Stalinist crimes (negationism)

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Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin and Kaganovich all played a major role in the Soviet Union's Red Holocaust. Historical negationism, also called denialism, is falsification or distortion of the historical record.

The term "Stalinist crimes" is invoked as a form of rhetorical red negationism in neo-Marxist and Trotskyist theory. The term "Stalinism" is a synonym of "Stalinist crimes ". Both terms are often used in the leftist community where the dominant viewpoint is that Karl Marx was a great thinker who devised a great political system, Stalin, on the other hand, perverted the teachings and became the greatest mass murderer in recorded world history.

History

In essence, the use of this term implies Red Holocaust denial, in that it seeks to play down the general role in the crimes committed by the international communist movement during the 20th century, portraying as the only Joseph Stalin as the only murdering beast, seeking to white-wash and even legitimise Stalin's fellow war criminals Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin in their role setting up the infrastructure of mass murder and genocide against gentiles in the Soviet Union. It is a subtle way of suggesting that Trotskyism and left-communism "isn't so bad really" and that in the West, their subversive activities should be allowed to go unsuppressed by the state.

The real earthquake in the West was only caused by the publication in 1973 of The Gulag Archipelago by the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a testimony confirming the existence of the gulags. This indictment against communism fundamentally changed the attitude in the West towards communist crimes and their victims.

In an interconnected sense, the term is also invoked by Jewish negationists who would like to white-wash the ethnic Jewish role in bringing Bolshevism to Russia and heading many of its institutions. The widely respected scholar Alexander Solzhenitsyn has noted that during this period the GULAG system was ran almost entirely by Jews and favoured them to other nationalities. Needless to say, Stalin's supposed "Hitlerian" tendencies hardly fits with his third-wife being Rosa Kaganovich, a Jewess, the daughter of his right hand man and life-long ally, Lazar Kaganovich. Nor does it fit with Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov running the NKVD in the 1930s.

When Stalin became an ally of Western countries during the Second World War, their governments tried to silence information about communist crimes. It was only after the start of the Cold War (a USSR–Western conflict) in 1947 that the Western Allies stopped covering them up. However, the testimonies of survivors from the gulags who found themselves in the West were long challenged by numerous supporters of the USSR. For example, in France, where communist influence was particularly strong, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński's book A World Apart containing memories of the gulags could only be published in 1985, that is more than thirty years after its first edition. However, the lie about Soviet crimes slowly began to crumble. In 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev revealed the truth about some of the 'distortions' under Stalin. The fact that this information came from the Soviet leader himself made an impression on the West. He disproved the claims that the crimes were an invention of anti-communist propaganda. Still, however, there was no shortage of those who claimed that they had only taken place under Stalin and denied their scale. Others searched for excuses for the crimes: for example, they preached the false theory that they fitted into the 'logic of history' and were an essential condition for the rapid modernization and industrialization of Russia. There were also those disillusioned with Stalin who transferred their sympathies to other mass criminals, especially the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. The atrocities of the communist state could still be denied, but no longer within the mainstream of public debate. After the fall of communism, the silence about the crimes in Central and Eastern Europe was broken. Although in Russia, a country that cannot come to terms with its communist past, the historical facts are still being denied with the support of the authorities: denial of the Katyn Massacre is increasing and the genocidal nature of the Holodomor (also known as the Great Famine) – a famine deliberately caused by the USSR authorities that claimed at least three million victims – is called into question. In 1997 Le Livre noir du communisme. Crimes, terreur, répression (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression) was published in France. This attempt to estimate the number of victims of communism from different parts of the world, and especially the introduction by the historian Stéphane Courtois, provoked extremely heated discussions in the West. Communist and left-wing circles especially heavily criticized these points: the number of victims that the publication put at 100 million, the claim that violence is an inherent feature of communism [...] there are communist states, Communist Parties in many countries operate legally and the Marxist-Leninist ideology still has its followers. In many left-wing circles, communist crimes are still a taboo. Only a few countries in Europe have legislation that bans denying them. Communist symbols are commonplace in pop culture. The hammer and sickle or portraits of communist revolutionary leaders, such as Mao and Che Guevara, decorate T-shirts and gadgets despite symbolizing a system that is responsible for more victims than that represented by the swastika or Hitler's image.

During and after the rule of Nikita Khrushchev (1956–1964), Soviet historiographic practice was more complicated. In this period, Soviet historiography was characterized by complex competition between Stalinist and anti-Stalinist Marxist historians. In 2006, the Holodomor Law proclaimed state-made famine organized by the Stalinist regime in Ukraine an act of genocide against Ukrainian people. In addition, Art. 2 of the Holodomor Law has stipulated explicit provision on historical denialism by stating that “public denial of the 1932–1933 Holodomor in Ukraine shall be recognized as desecration of the memory of millions of victims of the Holodomor as well as disparagement of the Ukrainian people and shall be unlawful. Russia’s secret police, FSB, once again officially denied the Holodomor in 2008.

See also

• Great Purge
• Katyn Massacre
• The Black Book of Communism
• Mass killings under Communist regimes

External links

• Defending Stalinism by Means of Criminal Law: Russia, 1995–2014 by Nikolay Koposov

Videos

• The Truth About Stalin’s Prison Camps