By Alexander Tarasov
SUGGESTED BY SENIOR EDITOR GAITHER STEWART
Scepsis.ru

The Return to a Global Revolutionary Strategy Based on the Experience of the 20th Century

Preface to the English Edition

“The World Revolution 2” is an old text; it was written before the global economic crisis, in the late 2005—early 2006. So it happened that Hungarian was the language this text was first published in, in the journal Eszmélet in 2006 (http://www.eszmelet.hu) because the article was based on a paper delivered at Budapest in October 2005. It was only at the end of 2009 that I managed to have the text published in Russian, in the journal Levaya Politika. Then, in 2010, there was a Ukrainian version published in the journal Vpered. That means that the facts of the global crisis are neither analysed, nor even mentioned in the very article.

Nonetheless, they speak for themselves and perfectly prove that the theses and analysis contained in the article are justified. Since this is a preface to the English version, let me focus primarily upon some episodes related to the First World, although I have to be brief.

Firstly, please note that the current crisis is the first truly global economic crisis coming after WWII. It was quite predictable: as soon as the worldwide confrontation between the two systems (the Cold War, that is the World War III which de facto forced the capitalist economy to work as a military one because of the arms race and the impact the fact of confronting the “external enemy” had upon the internal situation) came to an end, the functioning mechanisms of the capitalist economy, well known to us from the Marxist political economy classics, restarted working without distortion again.

Secondly, let me point out that the economic crisis has hit the capitalist periphery the hardest: it is where the UN and FAO have recorded 1 billion hungry people (the figure unprecedented in the world history!); it is where we have witnessed classic revolts of the hungry in Egypt, Bangladesh, Haiti, etc.; it is where the crisis has destabilized the political structures which appeared to be stable, or were successfully stabilized not so long ago (Thailand, Mauritania, Haiti, Kyrgyzstan, Honduras, Mexico, Côte d’Ivoire).

But, typically for a global economic crisis under capitalism, the current crisis started not in the periphery but in the capitalist metropolis. And it is in the metropolis (which accumulates most capital and other wealth!) where the ruling classes tried to do their best to solve the economic problems at the expense of the workers, at the expense of the wage earners. Banks and corporations on the brink of collapse were everywhere saved with cash from the budget (from budgetary funding to direct nationalization, and nobody is making a secret of the act that it is temporary nationalization), i.e. at the expense of the ordinary taxpayer unable to conceal his income by resorting to the “rightsizing” accounting techniques or placing it offshore. The next step was to introduce, under the pretext of “anti-crisis measures”, aggressive neoliberal methods of “cost saving” that is to initiate a new round of counterreforms aimed at dismantling the welfare state.

So how did wage workers of the metropolis respond to this offensive? The attack on their earnings and rights was so blatant and gross, wasn’t it? One could hardly come up with a better test of the revolutionary potential of the broadest masses of workers of the First World.

If one looks through leftist periodicals, whether anarchist, Trotskyite, Maoist, Stalinist, or of smaller tendencies, published in the countries of the metropolis, overoptimism leaps to one’s eye. “The workers got up for their rights!”, “Mobilization unseen in many years”, “General strike, the first one for… (a number of years follows)”, “All trade unions were unanimous for the first time in… (a number of years again)!”, “Revival of the working class spirit!”, etc., etc. Though the tone is quieter and optimism contained in the countries where mass mobilizations and large-scale strikes took place not so long ago. The French left, for example, on the one hand, are boasting of their achievements but, on the other, are already looking for those responsible for the failure (although the struggle seemingly is not over).

It’s clear why. General strikes (especially in the countries which hadn’t seen those for decades) and multi-million demonstrations are impressive, of course, but the result is always the same: the ruling class quietly spits at them and continues their neoliberal counterreforms everywhere. We can see it in Greece, and in Italy, and in France, and in Spain, and in Portugal, and in Germany, and in Britain, and in Ireland. Elections, which do not change anything, serve as a bone tossed to the embittered people: Labour may take over from the Conservatives (in Britain), and vice versa the Conservatives (neoliberal radicals) may replace the Socialists (in Greece) that does not matter; whoever forms the government, it keeps pursuing (and even intensifying) the same policy of counterreforms despite the widest and most impressive protests of the population.

Why is it happening? Because participants of the mass protests in the metropolis, who are wage earners, representatives of the middle class, make no attempt at the founding principles of the System. These classes, which have been for decades bribed with a share of the super profit extracted by monopolies from the Third World and distributed among the general population, are quite satisfied with capitalism, and all they want is to have capitalism with a “human face”. And they are completely unaware of the fact, or rather prefer not to hear about it because it is an unpleasant fact, that such a “human face” in the metropolis can be made possible only by way of looting and overexploiting the periphery. That means their protest is purely defensive (and even conservative where it comes to preserving the vanishing welfare state under capitalism), they think in terms of conformism and reformism.

All the scandalous electoral successes of the ultra-right in various countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Austria and even Greece, go with the above-said phenomena. The successes are diverse in scale but all are thought-provoking.

Let us recall what was the first response of British workers to the crisis? It was “wildcat” strikes and pickets by energy sector workers clamouring against the employment of foreigners (i.e. their class brothers!), those protests being spontaneous, not organized and not inspired by any right-wing groups, parties, publications.

In fact it is already at this point that the British left should have asked themselves what have they been doing all these decades? Was the failure of the grandiose anti-Iraq war protests, which they were so proud of, an accident?

This is not a question of right/false ideologies, of correct/false tactics. As always in cases like this, this turn of events is rooted in economic causes. In this case, the transformation of the metropolis (the First World) into the collective exploiter of the periphery (the Third World), a collective parasite, is the cause. Exploiters and parasites don’t make revolutions. And if they do, those turn out to be “conservative revolutions”.

Let us compare today’s behaviour of the wage workers of Western Europe with their truly revolutionary behaviour in Europe in the past. Take, for example, the Spain of the early 20th century. A vast number of specialized studies and a larger number of memoirs show us that the Spanish workers (first of all workers, later joined by, among others, rabassaire peasants), when they were coming out for grand strikes and demonstrations comparable in size to the current ones (and even much smaller!), were setting themselves a direct and express task of overthrowing capitalism. But they saw strikes and demonstrations merely as a first stage, as a necessary step on their way to the said end. And even if it was struggle for higher wages or shorter working hours, everyone knew–this is not the real goal, this is only an interim, tactical goal, the real goal is a social revolution, destruction of the power of capital. Therefore, every such manifestation, every such strike could easily escalate into armed hostilities and armed uprising (and even into the proclamation of a workers’ and peasants’ republic as was the case in Asturias in October, 1934). It’s true that anarchists used these tempers for their adventurous ends but it’s only because of this militancy that the struggle of the Spanish workers led in the 1930’s to a revolution, the destruction of achievements of which (that is eventually keeping Spain within the capitalist world) required combined efforts of all three major fascisms of the time: Franco, Nazism and Italian fascism.

The same specialized studies and memoirs (plus statistics) also show us why the workers of Spain behaved the way they did, in a revolutionary, not in a reformist manner. Because they lived under the very conditions, under which the workers of the Third World live today. This is exactly what explains why the masses opened their hearts to the revolutionary organizations’ calls for social revolution.

To put it otherwise, it’s not simply because today the European left, afraid of direct political repression, at best talk of the need to “transcend” capitalism in general, in some distant future but do not call for immediate struggle, including armed struggle, for social revolution. There are those (although few in number and weak in influence) and who do. But somehow their calls fail to ring the bell with wide, and even narrow, masses of the workers.

And the situation will not change as long as the ruling classes of the First World will afford to corrupt, more or less generously, the general population with a share of the excess profits they derive from exploiting the Third World. It is only when this source of profit is minimised, if not liquidated altogether, the ruling classes of the First World will be forced to take such a measures against the workers of the metropolis that will inevitably blow up the class peace, i.e. to refuse to limit the working day, to terminate the dole system, to actually eliminate the social infrastructure, to crack down on protests (for there will be no more money to buy effective compromises). And these circumstances will inevitably lead to the class organizations of workers (such as trade unions) radicalizing, to the capitalist society betraying its class nature, to the general public opening up to the revolutionary propaganda, and consequently, to the class struggle reviving in its original, violent and ruthless form, and then to a social revolution.

And however strong the class enemy can be, the social revolution in the metropolis will have a chance to win because it will take place in favourable circumstances –in the circumstances when it will have a powerful rear base and strong support in the form of a revolutionary Third World, and this revolutionary Third World will act as a material checking, restraining and demoralizing factor in relation to the forces of counterrevolution in the metropolis.
2-5 December 2010
Preface
I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that this article was written between October 2005 and January 2006, that is, almost four years ago. Therefore, all comparative dates in the text (for example, “15 years ago”) should be understood as from the perspective of when the article was written. This also applies to all statistics and other examples in the text.
To my surprise, I initially failed to find a single publisher- either paper or electronic, including those who consider themselves to be on the far-left who would agree to publish the text. For some reason the article provoked shock and seemed to many to be “too radical” (in general, or because of the “current climate”).

Therefore, when the opportunity arose to publish it I decided in principle not to change a single word, and to leave it just as it was four years ago. I did so in order to give the reader the opportunity to also ponder the question: just what is it about this text that other editors have found to be so seditious?

However, I could, of course, offer a number of examples of sedition. Take, for instance, the example of the elections in Guatemala where Rigoberta Menchú confidently won in districts where the population speak K’iche’ Maya, not Spanish. She lost, however, in an almost identical social environment where the Spanish speaking population proved unable to resist the subtle pre-election populism of the bourgeois parties. Or, the example of Nepal where, after coming to power the Maoists decided to translate their entire literature and propaganda into English. Consequently, experts and specialists from India (and the U.K., and probably the U.S.A.) were able to make use of this newly translated information in order to quickly develop strategies for their agents in Nepal. This in turn has created serious problems for the Maoists. Or, consider the example of Colombia, which is, as far as I know, the only country where not the right but the left (FARC-EP) have tried to destroy infrastructure by exploding oil pipelines and power lines, etc. In response, other leftists stigmatized or mocked them (depending on their degree of sympathy for the FARC struggle), and they finally managed to persuade FARC to abandon such tactics on the grounds that they were ‘alien’ to the class. Meanwhile, before the start of this campaign FARC could scarcely count on 4.5 thousand supporters, yet towards the end of it they had twelve thousand. This testifies the correctness of their materialist approach to politics (and let us not forget that politics ultimately boils down to economics). Finally, I could write about the frenzied demand of the U.S. administration which, at the end of the George W. Bush era, decided to automatically use military force against any country which tried to limit U.S. access to hydrocarbon resources. That is to say, the experience of the past hundred years has shown us time and time again that the right (i.e. the capitalists) have, in practice, been even more materialist than the left! The left will have no victories to celebrate unless this situation changes, and unless they stop opposing armed resistance from a moral perspective. Concealed idealism will ultimately come back to haunt you.

Aleksandr Tarasov
3-7 September 2009

The world-historic defeat of the Soviet Bloc in the Third World War (i.e. the Cold War) gives us the opportunity to finally return to the topic of a global anti-bourgeois revolutionary strategy.

During the 20th Century such a strategy (i.e. one based on a global vision and a class approach) presented itself on two occasions: the first was offered to the Bolsheviks, who knew very well that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended on a world revolution, and that the “building of socialism in one country” was impossible. Hence, they quite deliberately prepared for world revolution, and to this end, the Comintern was created.

Originally, world revolution conceived itself as a revolution in various European countries, yet the Bolsheviks soon moved their attention to the countries of the Third World, and primarily to the colonial and semi-colonial Asian countries.

This strategy was rejected after the Stalinist counter-revolutionary Thermidorian coup. The petty bourgeoisie which came to power in the U.S.S.R. during this period (more specifically they were the bureaucracy, but their social background was mostly rural petty-bourgeois) were not interested in continuing the revolution, the revolutionary struggle, of the risks associated with it. Like any bourgeoisie, it strove to achieve stability (and the fact that in the specific Soviet context the bureaucracy was only a virtual petty bourgeoisie does not change a thing, for stability is a category of social psychology, social action). The revolutionary strategy of class conflict was replaced with the counter-revolutionary strategy of Realpolitik. The class position was replaced by a state one, that is, oppositional classes and their political representatives were replaced with oppositional states, and later, military-political blocs (i.e. NATO against the Warsaw Pact, the West against the East, etc.). This served to return to a classical politics, which always creates for states in the international arena the foundations of class exploitation.

The establishment of social order in the U.S.S.R. (and later in its satellites) was a form of superstatism (for more on superstatism see my article “superstatism and Socialism” in Svobodnaya Mysl’, 1996, №12), based on the combination of an industrialized mode of production with public ownership of the means of production. This formed an alternative capitalism (alternative in the true sense of the word, meaning a choice between two or more equals) in the singular framework of an industrialized mode of production. Its objective was for a peaceful inclusion in the capitalist world economy, and it was not geared towards an all-out military struggle.

Of course, from the period of Stalinism onwards the Soviet elite were ready to give up their confrontation with the bourgeois world. However, they were unable to do so because of the nature of the bourgeois world itself: the ruling classes of the capitalist world were so shaken by the Bolsheviks’ expropriation of the means of production that the cessation of the conflict between the U.S.S.R. and capitalist countries could only be achieved by returning all expropriated property to its former owners and by imprisoning the Bolshevik expropriators. Understanding this, the Stalinist and also the post-Stalinist leadership decided to continue their statist, militaristic and ideological confrontation with the West. Yet the more they did so, the more their leadership came to be legitimised solely by appeals to the slogans of October 1917.

However, the strategy of state opposition was from the outset doomed to failure: to those familiar with the history of exploitative class societies, it was a typical and familiar strategy based on state mobilization, i.e. in the long run the mobilization of material, technical forces in opposition to monetary finance and its material and technical forces and resources (including military and manpower). Evidently, the U.S.S.R. (even with its satellites in tow) was weaker than the rest of the world (i.e. the capitalist world), for it had fewer resources. In addition, unlike the West the U.S.S.R. was unable to openly loot and exploit the countries of the Third World. This was due to reasons of an ideological nature: basically the Soviet superetatist elite were forced to make reference to a socialist ideology which in essence was alien to them. It was a façade, a cover.

Consequently, the defeat of the U.S.S.R. and its allies in this global confrontation was simply a matter of time. This defeat occurred 15 years ago—before our very eyes—soon after the volume of capitalization of some of the Western TNCs had become greater than that of the U.S.S.R. It is essential to understand that in the world economy the Soviet Union acted as a huge monopoly. It was compelled—unlike Western monopolies—to (1) compete with all kinds of products, and (2) waste a huge portion of its profits on the maintenance of its armed forces and social services. Class conflict, unlike the state, is now developing according to different laws and is based upon a different principle: it is not a struggle between various countries and blocs, or between opposing forces ready to wage total war and wipe out entire populations, economies and territories. Rather, it is the struggle of opposing class forces for the same thing: national-economic objectives (and resources). Neither side in this struggle is interested in the destruction or annihilation of these objectives and resources. Not even the most reactionary right winger would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on his own factories if the workers took control of them. This provides real scope for a victory for revolutionary forces, even when their opponent is objectively stronger.

The second time a global revolutionary strategy presented itself in the 20th Century was in Ernesto Che Guevara’s famous “Message to the Tricontinental”. If we recall, Che declared the U.S. to be the enemy of mankind, and called for establishment of “two, three, many Vietnams” in the countries of the Third World. He did so in order to 1) undercut the basis of imperialism by wrestling the commodities, energy sources and economies of the Third World away from the imperialist countries, and to 2) engage imperialism in a number of local military conflicts in the capitalist periphery so as to cause it to economically stretch itself to the limit. In fact, Che proposed a global strategy of guerrilla war within the territory of the First World itself so that the enemy could not rest even in the capitalist metropolis, and so that it would be compelled to carry on the armed struggle on its own turf, and finally, so that this struggle would compound its economic and political problems by inevitably pushing the First World towards open class conflict.

Che proposed this strategy to all opponents of imperialism including, of course, the Soviet leadership. Although he held no illusions about the U.S.S.R., Che understood that objectively speaking the USSR was—despite the will of the Soviet nomenclature—an opponent of Western imperialism. However, as Che no doubt anticipated, the counterrevolutionary Soviet leadership rejected his strategy as a form of “adventurism”. Indeed the label “adventurist” was assigned to all supporters of Che Guevara’s strategy. What is clear is that by the end of 1960s and the start of the 1970’s the Soviet nomenclature – like a social collectivity – was already preparing to become not only leaders but owners. That is, they were prepared to renounce their socialist ideology (which was alien to them anyway) and include the countries of the Eastern Bloc in the world capitalist system. Even the “oil crisis” of the 1970s, which clearly demonstrated the correctness of Che’s position, did not influence the stance of the Soviet nomenclature.

Meanwhile, the imperialists themselves actually came to appreciate the strategy proposed by Che Guevara. It is no coincidence that Zbigniew Brzezinski later cynically confessed that during Reagan’s era, the strategy of “two, three, many Vietnams” was consciously adopted by Washington against the Soviet Union: the USSR was forced, to varying degrees, into a number of conflicts around the world (in Afghanistan, Poland, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Cambodia, Nicaragua) to ensure that the Soviet economy would stretch itself beyond its capabilities. Che’s strategy, as one might expect, was successful.

What is more, features of this strategy were actively used by the U.S. to destabilize leftist regimes. For example, during the period of Allende a de facto guerrilla war was deployed by the ultra-rightists in Chile to purposefully destroy national-economic facilities and infrastructure (this included blowing up bridges, roads, power lines, power plants, mines and so forth). This quickly created extraordinary economic problems, which in turn provoked dissatisfaction with Allende’s regime to the extent that a significant part of the population successfully prepared the military coup of September 11, 1973.

The practice of economic embargos, which intentionally aim to deprive regimes of resources and commodities, is still widely used by the United States in order to destabilize those regimes which it considers to be objectionable.

The transferring of hostilities to opponent’s territories (“the exportation of counterrevolution”) was tested with success in Afghanistan (from Pakistan’s territory), Mozambique (from the territory of South Africa), Angola (from the occupied territories of Namibia, South Africa), and Nicaragua (from the territory of Honduras).

At the same time, in no cases did the opponents of imperialism try to use their own territory as a rear base for an active guerrilla war so that the forces of revolution could systematically and successfully attack the class enemy. Nowhere did they carry out the mass strategy of destroying infrastructure in order to destabilize the economy. No one tried to block, paralyse or destroy the traditional means in which the material resources of the Third World are expropriated by the First World. Nobody even tried to cause damage to the stock exchange by hacking into its computer systems (even though this is quite easy to do!) and so on and so forth. On the contrary, those weaknesses are forced weaknesses because of limitations in the people and in the means. Attempts to carry the war to the metropolis, attempts which made revolutionaries in the First World, exposed the Soviet leadership as counter-revolutionaries. Yet the Soviet elite threw labels at the revolutionaries such as “provocateurs” and “CIA or Beijing agents”, and in doing so the Soviet elite, with great satisfaction, took the logic of their political enemies in Washington by equating revolutionary armed struggle with terrorism.

But if Che Guevara’s analysis was correct in the late 1960’s, it is even more so today. In the last decades of the 20th Century – and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc – the industrial sites of the First World have, with increasing frequency, been either indefinitely or temporarily closed down whilst industrial production has been transferred to the Third World. Indeed the tactic was later employed of actively curtailing industrial production in the First World in order to transfer industrial production to the countries of the Third World. This means that metropolises are in fact materially dependent upon the periphery, and as such they are becoming ever more vulnerable to the strategy of global guerrilla war.

If we compare the data from six different international economic reference books pertaining to the period from 2000—2002, we can quite clearly see the dependence of the capitalist metropolises (including Australia, New Zealand and Israel) upon the periphery:

>> energy – 52% (and if we take only hydrocarbons, then that figure rises to 79%);

>> metals – 81%;

>> raw materials for chemical industry – 89%;

>> raw materials for food industry and agricultural products – 46%;

>> raw materials and finished products for light industry – 67%.

However, this dependence is actually even greater for official statistics do not reveal a complete picture. Take, for instance, the example of maquiladoras. Mexican maquiladoras are divided into three categories depending on their legal status. As it turns out, production of the third category of maquiladoras (using the right of exterritorialy) is not included in Mexican statistics, whereas it is included in the U.S. statistics; though these factories are located outside the U.S.A., and their workers are not U.S. citizens but Mexicans (whom the North American statistics surely do not count). Thus, we arrive at the situation when by recording the products of American companies made in maquiladoras, the U.S. official statistics not only exaggerates the total production output of U.S.A. but also overstates the productivity of American workers’ labour.

There are plenty of particular examples that prove the discrepancy between the official statistics and the actual situation. For instance, once upon a time I had a computer brought from the U.S.A. According to all the documents, it was a “white produce” PC manufactured in the Silicon Valley. When the computer broke down and was dissembled it was found out that the Silicon Valley had produced only the motherboard while all other components had been made in Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India, and South Korea. Although, doubtlessly the statistics had already counted that computer as one made in the U.S.A. Here is another example: one of my former students, who lives in Munich now, bought her husband a suit for solemn occasions in a store that sold only expensive German menswear. According to all documents, the suit appeared to have been produced by a well-known and reputable German company. It was only at home, when she was ironing the trousers from the inside, did she discover a tiny tab hidden in a seam which read the suit had been actually sewn in Orsha, Belarus. Once again, there is no doubt, that this product was counted by the statistics as produced in Germany.

In other words, the capitalist metropolis (the First World) has turned into a collective exploiter of the capitalist periphery (the Third World). Thanks to superprofits extracted by the western monopolies from the Third World, a massive bribery, through the redistribution of income in the tax system, of the public is going on in the First World that extends to the broad masses of workers. That means that the metropolis is assuming increasingly more visible attributes of a parasitic formation, just like the metropolis of the Roman Empire which lived at the expense of exploiting and robbing the provinces and neighbouring lands.

The ruling strata and classes’ corrupting the workers is not new: this phenomenon had long been described by classic Marxian authors illustrated by the “labour aristocracy”. What is special today is that the enormity of superprofits makes it possible to extend this strategy to broader masses of population.

Moreover, the ruling strata and classes of the capitalist metropolitan states having taken warning by the Bolshevist and other revolutions, consciously pursue the policy aimed at reducing the number of the working class (and first of all the industrial proletariat) to a minimum in the countries of the First World in order to change the class structure of their populations, increasing the number of small owners and individuals employed in services and entertainment, individuals directly dependent on the interests of the ruling classes and often belonging to the parasitic or semi-parasitic social groups. Shopkeepers, lackeys, prostitutes and clowns displace those who with their labour produce material wealth—the foundation of any civilization.

That means that the traditional working class orientation of the left in metropolitan countries is doomed to failure: firstly, because the corrupted working class cannot be revolutionary; secondly, because the working class itself is rapidly diminishing that obviously leads to the decline of its influence in the society. The fact that social-democrats and labourites had degraded to neoliberals is not accidental at all and surely is not a product of somebody’s evil will: it is a natural response to the social changes underway in Western Europe.

Hence it appears that there are no perspectives for a revolution in the countries of the First World (parasites and exploiters never become revolutionaries), and that revolutionary centres have shifted to the countries of the Third World. The left in the First World countries have no future provided, of course, one does not accept a repetition of the disgraceful way of the European social-democrats and labourites, who have betrayed their ideals and turned into an instrument of big capital, as their “future”. It is highly demonstrative that the contemporary left of the metropolitan countries have failed to offer strategies for the struggle other than reformist ones: struggle for minorities’ rights, for women’s equality, for the rights of immigrants and homeless, defending the environment and so on, that is they have offered actions aimed at improving capitalism partially (which helps to make capitalism more attractive to a greater number of people and thus decreases the number of socialist fighters) not at destroying it. And certainly all this does not pose any threat to the rule of capital.

As does not the so called antiglobalism, all the more so in its cynically reformist form preached by ATTAC (taxing financial transaction implies worrying about the prosperity and expansion of the same transactions), and in its carnival disguise which the Western left like so much (carnival by definition is not a struggle but a spectacle; as Metternich used to say, unless people stop dancing they are not dangerous.

As far as organization is concerned, the strategy proposed by the “antiglobalists”—mass movements instead of “totalitarian” strictly-centralized organizations—is dead-end because firstly, these movements are transparent to the class enemy and its secret services; secondly, the political adversary has already found and practically tested a remedy against this strategy: it has learned to create, resorting inter alia to bribery, mass public movements of counterrevolutionary, reactionary character. The experience of “colour revolutions” in Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Georgia (and less known affairs in Bulgaria and Romania) have demonstrated it.

The contemporary Western left have exposed their pettiness when they failed to head, let alone organize, a single event of massive radical counteraction against the neoglobalism politics in the countries of the First World, from the street fights between fishers and dockers, and the police in Spain to with the riots in French HLM’s.

Nonetheless, there is a chance to save their reputation for those of the First World left who consciously spend all their time and efforts, give all their life to the revolutionary struggle in the countries of the Third World. Actually, some Western left of the 1960’s and 1970’s furnished relevant examples already in the 20th century—those French, Spanish, Italian comrades who joined the guerrilla in the countries of the Third World; those North American left who decided it was necessary to come to Venezuela to serve advisors to the government of Hugo Chavez, and those who (like RAF in West Germany) openly declared themselves armed agents of revolutionary forces of the Third World in the First World.

Generally speaking, the viewpoint which Moscow imposed on the world left movement during the soviet period and according to which the most developed capitalist countries stand closest to a socialist revolution, is not a Marxist point of view, not dialectical, and not scientific but positivist. Marx himself was a dialectician and understood well that social progress in class, exploitative societies takes place outside of the positivist schemes but is implemented by those forces which have previously fallen a prey to this progress, and explicitly wrote so in “The Poverty of Philosophy”.

The only promising global revolutionary strategy today is the strategy of creating revolutionary focuses in countries of the Third World, establishing horizontal ties between those pockets that would ignore the First World and its primary imperial cultural institutes and languages, and subsequently raising the arms, organizing riots, creating “liberated areas” and seizing power in separate countries which then must consciously become logistical bases of the world revolutionary process.

It was impossible to implement this strategy in the early 20th century: the superetatist revolutions similar to the Bolshevist revolution, de-facto solved the tasks of bourgeois revolutions (industrialization, resolving the agrarian question, and cultural revolution), therefore the countries of the then periphery and semi-periphery (where strictly speaking the anti-bourgeois revolutions broke out) were forced to learn from the metropolitan countries, borrow their culture and technology. Furthermore, the horizontal links, because communications and information technologies had not been developed yet, and nations of the world were isolated, between the revolutionary forces of the periphery countries were extremely difficult to establish (that is why, for example, revolutionaries of the colonies of the British Empire had to communicate via the metropolis and in the metropolitan language).

Globalization removes those obstacles. Moreover, there is no need to turn to the culture of the modern West as this is a culture of degradation: since the 1970’s the culture and human sciences of the metropolitan states corrupted by post-structuralism and post-modernism, have not presented any major achievements to the world; and by the way this is typical of parasitic societies. In the early 20th century, capitalism was on the rise, the bourgeoisie—if one looks at it not from national perspectives but from a planetary point of view—still was a rising class first of all associated with the real material production. However, today capitalism has reached the limits of its qualitative growth continuing to develop only in quantity, predatorily exhausting the planetary resources, and the bourgeois class is connected first and foremost with the sphere of finance—and even within this sphere primarily with speculative, virtual capital. The capitalism of today has no experience that would be worth borrowing by the anti-capitalist forces.

The victory of mass culture in arts and literature, the victory of post-modernism and the rejection of the scientific approach in human sciences, the victory of “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” in social life, the victory of obscurantism, religious fundamentalism and neoliberalism in the ideology of the contemporary West is not accidental but logical and is explained by the parasitic nature of metropolis. The art and literature, philosophy and humanities of the modern West no longer has any progressive social value (this equally applies to the Western left; one can simply compare the outright mass-culture Tony Negri’s bestsellers “The Empire” and “Multitude”, which are within an ace of gutter press, with his really serious and truly pioneering works of the 1960-70’s). We have finally made it to the day when we need not and should not learn culturally from the developed capitalist countries (there is nothing we can learn there) but should instead develop independently on the basis of the opposition to the bourgeois “culture”.

Unfortunately, the technical superiority of the First World cannot be ignored. This concerns not only the military superiority but, first and foremost, the superiority in the field of surveillance of the political and public scene, of organizations and individuals, control of social behaviour and social actions. Imperialism actively develops and implements, with the help of secret services that have received exclusive rights and powers (this is exactly what the “antiterrorist” hysteria was unleashed for), methods and mechanisms of total surveillance and total control and, consequently, total suppression.

That means that generally only those revolutionary forces, which will not be transparent to imperialism. will be able to survive, hold on and create revolutionary pockets of resistance In other words, the revolutionary forces require areas of autonomy. The experience of the 20th century showed that the organizational forms, which had ignored the laws and will of the class and political enemy and which the class and political enemy had failed to influence because of the lack of information about the situation in the areas, could be the effective areas of autonomy. So are, for example, underground or partisan parties.

The class and the political enemy imposes its rules through the state as a machinery of direct class suppression and through the “civil society” as a duplicating system of class suppression (formally independent from the state). It was Gramsci who once noted that exactly because there is this duplicating repressive system, the “civil society”, under capitalism, the revolutionary forces will be able to win only if confront the institutes of the bourgeois “civil society” with institutes of its own anti-bourgeois “counter-civil society”, that is if they create such a social sphere that will be opaque for the enemy and closed which it cannot enter. The experience of the 20th century demonstrated that such were the territories of revolutionary culture and institutes of revolutionary “civil society” most completely implemented in the practice of guerrilla (the experience of China, Vietnam, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Nicaragua).

And all the attempts to play at somebody else’s ground, in the bourgeois “civil society”, suffered an inevitable defeat as they were made in pursuance of the strategy of legal activity on the enemy’s terms, inside this society (with an illusionary aim of “seizing the hegemony”) instead of the strategy of demolishing, eliminating the bourgeois “civil society”.

It would be correct strategically not to duplicate the institutes of the bourgeois “civil society” and bourgeois cultural institutes but to reject them, replace them with different institutes—the institutes, which are required to perform the tasks of the world revolution. It was no accident that the U.S.S.R. after the 1920’s and the Eastern Bloc countries were very bourgeois in their cultural (and lifestyle)—they were not revolutionary countries. Conclusions should be drawn from this grievous experience, and mistakes of the Soviet Union and other superetatist states should not be repeated. To put it otherwise, one must already today to study thoroughly (and critically, of course) the early revolutionary cultural and social experience of Soviet Russia of the 1920’s, the first revolutionary years of Vietnamese, Cuban, Nicaraguan and other revolutions.

Finally, rejecting the major languages of the world imperialism, first of all English, is an essential prerequisite for victory. The U.S. as the world policeman quite consciously impose English as the international language upon the whole planet: it facilitates controlling the planet. It is not accidental that all recent achievements of radical antibourgeois forces, even though local, were made possible where these forces ignored the English language (and tried to avoid using other languages of the world imperialism such as French and German): Chiapas where revolutionary propaganda was conducted in Maya languages; Ecuador and Bolivia where revolutionary propaganda was carried out mainly in Quechua and Aymara languages; Nepal and India where the Maoist rebels are conducting the propaganda in local languages (and in the last resort in Hindi and Nepali). In other words, the world imperialism has made a muff of those pockets of resistance exactly because of its imperial overconfidence: it believed that all important documents would surely be translated into English.

The boycott on the metropolitan languages (on English mandatory) in horizontal links between the revolutionary forces of the periphery, accompanied with studying of each other’s languages, will make these forces far less transparent to imperialism and, therefore, much more dangerous for it.

The strategy of the world revolution as a world guerrilla war coming from the Third World is a long-term strategy (even for local actions). The experience shows that preparing any armed resistance focus requires much time: it took 20 to 25 years to get ready for the uprising in Chiapas; 20 years for the preparation of the guerrilla of Sendero Luminoso in Peru; the Maoist guerrilla in Nepal and India was started by organizations created in the underground (or gone underground) in the late 1960’s; the victorious massive street riots in Ecuador and Bolivia were organized by unions of the Indians created in mid 1970’s. Hence it follows that this strategy has nothing to do with the notorious “putschism”, “making a revolution in 24 hours” which our and Western “academic left” eagerly speak about (and criticize). These “academic left” with this criticism simply mask their own cowardice, their own inability to struggle actively, and their own vested interest in maintaining the status quo: they are more or less well-lodged within the bourgeois society and are afraid of losing what they have as a result of some “abrupt movements”. Holding “scientific conferences” is the favourite activity of the “academic left” (at their loose hours when they are free from duty in the bourgeois academic institutes and writing academic papers for the bourgeois academic journals). But the world history does not know any single case when scientific conferences would bring about a social revolution!

One can predict in advance that since the revolutionary centres have shifted to the capitalist periphery, the countries of the “New Periphery” (countries of the former Eastern Bloc) as countries belonging to, or claiming the status of, the semi-periphery, will be the last to join the revolutionary struggle. Some of them—those which will actually manage to become semi-periphery countries (so far Slovenia alone has clearly managed to do so)—will be the last by virtue of the very status of the semi-periphery. The remaining one because two prerequisites must be met for a successful development of the revolutionary movement in these countries (and it requires a lot of time):

(1) alternation of generations must occur: the “Soviet” generation, obviously lost for the revolution, must step down, and the generation of those who have been indoctrinated by unbridled anti-communist propaganda soaked up in adolescence, the generation of those who have cheered the coming of capitalism, must follow suit;

(2) the tradition of independent radical left opposition destroyed under the counterrevolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy rule, must come about.

At last one needs to understand that territories liberated from capitalism by the revolutionary forces, and it also applies to entire countries, cannot be anything but rear bases for the world revolution. The experience of the U.S.S.R. shows that any other approach, other strategy are suicidal. Objectively there are no conditions today for carrying out a socialist revolution: nowhere in the world the productive forces have developed enough to go beyond the economic formation and the industrial mode of production. (All the tales about a “post-industrial” society are ravings originated by the parasitic nature that the First World has assumed. If one follows this logic then the richer districts of capitalist cities have always lived in a “post-industrial” society). Therefore, one should distinguish the concept of antibourgeois revolution from the concept of socialistic revolution in order not to deceive oneself and others. The upcoming anti-bourgeois revolutions will necessary be superetatist, and the societies brought up by these revolutions will be egregiously imperfect, superetatist, and they are justified because they will become the areas of social and economic, and cultural experiments (during which new, post-bourgeois culture, psychology and social relations will take shape by the method of selection) and will serve bridgeheads for revolutions in other countries, revolutions a chain of which will in the end do away with world capitalism.

In this sense, the negative experience of the superetatist countries (the U.S.S.R. and others) is invaluable as it allows for forming a clear picture of the dangers that objectively threaten the victorious anti-bourgeois revolutions, in advance.

A socialist revolution, which can only be worldwide and which will not run in the same pattern common for the bourgeois and superetatist revolutions, is a matter of the distant future. However, our contemporaries will witness, and may join, antibourgeois revolutions. And, lastly, one should keep in mind that the future is open, and if this strategy is not implemented for any reason by the left, some other adversary of the First World can realize it, for example, Islamist radicals can, who today act as a force regionally resisting the Western imperialism but who, if the left continue to be passive, may become a global force (and this very anti-imperialistic potency makes Islamic radicalism so attractive in the world; it is not accidental that every year in Germany 10,000 Germans get converted to Islam)

10 October, 2005-18 January, 2006

Published in The Future Present (L.). 2011. Vol. 1. N 1.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander Nikolaevich Tarasov is a Soviet and Russian left-wing sociologist, politologist, culturologist, writer and philosopher

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A Foreword by Gaither Stewart

 War under false pretenses

Strobe Talbott, the Deputy Secretary of State under [Bill] Clinton and the leading U.S. negotiator during the war, later denied that “the plight of the Kosovar Albanians” was the driving force behind the campaign, claiming the real reason to be “Yugoslavia’s resistance to… [the] political and economic reform [imposition of neoliberalism—Eds]” that had been driving forward the liberalisation and deregulation of markets throughout the region.”

Dalibor Stanojevic, a 30-year old political activist and a software engineer in Leskovac, Serbia, has offered this explosive testimony, a cry from the heart of the Balkans, a J’accuse against the criminal US-led attack on Serbia-Yugoslavia in 1999, which from the start aimed at (and achieved) regime change in Belgrade, elimination of the last “Communist” stronghold in East Europe, and occupation and detachment from Serbia of the mineral rich and geographically strategic region of Kosovo. When I was introduced to Dalibor by a mutual Serbian friend, he wrote me an e-mail expressing his surprise and pleasure that someone in the West was interested in the plight of Serbs since the US aggression against that nation lasting through much of the 1990s.

“I’m glad that intelligent people in the West resist the brainwash concerning the situation in the Balkans,” Dalibor wrote. “The problem of Serbs with the West is long-lasting. Centuries have passed, ideologies and governments have changed but the behavior remains the same: in the eyes of the West, Serbs are always enemies. It’s no wonder that for the average Serb today there is little difference between Nazi Germany and NATO, which in our regard is the realization of Hitler’s ideas. War, which should be the last option in international relations, for Nazi Germany last century and today for NATO, is the first. Two thousand years pass and some things never really change. Some Western intellectuals are still marching on Stalingrad, while the USA and NATO steal our lands and impose their hegemony over us.”

Stanojevic’s article below is a plaintive though rabid cry against injustice arriving from lands largely forgotten or never known in the West—I would wager that few people west of ex-Yugoslavia even know where the important city of Leskovac is located. His J’accuse reflects the opinions and feelings toward the West and an interpretation of a history that seems like only yesterday to the majority of Serbia’s eight million people. The NATO war against Yugoslavia is not an event of “a long time ago,” words used by ex-New Mayor Rudy Giuliani on a recent visit to Belgrade. —GS
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NB: We have also included an analysis by Peter Schwartz, of WSWS.ORG, on the repercussions of Western meddling in the Balkans. This analysis is found in the addendum. 

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By  Dalibor Stanojevic

(Leskovac, Serbia, The Balkans, East Europe) For years now every Serb has been wondering if the NATO attack on Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which culminated in occupation of many lands of ex-Yugoslavia of which Serbia was the major republic, represents a new episode in Serbian-Western relations. Or was it a long planned attack that simply had to wait for the proper time to happen?

   Belgrade burns after night bombing raid.

Serbs do not consider themselves war criminals, terrorists or murderers who attacked their own Kosovo province and committed genocide there. Every Serb knows that the USA and NATO intentionally broke up and took what it wanted from ex-Yugoslavia and at the same time saved Albania. (The Serb-Albanian conflict is an old one in the Balkans. Albania, south of ex-Yugoslavia, has always had its eyes on the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, Serbian for hundreds of years, but populated chiefly by ethnic Albanians. Long range Albanian policy has long revolved around the creation of a Greater Albania to include the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo, Macedonia and Greece. Editor’s note)

^{(The massacre at of Rachak on January 15, 1999 was a famous episode in the Kosovo War in which some 40 ethnic Albanians were killed by Yugoslav forces. Belgrade charged that they were all members of the (Western supported) rebel KLA (the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army) who were killed in combat with state security forces. The killings there were a major factor in the NATO decision to unleash its full scale war on Yugoslavia. The incident was the subject of three forensic reports, one Yugoslav, one Belorussian and one Finnish. The first two concluded that the victims were not civilians. At the time the Western international community did not accept the Yugoslav version , charging Serbia instead with genocide. This was the justification for the bombings of Serbia, and was one of the chief charges against Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague International Court and the motivation for the war against Serbia: allegedly aimed at stopping the genocide. The Serbian government still declares that the victims were all members of the KLA. Partial Western recognition of the Serbian version of the events arrived only after the war and after Kosovo’s detachment from Serbia and its independence.}

Even the Hague International Court today declares that “no genocide was committed against Kosovo’s Albanian peoples”. Even German political leaders admit that during the Milosevic regime Serbs did not target Albanians as such, only terrorists. Those terrorists belonged to the Western- supported KLA, so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, whose chief activity has consisted in dealing in arms and drugs and eliminating Serbs.

Recently, the former Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, was in Belgrade to support the pro-West political party, SNS—a breakaway faction of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party—which favors Serbia’s accession to the European Union. When asked about the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and his support for targeting civilians, Giuliani refused to answer, saying “that was a long time ago.”

I am 30 years old and at age 17 I heard reports of bombing every day during that war. Giuliani conveniently forgot that Serbian officers and soldiers were prosecuted and jailed for their actions during the war. But in NATO countries no one has been prosecuted for bombing hospitals, passenger trains, buses, the downtowns of Serbian cities—in fact, crimes against humanity, which the whole world is now learning about. But for Giuliani and his nation it was not terrorism. It was not a war crime. It was simply something that happened “a long time ago.”

Only the USA appears to have a license to kill. It is judged to be a long time ago when the US burned our country to the ground in the name of democracy, human rights and other such humanitarian bullshit. But when two buildings are destroyed in New York, allegedly by Al-Qaeda, the incident is branded as terrorism and is never forgotten. Truth is anything that is in the interest of the USA.

No, gentlemen of the West, we do not want to capture you because you hate Serbs or because of your false claims about protecting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. No! You, Bill Clinton, you, Madeleine Albright and the others, we want to put you in jail for your war crimes against Serbia. No ideology or politics gives you the right to kill innocent people as you did in Serbia.

As a rule US politics as is US truth are the consequence of its economic interests. So why bomb Serbia? Firstly, Serbs are aware of the powerful Albanian lobby in the USA that has paid out some $600 million in the last 30 years to gain US protection. They paid with money from the trade in heroin that the Albanian mafia sells throughout Europe and the USA. (The Albanian mafia is very active in drugs trade, especially in Italy and Germany. Ed.)

The second reason for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 was because Serbia is a strategic area of the Balkans for the US future war against Russia. It was necessary to pacify Russia’s most important ally in Europe—Serbia, or ex-Yugoslavia. It has been said that Serbia is a “a house with two doors, one leading to the East and the other to the West”. We Serbs know that “both doors must be kept open, because anyone who can offer Serbian citizens anything to improve our situation is welcome.

The third and most important reason for the war against Serbia was in order to detach Kosovo from Serbia. The USA thus got its hands on 70 billion tons of coal reserves, millions of tons of nickel, zinc, gold, silver and other natural resources in the Serbian province of Kosovo.

The US plan must have been to occupy Kosovo, exploit it, and when everything of value has been stolen, give Kosovo back to Serbia—and everyone will be happy. The USA and NATO, and the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo will keep the houses and the wealth stolen from Serbia. But as Giuliani says, that was all a long time ago.

The epilogue will look like this: the US media created the war against Serbia; the USA occupied our territories, burned 300 medieval churches, stole iron, oil and coal, gold and silver; and then went home. In The Hague, Serbs will be forgiven for their “crimes” and the court will prosecute a few Albanians to show its objectivity.

But is that the end of the story? No, that is not the end. I don’t believe people in the West care what Serbs think of NATO. No one in the West can even imagine what Serbs think. I’ll tell you what they think. Many, if not most of us, consider NATO a satanic force, just as Nazi as was Nazi Germany and Austria, as fascist as fascistic Spain—and France and England.

Bomb crater near school 

An average Serb makes this comparison:: Hitler’s Reich caused the deaths of 55 million people and created unimaginable material damage. Hitler too had interests for which he fought regardless of the number of victims and crimes against humanity. The US-NATO alliance, on the other hand, has murdered 60 million since 1945: in Vietnam, four million; North Korea, five million; Somalia, one million; Iraq, two million; plus the wars in Panama, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Libya and Serbia. Wars fought for their own interests, regardless of the numbers of victims and the suffering of the innocent, have been supported by their informational artillery such as, again, CNN, BBC, Sky News, even Al Jazeera, imitating Nazi propaganda methods. Serbs also recall that Hitler didn’t target our hospitals; but Nato did. NATO bombed two of our oil refineries, causing the greatest ecological disaster in the Balkans since WWII: 100,000 tons of oil burned, contaminating half of the Balkans.

We Serbs are well aware of the US use of depleted uranium in Serbia and Iraq, forbidden by the Geneva and other UN conventions. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children have died because of depleted uranium. In Serbia, NATO murdered 3500 civilians and 40 soldiers of the Yugoslav army. That is, only 1% of Serbian victims were soldiers while 98.8% were civilians. Collateral damage or the intentional murder of civilians? Those figures represent only direct casualties; 30,000 people die each year as a consequence of depleted uranium dropped on Serbia during the 1999 war, a total of some 400,000 Serbs, chiefly due to leukemia and other cancers caused by depleted uranium.

It is interesting to note that as a rule the Serbian factories that were destroyed by the 1999 bombing were all competitors of US-based multinational companies. And all of those factories were bought by the USA after the “democratic revolution” in Serbia. The USA has introduced a new rule in international relations: “You sell me what I want at a low price or I will bomb you and take it for free.”

But no one is guilty. No one has been prosecuted or imprisoned. USA-NATO after all has its license to kill. Imagine the feelings of the average Serb when he hears day after day the American President’s threats against Syria: “Stop the killing of innocent people”! We know from experience that the threat of “bringing democracy to you” hangs over any country standing in America’s way.

The whole world knows—or can learn—that Kosovo has been part of Serbia for many hundreds of years. Instead, the USA, to back up its imperialist strategy, has created an apocryphal history in films and books describing Albanians as an old nation in the Balkans while the Serbs are supposedly “Balkanic Russians” who came here only 200 years ago. But even Constantine VII of Byzantium wrote that “Serbs arrived here in the sixth century”.

We Serbs are hostages of an uncivilized empire. We are slaves of one country. A few oligarchs from that country order us what to think, how to live—or not to live. The average Serb thinks the USA’s economic power should be decreased and divided with the world; the USA should disappear politically. Because of its crimes it should be under economic sanctions imposed by the UN. The American empire instead of using its advantages for the good of humanity, uses its power for the destruction of other peoples, nations and countries. While every day America speaks about democracy, it is killing people who think differently, people who reject its life style. The way out of this situation is to put limits on the USA’s unlimited power. The world must teach America reason and civilization and forbid it to use the wealth it gains from trade for the establishment of its hegemony over others.

The average Serb compares the USA and NATO to a resurrected Roman Empire, permitted to kill and steal anything they want, while labeling their actions war against terrorism, humanitarian war, war in the name of human rights. But behind those words, we know, stand their economic and political interests, while American people simply don’t care what their government does in Iraq or Serbia, as long as they continue to live well.

In general, we Serbs don’t believe in ideologies. We believe that hate is genetic, written in blood, as shown in what was done to us in Kosovo. We identify in American policies toward us elements of the old Germanic hatred of Slavs and the Vatican-Catholic hate for Orthodox. We compare American descendants of murderers deported from Mother England to the Albanian descendants of killers imported from the Caucasus to fight against Serbs. Americans who slaughtered the original population of America and took their lands. Albanians who murdered the Greeks in Thessaly and stole their lands.

What, one wonders, will happen to the NATO and the USA after they have used up the resources of the world, the gas, oil and minerals from weak countries? In the end they will have to fight against China and Russia in a new world war. Rather than accepting our role of today as hostages, as part of the West, we feel it our duty to help the USA avoid the same end as Nazi Germany. A way must be found to limit America’s power before it is too late. 

Dalibor Stanojevic is software engineer and political activist in Serbia.

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ADDENDUM (From Archives)

NATO attack on Serbia has repercussions for Europe as a whole

By Peter Schwarz, WSWS.ORG
31 March 1999

Little more than a week of intensive air attacks against Serbia has resulted in numerous military and civilian facilities and factories going up in flames and the deaths of an untold number of human beings. Also included amongst the first casualties of the war is what remained of the world order that provided Europe with a certain degree of stability over the past five decades.

The official justification for NATO’s attack–to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and to limit the conflict in Kosovo–has rapidly proved to be a fraud. Instead of solving the crisis in the Balkans, the war is Balkanising world politics. A wildfire threatens to spread to the entire region, affecting Europe as a whole.

It was not hard to foresee that the air attacks on targets in Serbia and Kosovo would unleash one of the largest floods of refugees since the beginning of the crisis in the former Yugoslavia. According to Albanian government sources, almost 100,000 refugees have streamed over the mountainous border with Kosovo since the offensive began. NATO itself has spoken of some 500,000 Kosovan Albanians presently fleeing the hostilities.

These figures are just as hard to verify as the claims of the Albanian government that several thousand Kosovars have been massacred by Serbian forces. Since the withdrawal of all journalists and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers from Kosovo, it is difficult to distinguish between the war propaganda of the various parties and the truth. Nevertheless, there is no question that the NATO offensive has further intensified the interplay of national hatred and violence in Kosovo. This follows from the entire previous course of events.

Since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the interventions of the Great Powers have been directed towards splitting up the multiethnic state into ever-smaller autonomous units. This was justified on some occasions by referring to the right to self-determination, on others by invoking humanitarian motives. The result has been to encourage bitterness and nationalist sentiment, and has helped several right-wing nationalist cliques, which are, in turn, supported by the Great Powers or played off against each other, to gain power.

The crisis in Kosovo is the result of these policies; and could have been predicted long ago. However, as long as the Serbian regime in Belgrade was useful in pushing through the Dayton Accord regarding the fate of Bosnia, it was tolerated. When that process was completed the Western powers began to arm the underground Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and to enhance its diplomatic status. For its part, the strategy of the KLA was to launch attacks on Serbian facilities so that the reprisals would provoke an intervention by NATO.

In the meantime, accusations have continued to arise that Washington expressly sought to prevent a peaceful resolution. Willy Wimmer, vice-chairman of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, has accused the United States of trying to “completely upstage” the OSCE and the Contact Group. In an interview with a German radio station in mid-January, Wimmer said, “The impression is often created that the reason why the Europeans must not achieve anything is so that the United States can intervene here. Possibly, quite different objectives are pursued in their Balkan policy.”

The official justification for the attack on Serbia–that years of pent-up national hatred must be dampened by bombs–is like suggesting that one put out a fire with kerosene.

The war is now starting to unfold according to its own logic. While NATO continues to insist its official aim is to force the Milosevic regime to sign a peace accord providing for an autonomous Kosovo within the Serbian state, the escalation of the war has long since removed any such possibility.

Every day the bloodbath in Kosovo intensifies, the calls for the deployment of NATO ground forces or a massive arming of the KLA grow louder. In both cases, the inevitable consequence would be either the complete separation of Kosovo, or its division into two hostile parts. The creation of an Albanian mini-state in Kosovo would itself raise the question of a Greater Albania and draw the neighbouring states into the conflict. Albania is already threatening to enter the war and Macedonia could be next.

A quarter of the 2 million inhabitants of the Macedonian state founded in 1991 are of Albanian origin. Half of the Macedonian army is comprised of Albanians. There are considerable Serbian, Bulgarian and Greek minorities living in the country. The high emotions that have already been enflamed could be seen last Thursday in the violent demonstrations of Serbian youth outside the American, British and German embassies in the capital, Skopje.

It would be impossible for Greece to remain uninvolved in any conflict in Macedonia. For years, Athens has refused to even recognise the name of this state for fear that it might encourage territorial claims to the eponymous region in northern Greece. Moreover, some 10,000 NATO troops are presently stationed in Macedonia to oversee a future Kosovo accord. They could easily be drawn into the war, regardless of the opposition to such a course inside most of the NATO states.

Montenegro–which borders Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and Bosnia–is also being put under enormous pressure by NATO to secede from federal Yugoslavia.

The fragile cease-fire in Bosnia would hardly survive under such circumstances. How could the secession of Bosnian Republika Serbska then be prevented when both Kosovo and Montenegro have parted company with Serbia proper with the military support of NATO? The present war, therefore, has the potential to spread like wildfire, with unforeseen consequences. There is not the slightest indication that the governments that have unleashed this war have any answers to such developments.

Another result of the war against Serbia is the dramatic worsening of relations with Russia. Within Europe, a new Cold War threatens to develop that could have far-reaching consequences for the planned expansion of the European Union (EU) and NATO.

Within the framework of the Contact Group, Russia supported an accord granting the autonomy of Kosovo, but has strictly opposed the enforcement of this by military means. The demonstrative disregard for the Russian veto and the attack on a country with traditional ties to Russia have unleashed a wave of indignation that threatens to bring a nationalist regime to power.

The government of Yevgeni Primakov at first reacted with symbolic gestures–cancelling a state visit to Washington and breaking off diplomatic ties with NATO. If relations continue to cool, this could have serious implications for Europe’s internal equilibrium.

French President Jacques Chirac, in consultation with the German government, has won the agreement of the Russian premier to act as an intermediary with Belgrade. In this way they hope to patch up the breach with Moscow. Primakov is to propose to the Serbian government that there could be a strong Russian contingent in the troops securing any Kosovo peace. This might then act under the auspices of the UN, rather than NATO.

In the European NATO countries the first days of war united most of the political parties behind their respective governments. In the press, however, critical voices could be heard from the start. These expressed two predominant themes.

One is the concern that the attack on Serbia without a UN mandate clearly signifies the flouting of international law.

A typical commentary in the German press: “What is collapsing without comment before our very eyes is something that was only achieved with difficulty: the rule of international law. In the League of Nations, in the Kellogg Pact, and finally in the charter of the United Nations, the peoples [of the world] have promised to mutually respect their borders under all circumstances and not to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states.”

The unspoken fear in all these editorials is that a precedence is now being established that means that international relations will operate according to the rule of the jungle, the right of the strongest. If today the veto right of Russia and China in the UN Security Council is ignored, why not tomorrow that of France and Britain, or Germany, which is also claiming a permanent seat?

The second theme revolves around the question: what will happen if the war escalates any further? It is clear that most of the European governments are not prepared for such an eventuality and had hoped that the threat of war alone would suffice to ensure Belgrade’s co-operation.

Herbert Kremp asks in the conservative German paper Die Welt, “All the questions that are currently posed come back to the same essential point: Did the Western politicians make a correct estimate of their opponent before they authorised the NATO attack?”

Josef Joffe, a supporter of the NATO attack, wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “The ethnic earthquake that broke out again in 1991 is immune to cruise missiles. What should happen when the bombing stops? There is only one good answer to this: under no circumstances should ground troops be dispatched, that have to impose a peace through arms.”

Nevertheless, the call for the deployment of ground troops grows louder. The first high-ranking diplomat to openly call for their use was Wolfgang Petritsch, the Austrian EU representative. The former commander of the UN troops in Bosnia, French General Philippe Morillon, has also said the use of ground troops is unavoidable.

The German government continues to avoid giving a categorical answer to such questions. But that such a course is being considered can be seen from the actions of the former Defence Minister Volker Rühe, who has loudly called for the withdrawal of the 3,000 German troops stationed in Macedonia. He clearly fears that, regardless of the fact they were sent there to police any agreed peace, they might easily become the vanguard of a hostile intervention force.

The deployment of ground troops would further intensify the conflicts inside NATO and inside Europe. In Germany, which since the defeat of 1945 has not participated in any war, such a course would unleash a great shock. Already some 400 mothers of German soldiers stationed in Macedonia have joined together to prevent their use in a war setting. To this end, they have sought contact with the mothers of Serbian soldiers.

In Italy and France the coalition governments are already split. In France, the Communist Party of Robert Hue and the Citizens Movement of Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènment oppose the NATO action. The same stance is taken by the Italian Communists of Armando Cossutta and the Greens in Italy. Here, where even the Catholic bishops have spoken against the war, a further escalation might bring down the government. Cossutta’s party has threatened to withdraw its ministers and parliament has demanded a halt to the air attacks and the immediate resumption of negotiations.

Opposition to the war is even stronger in Greece, where the government as a whole opposes it. This NATO member not only enjoys close traditional ties to Serbia, but in the case of Macedonia is directly involved in the outcome of the war.

Amongst the people of Europe, there is undoubtedly a broad opposition to the war. However, in the “official” opposition, which finds its echo in the press, only considerations of power politics find expression: growing US-European antagonisms and Washington’s interference in the older continent are felt to signify a weakening of Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

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“I regard class differences as contrary to Justice.” (Albert Einstein in a personal statement of his credo.)    

     “The Russians have proved that their only aim is really the improvement of the lot of the Russian people.” (Albert Einstein in his 1934 refusal to sign a petition condemning Stalin’s murder of political prisoners.)

     “Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny. The danger … is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen.”   (Albert Einstein in a speech to Russian scientists in support of democratic socialist ideals and criticism of untrammeled capitalism.) (1)

BY GAITHER STEWART 

(Dateline: Rome, 20 August 2008)

 I have chosen to set out on this trip back in time to Joseph Stalin from the six-meter tall statue of the revolutionary writer, Vladimir Mayakovsky.

)

But first, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The Cubo-Futurist poet of the Russian Revolution, admired, pampered and promoted by Stalin and some Russian revolutionary leaders, mistrusted and criticized by others, apparently shot himself in his office one day in April in 1930 in Moscow. His death ultimately became the subject of speculation for historians and mystery thriller writers alike: suicide or murder? Both versions are tempting and facile: either he committed suicide because of putative disillusionment with the revolution or he was murdered by Stalin. Or perhaps it was a more mundane question of his love life.

The poet with his pre-eminent love interest, Lilya Brik, who, unfortunately, was married.

Mayakovsky moved with his family to Moscow in 1906 from Georgia (Gruzia) where both he and Stalin were born, he Russian, Stalin, Georgian. Legend has it that he was a member of the Bolshevik Party at age 14, a messenger and distributor of leaflets for which he was arrested before the Revolution. He allegedly wrote his first poem in solitary in Butyrki Prison when he was 16. Then, while studying art he published in 1912 together with a group of avant-garde painters a Futurist manifesto entitled “A Slap In the Face of Public Taste” which demanded that earlier writers such as Pushkin and Tolstoy be thrown overboard. Fiery eccentric Mayakovsky became the star and the legend of the revolutionary period because of his booming voice, exciting reading, showman abilities and the revolutionary idea in his work.

…grab stones, bombs, knives, whatever you can find and those of you who have no hands

hit with the forehead. March you oh hungry ones

Crooked,

Skinny, dirty, full of parasites

March!

During the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, Red sailors marched on the Winter Place chanting one of Mayakovsky’s slogans: Eat pineapples, chew on quails, Your last day is coming, bourgeois!

Mayakovsky was active in many facets of agitprop on behalf of the revolution. This (left) is one of the posters he designed.

Left March, his poem of 1918 about the proletarian courage, discipline and optimism of those engaged in the struggle against counter-revolution, was typical of his lyrical poetry, clear and simple, fully intelligible to the masses and admired by Lenin and soon by Stalin. A newspaper wrote at the time that when with his strong, powerful voice resounding through the whole square, he read Left March, the whole square repeated his verse:

 ‘The Commune will never go down.
Left!
Left!
Left!’

Left!

Left!

Left!’

The poet of the Revolution scorned the official Proletarian Culture establishment, Proletkult. Producing posters and placards and slogans for the revolutionary government, he came to believe he embodied the Revolution. In his many films, none really successful, and in his greatest poetry, his major theme was the proletariat. He traveled over the world from Paris to Mexico (to visit the Communist Diego Rivera) and to the USA where he read his revolutionary works. In one poem he boasted of the bewilderment and fright his red Soviet passport created in the world of those times when immigration officials touched it as if it were a bomb.

______________________

LEFT: Czarist police mugshot and filecard for Stalin. A man of demonstrated courage. Stalin robbed banks at gunpoint to fund the Bolshevik cause. As ruler of the U.S.S.R. from 1929 to 1953, Joseph Stalin was in charge of Soviet policies during the early phase of the Cold War. He adopted the name Stalin, which means “Man of Steel,” while still a young revolutionary. 

In 1925, he had criticized suicide in a poem dedicated To Sergey Yesenin (whom he did not particularly admire) when that revolutionary poet committed suicide: In this life, to die is not so difficult, To make life is considerably more difficult. Active in diverse fields and the mouthpiece of the Proletariat till the end, Vladimir Mayakovsky shocked everyone when suddenly, surprisingly, on April 14, 1930 he shot himself in his Moscow office. He left this note: 

“As they say, the incident is closed. The love boat wrecked by daily life. I’m all even with life and nothing would be gained by listing mutual hurts, troubles, and insults. This is not the way I recommend but there is no other way out. Don’t think I’m a coward. Seriously, it could not be helped. Lili, love me”

‘Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’ and that ‘indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime.’(2)

CHOICES

LEFT: Stalin, TIME “Man of the Year” for 1943. The anti-Nazi alliance between the US and the USSR in WWII momentarily suspended the constant barrage of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda throughout the Western media. Political truth—for the mainstream press—is what the State Department says it is. 

In EITHER/OR Kierkegaard idealized the role and life of a poet as despair. The poet sees the ideals but he must flee from the world in order to rejoice in them and he cannot remain unaffected by the caricatures of these ideals all around him. Similarly also the greatest political idealists, those whose ideas can change the world just as every poet aspires to do, experience extreme despair and doubt. I suspect they too quake in doubt and fear, as Stalin down in the Kremlin must have done. Their passions are perhaps those of the poet even though their mission requires a cruelty—or ruthless determination—foreign to the poet. Tolstoy wrote that ordinary men too do the things they do, perhaps making history without knowing what they are doing. Tolstoy believed that the force that took God’s place and moved history was something great but incomprehensible, inaccessible, arcane.

Only the truly arrogant pass through life believing they have always made real choices.

I could hardly believe it! With the idea of political choices in mind I wrote in Yahoo Search the words “American Left” with the intention of investigating the reasons behind the socio-political choices we make in life. And what comes up? A long list of hate articles about even the mere idea of Left. Especially Socialism. And collectivism. From Rightwing watch. People for the American Way. One wrote “The Left is brainwashing us of our patriotism!” (sic)

Such knee-jerk hate reactions make choice seem like a rare luxury. A chimera.

LEFT: The “Big Three” at the Yalta Summit, in 1945.

completely his own path and maybe there is less freedom of will in us than we like to believe. Tolstoy and Stendahl among others believed that everything is predetermined by the course of things.

STALIN AND THE POET

Stalin is my major concern here. My conclusion is that I have been had in his regard. I have been brainwashed both by western propaganda—mostly of the Anglo-Saxon variety— and biased historians of all nationalities and ideologies. Now my eyes are more open. My receptors are up and searching. I read my history. I note that Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon and even Robespierre have been rehabilitated. Today Napoleon is more hero than scoundrel.

Most certainly Stalin, whose positive accomplishments survive, should not be classed with Hitler, whose counter-revolution destroyed his own nation in a delirium of madness, and whose social agenda, from the start, was reactionary, racist, and ignoble. Though Stalin like Hitler was ruthless in eliminating opposition and built a totalitarian state, he succeeded in creating a new social order and, at an enormous price, made a modern nation of what had been labeled a country of savages. (3)  Moreover, while Hitler was engaged in all his Aryan gibberish, Stalin’s goal, however distorted by Stalin the dictator, was and remained the birth of a new society based on equality. Social justice. Surely even in deeply capitalistic and indoctrinated America we remember what that is all about? (4)

I don’t want to get started on my views of historians here since the task of reassessing Stalin will fall to them, the young historians capable of eluding the great brainwash. The task they face today is enormous. There are always many reasons to doubt the truth in history. Who organized the Cold War? Why the Korean War? Who killed John F. Kennedy and Bobby? How did either of the Bushes become President of the United States? What is the full story behind the towers of the World Trade Center? How and why did the United States of America go wrong?

As Virginia Wolfe said, “Positions have been taken, myths have been made.”

Stalin, Lenin and Kalinin, in 1919. All three at the core of old Bolshevism.

Here let’s list some of the positive accomplishments that outlived Stalin, some also right into Russian capitalism today. Many of my references are found in the biography, Stalin, by the historian Isaac Deutscher, who cannot be accused of leanings toward Stalinist Communism.

•••

•          Whatever his aberrations and “crimes”, Stalin was a revolutionary who introduced a new social organization in contrast to capitalism.
•          Stalin was the guardian of Marxist doctrine.
•          Many historians agree that Stalin was a Leninist as he himself claimed and a true follower of his master, the icon of Soviet Russia. Therefore, one speaks of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism as a continuum.
•          Stalin pragmatically forced through Socialism In One Country when it became obvious that world revolution was not imminent.
•          Stalin modernized Russia which until the Revolution was basically more Asiatic than European.
•          Stalin made a nation of a great potpourri of peoples.
•          Under Stalin Russia’s industry which in 1930 was inferior to any medium-sized European country by the late 1940s had become Europe’s first industrial power and for long the second in the world.
•          The whole nation was sent to school, as education boomed.
•          In the minds of Russians, Stalin led the entire nation to defeat Nazism in defense of the homeland against the foreign invader. The victorious war proved Stalin right in his forced, ruthless, rapid industrialization of the 1930s.
•          Stalin created the belief of the USSR as defender of the oppressed of the world, while leading the struggle against counter-revolution.
•          After WWII and its enormous cost in life (over 27 million dead, practically an entire generation) and the destruction of Russia’s productive industry Stalin ruthlessly forced a hungry people dressed in rags to “catch up with the USA”, to achieve greater production goals and to lay the foundations for Russia’s nuclear efforts.

Under Stalin Russian society was so dramatically changed that even after today’s political restoration and the return of capitalism Russia retains much of the heritage of Stalinist Soviet Union. (4)

LEFT: Monument to Stalin in Gori, Georgia.

STALIN’s “TERROR”

Robespierre’s “reign of terror” has quietly subsided into history books. Robespierre has found his place in history, comfortable and acceptable. After all, it was revolution. (The question is still debated among historians and political observers whether the French revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries committed greater crimes. Robespierre himself was executed in twenty-four hours without the benefit of a real trial, with his jaw literally blown away by a musket shot, and without receiving any form of medical care. And both the Thermidoreans and royalist restaurationists were fierce in their vengeance against the Jacobins and sans culottes.)

One of many adulatory posters produced during the war years, when the Cult of Personality was in full sway. Ironically, although Stalin did not directly discourage such sycophancy, he showed on a number of occasions that he had a jaundiced view of the practice. 

But Stalin? Well, he is still pretty fresh. Just barely off the books of current political news. And still powerfully influential on the legitimacy of the system he’s so clearly identified with: communism, capitalism’s main ideological alternative, indeed its nemesis.

The question we should ask is why did he do it? Why the putative cruelty? Terror for terror’s sake? Like gassing five million Jews? Of course not. Stalin was a revolutionary, aiming at a better life for Russia’s peoples. Otherwise, why all that pain and suffering, and intrigue and duplicity and betrayal of his closest comrades and friends? Only a bad faith western historian could portray the Stalinist period in only one color. If one must accuse, then better to zero in on Brezhnev and Stalin’s heirs, those who distorted a revolution into the grayest of useless and obtuse bureaucracies.

lying in state in the House of Trade Unions in Moscow (1953)

Deutscher notes that Stalin didn’t need scapegoats for the enormous economic difficulties involved in industrializing backward Russia. Stalin’s real motives were to wipe out all possible alternatives to his “socialism in one country” and the accompanying rapid industrialization. That is, he crushed opposition. And his era was rich in alternative ideas. From Trotsky on the far left to all the others on the right. Stalin suspected—with plenty of reason, as he understood class dynamics quite well and the nature of the capitalist cliques that confronted him— that the West was still plotting against the Soviet Union as it had done from the time of the Revolution. Western appeasement of Nazi Germany and its support of the revival of German militarism filled him with foreboding. Was the West not instigating Germany against Russia? Today stories of America’s close involvement with Nazi Germany, that of the Bush family for example, were not the fruit of Stalin’s paranoia. It was brutal reality. For Stalin, Germany’s crushing of the Tsar’s primitive armies in World War I was a recurrent nightmare.

Stalin’s real problems concerned the opposition capable of forming an alternative government. Not one alternative, but many. His method was to destroy them. In those times, it was easy—especially in a country convulsed by recent counter-revolutionary action, war and famines—to equate political opposition with counter-revolution, Stalin’s major internal problem. No less than organized political opposition has been eliminated in the USA and today more and more in Europe in general, Stalin’s goals were the same though his methods and style were much less subtle, even if his ultimate goals were at least defensible, which in our case, the utter triumph of a fascistic plutocracy, they are not. After all, wittingly or unwittingly, what has been the not always subtle policy of the US political leadership for 232 years if not to create what is in effect a one-party system, thus far making impossible the emergence of an alternative political system, i.e. socialism?

Kremlin Wall Necropolis

Revolution is not a tea party for young maidens. It’s not, as Mao suggested, a blacktie sitdown dinner. Revolution is dramatic, drastic, sweeping change, not a time for subtleties. Revolutions in human affairs often occur with the suddenness and blind force of earthquakes, once the underlying tectonic plates have come to the point where the friction and cumulative tensions can no longer be controlled. Counter-revolution from within or without was a real danger. The first so-called show trials of Kamenev and Zinoviev, both historic Bolshevik leaders, took place a few months after Hitler’s armies marched into the Rhineland. The last trials of Bukharin and Rykov coincided with Nazi occupation of Austria. Germany with Western help was rearming and taunting and testing the world. Western appeasement and aid to Nazi Germany duly preoccupied Stalin who had come to believe that the West was sicking Hitler on the hated Soviet Union. He had to dread the prospect of a single-handed war against Germany. He must have seen such a war as the end of the Soviet experience and his own personal end. He saw an opposition using a new war to its advantage to crush him and his Socialism In One Country. In such circumstances the leaders of the opposition on left and right would have been capable of overthrowing Stalin. Therefore the opposition had to die as traitors. Moreover, the purges then generated real opposition, thus leading to more and more terror, as in the French Revolution. Apparently there was a real conspiracy among military leaders. A genuine plot? A conspiracy perhaps?

Deutscher notes that “quite a few non-Stalinist sources maintain that the generals did indeed plan a coup d’état and did this for their own motives, and on their own initiative, not in compact with any foreign power.” It was to have been a palace revolt in the Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin.” The plot was uncovered and Stalin hardly hesitated in the elimination of one-fourth of the officers’ corps.

From that point there was no more rebellion against Stalin as happened to Robespierre. There was no Thermidor for Joseph Stalin, born Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili. The new Soviet nation hardly changed as a result of the purges. Instead it organized and in defense of the homeland defeated Hitler’s until then invincible armies.

For many of the above reasons, western Communists did not desert Communism and the home of the world revolution until nearly 20 years after Stalin’s death. Stalin got some of the blame but far from all. If anything the grayness of the bureaucratism of the Brezhnev years and the crushing of dissension and rebellion in East Europe, especially in Prague 1968, finally led to the end of “the age of innocence” of many Western Communists.

While Mayakovsky’s lonely statue still stands on Triumphalnaya Square and many people still call it Mayakovskaya Ploschad, the poet is rather forgotten.

On the other hand, though monuments to Stalin have been pulled down across Russia [and new ones are now being proposed], his shadow nonetheless hovers and haunts modern Russia and like the ideals of the French Revolution many of his achievements survive making Russia great and particular and its capitalism dicey … to say the least.

=======

NOTES

 Einstein’s views on other issues, including socialism, McCarthyism and racism, were controversial (see Einstein on socialism). In a 1949 article, Albert Einstein described the “predatory phase of human development”, exemplified by a chaotic capitalist society, as a source of evil to be overcome. Einstein was very much involved in the Civil Rights movement. He was a close friend of Paul Robeson for over 20 years. Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups (including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP) many of which were headed by Paul Robeson. He served as co-chair with Paul Robeson of the American Crusade to End Lynching. When W.E.B. DuBois was frivolously charged with being a communist spy during the McCarthy era while he was in his 80s, Einstein volunteered as a character witness in the case. The case was dismissed shortly after it was announced that he was to appear in that capacity. Einstein was quoted as saying that “racism is America’s greatest disease”.

[16] to President Roosevelt (dated August 2, 1939, before World War II broke out, and probably written by Leó Szilárd) encouraging him to initiate a program to create a nuclear weapon. Roosevelt responded to this by setting up a committee for the investigation of using uranium as a weapon, which in a few years was superseded by the Manhattan Project.

Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin about this, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik’s letter:

Yezhov, please take charge of Brik’s letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik’s complaints are, in my opinion, justified…” (Source: Memoirs by Vasily Katanyan (L. Yu. Brik’s stepson) p.112)

Four Winds movement there.^[2] He was also an influence on the writer Valentin Kataev. The well-known phrase “Lenin lives, lived and will live” come from his elegy “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”.

War in the Vendée, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_in_the_Vendée. Eds.

[82] This is seen by some as a return of Stalin’s cult. In Krasnoyarsk, it has been decided to rebuild a communist-era memorial complex dedicated to Josef Stalin.^[83] Also, a new statue of Stalin is to be erected in Moscow, “returning his once-ubiquitous image to the streets after an absence of four decades, a top city official said yesterday”, as reported by The Scotsman.^[84]

Name of Russia. Historical Choice 2008” in which 178,881 out of 1,453,390 voted for him.^[86]

See also:

Stalin: A New History, by Sara Davies and Jim Harris

• Some Remarks On Yet Another Anticommunist Article Concerning Communist Solidarity With The Spanish Republic In The Spanish Civil War // 

• A review of Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War by Ronald Radosh (Editor), Mary Radosh Habeck (Editor), Grigory Sevostianov (Editor). Annals of Communism series. Yale University Press, June 2001.

an interview with Prof. Grover Furr