 1943 were the worst years of the war. 50.7% of all the deaths in the GULAG occurred in 1932-33 and 1942-44.
During these periods a great many Soviet citizens were also dying prematurely. For example: during World War II Soviet workers sickened and died of starvation at their work, far from any fighting. (Editor's Note: Indeed, many people died, including notable figures, like Oleg Losev, the inventor of the LED, as even the Wikipedia recognizes: Losev died of starvation in 1942, at the age of 38, along with many other civilians, during the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans during World War 2.[1][2][3] It is not known where he was buried.)
The high intensity of work at the factory and the inadequacy of the food make it a matter of urgency that [workers receive their rightful days off], as witnessed by the frequency with which workers are dropping dead from emaciation right on the job. On some days you see several corpses in the shops. During the two months December 1942 and January 1943, they observed 16 bodies just in the factory shops. Those dying from emaciation are mainly workers doing manual labor. (Shliaev, Chief Prosecutor of Cheliabinsk province, to Bochkov, Prosecutor General of the USSR, March 29, 1943)
This is from an article by Donald Filtzer, “Starvation Mortality in Soviet Home Front Industrial Regions During World War II.” Filtzer is a conventionally anticommunist scholar who specializes in studying the Soviet working class. He states:
During 1943 and 1944, starvation and tuberculosis – a disease that was endemic to the USSR and is highly sensitive to acute malnutrition – were between them the largest single cause of death among the nonchild civilian population.
Filtzer continues:
The USSR did not have enough food to feed both its military and its civilians, even with the arrival of Lend-Lease food aid. The state therefore had to engage in a grim calculus and decide how it could most efficiently use its limited resources – that is, how many calories and grams of protein it could allocate to different groups. In these circumstances it was inevitable that some people would not obtain enough to eat and many would die. No matter what regime had been in power in the USSR—Stalinist, Trotskyist, Menshevik, or capitalist—it would have faced the same set of choices.
Skopic does not identify his source for the figure of 390,000 persons dying during “forced resettlement of rural peasants” so it is impossible to know exactly what he means. It probably means that peasants – mainly rich peasants, or kulaks, and those who, perhaps under the influence of the kulaks, who were very influential people in their communities, resisted collectivization, were resettled, and eventually died, not during resettlement but at their place of resettlement. No doubt many of them died during the great famine of 1932-33 and the very bad famine of 1946.
Similarly, Skopic does not tell us where he gets the number of 400,000 “people deported to Siberia and elsewhere” or what it means – deaths during deportations, or all deaths, including persons who died after deportation.
We do have some information about mortality during deportations. For example, we know that very few of the Chechens and Crimean Tatars deported in 1944 for collaboration with the Germans died during deportation.
According to an NKVD report reproduced in several places, 191, or 0.126%, of the 151,529 Crimean Tatars deported to Uzbekistan, died in transit. … In the case of the much larger population of deported Chechens and Ingush, numbering 493,269 persons, we have primary source evidence that 1272, or 0.25%, died in transport.See N.F. Bugai and A.M. Gonov. “The Forced Evacuation of the Chechens and the Ingush.” Russian Studies in History. vol. 41, no. 2, Fall 2002, p. 56.
The Crimean Tatars and Chechens were deported en masse so as to keep these linguistically and culturally distinct groups united. To separate them would have been a form of genocide (though the term did not exist until after the war).
Skopic:
Under Stalin’s leadership, many of the hard-won victories of 1917 were undermined and rolled back, in a downward slide into social and political conservatism.
This was Leon Trotsky’s claim, so it is no surprise that Skopic quotes the following passage from Leon Sedov’s Red Book on the Moscow Trials (1936)
We’ll examine these assertions one at a time.
Revolutionary internationalism gives way to the cult of the fatherland in the strictest sense.
It was the whole Soviet Union, not just the communists, that the fascists would attack. But only a small percentage of Soviet citizens were communists. Non-communists, the vast majority of the population, were encouraged to be loyal to their country, the Soviet Union. Furthermore, since the Soviet Union was the homeland of socialism and the headquarters of the worldwide communist movement, why shouldn’t communists too be loyal to it?
Officers’ ranks were indeed re-established in the belief that this was necessary for a strong army. Red Army officers had been trained along the lines of, and in many cases by, military men from Western capitalist countries. Sharp differentials in wages for more productive work, as in the Stakhanovite movement, and “one-man management” for managers, were believed to be necessary for higher productivity.
These measures contradicted the move towards egalitarianism, a hallmark of development towards a communist society. But the Soviet Union was not even fully “socialist” yet. If the fascists defeated it they would never see either socialism or communism.
So, Stalin and the Party compromised on principle in order to move towards communism later, after defeating the fascists. Stalin did begin to do this after the war. But his efforts were cut shot by his death. For more on Stalin’s post-war efforts to move towards communism see Part II of my essay “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform.”
Sedov / Skopic:
The old communist workers are pushed into the background …
There is no evidence for this, or even an explanation of what it means. Who were these “old communist workers”? Since this was written by Sedov, Leon Trotsky’s son and closest political confidant, it probably means that workers loyal to Trotsky were no longer promoted within the Party or the trade unions. Naturally enough – Trotsky’s followers within the USSR were involved in serious anti-Party and anti-Soviet conspiracies.
Sedov / Skopic:
The old petit-bourgeois family is being reestablished and idealized in the most middle-class way …
This is incoherent. When was the family ever disestablished? Skopic does not tell us. But see comments on “socialism” below.
… abortions are prohibited, which, given the difficult material conditions and the primitive state of culture and hygiene, means the enslavement of women, that is, the return to pre-October times.
Abortion on demand was made illegal -- see the more detailed discussion below. However, the benefits granted to mothers shows that Skopic is wrong -- there was no “return to pre-October times.”
The “Trotsky Cult”
Trotsky hated Stalin. He had no incentive to be objective or truthful about Stalin and Soviet society of his day. In my books I have shown in detail that Trotsky lied about Stalin too many times to count. If Skopic doesn’t know this he has no business writing about the Stalin-era Soviet Union at all.
Skopic himself admits that “there are layers of irony to this passage” from Sedov’s book. Why then does he quote from it? Critical of the “great man” cult around Stalin – rightly so – Skopic has fallen prey to the “great man cult” around Trotsky!
The Stalin “cult of personality” thankfully died decades ago. Stalin himself strongly opposed it, as I have shown in Khrushchev Lied. But the “Trotsky cult” lives on, nourished by the falsehoods of overtly anticommunist historians and an uncritical attitude towards Trotsky’s own writings. I have published four books in which I show that Trotsky lied to an extent scarcely believable, especially about Stalin and anything to do with him.
Trotsky incited his clandestine supporters to assassinate Soviet leaders and sabotage the economy, conspired with Marshal Tukhachevsky and other high-ranking military commanders to sabotage the Red Army and with Nazi Germany and fascist Japan to stab the army in the back in the event of invasion. Trotsky agreed to abolish the Communist International, and to divide up the country to give Ukraine to Germany and the Pacific coast to Japan. Some communist!
Skopic:
… the working class found itself increasingly micromanaged and exploited under Stalin.
Skopic does not know what “exploitation” means. It is the private appropriation of the surplus value produced by the working class. Nothing of the kind occurred in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s time. Salary differentials between managers and workers, whether desirable, necessary, or not, are not “exploitation.”
Skopic:
… new labor-discipline laws introduced in 1938 and 1940 made it a criminal offense to be more than 20 minutes late to work, punishable by dismissal at minimum and sometimes actual imprisonment.
By 1938 the Soviet Union was preparing for the inevitable war that Stalin, with uncanny accuracy, had predicted in 1931 would happen in ten years.
We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or we shall go under.
Military men were drafted and then subject to discipline. Why should workers, whose production would be a make-or-break matter in the upcoming war, be permitted to be absent or to move to try for a better job somewhere else? Production for the social welfare took precedence over the individual desire to “get ahead.”
Skopic:
The hated “domestic passports” used by the Tsars were reintroduced, forcing workers to show their “papers” to police at a moment’s notice, and justify why they were in a given area. If they couldn’t, this too could lead to arrest and prison time.
Passports were instituted, but not like under the Tsars. Pre-Soviet Russia was indeed an exploitative society. In the Soviet Union there was no appropriation of the value produced by the working class to private capitalists. All production benefited the working class as a whole.
The Soviet Union ran on a planned economy, not a market-based capitalist economy. Unlike in the capitalist world, jobs were guaranteed. But moving around to get the best job sabotaged the economic plan and production, so it was restricted.
Passports were also needed to control the movement of population, particularly to prevent a flood of immigration to the big cities. It was essential to develop the trans-Ural USSR, the Asian areas and Siberia, and to guarantee sufficient labor power on the collective farms that fed the whole society..
Skopic:
The government even resorted to strikebreaking and the suppression of labor power, arresting workers en masse in the cotton-mill town of Teikovo when they organized a short-lived strike against food rationing.
The state had an economic plan for the allocation of scarce resources. The plan called for shared scarcity. It was not an attempt at super-exploitation to make a rich boss even richer, as under capitalism.
The Teikovo strike and a few others were indeed protests against an increase in food prices. This was 1932, when industrialization was just beginning, collectivization was still under way, and the economy was very fragile.
Bolshevism had offered a promise of total liberation for working people, but now, Stalinism delivered the opposite.
Skopic has a bourgeois – i.e., a capitalist – idea of liberation.
The working class in the Stalin-era Soviet Union was indeed liberated from exploitation of worker-produced value by private capitalists. However, communist liberation cannot mean “freedom to do what you want, when you want.” Real liberation is only possible when there is a strong commitment to the collective good.
Skopic:
The point about “revolutionary internationalism,” too, deserves a closer look. At first glance, this might seem like an arcane Trotskyist grievance, but the consequences for people around the world were very real. To the extent that he believed in anything, Stalin was a firm believer in “socialism in one country”—that is, the idea that the Soviet Union should focus on its own industrial development, compete with the West on that basis, and remain detached from any form of global class struggle. The old slogan “workers of the world, unite!” was abandoned, and the Soviet state became either indifferent or actively hostile to the efforts of socialist movements in other countries, even as those movements looked to it for support and guidance.
This is simply a series of outright lies. Skopic has no evidence to support any of these allegations. Skopic has chosen to believe Leon Trotsky’s unsupported claim that building socialism in one country was in contradiction to building for revolution in other countries. This is not true (see the quotations from Robert Tucker and Lars Lih above).
During Stalin’s time the Communist International, or Comintern, was established in virtually every country in the world. The Soviet Union committed vast resources to supporting communist parties worldwide.
After Adolf Hitler smashed the Communist Party of Germany, the largest communist party in the world at that time outside of the Soviet Union, the Comintern saw that there was no chance for a socialist revolution any time soon in the industrialized countries of the world. It decided that fascism was the greatest danger to the world’s working class, so it downplayed organizing for communist revolution in order to try to make alliances with anti-fascist capitalist governments. Soviet and Comintern leaders were convinced that the USSR, the only country in the world that had no allies, could not defeat the impending fascist attack alone.
This strategy worked to a degree, in the sense that the Soviet Union managed to create an alliance with the major capitalist powers in World War II against the fascist powers. Victory against the Axis led to communist revolutions in China, Yugoslavia, Albania, and ultimately in Vietnam after the defeat of the United States.
The Soviet Union and the Comintern were also the principle forces behind anti-colonial struggles throughout the world. The Western imperialist countries of the so-called “Free World,” all of them self-styled “democracies,” never permitted democracy in their colonies, which they exploited with a murderous hand.
Soviet Aid to the Spanish Republic
Skopic:
In the Spanish Civil War, for example, the USSR lent a limited amount of military aid to the Republican forces battling Francisco Franco.
Skopic is in error. The USSR sent massive amounts of aid to Spain despite its own need to build up its military in advance of the inevitable war with the Axis.
The Soviet Union was generous in supplying military equipment to the Spanish Republic even though it was building up its own military as fast as possible too. On November 2, 1936, Kliment Voroshilov, Commissar for Defense, wrote to Stalin as follows:
Dear Koba! I am sending a letter of the property which, though it will hurt us, may be sold to the Spaniards... You will see that the list is for a rather substantial number of weapons. This can be explained not only by the great needs of the Spanish army and artillery, but also because Kulik (in my opinion, rightly) decided to finally free ourselves of some foreign-made artillery—British, French and Japanese—totaling 280 pieces, or 28% of the weapons of the category in our artillery parks. The most painful of all will be sending off the aircraft, but this is needed more than anything else, and therefore it must be given.
This private note, never intended for publication, proves Stalin’s commitment to proletarian internationalism in Spain.
The Spanish Republican government paid for some of this aid with gold. But the Soviets kept sending military equipment in 1938 and even in 1939, when there was no hope that the Republic could pay for it. Helen Graham, a world expert in the Spanish Civil War, has written:
… the Soviet Union actually also gave some big credits to the Republic in the course of 1938 which it must have known it would have absolutely NO chance of recouping (especially by the second half of that year) …
In her 2002 book The Spanish Republic at War 1936-1939 Graham writes:
In July [1938] [Prime Minister] Negrín sent his former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Marcelino Pascua (from spring 1938 ambassador in Paris) back to Moscow with the request. Stalin agreed to make a $60 million loan available to the Republic. This was in addition to the $70 million agreed the previous February. But this second loan was made when there was virtually no gold to back it. Without the July credit the Republican war effort could not have survived through the second half of 1938.
In The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005) Graham writes:
In 1937 Soviet industrial production was still in a turmoil of reorganization, made worse by the purges, and throughout the war in Spain real Soviet production levels remained anything up to 50% below the published ones. Given this situation, it is surprising that Stalin sent even as much domestically produced materiel to the Republic as he did. This was high quality – most crucially the planes and tanks – and, as we have seen, it was vital to Republican survival, especially at the start. (88)
These scholars and documents give the lie to Skopic’s claim. In fact, the Soviet Union “gave even though it hurt.”
Skopic continues:
But at the same time, Stalin dictated the policy line of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, or PCE), which was fiercely loyal to Moscow, and through this mouthpiece, he made it painfully clear that there would be no workers’ revolution as a result of the war. Instead, the PCE mandated a “united front” with a so-called “progressive bourgeoisie”—in other words, any part of the ruling class that wasn’t actively fascist …
The Soviets and the PCE believed that no workers’ and peasants’ revolution was possible as long as Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were arming and fighting alongside Francisco Franco’s army. Western powers feared a Bolshevik-type revolution in Spain much more than they feared Franco, a fellow capitalist and imperialist.
All the Spanish Republic’s governments were firmly capitalist. What they really wanted was aid from the non-fascist European powers, mainly Britain and France. They accepted Soviet aid because the Western powers, including the United States, refused them.
The hope of the Soviets and the Comintern was to defeat Franco, leaving the Spanish Republic as a liberal democracy with a strong and militant working-class movement and a large communist party. Then they could organize for revolution.
But this was exactly what the Western imperialist countries, together with the leaders of the Republican government, did not want. They much preferred a fascist, anticommunist, and capitalist Spain.
Understandably, many Spanish communists refused to follow these high-handed orders, especially in the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification—the other, non-Stalinist communist party in the mix). So, the Stalinists pressured the Republican government to declare the POUM an illegal organization, causing open conflict between the two factions.
This is false. Dominated by anti-Soviet Trotskyists, the POUM was one of the forces that led a rebellion – in fact, an abortive attempt at a revolution -- against the Spanish Republic while the war against Franco was going on. This 1937 revolt, called the “Barcelona May Days,” was a stab in the back of the Republic that had to draw resources from the anti-Franco war to suppress it.
Franco and Nazi agents were also working to bring about a split in the Republican forces that culminated in the “May Days’ revolt. The Soviets knew this from their agents. Trotsky had sent Erwin Wolf, his most trusted aide, to Spain, where he became a top adviser to POUM.POUM leader Andres Nin had also been a top political aide of Trotsky’s. Kurt Landau, another Trotskyist, was a POUM adviser too.
For more details and evidence see my article “Leon Trotsky and the Barcelona 'May Days' of 1937.”
Skopic:
As Jesús Hernández, a high-ranking member of the PCE, recalls in his memoirs, POUM founder Andreu Nin was captured by agents of Stalin’s NKVD, who tried to make him confess to being a fascist traitor …
Skopic goes on to quote from this former Spanish Communist who claims that Nin was tortured and then killed when he would not confess. But Jesús Hernández is not a reliable source.
According to Paul Preston, one of the greatest historians of the Spanish Civil War,
Unfortunately, Jesús Hernández fell into the clutches of Joaquín Gorkín and the Congress for Cultural Freedom.In consequence, his work was manipulated by Gorkín and, I believe, contains several falsifications.
Preston recommends a study by Herbert Southworth and another by Fernando Hernández Sánchez. Both question the objectivity of Jesús Hernández’s book.
Southworth:
According to Gorkin … José Bullejos, Secretary-General of the Spanish Communist Party from 1925 until his expulsion in 1932, informed him that Jesús Hernández wanted to talk with him. It was common knowledge among the Spanish groups in Paris that Gorkin could help to publish anti-Communist books. Gorkin, according to Gorkin, replied to Bullejos: ‘I cannot clasp the hand of Jesús Hernández so long as he has not denounced in a book the Stalinist crimes in Spain and, precisely, the details about the imprisonment and assassination of Andrés Nin’.
Gorkin, in effect, had indicated to Hernández the conditions under which his book could be published. ‘Six months later’, Gorkin continued, ‘after my return to Paris, I received the text of Hemández’s book ‘Yo fui un ministro de Stalin’. Hernández had followed the instructions given by Gorkin … (267)
[Gorkin’s book] contained … thirty pages from Jesús Hemández’s Yo fui un ministro de Stalin, the manuscript of which, as I have indicated above, was corrected following Gorkin’s instructions to overstate the significance of the murder of Andrés Nin, turning it into the pivotal incident of the Spanish Civil War. Unsurprisingly, these pages from Hernández’s opus gave exaggerated importance to the POUM and to the political role of Julián Gorkin. (290-1)
… since the CIA, and its affiliate the Congress [for Cultural Freedom – GF], grouped together, constituted a major world-wide influence for right-wing causes, its centralizing force ineluctably, however haphazardly, pulled into its orbit all those persons interested in besmirching the Spanish Republicans. Among the leading candidates for this kind of work were Julián Gorkin and Burnett Bolloten. (307)
Hernández Sánchez doubts that Jesús Hernández simply followed Gorkin’s hints in order to get his book published. But he does not deny that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front of the American C.I.A., was involved in publishing his book. No genuine communist would accept support from such a source. Hernández Sánchez also records that Ricardo Miralles, a biography of Juan Negrin, questions the accuracy of Jesús Hernández’ book on several grounds.
No one claims that Jesús Hernández was a witness to Nin’s interrogation, so his account is hearsay in that regard. But the story of Nin’s arrest, supposed “torture,” and murder by communist and Republican police have become a mainstay of anticommunist historiography of the Spanish Republic.
There is no evidence that Nin was tortured. Paul Preston believes he was not.
Preston assumes here that Nin had no relation to the fifth column (Francoist forces within the Republic). It is more accurate to say that we don’t know whether he did or not. There is good evidence that Trotskyists and Germany and Francoist agents were both involved in the “May Days” revolt in Barcelona. (See my article for more details and documentation.)
Far from securing a united front, Stalin’s meddling had snuffed out any hope of resistance, and Spanish fascism reigned supreme.
No one has ever cited any evidence that a proletarian revolution could have been victorious in Spain in 1937, much less one led by an unstable coalition under anticommunist leadership, Trotskyist (POUM) and anarchist. Even George Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia was a Cold War-anticommunist hit, later conceded that the Spanish Republic was doomed by the “democratic” Allies, who blockaded aid to the Republic while allowing Hitler and Mussolini to send enormous amounts of materiel, airmen, and soldiers, to aid Franco. In 1942, Orwell wrote:
Skopic recognizes that “nobody, not even the Yugoslav Communists, spoke of revolution.” But Skopic knows better! Sure, he does! So, he still blames Stalin for the fact that
it took until 1945 for Yugoslavia to actually become a socialist nation—a much longer and bloodier struggle than it might have been.
No one believed that socialist revolution was possible while a country, whether Yugoslavia or Spain, was occupied by Hitler’s army. Yugoslav partisans were not able to expel German troops until 1945. They could only do it then because three-quarters of Hitler’s army was fighting the Red Army. This was the help that “Stalin” (read: the Red Army and Soviet people) gave to make the revolution possible in Yugoslavia.
Skopic:
When Greek communists begged Stalin for help in their own civil war, their pleas fell on deaf ears. Stalin, it turned out, had promised to stay out of Greece and Turkey in a backroom deal he made with Churchill, in exchange for greater influence over the Balkans—and he valued his word to an arch-imperialist more than the lives of the Greek partisans. Across the ocean, Harry Truman had no such qualms, and supplied the Greek far right with both military advisors and napalm. The revolution burned to ash.
Skopic falsely assumes that the Soviet Union had the capability of facilitating a revolution in Greece. But Stalin knew that the Red Army was not prepared for a war with the US and Great Britain. The Soviets were probably aware that within a month or so of the end of the war the Western capitalists were considering a joint Allied attack on Soviet forces in Europe – “Operation Unthinkable.” Stalin appears tohave also harbored an illusory hope that the USSR could maintain a peacetime Grand Alliance with the “Allies.”
Homophobia and Abortion
Skopic discusses the law of 1933 criminalizing homosexuality and the later law outlawing abortion on demand while permitting exceptions for medical reasons. What Skopic does not reveal is that the Soviet policy on (male) homosexuality was in accord with medical – that is, scientific – opinion in the advanced capitalist countries.
In the 1930s virtually all Soviet doctors had been trained before the Revolution. The few doctors trained after the Revolution had been educated by the older doctors. Soviet medical science followed that of the European capitalist countries.
It is idealism to fault the Bolsheviks for not somehow knowing that the best contemporary medical opinion was based more on age-old prejudice than on science. Homosexuality and abortion were not legalized in capitalist countries until 40 years later or more.
Skopic:
When the Scottish Marxist Harry Whyte, then working for the Moscow Daily News, wrote his own impassioned letter to Stalin defending gay rights, Stalin’s answer was blunt, scrawled across the letter in pencil: “An idiot and a degenerate.” (To the archives the letter went.)
But even Whyte himself expressed in this letter what we would regard today as prejudiced views about certain types of homosexuality:
When we analyze the nature of the persecution of homosexuals, we should keep in mind that there are two types of homosexuals: first, those who are the way they are from birth … second, there are homosexuals who had a normal sexual life but later became homosexuals, sometimes out of viciousness, sometimes out of economic considerations.
As for the second type, the question is decided relatively simply. People who become homosexuals by virtue of their depravity usually belong to the bourgeoisie, a number of whose members take to this way of life after they have sated themselves with all the forms of pleasure and perversity that are available in sexual relations with women.
Skopic:
The homophobic law remained on the books until 1993, and it decimated the Soviet LGBT community, sending thousands to the Gulag …
Skopic hasn’t even read the text of this law! It does not mention lesbian sex, bisexual persons, or transsexuals. Only sexual relations between men were illegal. Moreover, Skopic does not know how many people were imprisoned under this law. The article linked at this point in Skopic’s essay refers to the 1970s and 80s, not to the much-earlier Stalin period.
Abortion
Abortion on demand was made illegal -- as it was in capitalist societies at that time, and for the same reason: medical opinion opposed it (abortion for medical reasons was of course permitted).
Skopic mentions that the Soviet state provided “paid maternity leave and cash allowances for childcare supplies.” He comments that this Soviet provision of aid to mothers was more progressive even than many capitalist states today, much less at the time.
In today’s capitalist world, where increasing numbers of young people simply can’t afford to have children and are pressured to return immediately to work when they do, some of this might sound genuinely nice.
But then Skopic claims that being supportive to mothers was not Stalin’s intention:
But Stalin was less concerned with helping women or children as such, and more with replacing the devastating loss of population the USSR had suffered in the first World War (to say nothing of his own purges and manufactured famines).
Skopic is determined to portray Stalin in negative tones. But the text of the Soviet law (see below) goes far beyond anything in contemporary capitalist societies at the time.This law was clearly progressive for its time! So Skopic claims that Stalin did not support it for progressive reasons! Skopic cannot possibly know what Stalin’s intentions were – what he was “concerned with.”
Skopic refers to “manufactured famines” -- plural. But there were no “manufactured famines.” There were four famines in the USSR during the 1920s, all due to the devastation of war, disease, and natural causes. The great famine of 1932-33 was entirely due to natural causes. The last famine of Soviet times was in 1946, due to weather conditions that high Western Europe hard as well. I discuss Soviet famines and the research on them in the first two chapters of Blood Lies and the first chapter of Stalin Waiting for … the Truth.
Skopic also doesn’t know that a “purge”—”chistka” in Russian -- was a periodic process of verification of Party membership cards to make sure that Party members were active and not engaged in anything immoral or illegal. The penalty for failing the purge was expulsion from the Party, usually with a chance to reapply after a certain period.
Skopic quotes from a 1946 article by Soviet revolutionary and ambassador Alexandra Kollontai promoting motherhood for Soviet women. Famous for her feminism, Kollontai’s support for motherhood reflects the progressive opinion of that time.
Skopic then quotes from an account by Anna Akimovna Dubova, a Soviet woman who recalled her own illegal abortions. Dubova’s father was a kulak, and her parents were Old Believers who considered the Bolshevik Revolution to be the work of Antichrist. Her anticommunist background may help to explain why Dubova’s account contains an important falsehood (see below).
In the source from which Skopic got Dubova’s story she reveals that she had one child with her husband, who went off to war. Then she lived with another man who abandoned her. Then her husband returned, and she had another child. Later she married at least twice more, and had two abortions. She said:
… So many women died, leaving small children, and so many were sent to prison. Women who had the abortions and suffered were sent to prison, and those who performed the abortions were also sent to prison. …
This is not true. Women who had illegal abortions were not imprisoned. Dubova herself was not imprisoned. Either her memory failed her here, or she deliberately lied to make the Soviet policy appear worse.
The law reads in part:
4. В отношении беременных женщин, производящих аборт в нарушение указанного запрещения, установить как уголовное наказание, общественное порицание, а при повторном нарушении закона о запрещении абортов — штраф до 300 рублей.
4. With regard to pregnant women who have an abortion in violation of the said prohibition, to establish as a criminal punishment, public censure, and in case of repeated violation of the law on the prohibition of abortion - a fine of up to 300 rubles.
It’s worthwhile citing the title of the law (we won’t reproduce the text of the law in full – it’s too long):
Decree on the Prohibition of Abortions, the Improvement of Material Aid to Women in Childbirth, the Establishment of State Assistance to Parents of Large Families, and the Extension of the Network of Lying-in Homes, Nursery schools and Kindergartens, the Tightening-up of Criminal Punishment for the Non-payment of Alimony, and on Certain Modifications in Divorce Legislation.
As far as I can determine, no capitalist state at the time provided such benefits to mothers.
Skopic uses this quotation for an anti-Stalin rant:
This, to put it mildly, does not sound like the actions of any socialist state worthy of the name. Instead, it sounds like something Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis would do if you gave them unlimited power.
When it comes to Stalin and the Soviet Union Skopic is incapable of being objective. His absurd statements here and elsewhere show that he is prejudiced against Stalin to the point where his judgment is disordered. The anti-abortion movement in the US – “Cruz and DeSantis” -- shows no interest in providing the benefits to mothers that the Soviet state was providing in the 1930s.
We must evaluate the Soviet – Stalin’s – policy on abortion on demand not according to the views of progressive people today but in the context of its time and in total, including the benefits to mothers. Viewed historically, Soviet policy was indeed progressive.
Skopic:
This further illustrates the fallacy of taking things out of historical context. Even Skopic concedes that well-known Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai, a progressive in her day, supported this policy in the 1940s.
Art
Skopic doesn’t know or, evidently, care anything about Soviet arti.
But these currents existed in an uneasy tension with “socialist realism,” the brainchild of Anatoly Lunacharsky—a Bolshevik commissar who believed that art should be used for didactic purposes, to depict “ideal” workers and communities and instruct people in how they ought to be living their lives.
Skopic gives no evidence for this statement. I cannot find any either. But here is what scholar of Soviet art K. Andrea Rusnock says about Lunacharsky:
Verbally. Lunacharsky was proclaiming [in 1922] that realist art was the appropriate vehicle for conveying the events of the Bolshevik revolution, its achievements, and the heroes and heroines, of the new Soviet state. Despite his words, however, and the party's increasing pressure, Lunacharsky did continue to support avant-garde art until his 1928 resignation as Commissariat of Enlightenment.
Skopic does not cite any source for his misunderstanding of socialist realism. Indeed, there is no single authoritative definition. Here is what Maksim Gorky wrote about it in 1934:
Социалистический реализм утверждает бытие как деяние, как творчество, цель которого — непрерывное развитие ценнейших индивидуальных способностей человека ради победы его над силами природы, ради его здоровья и долголетия, ради великого счастья жить на земле, которую он, сообразно непрерывному росту его потребностей, хочет обрабатывать всю, как прекрасное жилище человечества, объединённого в одну семью.
Socialist realism affirms being as an act, as creativity, the purpose of which is the continuous development of the most valuable individual abilities of mankind for the sake of his victory over the forces of nature, for the sake of his health and longevity, for the sake of the great happiness of living on the earth, all of which he, in accordance with the continuous growth of his needs, wants to cultivate everything, like a beautiful dwelling of mankind, united in one family
Elsewhere in his essay, but not in this context, Skopic quotes Sheila Fitzpatrick, a mainstream anticommunist historian of the Soviet Union. Here is what Fitzpatrick writes about socialist realism:
The formula of “socialist realism’? which the [Soviet Writers’] Union adopted was not originally conceived as a “party line,” any more than the Union was conceived as an instrument of total control over literature. Both were initially intended to cancel out the old RAPP line of proletarian and Communist exclusiveness and make room for literary diversity …
According to literary historian Lawrence Schwartz,
There is direct evidence to support the contention of liberalization. It is true that a plan for literature was devised, but also that it was not devised by Stalin as a devious ploy for dictatorial control over literature. The guidelines on literature were established not as a separate category but as part of a general Party effort to create a working relationship with fellow travelers.
Skopic:
When Stalin took power, he favored this more authoritarian take on art and put strict new restrictions on both the styles that could be used and the content that could be depicted. Non-representational art came to be viewed as “decadent” (just as it was “degenerate” to the Nazis), and it was usually forbidden to display it.
Instead, public space became an endless gallery of kitsch, with propaganda posters showing muscular Soviet workmen hammering rocks, driving tractors, and gazing sternly into the distance. Predictably, many of the posters were tacky heroic portraits of Stalin himself: Stalin marching with happy workers, Stalin holding a baby, Stalin steering a big boat marked “CCCP.”
Skopic does not like socialist realism and representational art. But who cares what Skopic believes? “Kitsch” is simply a term of insult, a way of avoiding historical accuracy.
Skopic confuses fine art with poster art. The Soviets reproduced paintings on postcards for mass distribution and in larger formats for local exhibitions. Exhibitions of original art works took place mainly in cities.
Art for Whom?
Moreover, Skopic fails to understand a basic question: What kind of art should be encouraged? What kind of art can best serve not the individual vision of the artist, but the working class? Skopic values the individual vision. Socialist realism promoted art that was intelligible to and reflected the interest of the collective.
Skopic:
This is not true. According to the biography of Filonov by Anna Laks:
Филонов все 1930-е бедствует, недоедает, одалживает у жены и сестры деньги, судорожно ищет заказы ... Но позиций не сдает, своих работ не продает, потому что знает, заказ — это заработок, а его личное, свободное творчество вместе со школой — это святое, это его миссия, это его пространство, это его храм, где не место ни иноверцам, ни торговцам.
Throughout the 1930s Filonov lived in poverty, malnourished, borrowing money from his wife and sister, frantically looking for orders … But he doesn’t give up his positions, he doesn’t sell his works, because he knows that an order means wages, and his personal, free creativity, together with his school, is sacred, this is his mission, this is his space, this is his temple, where there is no place for non-believers or merchants.
Ему часто хотят заплатить деньги, приручить, „законтрактовать”, купить его работы из мастерской. Он отказывается от очень многих заманчивых предложений, если в их „идеологии” чувствует что-то не свое, „нефилоновское” … (75)
People often want to pay him money, to tame him, to give him a “contract”, to buy his works from the workshop. He refuses very many tempting offers if in their “ideology” he feels something not his own, “non-Filonovian” …
The Soviet state – “Stalin” – did not condemn him to this life. Filonov chose to live in poverty, begging for money from his family, refusing orders for his paintings, refusing to sell his works.
Filonov died during the Siege of Leningrad, where over a million Soviet civilians died.
Skopic:
In some cases, artists who annoyed Stalin were even framed and executed in the same way as his political rivals, as with the poet Titsian Tabidze—a close friend of Boris Pasternak, who barely escaped execution himself.
According to his Russian-language Wikipedia page Titsian Tabidze enjoyed a celebration of his poetry in in Moscow and Leningrad at the beginning of 1937. Later that year he was named as a participant in an anti-Soviet conspiracy by several important Georgian nationalists such as Budu Mdivani. Someone has seen his trial transcript, since the witnesses against him are named.
There is no evidence that Boris Pasternak “barely escaped execution.” On the contrary! According to Evgenii Gromov, author of Stalin: Art and Power (2003):
And he [Pasternak] spoke just as sincerely about the revolution in the poems “The Nine Hundred and Fifth Year” and “Lieutenant Schmidt.” Genuine feeling permeated his “Stalinist” poems. People close to Pasternak noted that he had a kind of love for Stalin. And he believed in him … (306)
Gromov goes on to relate the famous story about how Pasternak telephoned Stalin to intercede – successfully, as it turned out -- on behalf of his friend the poet Osip Mandel’shtam.
Skopic:
In yet another area of life, freedom, playfulness, and exploration had been replaced with grim conformity and fear, and these would be the aesthetic markers that defined the USSR in the eyes of the world.
This is just slander. There was nothing “grim,” “conformist” or “fearful” about Soviet art. Exhibitions and reproductions of social realist art drew mass audiences in the Soviet Union and influenced art worldwide including W.P.A. art in the USA.
World War II
Skopic:
Stalinist authors like Furr and Ludo Martens devote many pages to the war years …
This is false. I have never written about the war years. And I am not a “Stalinist,” as I explain at the beginning of this essay. I defend not Stalin, but the truth.
Skopic:
The images of Red Army soldiers throwing open the gates of Auschwitz will live in human history forever, and at Stalingrad alone, more than a million of them gave their lives—more than the U.S. lost in the entire war. But crucially, these are not Stalin’s victories, nor his sacrifices. He, like Churchill and Roosevelt, was sitting safely behind his desk when the real heroism happened.
Stalin himself publicly recognized the fact that the victory over the Axis was due not to himself or other leaders but to the ordinary Soviet people, without whom the leaders are nothing. Here is what Stalin said at the Kremlin reception in honor of the participants in the victory:
I am not going to say anything extraordinary. I have the simplest, most ordinary toast. I would like to drink to the health of the people who have little rank and no distinguished title. To the people who are considered the “cogs” of the great state mechanism, but without whom all of us marshals and commanders of fronts and armies, to put it bluntly, are not worth a damn thing. Some little “screw” goes wrong - and it's all over. I raise a toast to the simple, ordinary, modest people, to the “cogs” that keep our great state mechanism in active condition in all branches of science, economy and military affairs. There are a great many of them, their name is legion, because they are tens of millions of people. These are humble people. No one writes about them, they have no title, are of low rank, but these are the people who hold us like the foundation holds the structure. I drink to the health of these people, our respected comrades.
Skopic continues:
Apart from this, there’s evidence that Stalin and his paranoia actively harmed the Soviet war effort. Because Trotsky had been the original architect of the Red Army, Stalin always viewed its officer corps with deep suspicion and carried out extensive purges in the years 1937-8 just as he had within the Bolshevik Party itself. “Three of the five marshals, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, and eight of the nine fleet admirals” were executed, according to one account, together with more than 40,000 men who were dismissed from their posts for various small infractions and accusations of disloyalty.
See below about the high-ranking officers who were, in fact, guilty as charged of conspiring with the German General Staff and Leon Trotsky, who also conspired with Germany and Japan..
The best scholarly study of the officers dismissed from service is by G.I. Gerasimov, originally published in Rossiiskii istoricheskii Zhurnal No. 1 (1999). His estimate is 15,557:
В 1937 году было репрессировано 11034 чел. или 8% списочной численности начальствующего состава, в 1938 году - 4523 чел. или 2,5%.
In 1937, 11,034 people were repressed. or 8% of the payroll of the commanding staff, in 1938 - 4523 people. or 2.5%.
Gerasimov explains his use of the term “repressed” as follows::
К репрессированным автор относит лиц командно-начальствующего состава, уволенных из РККА за связь “с заговорщиками”, арестованных и не восстановленных впоследствии в армии.
The author refers to the repressed persons of the commanding and commanding staff dismissed from the Red Army for their connection “with the conspirators”, arrested and not subsequently reinstated in the army.
Not a small number, but far from Skopic’s 40,000.
Skopic continues:
A particularly consequential loss was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a military genius who had done more than anyone to modernize the Soviet armed forces, introducing revolutionary tank and aircraft tactics that earned him the title “the Red Napoleon.” For his troubles Tukhachevsky was, like so many, tortured into a false confession of treason and shot.
This is false. Hundreds of pages the investigative materials in the “Tukhachevsky Affair” case of May – June 1937 have now been declassified by Russian authorities. This evidence proves that Marshal Tukhachevsky and the seven other officers tried, convicted, and executed with him on June 11, 1937, were certainly guilty.
Skopic says:
(The confession, on file in Moscow today, still has visible bloodstains on it.)
The tale about “bloodstains on one of Tukhachevsky’s confessions” originated in a report to Khrushchev in 1964 and has circulated widely since its publication in 1994. But it is not true.
The document in question has been available to researchers for years now. There are no bloodstains on it. My colleagues Vladimir L. Bobrov, Sven-Eric Holmström, and I devote an entire chapter on the “bloodstains” question in our 2021 book.
Skopic:
These purges left an enormous talent vacuum at the top, which the USSR’s enemies could hardly fail to notice. At the time, General Konstantin Rokossovsky—who was imprisoned for two years, but survived and became a military hero during WWII—said that “this is worse than when artillery fires on its own troops …”
Perhaps Rokossovsky said this, though I can’t find a source. However, Rokossovsky had immense respect for Stalin.
Но настоящий плевок будет впереди, когда Хрущев развернул антисталинскую кампанию. Он попросил Рокоссовского написать что-нибудь о Сталине, дапочерней, как делали многие в те и последующие годы. Из уст Рокоссовского это прозвучало бы: народный герой, любимец армии, сам пострадал в известные годы... Маршал наотрез отказался писать подобнуюстатью, заявив Хрущеву:
— Никита Сергеевич, товарищ Сталин для меня святой!
На другой день, как обычно, он приехал на работу, а в его кабинете, в его кресле, уже сидел маршал К. С. Москаленко, который предъявил ему решение Политбюро о снятии с поста заместителя министра. Даже не позвонили заранее...
… when Khrushchev launched an anti-Stalinist campaign[. H]e asked Rokossovsky to write something about Stalin, but in blacker tones, as many did in those and subsequent years. From the lips of Rokossovsky it would have resounded: a national hero, the favorite of the army, he himself suffered in certain years ... The Marshal flatly refused to write such an article, saying to Khrushchev:
- Nikita Sergeevich, for me comrade Stalin is a saint!
The next day, as usual, he arrived at work, and Marshal K.S. Moskalenko was already sitting in his office, in his chair, and showed him the decision of the Politburo to remove him from the post of deputy minister. They didn't even call ahead to tell him.
Stalin personally apologized to Rokossovsky when the latter was released from prison where Yezhov’s men had beaten him.
Skopic:
… and at the Nuremberg Trials, Wehrmacht field marshal Wilhelm Keitel testified that Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR was based partly on his belief that “the first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need.”
Once again, Skopic cites no source. If Keitel did say this, it would have been out of ignorance.
Hitler and Heinrich Himmler knew that Tukhachevsky had been conspiring with Germany, as did others in the German Foreign Ministry. For quotations from the primary sources see Chapters 6 and 12 of Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy.
Skopic:
So not only did Stalin’s “tough decisions” not win the war, but they actually played a part in getting his country attacked and leaving it with a limited capacity to fight back.
Exactly the opposite is the case In August 1937 Hitler himself told some of his generals that their reliance on Tukhachevsky and the others had failed – the treasonous Soviet generals were “under the ground.”
Fascists Like Not Stalin But the False Portrayal of Stalin
In the following paragraph Skopic notes that some contemporary fascists and white supremacists claim to admire Stalin/ Skopic concludes: “In other words, the two [Stalin and Hitler] were more alike than different.”
Nonsense! These contemporary fascists believe the same phony history that Skopic does. They imagine Stalin as anticommunists like Skopic, Trotskyists, Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and anticommunist “scholars” portray him.
That is, these latter-day racists and fascists are reacting to this false portrayal of Stalin. If they knew the truth about Stalin they would hate him just as the racists and fascists of his day hated him.
Not “Hitler and Stalin” But Hitler and Churchill
It is more accurate to compare to Hitler not Stalin, but political leaders like Winston Churchill and other British leaders, and any or all of the presidents of France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States of America. These supposedly “democratic” leaders killed millions of workers and peasants in their empires. To hundreds of millions of people around the world, the Soviet Union was a beacon of the fight for independence and freedom from the savage repression by Western colonial powers.
Skopic’s final paragraph summarizes many of the lies he has written, and no doubt believes.
Stalin offered the world nothing but weakness: constantly jumping at imaginary threats, alienating potential allies, and dividing the working class against itself.
These claims by Skopic are false on the evidence, as we have demonstrated in detail in published research.
A “strong” movement does not need to arrest poets for using a different style to the approved one. For anyone skeptical of the police or prisons, the idea that it even could is monstrous.
This is a lie. Stalin never did any of these things. It is significant that Skopic himself does not name even one such incident.
… aspects of the Stalinist idea keep popping up—in defenses of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad as opponents of “imperialism,” in disdain for feminism and LGBTQ rights as distractions, and in the attitude that anything is justified if it leads to power.
Shortly after Stalin’s death the American C.I.A. reported that Stalin had not a dictator, Nor does Skopic even attempt to argue that Stalin believed that the quest for power justifies “anything.”
Skopic concludes:
All of this is a poisonous dead end for the left, and the question “how can we be sure you won’t create another Stalin?” is a serious one for future parties and movements to address.
Here is the problem: Stalin has been slandered, falsely accused of a many crimes that he never committed. The reasons for this slander are obvious.
Capitalists hate the communist movement because of its magnificent successes. The Revolution of 1917 throughout Russia and the victory against the Whites and the Allied interventionists took place when Lenin was alive. But the rest of the successes of the Soviet Union and the Comintern took place after Lenin’s death when Stalin was in the leadership.
These include:
* Through the Third Communist International, or Comintern, led by and headquartered in the USSR, the worldwide anti-imperialist movement in colonial possessions of the phony “democracies.”
* Socialist revolutions in China, Vietnam, Albania, and elsewhere, all led by local communists but inspired and aided by Soviet agents.
* The defense of the Spanish Republic against the fascist and Nazi forces during the Spanish Civil War, the single greatest act of proletarian internationalism in history.
* The defeat of the fascists in World War II.
* Material security for workers: low-cost housing and public transportation, guaranteed employment, vacations, medical care, pensions.
* The promotion of women into jobs and professions traditionally reserved for me.
* The commitment to oppose racism against minority ethnicities and nonwhite people.
Conclusion: How Could Skopic Be So Wrong?
Skopic is wrong on every charge he makes against Stalin. But how is this possible? The charges of crimes and misdeeds that Skopic levels against Stalin are generally consistent with what we hear and read about Stalin almost everywhere -- from the mass media, from textbooks, from academic specialists in history. How could all these sources of historical information be wrong? Here is a brief explanation.
The field of “Soviet Studies” (hereafter without the scare quotes) has always been the servant ofanticommunist propaganda combined with an to understand the communist movement for the purposes of maligning and weakening it. The contradiction between understanding Soviet reality and providing anticommunist and eventually anti-Stalin propaganda intensified with the Cold War. It continues today.
A second stream of anticommunist propaganda has concentrated on the figure of Joseph Stalin, the leading political figure in the USSR between the death of Vladimir Lenin in January, 1924, until his own death in March, 1953. The most important forces here are Leon Trotsky, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mikhail Gorbachev.
I first encountered the “Stalin vs Trotsky”conflict within the communist movement within the anti-Vietnam War movement of the ‘60s. During the past two decades I have done a great deal of research on Trotsky’s writings between the mid-20s until his assassination in 1940. Contrary to what I had expected, my research has revealed that Trotsky lied about Stalin so flagrantly and so frequently that at first I found it hard to believe.
Trotsky’s lies became a major source for Nikita Khrushchev, starting with this famous “Secret Speech” to the XX Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on February 25, 1956. During and especially after the XXII Party Congress in October 1961, Khrushchev sponsored an avalanche of phony “research” by equally phony historians who accused Stalin of innumerable crimes. This material became “evidence” for generations of historians.
About a year after becoming First Secretary of the CPSU Mikhail Gorbachev inaugurated a campaign of accusations and vilification of Stalin that outdid Khrushchev’s. It too was carried out by a phalanx of dishonest historians who published hundreds of books and articles in which Stalin was accused of many terrible crimes.
Instead of exposing this phony research, post-Soviet historians have doubled down on it, accepting Trotsky-, Khrushchev- and Gorbachev-era allegations against Stalin and adding yet more. They have done so despite the enormous number of primary-source documents, largely from former Soviet archives, that have made it possible to examine accusations against Stalin and either verify or – in all, or almost all, cases – disprove them.
Today most falsehoods about Stalin and the Stalin years come from academic historians. These academics draw heavily upon the mountain of anti-Stalin and anticommunist lies produced by Trotsky and under Khrushchev and Gorbachev and also concoct some of their own.
On the Left Trotskyists repeat Trotsky’s proven lies and repeat anticommunist lies of “legitimated” academics, while “socialists” – anticommunist social-democrats like Skopic is – do likewise, without the cultlike repetition of the Trotskyists.
* * * * *
I have been studying the allegations of crimes against Joseph Stalin for many years. My intention is to research every one of them.
When I began years ago I thought that it would be only a matter of time – perhaps a year or two – before I discovered that at least one of these allegations against Stalin was true, could be confirm ed by primary-source evidence. I was wrong. So far, after several decades of searching, I have yet to evidence that Stalin committed even one crime, much less the myriad crimes that Trotsky, Khrushchev’s men, Gorbachev’s men, and academic researchers have confidently asserted.
I intend tokeep looking. Perhaps some day I will discover at least one genuine crime that I can truthfully say is supported by the best evidence we have. If and when I do, I will publish it and the evidence to support it.
AUTHOR'S REFS
Here are the links to my article:
* at “In Defense of Communism:
http://www.idcommunism.com/2023/05/anti-stalin-falsehoods-from-socialist-writer.html
* at “The Greanville Post”
https://www.greanvillepost.com/2023/05/16/anti-stalin-falsehoods-from-a-socialist-writer/(NOTE: No end notes on this version)
* at my own Home Page
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/gfantiskopic0523.html
* in PDF format (with footnotes, perhaps more suitable for printing)
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/gfantiskopic0523.pdf
Please feel free to share this essay with anyone you think may be interested.
Also, please send me your comments and criticisms.
Warm regards and solidarity!
Grover Furr
Stalin was socialism’s worst enemy. History is easily forgotten, so nostalgia for the “Man of Steel” needs to be guarded against.
declaring “better the worst of Stalinism than the best of the liberal-capitalist welfare state” in his book Trouble in Paradise. By themselves, these figures are fairly marginal, but the politics Stalin represents—admiration for dictators, disdain for democracy and debate, and a fast-and-loose approach to human rights and the historical record—are far more widespread. So how, we might ask, do otherwise intelligent people find themselves drawn to Stalinism, then and now? What is the appeal?
We can find the key word in Bair’s comments: strength. Stalinists long for a “strong” left that wins at any cost—one that isn’t afraid to fight dirty, or to use harsh and autocratic methods against its enemies. In the Anglophone West, some may have been disillusioned by the electoral defeat of figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and concluded that democratic socialism is too “weak” for the tasks at hand, turning to more authoritarian strains instead. In the Global South, meanwhile, some labor leaders and activists see the former USSR as fairly benign compared to genocidal abusers like the U.S. and Britain, and admire Stalin himself enough to name their kids after him. Hence the jarring appearance of political figures like India’s M.K. Stalin or Sri Lanka’s Joseph Stalin (a trade unionist arrested for helping to organize a general strike in 2022). In either case, the underlying assumption is that Stalin really was the “Man of Steel” portrayed in Soviet propaganda—a tireless warrior who embodied the will of the global working class, and an implacable enemy of exploiters and fascists everywhere.
It’s easy to see how such an image would be attractive, especially in difficult political and economic times. People want heroes, and they’ll ignore any number of inconvenient facts to preserve a narrative they find satisfying. In the wake of Stalin’s death in 1953, the floodgates of state censorship opened, and a seemingly endless series of atrocity stories came out—but some socialists, both in the USSR and the West, simply refused to believe them, as Vivian Gornick recounts in The Romance of American Communism:
My mother was desperately confused. My aunt remained adamantly Stalinist. Night after night we quarreled violently.
“Lies!” I screamed at my aunt. “Lies and treachery and murder. A maniac has been sitting there in Moscow! A maniac has been sitting there in the name of socialism. In the name of socialism!” […]
“A Red-baiter!” my aunt yelled back. “A lousy little Red-baiter you’ve become! Louie Gornick must be turning over in his grave, that his daughter has become a Red-baiter!”
Others believed the accounts of torture and repression, but found ways to rationalize them, as Norman Finkelstein ruefully recalls in his essay “Misadventures in the Class Struggle”:
In my mind I was able to adduce a thousand justifications: some more, some less plausible, one often contradicting the other, each containing a morsel of truth, but, although not wrong, none—when I look back—finally adequate. I could facilely draw on an arsenal of clichés: “Revolution is not a dinner party” (Mao), “Revolutions are not pink teas” (Rosa Luxemburg), or the old Bolshevik standbys, “To make an omelette, you have to break eggs,” and “When you fell a tree, chips will fly.” If on occasion I found myself inwardly unnerved by the bloody horrors, I imagined that it was because I was too faint of heart, lacking the requisite ruthlessness to be a true revolutionary.
These are, broadly speaking, the two rationales used by Stalin’s defenders today. Either the murderous nature of his regime was completely fabricated (the theme of Grover Furr’s signature book Khrushchev Lied), or the noble goal of revolution justified the “requisite ruthlessness” along the way. Mix and match as needed.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Stalin’s most prominent critics today actually are “red-baiters” who cynically use his crimes as a cudgel against socialism in general. Consider our old friend Ben Shapiro, who immediately jumped to condemn Dr. Bair’s pro-Stalin comments, insisting that Stalin was “a mass murderer responsible for the death of tens of millions of human beings.” (Notably, Shapiro supported the invasion of Iraq and continues to support the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, so it’s not like he objects to mass murder as such.) Then there’s Jordan Peterson, who cites Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as a formative influence for his own hatred of “radical leftists.” (He leaves out the bit where Solzhenitsyn was a none-too-subtle antisemite who wanted Jews to accept “their own share of sin” for their supposed “disproportionate role” in the Soviet government.) In the media, any reasonably prominent socialist can expect to get accused of being a potential Stalin. This guilt-by-association was the root of commentator Chris Matthews’ public meltdown during the 2020 presidential primaries, when he speculated that a Bernie Sanders victory would lead to “executions in Central Park,” and of Boris Johnson’s rhetoric in the 2019 U.K. elections, when he accused Jeremy Corbyn of persecuting the rich “with a relish and a vindictiveness not seen since Stalin.” These are obviously absurd smear attempts, so it’s tempting to imagine that the basic concept of Stalin-as-evil is equally groundless—and further, that he might even have been a misunderstood hero if right-wing ideologues hate him so much.
Then, too, it’s important to give the devil his due. Stalin had his strengths, and he knew how to use them. While Hitler is usually recognized for his rhetorical skill and ability to sway a crowd, Stalin could be just as eloquent, if not more so. When he criticized the capitalist West, as he did in a 1936 interview with the American journalist Roy Howard, his points struck home:
It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.
All this is perfectly true, and beautifully stated. Predictably enough, the quote still circulates as a meme today. It’s not the only rhetorical victory for Stalinism, either. In the ongoing rivalry between the two powers, Stalin and his propagandists never missed a chance to slam the United States for its record on racial injustice, deploying the bitter phrase “А у вас негров линчуют” (“And you are lynching Negroes!”) whenever American diplomats criticized the USSR’s human rights abuses. This was, of course, a cynical ploy, but it had positive consequences. After being publicly shamed in forums like the United Nations, some postwar American leaders felt pressured to support the Civil Rights movement “out of a desire to promote a positive image of America abroad, particularly in the contest for support in developing and decolonized countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—principal proxy arenas for the Cold War.” (This much is, nowadays, admitted on official government websites.) As interventions in world history go, that’s not a small thing, and Stalin’s government won the support of several prominent African American thinkers and activists, including Langston Hughes (who poignantly noted1 that “In the Soviet Union, dark men are also mayors of cities”), Paul Robeson (who visited the USSR in 1934 and said that “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life”), and even a late-career W.E.B. Du Bois. Could these three men, each a genius in his own field, have been so completely wrong?
Well, yes. Sadly, they could. To an extent, they had good reason for being taken in—the extent of Soviet repression wasn’t yet well known, and when people like Hughes and Robeson toured the USSR, they were shown a carefully curated version that showcased only the best elements. (For the same reason, dignitaries visiting the U.S. do not see Rikers Island.) The Stalinists of the 20th century desperately wanted to believe in the promise of a new society, and they weren’t given the facts they needed to see through the illusion. In the 21st century, though, we have no such excuse. There is ample evidence from dozens of different sources detailing Stalin’s abuses and betrayals, and it has become impossible to view his time in power with any kind of admiration or nostalgia. Instead, it’s vital for today’s leftists to face the truth, horrible as it is, and avoid falling into the same old patterns of self-deception.
2 is particularly haunting, using Stalin’s personal nickname in an appeal to their onetime friendship: Koba, why do you need me to die?) In the same year, Jānis Rudzutaks, a Latvian revolutionary who had served ten years in Tsarist prisons for his Bolshevik convictions, was executed despite never having voiced the slightest objection to the Party line. His only offense,3 according to Stalin’s confidante Vyacheslav Molotov, was that he was “too easygoing about the opposition” and “indulged too much in partying with philistine friends,” and was therefore a liability. No one was safe.
4 the quota for Trotskyites, but were short on nationalists, even though they’d taken all the Tatar writers they could think of.” Later, others fell victim to the sadism of Lavrentiy Beria, a truly vile figure who used his position as head of the secret police to sexually assault hundreds of women and girls, often threatening a loved one under arrest to secure their silence. (When this method didn’t work, Beria simply murdered his victims; in 1993, workers digging a ditch at his former home found several sets of human remains that had been hastily covered up with quicklime.) directly recorded in the Soviet archives (799,455 executions, 1.7 million deaths while imprisoned, 390,000 during the forced resettlement of rural peasants, and 400,000 people deported to Siberia and elsewhere), we still get a figure of more than three million. Some of these, doubtless, were actually guilty of something, including Nazi sympathizers and fifth columnists. Still, no crime justifies a slow, agonizing death by frostbite or starvation in the Gulag. This is practically the definition of “cruel and unusual.” Even at the time, socialists were among the most vocal opponents of capital punishment as an institution, and Stalin’s haphazard death-dealing shows exactly why. Even one life wrongfully taken in the name of socialism would be an appalling tragedy. Three million is a horror almost too vast to contemplate. Along with the death of citizens came the death of ideals. Under Stalin’s leadership, many of the hard-won victories of 1917 were undermined and rolled back, in a downward slide into social and political conservatism. As Leon Sedov, son of the exiled Trotsky, notedmournfully in 1936: There are layers of irony to this passage. Trotsky himself, after all, had been instrumental in putting down the 1921 Kronstadt sailors’ uprising, so it’s a bit rich for his heirs to decry the return of military hierarchy. But if anything, Sedov is understating his case. More than being “divided into different layers,” the working class found itself increasingly micromanaged and exploited under Stalin. As Sheila Fitzpatrick details in her meticulous book Everyday Stalinism, new labor-discipline laws introduced in 1938 and 1940 made it a criminal offense to be more than 20 minutes late to work, punishable by dismissal at minimum and sometimes actual imprisonment. The hated “domestic passports” used by the Tsars were reintroduced, forcing workers to show their “papers” to police at a moment’s notice, and justify why they were in a given area. If they couldn’t, this too could lead to arrest and prison time. The government even resorted to strikebreaking and the suppression of labor power, arresting workers en masse in the cotton-mill town of Teikovo when they organized a short-lived strike against food rationing. Bolshevism had offered a promise of total liberation for working people, but now, Stalinism delivered the opposite. In place of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” there was only a dictatorship of the police and prisons over the proletariat, with men like Beria as the cops-in-chief. The point about “revolutionary internationalism,” too, deserves a closer look. At first glance, this might seem like an arcane Trotskyist grievance, but the consequences for people around the world were very real. To the extent that he believed in anything, Stalin was a firm believer in “socialism in one country”—that is, the idea that the Soviet Union should focus on its own industrial development, compete with the West on that basis, and remain detached from any form of global class struggle. The old slogan “workers of the world, unite!” was abandoned, and the Soviet state became either indifferent or actively hostile to the efforts of socialist movements in other countries, even as those movements looked to it for support and guidance. In the Spanish Civil War, for example, the USSR lent a limited amount of military aid to the Republican forces battling Francisco Franco. But at the same time, Stalin dictated the policy line of the Spanish Communist Party (Partido Comunista de España, or PCE), which was fiercely loyal to Moscow, and through this mouthpiece, he made it painfully clear that there would be no workers’ revolution as a result of the war. Instead, the PCE mandated a “united front” with a so-called “progressive bourgeoisie”—in other words, any part of the ruling class that wasn’t actively fascist—dismantled the self-governing workers’ councils that had sprung up in the early days of the war, and declared that “any seizure of property by the workers is only a temporary measure in the interests of defence,” with capitalist ownership to return as soon as possible. Understandably, many Spanish communists refused to follow these high-handed orders, especially in the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification—the other, non-Stalinist communist party in the mix). So the Stalinists pressured the Republican government to declare the POUM an illegal organization, causing open conflict between the two factions. As Jesús Hernández, a high-ranking member of the PCE, recalls in his memoirs, POUM founder Andreu Nin was captured by agents of Stalin’s NKVD, who tried to make him confess to being a fascist traitor: Nin did not capitulate. He resisted, to their dismay. His torturers grew impatient. They decided to abandon the ‘dry’ method. Now came the living blood, the rended flesh, the twisted muscles, which would put to the test the man’s integrity and capacity for physical resistance. Nin bore up under the cruelty of the torment and the pain of refined torture. At the end of a few days his human shape had been turned into a formless mass of swollen flesh. Orlov, in a frenzy, crazed by the fear of failure—a failure which could mean his own liquidation—slavered over with rage against this sick man who agonised without ‘confessing,’ without implicating himself or seeking to implicate his party comrades who, at a single word from him, would have been stood up against the wall for execution, to the joy and heart-felt satisfaction of all the Russians. Nin never did give his tormentors what they wanted, and his courage and endurance only brings their betrayal of the most basic socialist principles into sharp relief. Still, the damage was already done. The fratricidal infighting between POUM and PCE drove a wedge through the Republican alliance as a whole, weakening its forces even as Franco gained in strength, and by 1939, the war was lost. Far from securing a united front, Stalin’s meddling had snuffed out any hope of resistance, and Spanish fascism reigned supreme. This hostility to revolutionary movements abroad didn’t end with Spain, either. In his own memoirs, Yugoslavian diplomat Milovan Djilas recalls how Stalin’s USSR was strangely reluctant to acknowledge the ambitions of his country’s socialist partisans, who were fighting a war on two fronts—both against Nazi invasion, and to overthrow their monarchy: Though nobody, not even the Yugoslav Communists, spoke of revolution, it was long since obvious that it was going on. In the West they were already writing a great deal about it. In Moscow, however, they obdurately refused to recognize it—even those who had, so to speak, every reason to do so. Everyone stubbornly talked only about the struggle against the German invaders, and even more stubbornly stressed exclusively the patriotic nature of that struggle. There could be any number of reasons for this stance, from Stalin’s distrust of internationalism in general to a desire to avoid angering the Allies by stirring up revolutionary fervor in Eastern Europe. Whatever the cause, relations between the two camps remained frosty, and it took until 1945 for Yugoslavia to actually become a socialist nation—a much longer and bloodier struggle than it might have been. Even after the conclusion of WWII, this standoffishness remained a consistent pattern. When Greek communists begged Stalin for help in their own civil war, their pleas fell on deaf ears. Stalin, it turned out, had promised to stay out of Greece and Turkey in a backroom deal he made with Churchill, in exchange for greater influence over the Balkans—and he valued his word to an arch-imperialist more than the lives of the Greek partisans. Across the ocean, Harry Truman had no such qualms, and supplied the Greek far right with both military advisors and napalm. The revolution burned to ash. penal code of 1922, the USSR had become one of the first nations on Earth (after revolutionary France and its imitators) to decriminalize homosexuality, and homophobia—although it obviously still existed—had begun to fade into the margins, viewed as part of the same feudal “backwardness” and conservatism that characterized the old Tsarist regime. The Bolshevik party had its share of gay officials, such as Georgy Chicherin, who served as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs from 1918 to 1930, and openly gay writers and artists like Mikhail Kuzmin were highly respected in early Soviet cultural circles. (Kuzmin himself, incidentally, is one of the great forgotten figures of world literature; among other things, his novel Wings is the first widely-published work to depict a “coming out” scene.) With Stalin, all this changed. In 1933, secret police deputy chief Genrikh Yagoda wrote to Stalin claiming that homosexuality had “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers,” and that gay men were likely to be spies and traitors meeting in conspiratorial “circles.” Stalin agreed, and replied that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment.” The following year, a new article5 was added to the penal code, dictating that “sexual relations of a man with a man (pederasty) shall be punished by deprivation of freedom for a term of up to five years,” and police raids on the homes of well-known gay men became commonplace. (Like Victorian England, the state made no mention of lesbians, apparently reluctant to acknowledge they existed.) When the Scottish Marxist Harry Whyte, then working for the Moscow Daily News, wrote his own impassioned letter to Stalin defending gay rights, Stalin’s answer was blunt, scrawled across the letter in pencil: “An idiot and a degenerate.” (To the archives the letter went.) The homophobic law remained on the books until 1993, and it decimated the Soviet LGBT community, sending thousands to the Gulag—where they were ostracized, labeled with various slurs, and routinely abused and assaulted by both the guards and their fellow prisoners. With a few strokes of a pen, the Soviet Union’s brief window of sexual and gender liberation had been savagely slammed shut. special government medals for women who had multiple children, placing motherhood on an equal footing with military service as a priority of Soviet society—and tacitly discouraging other ambitions. outlawing abortion in June 1936. As usual, solidarity between women made this unenforceable, but the resulting black market was both expensive and unsafe, relying on babki (midwives) who often worked in cramped and unsanitary conditions. Anyone who helped to end a pregnancy could be sentenced to two years in prison, and police were merciless in pursuing this “crime,” as one woman of the time recalls6: It was terrible, absolutely terrible. So many women died, leaving small children, and so many were sent to prison. Women who had the abortions and suffered were sent to prison, and those who performed the abortions were also sent to prison. We were interrogated. I remember how after I had had the abortion I was lying there, weak from the loss of blood, and they kept questioning me, Who performed it, who performed it? And I was so weak, yet how could I send a person whom I had personally asked to perform the abortion to prison? […] I felt so awful that on my way home I crept under the railroad platform and thought, I’ll just lie here and die. And to think that two children were waiting for me at home! Even art wasn’t safe. In its early years, the Soviet Union had seen an unprecedented flowering of avant-garde and experimental art, in keeping with the idea that a radically new society would express itself in radically new ways. Artists like Pavel Filonov—who was also chairman of the Revolutionary War Committee in the Dunay region—invented entirely new schools of painting, while others enthusiastically adopted European movements like Cubism and Futurism and pushed them to new heights. Authors like Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote some of their most important works in the 1920s. Science fiction imagined a dizzying array of possible futures, and Soviet artists took to the new medium of film to depict them. But these currents existed in an uneasy tension with “socialist realism,” the brainchild of Anatoly Lunacharsky—a Bolshevik commissar who believed that art should be used for didactic purposes, to depict “ideal” workers and communities and instruct people in how they ought to be living their lives. When Stalin took power, he favored this more authoritarian take on art and put strict new restrictions on both the styles that could be used and the content that could be depicted. Non-representational art came to be viewed as “decadent” (just as it was “degenerate” to the Nazis), and it was usually forbidden to display it. Instead, public space became an endless gallery of kitsch, with propaganda posters showing muscular Soviet workmen hammering rocks, driving tractors, and gazing sternly into the distance. Predictably, many of the posters were tacky heroic portraits of Stalin himself: Stalin marching with happy workers, Stalin holding a baby, Stalin steering a big boat marked “CCCP.” Titsian Tabidze—a close friend of Boris Pasternak, who barely escaped execution himself. In yet another area of life, freedom, playfulness, and exploration had been replaced with grim conformity and fear, and these would be the aesthetic markers that defined the USSR in the eyes of the world. What about World War II, though? Surely that’s Stalin’s ace in the hole—that no matter how many people he purged, how many socialist movements he wrecked, or how much of a bigot and philistine he was personally, his “tough decisions” were the crucial factor that won the war. Stalinist authors like Furr and Ludo Martens devote many pages to the war years, and there is one thing they’re right about: the Soviet Union, more than any other geopolitical group, was responsible for breaking the back of Nazi Germany, and destroying Hitler’s empire of madness and death. The images of Red Army soldiers throwing open the gates of Auschwitz will live in human history forever, and at Stalingrad alone, more than a million of them gave their lives—more than the U.S. lost in the entire war. But crucially, these are not Stalin’s victories, nor his sacrifices. He, like Churchill and Roosevelt, was sitting safely behind his desk when the real heroism happened. To credit him with “winning the war” or “defeating Nazism,” as if he personally parachuted into Berlin with a belt of grenades and started blowing up bunkers, is to erase the collective struggle of millions, and to surrender to the deeply conservative “great man” theory of history. Supposed Marxists should know better. extensive purges in the years 1937-8 just as he had within the Bolshevik Party itself. “Three of the five marshalls, thirteen of the fifteen army commanders, and eight of the nine fleet admirals” were executed, according to one account, together with more than 40,000 men who were dismissed from their posts for various small infractions and accusations of disloyalty. A particularly consequential loss was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a military genius who had done more than anyone to modernize the Soviet armed forces, introducing revolutionary tank and aircraft tactics that earned him the title “the Red Napoleon.” For his troubles Tukhachevsky was, like so many, tortured into a false confession of treason and shot. (The confession, on file in Moscow today, still has visible bloodstains on it.) testified that Hitler’s decision to invade the USSR was based partly on his belief that “the first-class high-ranking officers were wiped out by Stalin in 1937, and the new generation cannot yet provide the brains they need.” So not only did Stalin’s “tough decisions” not win the war, but they actually played a part in getting his country attacked and leaving it with a limited capacity to fight back. Certainly today’s Nazis aren’t worried about Stalinism as a potential threat. Just the opposite, in fact. In Stalin: The Enduring Legacy, Kerry Bolton—a New Zealand white supremacist and frequent contributor to the “books you can’t read on the bus” subgenre, whose other works include The Holocaust Myth and Mel Gibson and the Pharisees—praises Stalin for “reversing the Bolshevik-Marxist psychosis that would have reduced Russia to chaos and destroyed the very soul of the Russian people,” and hails Stalinism as “a major force for tradition and conservatism in the world, against globalization.” Minus the “psychosis” bit, he’s exactly right. The diagnosis neatly follows that of Konstantin Rodzaevsky, the leader-in-exile of the Russian Fascist Party, who remarked7) shortly before his death in 1946 that “Stalinism is exactly what we mistakenly called ‘Russian Fascism.’ It is our Russian Fascism cleansed of extremes, illusions, and errors.” In other words, the two were more alike than they were different. Heavy on quotes like these, all Bolton’s book really does is to document different aspects of the USSR’s rightward drift under Stalin—he’s especially fond of the abortion ban—and then smugly assert that they were actually good things. For the avowed Stalinists of today’s left, is this not concerning? could is monstrous. Thankfully, it’s still fairly rare to find someone who idolizes the man himself, but aspects of the Stalinist idea keep popping up—in defenses of dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad as opponents of “imperialism,” in disdain for feminism and LGBTQ rights as distractions, and in the attitude that anything is justified if it leads to power. All of this is a poisonous dead end for the left, and the question “how can we be sure you won’t create another Stalin?” is a serious one for future parties and movements to address. The working people of the world have no need for a Man of Steel; they’re already more than capable of leading themselves.
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Did you sign up yet for our FREE bulletin? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORSTwo worlds, staged on May 6 and 9Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise. by Thierry Meyssan
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NOT JUST IN RUSSIA: Berliners participate in ‘Immortal Regiment’ march honouring the Soviet soldiers
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Traditionally, since 1965, Russians also march on Victory Day, May 9, in honor of their grandparents and great-grandparents killed fighting the Nazis. From 2012, this parade became widespread throughout the country and was organized under the name of the "Immortal Regiment". Today it is not so much to celebrate the dead, but to pose as his successors, to say that we are ready to die to defend others. Russians are patriotic, not chauvinistic, but capable of sacrifice.
Given the Ukrainian attacks, most of these parades will not take place this year. Vladimir Putin will preside over the events, including the traditional parade of armies on Red Square. In the West, he is described as a dictator living in luxury, far from his people. His fellow citizens know that this is not true. He is of Russian culture and therefore considers, like them, that luxury should not make him forget that he is a man.
If the subjects of King Charles III are fascinated by the magnificence of the Crown, the citizens of President Putin consider that there is no nobility in adorning themselves with stolen jewels. For them, only what one has earned oneself has value.
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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS