Stalinist Historiography

The following is an extract of a book review by Peter Brandt, Berlin, translated by Norman LaPorte (the full review see: Twentieth Century Communism 3 (2011), p. 226-230).

One of the darkest chapters in the history of Soviet-style communism was the two years of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, 1939-41. And here, as in many other cases, whoever wanted to know what was really happening then could have known earlier--at least in general outline (...) By this means the intensity of German-Soviet co-operation around 1940--both the open and secret support of the USSR for the Nazi Reich--was more clearly established; as well as the fact that Stalin in the summer of 1939 consciously decided in favour of the option presented by Hitler's Germany, which he thought was advantageous for him. Overall, today one can no longer speak of a poor state of research in relation to the inter-state level of the pact.

This book, however, presents documents on an aspect of the topic that is relatively underexposed though not previously unknown: the specific role of the Communist International, its various member parties, and in particular the KPD in exile. And it is a study as fascinating and gripping as it is depressing. The collection is complemented by a contribution from a contemporary witness, Wolfgang Leonhard, who experienced the policy reversal inside the Soviet Union and the communist movement as a very young man, and who remains today perturbed by the shock of these events. Bayerlein's introduction, which follows an extensive contextualising foreword by Hermann Weber, contains some impressive interpretational work, which is almost always convincing. This study is to be recommended without reservation!

The book is not an edition for purely academic use. The sources it presents are, generally, published consecutively, as a series of extracts, but also comply with academic referencing norms; and they manage to fit a large amount of rich material between the covers. The individual extracts are each preceded by a short introduction, giving the necessary historical context. Additionally, more specific explanations or notes are incorporated into the text and, together with relevant photographs, listed in the margin. An annotated register of names, an index of pseudonyms, codenames and acronyms, and a thematically ordered compilation of selected literature, round off this user-friendly volume for a broadly historically and politically interested public. The documents, translated from various languages into German, originate in the main from the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History and the Archive of the Parties and Mass Organisations of the GDR in the Federal Archives; in addition there is material from a number of other archives, plus, not least, documents from several foreign publications.

At the centre of the documented events (... ) is the encoded correspondence of the Moscow Centre of the Comintern, which was handled by its secret radio networks; the informal sources around Stalin and his closest collaborators; and party and government declarations, official correspondence, speeches, articles, secret reports and so forth, at various different levels. From all this there emerges into view a multifarious and dense network of a very particular mechanism, and its specific relationships to the power politics of the Soviet state and ideological legitimisation. Communist sources are frequently cross-referenced to (more or less private) statements by left-wing critics, from within the communists' own ranks, and there are also revealing quotes from Goebbels's diaries. In the course of this, the nomenklatura appears above all else as a dictatorship, based on methodical lies and self-deception.

What was the bottom line? The official communist party characterisation of the war before the summer of 1941 was that it was imperialist on both sides (...). But during the years of the Hitler Stalin pact world communism--following Stalinist foreign policy and its instrumentalisation by the Soviet state--in fact stood on the side of national socialist Germany, although this was cloaked in official neutrality. This was most blatantly visible in the attempts of the communist parties of northern and western Europe to enable the continued existence of their organisations and press during the course of the German occupation of their respective countries in the spring and summer of 1940. The hopes of German communists themselves for a long time focused on a semi-legal status for the KPD under the national socialist dictatorship. According to Walter Ulbricht, they would then defend the German-Soviet Pact--together with social-democratic workers and Nazi 'working people'--against the aggressive, bellicose plans of England, the alleged centre of world imperialism, and 'expose' its enemies. It was because of this perspective that world communism hushed up national socialist terror during these years, especially the persecution of the Jews.

This means that Ulbricht's infamous article in the Comintern journal Die Welt (9 February 1940)--which Bayerlein takes up--far from representing an extreme position or an aberration, in fact describes in its logic exactly the political line of the KPD, the Comintern and its Moscow masters. After the rapid victory of the German Wehrmacht over the French army and the speedy establishment of Nazi hegemony on the European continent, which was obviously not anticipated by Stalin, there was a tentative modification--though not a revision--of the communist stance on the war that had been propagated since the end of August 1939.

Bayerlein's collection does also show how profoundly the communist world movement--especially in Europe--struggled to accept the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and in the subsequent period tried to assess how to react to further changes to the situation as brought about by the Soviet-German Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September 1939. They had, after all, battled for years under the banner of antifascism. But 'fascism' and 'antifascism' were now, according to foreign minister Molotov, 'outdated unusable formulations'. The previous world view had virtually been turned on its head.

Initially, a number of communist parties misunderstood the German-Soviet Pact as purely an emergency measure taken by Stalin, which would still allow them to continue the policy of the 'people's front' period in a modified form. (...) The Moscow leadership, communicating its stance via the Comintern, had to intervene severely in this case, as well as against other communist parties, in order to 'correct' this (...) Especially among their closer allies in the left and liberal political spectrum, there was a horrified distancing from this policy. Among German political exiles, the Hitler-Stalin Pact (...) contributed decisively to a rapprochement of independent left-wing socialist groupings and the rump SPD.

One of the particular merits of the present selection of documents is the opportunity it offers of establishing continuities between the 1939-41 phases and the following phase--from the beginning of the Wehrmacht's Russian crusade until the dissolution of the Comintern (1941-43). A key continuity was the complete abandonment of a world revolutionary orientation--in the original sense--in favour of the pursuit of espionage activities for the USSR, which could now scarcely be differentiated from the political activities of the International. (The heroic resistance of communists in Nazi-dominated Europe, including the Third Reich, is of course another story.) The proclaimed aim of the making of 'patriotic alliances'--now very widely conceived--is, upon closer examination, on a par with the empty phrases of the pact phase. (...)  This effectively Moscow-initiated strategy is rightly stripped of its heroic halo by Bayerlein, through the use of documents by contemporary critics.

The title of the book is a quote from the last article written by the inspired publicist and organiser Willi Münzenberg, who had been forced out of the KPD in 1938-9 because he did not follow Ulbricht's policy towards the communists' allies on the left--or on other forms of intolerant and ill-advised behaviour. On 22 September 1939, in response to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Münzenberg wrote--in a reference to the typical Stalinist psychosis of betrayal: 'Today millions wake up in all countries, they stretch out their arms, pointing to the East, and call: "The traitor, Stalin, is you!"'

Münzenberg, who was murdered in the summer of 1940 in unexplained circumstances, could not know in the autumn of 1939 how far Stalin was prepared to go. In furtherance of the pact, more than 1000 imprisoned German communists who had fallen out of favour were got rid of by simply handing them over to the National Socialist security forces at the German-Soviet demarcation line.

Celebrare la rivoluzione d’Ottobre implica, in qualche modo, seguirne il filo rosso per fare i conti con le costellazioni che si sono formate in seguito a questo evento. Il suo centenario è l’occasione per raccoglierne l’eredità e interrogare, ancora una volta, la trama degli eventi storici, delle promesse e dei fallimenti del Novecento. La rivoluzione d’ottobre è un evento storico epocale, ma anche un mito collettivo che la cultura visuale ha nutrito. Se i raggi della stella della rivoluzione si sono propagati lungo tutto il secolo scorso, le sue scintille dalla Russia hanno raggiunto le lotte di liberazione anti-coloniali nelle periferie del mondo e continuano, ancora oggi, ad esercitare una forte influenza. Il 1917 è uno spartiacque fondamentale della contemporaneità e la rivoluzione è stata la prima sfida aperta alla forma di produzione capitalistica, che ha veicolato un mutamento politico della sovranità, della struttura sociale e del rapporto di forza tra classi. La grande mobilitazione bolscevica che segna il 1917 è una storia di resistenza che ha condotto all’emancipazione delle masse contadine e dei rapporti di genere, al rifiuto dell’imperialismo guerrafondaio e alla sperimentazione di forme dirette di democrazia. E se da un lato la rivoluzione va ricollocata all’interno della storia della Russia e alla fine di un impero, dall’altro lato è utile spezzare quella linea di continuità che fa dello stalinismo il suo telos necessario. Questo numero de Lo Sguardo si fa carico di un’esigenza profonda che è quella di ripensare la rivoluzione da un punto di vista scientifico e filosofico, facendo i conti con un’eredità difficile ma anche con un certo imbarazzo o una velata diffidenza attuale che è la misura del nostro rapporto con l’esperienza socialista, ma in particolare con il leninismo prima e lo stalinismo poi.

This essay criticizes Alexander Etkind's book, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, for analyzing consequences of repressed histories while itself neglecting important historical facts: like the fact of Stalin's post-1956 omission from public discourse. I show that Etkind's texts rely on such factual omissions to denounce the “criminal state” from a position of non-complicity, perpetuating a popular perestroika-era historiographic narrative that today is countered by “patriotic” historiography, which unproblematically unites the Russian people and nation against foreign aggression. The two positions are counterparts, this essay argues, united by a morally unambiguous relationship to the past, and by the omission of factual details that could complicate such an unproblematic identification. 
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Статья критикует работы Александра Эткинда о “искривлении горя,” анализирующие последствия политических репрессий в общественной памяти. Однако, в этих работах Эткинд игнорирует исторические факты важные для подобного анализа: например, факт умолчания имени Сталина в официальных обсуждениях после ХХ Съезда. Тем самым автор продолжает популярную историографию перестройки, давшую возможность публично осуждать советский режим не обдумывая личную сопричастность к его злодеяниям. Данная публикация указывает на недопустимость избирательного подхода к истории, так как именно на исторических пробелах строится новое заблуждение: продолжению перестроечной историографии, содержащей пробелы и неувязки, сегодня и противопоставляется новая патриотическая идеология, объединяющая нацию против “внешнего врага,” как в настоящем времени, так и в оценках прошлого.