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Stalin is of vital importance in the former socialist countries
Since capitalist restoration in the USSR, Stalin's work has become important in understanding the mechanisms of recent class struggles under socialism.
There is a link between the capitalist restoration and the virulent campaign against Stalin that preceded it. The explosion of hatred against a man who died in 1953 might seem strange, if not incomprehensible. During the twenty years that preceded Gorbachev's rise to power, Brezhnev incarnated bureaucracy, stagnation, corruption and militarism. But neither in the Soviet Union nor in the `Free World' did we ever witness a violent, raging attack against Brezhnev similar to the ones against Stalin. It is obvious that over the last few years, in the USSR as well as in the rest of the world, all the fanatics of capitalism and of imperialism, to finish off what remained of socialism in the USSR, focused on Stalin as the target.
The disastrous turn taken by Khrushchev shows in fact the pertinence of most of Stalin's ideas. Stalin stressed that class struggle continues under socialism, that the old feudal and bourgeois forces never stopped their struggle for restoration and that the opportunists in the Party, the Trotskyists, the Bukharinists and the bourgeois nationalists, helped the anti-Socialist classes regroup their forces. Khrushchev declared that these theses were aberrations and that they led to arbitrary measures. But in 1993, the apparition of Tsar Boris stands out as a monument to the correctness of Stalin's judgment.
Adversaries of the dictatorship of the proletariat never stopped in insisting that Stalin represented not the dictatorship of the workers but his own autocratic dictatorship. The word Gulag means `Stalinist dictatorship'. But those who were in the Gulag during Stalin's era are now part of the bourgeoisie in power. To demolish Stalin was to give socialist democracy a new birth. But once Stalin was buried, Hitler came out of his tomb. And in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, etc., all the fascist heroes are resurrected, ilk such as Vlasov, Bandera, Antonescu, Tiso and other Nazi collaborators. The destruction of the Berlin Wall heralded the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany. Today, when faced with the unleashing of capitalism and fascism in Eastern Europe, it is easier to understand that Stalin did in fact defend worker's power.
Next: Stalin is at Up: Introduction: The importance Previous: Introduction: The importance
Fri Aug 25 09:03:42 PDT 1995