Vadim Rogovin
"The director is not appealing to reason or criticism.
He wants to crush the rights of reason with the massive scale of the frame-up,
reinforced with executions."
Leon Trotsky
"Trotsky was a hero of the revolution. He fell when the
heroic age was over."
E. H Carr
Vadim Zakharovich Rogovin's 1937: Stalin's Year of Terror was
one of a seven-volume study that set out to prove that there "Was An Alternative to Stalinism and that alternative came from Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition.
If there was one figure, Stalin feared the most it was Leon
Trotsky and the International Left Opposition. Trotsky without the resources of
state power exposed the treachery of the Stalinist bureaucracy and advocated a political
revolution to overthrow Stalinism.
Stalin could not defeat Trotsky politically hence the need
for the Moscow Trials which according to Rogovin the main goal "was to
create the conditions for politically discrediting and physically exterminating
the entire communist opposition in order to behead the population, to deprive
it for many years of a political avant-garde and therefore of the ability to
resist the totalitarian regime. The class struggle in the USSR assumed,
essentially, its sharpest form - civil war. This civil war, unlike the civil
war of 1918-20, took the specific form of state terror directed at precluding
any political activity by the masses".[1]
In this book, Rogovin cites numerous myths that surround the
events of 1937 that were regurgitated over the following decades. In a lecture
given in the United States, he says "there were two basic forms. The first
could be called the Stalinist school of falsification.
A second school we could
call the anti-communist school of falsification. It is quite curious that in
many places the explanation of our history coincides when presented both by the
Stalinists and by the anti-communists. For instance, one central thesis they
agree upon is that Stalin was the natural continuation of Lenin's cause.
Earlier there was one slight difference when they said that Stalin was the good
continuation of a good cause, the cause of Lenin. Now they say, on the
contrary, that Stalin was the wretched continuation of an evil policy by the
evil Lenin".[2]
With the development of "glasnost" [openness], Rogovin
hoped that these myths would be vanquished. During Glasnost and Perestroika, millions
of people in the USSR sought answers to complex historical questions. This led
to a sharp increase in sales of mass-circulation newspapers, as well as literary
and political journals. It soon became very clear to Rogovin that issues of the
Great Terror and Stalinism were far from being clarified but were instead being
used by many anti-communists to sully the name of socialism.
As Rogovin points out the origins of many of the so-called
new myths were peddled at the time of Khrushchev's 1956 report at the Twentieth
Congress of the CPSU. While many communists and socialists thought this action
by Khruschev would open up the possibilities of a struggle against the
bureaucracy prompting the poet and writer Bertolt Brecht to write "The liquidation of Stalinism can take
place only if the party mobilises the wisdom of the masses on a gigantic scale.
Such a mobilisation lies along the road to communism".[3]
Brecht would be disappointed as any figure that was capable
of opposing Stalinism had all but been wiped out in the purges. The 1956 speech
was not a political break with Stalinism but a mechanism in which to deal with
the raging political and economic crisis that washed world Stalinism.
Khrushchev delivered his speech with blood dripping from his
hands. He was as Rogovin points out implicated in all the major crimes
committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Khrushchev said "We must affirm
that the party fought a serious fight against the Trotskyists, rightists and
bourgeois nationalists and that it disarmed ideologically all the enemies of
Leninism. The ideological fight was carried on successfully ... Here Stalin
played a positive role."[4]
Rogovin's book, while examining the political implications
of the Great Terror also expands on the significant interest shown by many
figures who stood aloof from socialist politics. In the novel Doctor Zhivago,
Boris Pasternak used his hero to express the following thoughts: "I think
that collectivisation was a mistaken and unsuccessful measure, but it was
impossible to admit the mistake. In order to hide the failure, it was necessary
to use all means of terror to make people forget how to think and to force them
to see what did not exist or to prove the opposite of what was obvious. Hence
the unbridled cruelty of the Yezhov period, the declaration of a constitution
never intended to be applied, and the introduction of elections not based on
elective principles." [5]
Rogovin points out that Pasternak's statements bear a
significant resemblance to the ideas of Trotsky. Rogovin also points out that"
Pasternak's explanation of the tragedy during the "Yezhov period"
also displays unmistakable proximity to Lenin's prognoses made in 1921. In
referring to the alternatives Soviet Russia faced at that time, Lenin saw two
outcomes from the contradictions which had accumulated by then: "ten to
twenty years of correct relations with the peasantry and victory is guaranteed
on a world scale (even given delays in the proletarian revolutions which are
growing).[6]
Rogovin's mention of writers like Pasternak is interesting
in that it highlights the gap between people like Pasternak who were non-political
but would stand up for a principle against a coterie of Soviet writers led by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn who would not[7].
Solzhenitsyn's work was hardly a bastion of objectivity on the matter of the Great
Terror.
His book 'Gulag Archipelago' fails even to mention the main
defendants in the Moscow Trials Leon
Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. He writes next to nothing of the heroic
struggle of the Left Opposition against Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn started as a radical
critic of Stalinism but ended up being a virulent anti-communist and a Great
Russian chauvinist.
He vomited up all the old Stalinist lies that Stalinism was
an 'outgrowth' of Bolshevism and was the true face of the Russian revolution. Rogovin's
book thoroughly shatters these lies and with it Solzhenitsyn's thesis and
reputation.
Rogovin's thoroughness stretches throughout the book. For
the general reader, this might make reading a little daunting. The perseverance
of the reader is rewarded with a detailed study of what happened after the
Russian revolution. The book is hard sometimes going not because of Rogovin's
writing which is stunning and lucid but because he does not spare the reader
any detail as to what happened to not only the old Bolsheviks but anyone who
came into contact with them.
Group shootings with almost daily tens of prisoners sent
into the wilderness. According to Rogovin, "they shot not only the
Trotskyists themselves, but any members of their families who were with them".
He goes on: "When a husband was shot, his imprisoned wife was
automatically sent to be shot; with the most significant oppositionists, their
children who had reached the age of 12 were also subject to shooting."
The New Stalin
School of Falsification.
At the same, this book was translated by Fred Choate on behalf
of Mehring books there appeared a new Stalin school of falsification. As
Rogovin correctly states: "These ideological operations served the same
purpose as the historical falsifications produced by the Stalinist school: to
cauterise, deceive, distort and poison the historical memory and social
consciousness of the Soviet people."[8]
The release of the book happened to coincide with as one
writer puts it with an "orgy of capitalist propaganda which flooded
the post-1989 Russia has for the time being crowded out those voices like
Rogovin, demanding a real examination of the Moscow Trials. The bourgeois heirs
of the Stalinist bureaucracy that led society to the impasse of the late 1980s
cannot carry through this examination. Therefore, in the land of the October
revolution and the giants which are produced, the real lessons of these events
and its subsequent degeneration along the lines of Stalinism remain unknown by
the majority. Trotsky is a slandered figure in modern-day Russia, particularly
by the pro-capitalist parvenus who have arisen from the bureaucracy. In their
enthusiastic embrace of capitalism, they wish to obliterate all of the real
lessons of Stalinism and the heinous purge trials. Rogovin's book provides us
with the political ammunition to counter this".
Much of this orgy of Stalinist falsification came from
academia and in particular from the pen of Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. The
Marxist writer David North points out "The years since the fall of the
USSR have seen the emergence of what can best be described as The Post-Soviet
School of Historical Falsification. The principal objective of this school is
to discredit Leon Trotsky as a significant historical figure, to deny that he
represented an alternative to Stalinism, or that his political legacy contains
anything relevant in the present and valuable for the future. Every historian
is entitled to his or her viewpoint. But these viewpoints must be grounded in a
serious, honest and principled attitude toward the assembling of facts and the
presentation of historical evidence. It is this essential quality; however,
that is deplorably absent in two new biographies of Leon Trotsky, one by
Professor Geoffrey Swain of the University of Glasgow and the other by
Professor Ian D. Thatcher of Brunel University in West London. These works have
been brought out by large and influential publishing houses. Swain's biography
has been published by Longman; Thatcher's by Routledge. Their treatment of the
life of Leon Trotsky is without the slightest scholarly merit. Both works make
limited use of Trotsky's writings, offering few substantial citations and even
ignoring major books, essays and political statements.[9]
After Swain and Thatcher, there came a veritable flood of
books that sought to further The Post-Soviet School of Historical
Falsification. One particular is worth mentioning is Grover Furr's Stalin
Waiting For The Truth!. Furr believes that Stalin committed no crimes; the
charges against him are a fabrication. Not a single accusation holds up. On the
evidence, according to Furr, Stalin committed no- atrocities. One of Furr's
books if you could call them that was entitled "Khrushchev Lied".
It
is hard to know where to start with Furr's unhinged writings. The American
professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University is an unrepentant
Stalinist but the fact that Furr can even get a hearing is down to gentlemen
like Swain, Thatcher and Robert Service. Furr is "only a pawn in their
game". A terrible price continues to be paid for the falsification of
history and the denial of objective truth.
To conclude, it is hoped that people will read Rogovin's
work in Russia and throughout the world, not just to honour but to fight for
what he believed in.
[1] 1937-Stalin's Year of
Terror-By Vadim Z Rogovin-Mehring Books, 1998(page 145)
[2] lecture given by Professor
Vadim Rogovin on February 27 at Michigan State University in East Lansing- http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/russ/rogov1.html
[5] 1937: Stalin’s Year of
Terror By Vadim Z. Rogovin-Mehring Books-1998
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
[8] http://www.capitalh.org.uk/134/rogovin.html
[9] A review of two Trotsky
biographies, by Geoffrey Swain and Ian Thatcher-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/05/lec1-m09.html
