STALIN PAGE II

Stalin's War: Victims and Accomplices

Vinnytsia -- The Katyn Of Ukraine

Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War?, by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun).

An interview with Nathan Steinberger

Stalin's Great Terror: Origins and Consequences

SICK STALIN SKETCHED VILE CARTOONS OF VICTIMS

A museum of Mongol killings
Curator hopes years of slaughter at Stalin's urging will never be forgotten

Death of Stalin: a Coup d'Etat - A List of Links -

STALIN'S SECRET WAR by Nikolai Tolstoy. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981, 463pp, $18.50, ISBN 0-03-047266-0.

PAWNS OF YALTA: SOVIET REFUGEES AND AMERICA'S ROLE IN THEIR REPATRIATION by Mark R. Elliott. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, 287pp, $17.95, ISBN 0-252-00897-9.

Our "present" has to a large degree been shaped by the events of 1939-45. The outcome of the contest between Stalin and Hitler, as "relevant" to so many of our contemporaries as those earlier struggles between Persia and Greece or Carthage and Rome, does cast its shadow over our lives. Count Nikolai Tolstoy, in his latest book, sets out "to interpret Soviet policy, internal and external, during the crucial years 1938 to 1945. Above all, I have tried to lay bare how Stalin himself saw events and reacted to them." The author draws on much new material, as well as on evidence long before available but often "over-looked" in previous publications of other writers, to support his conclusions in what is a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Second World War on the Eastern Front.

It is Tolstoy's contention that Stalin was haunted by the fear that the Communist state was essentially a house of cards that could easily collapse. His overriding concern was to shore up the position of the regime, largely through a policy of terrorizing the various peoples who inhabited the USSR.

The first four chapters review Stalin's pre-war management of the Soviet Union. The "New Society" so admired by many Western intellectuals was an unrestricted police state, run by perhaps the foulest collection of congenital criminals ever assembled (thus far). Its economy rested upon the output of 15-20 million slaves, laboring in Siberia and mines in the Arctic Circle, where the annual death rate of 50-70% far surpassed that of any previous slave society. Stalin's Russia was a land with three categories of citizens: prisoners, former prisoners, and future prisoners. There was scarcely a family that had not been touched by the secret state police (NKVD). For the overwhelming majority living in the USSR, conditions were far worse than they had ever been under the Romanovs. In Tolstoy's view, "Stalin's great achievement was to place the entire population of nearly two hundred million people wholly in the power of the police, whilst himself retaining in turn absolute power over the police."

The author explains that Stalin was consumed by the fear that, given an opportunity, his hapless subjects would rise up against the Communist dictatorship. After spending a year in the Soviet Union, an American diplomat concluded that "Not very much leadership would be required to start a counter-Stalinist revolution. . . . Many people have come to believe if Germany turned eastward she could find enough people in Russia who were fed up with present rulers to welcome any outside aid, even from the Germans."

Part Two, the major portion of the book, deals with Stalin's diplomatic maneuverings and wartime direction of internal security and military affairs. In August 1939, while Western diplomats were engaged in negotiations with the Soviets, Stalin signed non-aggression and trade agreements with Hitler. These benefited both parties: Germany, for the time being, was able to concentrate her slender military resources against a recalcitrant Poland and Britain and France, and also received food, oil, and other supplies from the USSR. In exchange, the USSR obtained technical aid and freedom to enlarge her sphere of influence at the expense of Poland, Rumania, the Baltic states, and Finland. In the newly absorbed areas most vestiges of Western culture were extinguished. The author describes what happened when the Russians invaded Poland in September 1939:

The NKVD had categories of citizens subject to immediate arrest, from aristocrats and priests to Red Cross officials and even stamp collectors. Men were separated from their wives and children and those who were not executed upon arrest were shipped off to the slave-camps of GULAG. where they were litterally worked to death. The pattern was the same in the Baltic states. Tolstoy reveals that about one-tenth of the population of the newly occupied countries was deported. A Jewish Zionist who had looked with favor upon the USSR "as a great social experiment" only to end up in the GULAG camps himself for four years, declared after his release:

Tolstoy remarks that "History is accordingly presented with the extraordinary fact that Jews resorted to bribery and other desperate measures in efforts to escape from Soviet territory to the tender mercies of the Nazis."

Stalin still moved with caution in 1939-40. He feared that Germany, which served as a buffer from the Arctic Ocean to the Balkans, might be defeated by France and Britain, thus jeopardizing his own conquests. It seems that he breathed a sigh of relief once France capitulated in June 1940.

Hitler, who had made a career out of opposition to Bolshevism, decided to launch a pre-emptive attack on the USSR following Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's visit to Berlin in November 1940. Molotov presented a long list of Soviet territorial "interests," which included the Petsamo nickel deposits in Finland, the Baltic Sea up to the sound between Norway and Denmark, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. Later that month, at a meeting with German Ambassador Count von der Schulenburg, Molotov added other regions to the list. Hitler, long uncomfortable with the Soviet pact, had come under increasing criticism from Mussolini for seeming to abandon the anti-Communist struggle.* Stalin's new territorial demands decided the matter, as Hitler concluded that "they were thoroughly untrustworthy allies, who would seize the first opportunity of profiting by a German reverse to move forward into Europe. This is what he had always known and prophesied." On 18 December 1940, Hitler released War Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa, which ordered the invasion of Russia the following Spring. Tolstoy notes that Stalin, who had enjoyed a number of diplomatic successes up to that time, had over-reached himself: "The Soviet tactic (well-nigh universally employed) of demanding twice what they wanted and being content with half, had for once gone seriously astray. Hitler had no intention of conceding anything to an ally whom he rated many degrees lower than Mussolini, and was angered by what he saw as an emerging Soviet threat."

As has long been known, Stalin received numerous warnings about an impending German attack, including those from his master spy in Japan Richard Sorge. (On this point see General Charles A. Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring, E.P. Dutton, 1952.) Even after Germany and her anti-Comintern allies Rumania, Hungary, Finland, and Slovakia launched their invasion of Russia in June 1941, Stalin's primary fear was not of his foreign enemies but of the Russian people themselves. During the first weeks of the attack "the country seemed to be disintegrating precisely in the manner his worst nightmares had foretold."

The "secret war" Tolstoy goes on to vividly describe was the fierce campaign Stalin waged against the Russian population - a struggle which often took priority over pressing military problems. For example, Stalin tied up much of the rail network in western Russia with slave trains of captives from the Baltic states, instead of devoting all rolling stock to the reinforcement of the frontlines. At L'Vov, where the Soviet 4th Army was fighting desperately to prevent its surrender, Stalin's major concern was that the NKVD finish liquidating potential Ukrainian opponents of the regime rather than order the local security forces to join in the battle against advancing Axis units. While Stalin pleaded with the British to rush more aid and take further action, the NKVD labor camp guards were doubled in number from 500,000 to one million heavily armed men.

Standard treatments of this period always claim that the Soviet Union lost over 20 million people during the Second World War. Tolstoy makes a convincing case that the actual total is probably closer to 30 million, maybe even more - with about a third of these deaths attributable to Axis actions. The blame for as many as 23 million deaths is placed with Stalin and his NKVD henchmen.

Casualty figures for the Eastern Front have been estimated as follows: two and a half million German soldiers died in the East. It is believed that three Red Army men died for every German soldier killed. Of those 7,500,000 military deaths, approximately three million Russians died as POWs.

Tolstoy's analysis of these statistics does much to revise our understanding of the war on the Eastern Front, as he demonstrates that these high Russian military casualties were largely due to the Soviets' crude methods of waging war. 'Penal battalions" composed of "enemies of the people" (i.e., inmates of prisons and camps, and luckless peasants, including women and children) were hurled in waves against German defensive positions. Frequently unarmed and at times deprived of camouflaged uniforms to better draw enemy fire, they were often used to clear minefields. With NKVD machine-gunners poised behind them, they were forced across minefields until a path was cleared. The wounded were killed off by the NKVD. General Ratov, chief of the Soviet Military Mission to Britain, actually declined an offer of British mine-detectors, remarking that "in the Soviet Union we use people." SMERSH (from the initials "Death to Spies"), the NKVD's special murder arm made famous by Ian Fleming in his James Bond thrillers, was created in 1942 as an additional guard on Soviet front-line troops. The NKVD placed large heavily-armed formations at the rear of Soviet units to discourage withdrawals and to pick off "stragglers" and "cowards." In a number of instances, NKVD units fought pitched battles with Red Army detachments trying to retreat in the face of superior enemy forces. Stalin continued to purge his armed forces even as the Axis advanced. It is likely that hundreds of thousands of Russians were killed in such actions.

As for the POWs who died in German captivity, Tolstoy reminds the reader that the Soviet government refused to sign the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, refused to cooperate with the International Red Cross (the Nazis allowed the Red Cross to visit concentration camps), and rebuffed German feelers forwarded through neutralist concerning compliance with the Hague Convention. A 1941 directive ordered Red Army men to commit suicide instead of surrender and Soviet law regarded Russian POWs as traitors. Besides their own "penal battalions," the Russians occasionally used POWs to clear minefields.

German attitudes toward the Russians were further colored by evidence of NKVD massacres encountered at such places as L'Vov, Vinnitsa, and Katyn. They found not just piles of corpses, but apparently mass-produced torture instruments, including devices for squeezing the skull, another for the testicles, and tools used to skin prisoners alive. Ice picks, broken bottles, or whatever else was handy or preferred were also used. Tolstoy observes that "Soviet cruelty far outstripped that of National Socialism. . . . Torture in the USSR was (and is) employed on a mass scale as an important punitive means of overawing a resentful population." He goes on to explain that these ghastly scenes of state-sanctioned depravity "confirmed the German view that Bolshevik Russia was irredeemably savage and backward." Considering how civilians and POWs were treated by the Communists, the Germans felt no obligation to show much consideration for Russian POWs. According to the author, there was a purpose behind all of this cruelty:

Having accounted for the 7½ million military casualties, Tolstoy states that four million Russian civilians were killed by the Germans (although this includes those involved in anti-Partisan operations, military sieges of such cities as Leningrad, and 750,000 Jews). This leaves 18-20 million additional Russians killed in the course of Stalin's "secret war" against his own subjects. In his study Tolstoy sheds additional light on the British role in the immediate post-war forced repatriation of Russian POWs and refugees back to the USSR, a topic dealt with at length in his earlier book, The Secret Betrayal.** Nikolai Krasnov, one of the few "returnees" who survived ten years in the GULAG and was then allowed to leave Russia in 1955, is quoted as having been told by Beria's deputy Vsevolod Merkulov:

In Chapter 16, "Western Attitudes," Tolstoy attempts to reach an understanding of why so many in the West, especially "intellectuals," avidly supported the Soviet Union. He notes that there has long been a fascination with totalitarian solutions among the Left and that Soviet Marxism appealed to certain intellectuals' desire to rule society. Simple greed and envy are other factors. Tolstoy refutes the oft-made claim that the excesses of Communism must be weighed against the need to fight Fascism: "As Communism formed the prior totalitarian threat, this argument is surely more exculpatory of Fascism and Nazism than the reverse." ***

Stalin's Secret War successfully counters such treatments of this period as Harrison Salisbury's The Unknown War and Alexander Werth's Russia At War, 1941-1945. It deserves to be considered a standard reference work about Stalin and his role in World War II.

The issue of American involvement in the forced repatriation of Russians at the end of World War II, touched upon by Tolstoy in Stalin's Secret War, is the topic of Mark Elliott's recent study Pawns of Yalta. It is an expansion of the author's 1974 University of Kentucky Ph.D. dissertation, and takes into consideration additional material declassified in the 1970s and now available at the National Archives in Washington - such as the "Operation Keelhaul" papers.

When the war in Europe ended, there were several million POWs and refugees in the Western occupational zones. Among them were "Soviet citizens" whom the United States and Britain had pledged at the February 1945 Yalta conference to return to Soviet authorities. These included Red Army POWs, some of the estimated five to six million civilians who had been press-ganged by agents of Hitler's Plenipotentiary-General for Labor Mobilization Fritz Sauckel to work as laborers in the Reich's factories and farms, thousands of pre-war emigres who had fled Russia during the turbulent years 1917-1922, as well as a portion of the one million Soviet soldiers who served in the Wehrmacht during the war.

It is still a surprise to many in the West when they learn that by 1944-45, up to 40% of some "German" formations, and 10 to 15% of all units, were composed of Osttruppen (ex- Red Army men). In addition to the Hilfswillige scattered throughout the German armed forces, three divisions composed of Soviet racial minorities fought on the Eastern Front with the Axis: the Cossack Cavalry Division, the Turkish Division (made up of Moslems from Soviet Central Asia), and the Ukrainian Waffen SS Division "Galicia." And by November 1944, the first division of the proposed Russian Liberation Army, commanded by former Red Army General Andrei Vlasov, became operational. It did engage in some fighting against the Red Army in 1945, and from 6-8 May helped the Czechs liberate Prague from the Germans, before surrendering to the U.S. Third Army on 10 May. Elliott points out that these one million ex- Red Army soldiers who performed duties in German uniform "amounted to the largest military defection in history."

Both the U.S. and Britain were signatories to the 1929 Geneva Convention dealing with the treatment of Prisoners of War. This obligated parties to treat POWs "on the basis of the uniforms worn at the time of capture." While the war continued, the U.S. complied with this bilateral agreement, not wishing to give the Germans cause to mistreat American POWs of German, Italian, or Japanese descent. After VE-Day, when there was no longer danger of Nazi reprisal, the U.S. (and Britain) quickly set about repatriating German POWs on the basis of their nationality, in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention. A secret protocol of the Yalta agreement also provided for the forced return of Russian ex- concentration camp inmates and others who had managed to escape from Stalin's slaughter house, thus obliterating, in the words of the author, "all trace of the proud Western tradition of political asylum."

The British went a step further by handing over to the NKVD a number of former White Russian officers, some of whom had fought the Bolsheviks during the Second World War. All of them had been living outside of Russia since the end of the Russian Civil War and carried foreign passports or League of Nations stateless persons I.D.s. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has characterized this as "an act of double dealing consistent with the spirit of traditional English diplomacy."

American servicemen, led by wartime pro-Soviet propaganda to believe that Stalin was kindly "Uncle Joe" overseeing a noble human experiment in the USSR, were shocked at how most Russians in their charge reacted to the news that they were going to be repatriated to their Soviet homeland. This is illustrated by what took place at Dachau on 17 June 1946, after American authorities informed 400 Soviet refugees that they were going to be sent back to Russia:

The following month similar events took place at the Plattling camp in Bavaria. These were described by an eye-witness, U.S. Army translator William Sloane Coffin, Jr.:

Through suicide, several thousand Russians managed to escape the horrors that awaited returnees in the East.

Like Tolstoy, Elliott reviews the Stalinist attitude toward Russians who had spent time outside Soviet control during the course of the war. Soviet Decree #270 of 1942 labeled as deserters Red Army troopers who surrendered to the enemy. Forced laborers were also considered to be traitors. Relatives of POWs and dragooned workers were likewise treated as if they had personally committed acts of treason. Stalin's government, as noted above, rejected attempts by the Germans and the International Red Cross to obtain Soviet compliance with the Hague Convention.

After the 1939-40 Winter War with Finland, returned Soviet POWs were either shot or sent to slave labor camps in the Far North or Siberia. This is also how the victims of forced repatriation were dealt with. According to Elliott, of the approximately 2,500,000 Russians repatriated by the Western Allies, some 300,000 were executed by the NKVD soon after their delivery to Soviet authorities. With a few exceptions, the rest were condemned to the lingering doom of 10 to 25 year sentences in labor camps, from which ordeal few survived. Elliott also points out that the USSR never released 1.5 to 2 million German POWs, 200,000 to 300,000 Japanese POWs, and did not repatriate those few ex-Axis soldiers who did manage to survive the rigors of GULAG until 1956.

Elliott argues that the U.S. participated in this sordid business out of concern for the safety of 24,000 American servicemen who were in Soviet-controlled territory at the end of the war. However, he admits that U.S. cooperation with Soviet authorities was not reciprocated. And even after the last G.I. returned in July 1945, the U.S. continued the forced repatriation of luckless Russian POWs, refugees, and Vlasovites. (The last documented cases of forced repatriation took place in May and June 1947, Operations "Keelhaul" and "Eastwind"; Allied Forces Headquarters obtained Soviet assurances that they would accept corpses if the repatriation operation led to fatalities.)

Not everyone in higher circles approved of the repatriation policy; the author reveals instances where individual military officers and civilian government officials disobeyed or opposed the Yalta provisions. In June 1945, General Patton simply let 5000 Russian POWs go, and other commanders permitted lightly-guarded Russians to slip away. Secretary of War Henry Stimson was a vigorous opponent of forced repatriation, as were Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew and Attorney General Francis Biddle, who felt that "Even if these men should be technically traitors to their own government, I think the time-honored rule of asylum should be applied." In the opinion of R.W. Flournoy, the State Department's legal advisor. "nothing in the [Geneva) Convention either requires or justifies this Government in sending the unfortunate Soviet nationals in question to Russia, where they will almost certainly be liquidated."

This book serves as a companion volume to Count Tolstoy's The Secret Betrayal which deals largely with the British role in forced repatriation. It is a grim chapter of our recent history - and one totally ignored in contemporary textbooks and most treatments of the Second World War and its aftermath.

* In a long letter to Hitler dated 3 January 1940, Mussolini warned Hitler of the danger of pursuing a war with the Western powers without taking into account the threat posed by the Soviet Union. Criticizing Hitler for the August 1939 pact with the USSR and accusing him of abandoning anti-Communism, the Italian Duce wrote:

Department of State, Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918-1945, Series D, Volume VII, pp.604-609. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

** Reviewed by this writer in Journal of Historical Review Vol.1 No.4 (Winter 1980), pp. 371-76.

*** In his book An End to Silence (Norton, 1982), Stephen Cohen points out that "judged only by the number of victims, and leaving aside important differences between the two regimes, Stalinism created a holocaust greater than Hitler's." Writing in the New Republic of 26 May 1982 (an article headlined on the cover as "Why Stalin Was Even Worse Than Hitler"), Richard Grenier further reflects this most interesting phenomenon of recent years - the semi-revision even among traditionalist liberals of attitudes toward Hitler, vis-a-vis Stalin:

Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 84-94.

Vinnytsia -- The Katyn Of Ukraine

A Report by an Eyewitness

Toward the end of February, 1944, when I was marking time in a German prison in Potsdam, I was transferred to cell number 20, already occupied by several other prisoners. After a brief acquaintance I learned that one of these was a Ukrainian from the vicinity of Vinnytsia. We came to know each other closely and he told me his life history. At that time he was twenty-three years of age, born and bred in Soviet Ukraine. He had been educated by the Communist party and had been a Communist in the full meaning of the word. Communist ideals were his ideals. He fought on the German/Soviet front. After his capture by the Germans, he was forced into anti-aircraft artillery work for the Germans in Berlin. Because of negligence in line of duty he was thrown into jail. There our paths met.

I kept asking him questions about life under the Soviets. He formerly belonged to a civilian border patrol unit. Being a Comsomol, he took his duties seriously and helped track down many foreign intelligence agents who were trying to slip across the border into the Soviet Union. There were others, young Soviet patriots like himself, in the villages and districts.

He told me of the steps taken by the Soviets in Ukraine as a preparation for war. In the Communist party at least as early as 1937 it was felt that war against Germany was imminent. Confidential instructions to members of the party and the Comsomol stressed this eventuality. These instructions ordered that the Soviet hinterland in Ukraine be purged of enemies of the people. By the words "enemies of the people" were meant not only all those people who worked actively against the Soviet regime, but also those who were believed to be inclined to hostility toward the government including those whose complete devotion to the regime had not been clearly manifested.

A purge of enemies of the population of the Soviet border regions was commenced. Herein lies the story of the Ukrainian tragedy in Vinnytsia, which was revealed to the world in 1943. (Vinnytsia is a Ukrainian city, which was, prior to 1939, approximately 100 miles from the eastern border of Poland.)

My young companion is now a Ukrainian patriot, and much about him must not be made public. Everything he said supplemented my own knowledge of the Vinnytsia tragedy and helped to complete the picture I had formed of it during my experiences in Vinnytsia.

In the summer of 1943 I was living in Berlin under the close supervision of the Gestapo as a suspected foreigner, an unreliable alien and a Polish citizen. On July 2, 1943, during the noon hour, I was called to the telephone by what the Germans called the Ukrainian Confidence Service. This was a German government agency which registered all Ukrainians in Germany and tried to win their support for German purposes among the Ukrainians.

The chief of this agency informed me that in the near future a special committee for the investigation of mass murders in Ukraine would depart to do its work on the spot. He also told me that I had been appointed interpreter for this committee because of my knowledge of German, Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish, and in addition because I knew how to type in both German and Ukrainian. He suggested that I accept this position voluntarily and at the same time emphasized that, should I refuse, I would be drafted for it on the basis of a certain mobilization regulation.

I had no choice. I asked for several hours to consider the proposal. I immediately got in touch with my friends, among them Dr. Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych, the Ukrainian poet, who was living illegally at that time in Berlin. We agreed that it would be best for me to go with the commission, even though its destination was not known. And I had not asked, for in Germany during the war it did not pay to be overly inquisitive.

After two hours I called the confidence service and announced my willingness to accompany the commission as a translator-interpreter, I was instructed to await further instructions via telephone. About 5 p.m. of the same day the headquarters of the criminal police telephoned. I was ordered to appear at their address and to report to an official named Denerlein. I went.

Denerlein, a friendly man of rather advanced age, immediately introduced me to several officials in his department, and said that we would depart for Ukraine immediately. After brief interviews I was given appropriate military travelling documents and allowed to return home.

The criminal police department was swarming with uniformed police, some of them wearing an arm-band marked SD, which meant that these officials were from the special political section Sicherheits-dienst. By piecing together various bits of conversation I deduced that our group was going to the front lines. Among the members of the commission were Raeder, Krupke, and Groner, all three commissars of the criminal police. State-councilor Klass, the chairman of the commission, was already at the place where the commission was supposed to function.

We set out July 4, 1943, by way of Warsaw, Lublin, Kovel and Shepetivka. Before our departure I was given a pistol as a preparation for any eventuality. We were unmolested in Warsaw, although at that time the battle in the Jewish ghetto was going on but beyond that city our route was through a region controlled by Ukrainian insurgents (UPA).

Immediately outside of Warsaw we passed long trains that had been blown up. In the town of Kovel in the Ukrainian province of Volyn we had to transfer to another train. Precautionary measures for defense against partisans were taken and, ridiculously enough, I was ordered to hold my pistol in my hand in ready position for firing against the machine-guns and mines of the guerillas. We were not attacked, however, for the insurgents shot up with machine guns the dummy tank train that had been purposely sent ahead of us and we experienced nothing beyond fear. At the railway station in Shepetivka, however, we met action on a somewhat broader scale. After our train, loaded with German soldiers, pulled in at the railway station, the Ukrainians destroyed all of the four rail lines leading into Shepetivka and we could not continue the journey. We managed to reach Vinnytsia without any losses, around 11 o'clock at night. We were driven in police automobiles to No. 5 Mazepa street. Under the Bolsheviks this had been named Dzherzhinsky street and the building had housed the regional headquarters of the NKVD.

Excavations in Vinnytsia

In Vinnytsia I was informed about the purpose of the commission by one of its members, a photographer, who arrived in the city at some earlier date. With the aid of the civilian population mass graves had been discovered, in which thousands of corpses had been buried. These graves were to be opened and the commission was to establish whom the NKVD had murdered. The commission lived and worked in the former headquarters of the NKVD, the place from which the mass-murder was directed. It included among its members German specialists in criminal investigation.

The exhumations in Vinnytsia began on May 25, 1943, and were carried on in three places. The population was of the opinion that there were around 20,000 victims in the war years. In addition to our commission two other bodies -- a legal and medical commission -- took part in the investigations.

Our committee unpacked its equipment, set up its office and on July 7, after lunch set out in automobiles for the scene of the exhumations -- a garden along the Lityn highway, which leads from Vinnytsia to Lviv by way of Lityn.

From the conversation of the police, who were housed in the same barrack that we were, I had gained a more or less adequate picture of what had taken place. The first sight of the corpses horrified me, as did the stench that came from them. It was a hot summer day and it was necessary to steel one's nerves in order to live through the horrible experience. I had been a soldier in the Ukrainian army during the First World War and had seen many men killed in battle, but what I had then seen can in no way be compared with what I witnessed in that park.

A huge mass of people were milling among the trees in the garden. Everything was permeated with the heat of summer and the horrible stench of corpses. Here and there workers were digging up the earth. From it with the use of ropes they pulled out human corpses, some of them whole, others in pieces. They laid them carefully out on the grass. At first it seemed to me that there were thousands of them, but later I counted them and there were but 700 lying on the grass. Everybody present had a serious expression. The local inhabitants examined the exhumed corpses, and scrutinized the remnants of clothing. From the graves workers threw out bits of cloth and placed them in separate piles. The wet clothes were spread on the grass to dry. The dry clothes were searched for papers and other belongings. Everything was taken out, and registered; the documents found were read, when possible, and recorded; those not legible were preserved. Now and then for one group or another burst out the agonizing, hysterical cry of a woman, or the groan of a man, which resembled the terror of death. A woman recognized the clothes of her loved ones, or a man those of a member of his family. All of them, it was later ascertained, had been sure that their relative were somewhere in exile in Siberia, perhaps, or in the Far East, in the North, somewhere. Now they leaned how the Soviet government had fooled them, for their loved ones lay in Ukrainian soil, in Vinnytsia, murdered by the NKVD. The government had met all questions with the reply that all in exile were deprived of the right of communicating with their families.

After the first shock had lessened, and I had become accustomed to the sweet, unpleasant stench, I took a greater interest in the investigations. The digging was done by common criminals from the local prison under the guard of German police. Alcohol was frequently given to the workers so that they might be able to stand the stench. Men and women, clothed and unclothed, were dug up. Men with their hands tied behind their backs. Here and there heads that had been beaten in; sometimes the nape showed signs of bullet-wounds. Black corpses, mummified corpses, corpses yellow-black with cadaverous wax. They had been in the earth a long time, for the most part deformed by the pressure of the soil above. Member of the commission, old criminologists who had seen many a crime, affirmed that never before had they seen anything so ghastly. In an area close to the graves doctors made immediate autopsies and tried to ascertain the cause of death. The horror of Vinnytsia I shall never forget and it is doubtful whether ever a Dante would be able to portray the agony that had taken place.

Our next point was the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest, named in honor of the Russian poet. Here the scene was no better than the previous one. A lesser number of corpses was unearthed, for the most of the digging was done in the garden along the highway. The bodies of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers had been buried under the earth and over it a board had been placed for the young people to dance and amuse themselves, unaware that their relatives' corpses were lying underneath! The names of those Communists responsible for such diabolical measures are known and it is hoped that their evil memory will not pass into history forgotten.

the picture was the same in the graveyard opposite the park. Beside the regular graves as well as under the stones of the original graves were found mass-victims of the NKVD.

The Commission at work

The committee worked industriously. Witnesses of the horrible tragedy were questioned, the place of the criminal executions determined, and the time as well. Documents found either alone or on the corpses were analyzed, nothing was overlooked; German thoroughness, often approaching absurdity, as it seemed to me, was employed. I was not acquainted with the techniques of criminologists, the clues they put together in order to arrive at the facts, and often what to me appeared beyond dispute they accepted with reservations and searched for unimpeachable evidence. The hours of work were from 10 to 16 each day. I was used as an interpreter between the local inhabitants and the German specialists. Thousands of people volunteered to act as witnesses for the commission. They volunteered in spite of the fact that Bolshevik agents made many threats of revenge, and insisted that the Germans had killed these people and were now seeking to place the blame on the NKVD. This twist interested me and I paid special attention in order to ascertain its veracity. Insofar as I am concerned there is no doubt that the unearthed corpses in Vinnytsia were the first victims of the Bolsheviks, murdered in what was in fact a preparation for war.

I cannot describe the entire work of the commission, all that it ascertained and concluded. I imagine that its findings have been recorded in detail and are available somewhere. As a Ukrainian in civilian attire it was easy for me to get around, for I felt that I was at home, on native Ukrainian soil. The Germans, of course, did not enjoy such a confidence in Vinnytsia, for they had come as conquerors. A complete history of the entire tragedy will one day be written by historians. I was forbidden from doing anything on my own and was able to maintain official contact with my friends only through the German military post office, which was scrutinized by the Gestapo. I made no personal notes. Instead, another opportunity presented itself: through the kindness of one of the members of the commission I was able to send personal letters to Ukrainian friends in Berlin. He gave the letters to a pilot assigned to regular duty between Berlin and Vinnytsia. I recorded as much as I could in the from of private letters, and the material arrived in the hands of my friends without accident. On the basis of these letters I am able to reveal the impression I had of the tragedy in Vinnytsia.

Some special incidents of the tragedy in Vinnytsia

The wife of a priest named Biletsky from the vicinity of Vinnytsia recognized the garments of her husband lying on a mound. She cleaned the garment and a patch was revealed. As proof that she spoke the truth she departed for her village, and returned to the commission a few days later with other bits of the material used for patching. The committee examined the material and agreed that the patch on the priest's coat came from the same material. This was proof that her husband had been shot and buried in Vinnytsia, but the NKVD had informed her that her husband was in exile without the right of communicating with his family.

Hanna Hodovanets, a Ukrainian peasant woman, recognized her husband's coat as they unearthed it from a mass-grave. She told the police about her husband's arrest. He had been arrested because he had not reported at work on a certain holiday. She had done everything possible to find out what had happened to him, and one day in 1938 she received a card from Moscow, from the procurator's office and signed by none other than Audrey Vyshinsky, with the news that her husband had been freed from prison in March, 1938. However, her husband had never returned home and she felt that something was wrong. Her feelings became a sad reality when she recognized her husband's coat.

Another Ukrainian woman, Olkhivska by name, sat for hours on the hills of dirt as the corpses were lifted from the graves. At one grave she gave vent to cries of anguish. She had just recognized her husband, who had been arrested by the NKVD, by a broken small finger as well as by his clothes. And she too told a story that ended in a mass-grave.

There were similar examples by the hundreds, while thousands of others found no clues whereby they might identify their loved ones. I talked with them, recorded their tragedies, shared their suffering. The commission studied the methods of Soviet interrogation and trial, torture and execution, prison and exile. It interviewed thousands of witnesses, went through a mass of varied documents, and examined the belongings of witnesses.

The following incident suggests that justice may yet triumph in this world. A note was found in the coat of the exhumed corpse of a heroic Christian. It was wet, as was the corpse, but was carefully dried. The I set to work to decipher it. With the aid of several local Ukrainians we put together the story. The paper was of ordinary stock, white in color, used on local school tablets. In crude handwriting was penciled: "I ... beg the person that finds this note to pass on to my wife, Zina ... from the village ... region of ... that I was denounced to the NKVD by the following ..." And here were the names and addresses of seven persons. The note continued: "They bore witness against me before the NKVD and spoke falsehoods. I have been sentenced to death and in a short time will be shot. God knows that I am innocent. Let God forgive their transgression; I have forgiven them."

We refused to believe what we had read. To expect such magnanimity from a simple peasant in the moment of death was too much to believe. But the fact stirred everybody. We informed those in charge of the investigation, and later it was found that it was all true. Two of the persons named in the note had died in the meantime, two were officers in the Red Army, and three were available in the neighborhood, peacefully going about their business, since no one knew that they were secret assistants of the NKVD. During my presences in Vinnytsia they were not arrested. The Germans, however, recorded all the secret helpers of the NKVD. Some of them managed to obtain administrative posts during the occupation, and often announced themselves as of German origin. The Germans were aware of this manoeuver and were preparing a surprise move called "lightning-action," blitzaktion. I was later informed that this "lightning action" had been executed before the Germans abandoned Vinnytsia.

Hulevych, Skrepek, and many other Ukrainians testified how the NKVD transported the corpses to the burial points. They stated that the bodies were transported from NKVD headquarters at No. 5 Dzherzhinsky street, that at night they saw and heard the tucks in action and that in the morning on they way to work they saw the blood that had dripped from the trucks and that they saw NKVD underlings covering up the signs of their work at the site of the mass graves. There were also witnesses who testified that from trees they observed what was happening behind the high walls of the NKVD compound and that graves were dug and corpses buried. It was a fact well circulated in the city that two Ukrainians, who had dared to peer through the board fence despite the prohibition, had disappeared never to be seen again. It was also common talk that a boy, who had tried to climb the fence in order to steal some apples, disappeared without a trace after the NKVD guards caught him in the act.

How the NKVD operates

I talked with those people in Vinnytsia who first divulged the information about the mass murders, on the basis of which excavation was begun by the Germans. The commission found a woman who had worked in the NKVD headquarters for fifteen years. She was superannuated, and not in command of all her mental faculties, but the memory of what had transpired long before she retained as though it had happened yesterday. When the Bolsheviks retired before the German advance, she remained in Vinnytsia by frustrating efforts made by the government to evacuate her. Her revelations, although chronologically vague, were valuable in that they described Soviet methods of investigation and punishment. Former prisoners of the NKVD gave corroborative testimony.

One such former prisoner, named Dashchin, who had been in exile in the Kolyma region, told of an incident in a gold-mining camp. The camp contained 7,000 prisoners from all parts of the Soviet Union, and upon completion of the work there it was evident that the means of transportation to another locality were not available. The prisoners were too weak from malnutrition to go elsewhere on foot, for the nearest work-camp was thousands of kilometers distant. The problem was solved very simply. The prisoners were driven to a cliff that had been mined, and were blown into oblivion. Dashchin was one of the few that miraculously survived the explosion. Somehow he managed to trek across Siberia and return to Ukraine.

The NKVD usually made arrests at night, searching the houses and later writing a protocol on the case. The Commission found very many of these protocols both with the corpses and in a separate grave where only documents were buried. All arrested were accused of being "enemies of the people." Some had refused to renounce their religion, others had opposed the collectivization of their private property, still others had spoken dangerous words against Communism. Some had been victims of denunciations or revenge others had failed to appear at work during a religious holiday, while many had changed their place of work without the permission of the NKVD. Many witnesses questioned by the committee were unable to explain why their relatives had been arrested. Their inquiries addressed to the NKVD or the judge simply evoked the stereotyped reply, "enemies of the people exiled for a long period of time without the right of communication with their relatives." Women appealed to Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet state, but the reaction was the same. I saw and read many cards carrying that message. Among the items found in the graves were remnants of priestly garments, religious books, and correspondence of the murdered with the authorities of the state and the police. Items discovered were put on display -- photographs, letters, postage stamps, and crosses -- and many residents identified their dead relatives by them.

A religious group in the region of Ulaniv deserves special mention. Called the sect of St. Michael, nineteen of its members were arrested by the NKVD and some of them were identified in the graves. They were recognized because it was their custom to wear a white cross sewn to their clothes. Garments with this cross were found in the graves, sometimes alone and at times still about the corpse. Many members of this sect visited the excavations and recognized their co-religionists.

Statistics of the tragedy

From May 1943 to October 1943, 9,432 corpses were found in three places of excavation. There were 91 graves with corpses, and three with only clothes or documents. Forty-nine graves had from one to 100 corpses, 33 from 100 to 200 corpses, and nine from 200 to 284 corpses. One hundred and sixty-nine corpses were of women, 120 of advanced age, according to the findings of the medical commission. Forty-nine women were of young or middle age. The corpses of females of advanced age were clothed, whereas those of the younger years were naked. This seemed to bear out the rumors common among the local population that the young women arrested by the NKVD were subjected to sexual brutalities prior to their execution. One pregnant woman was found who had actually given birth to a child in the grave. Most of the corpses were of people from 30 to 40 years of age. Most had died from bullets from a special gun. Some of the victims had been hit by two bullets, others had but one bullet hole, while still other had received as many as four. Evidences of skull fracture by means of an instrument, apparently the butt of a rifle, was fund in 391 cases. The stronger men had their arms and legs bound. Cases of shooting in the forehead as well as the back of their head were recorded.

Of the total of 9,432 corpses 679 were identified, 468 by their garments, 202 by documents, and 2 by body marks. From the point of view of occupation the identified included 279 peasants, 119 workers, 92 officials, and 189 members of the intelligentsia. nationally the identified were broken down into 490 Ukrainians, 28 Poles, and 161 uncertain, although the names of the last group suggested almost all the nationalities of the USSR and some from Europe as well.

These basic statistics speak for themselves. Only one place, the garden, was thoroughly examined, for the park and the cemetery were only partially investigated. It is not excluded that many more bodies had been buried in these places. Other localities, which according to the reports of the local population, were also scenes of mass murder by the NKVD were not inspected. It was ascertained that other Ukrainian cities that had been regional and district headquarters of the NKVD had also experienced mass executions. Efforts were made to verify the rumors circulating among the population regarding mass graves. Kiev, Odessa, Zhytomir, Berdychiv, Haisyn, Dnipropertrovsk, Krasnodar in the Kuban region, and other places were supposed to be investigated, but chaotic conditions in Ukraine frustrated such endeavors, It is know, however, very definitely that in Krasnodar, where the Kuban cossacks fought stubbornly against the Bolsheviks in an effort to win independence, the NKVD employed a special machine which ground up the bodies of those shot and oftentimes still living persons as it they were meat and automatically dumped this mass of flesh into the Kuban river. This brutality was affirmed by eyewitnesses who reported various phases of the slaughter.

My companion in the German prison in Postsdam told me that in 1937 instructions were given both to the Communist party and the Comsomol to cleanse the border districts of Ukraine of "enemies of the people." This purge was carried out. The revelations of this former Comsomol both agreed with and supplemented the findings obtained by the committee of investigation.

Bibliography

Review

Russian Specialist Lays Bare Stalin's Plan to Conquer Europe

It sometimes happens that the most significant historical works are virtually ignored by the mainstream press, and consequently reach few readers. Such is the case with many revisionist studies, including this important work by a former Soviet military intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1978. Even before the appearance of this book, he had already established a solid reputation with the publication of five books, written under the pen name of Viktor Suvorov, on the inner workings of the Soviet military, and particularly its intelligence operations.

In Icebreaker Suvorov takes a close look at the origins and development of World War II in Europe, and in particular the background to Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" attack against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Since its original publication in Russian (entitled Ledokol) in France in 1988, it has been published in an astonishing 87 editions in 18 languages. In spite of its importance to the historical record, Icebreaker has received very little attention in the United States. The few reviews that have appeared here have been almost entirely brief and dismissive -- a shameful treatment that reflects the cowardice and intellectual irresponsibility of a "politically correct" scholarly establishment.

According to the conventional view, Hitler's perfidious attack abruptly forced a neutral and aloof Soviet Russia into war. This view further holds that a surprised Stalin had naively trusted the deceitful German Führer. Rejecting this view as political propaganda, Suvorov shows Stalin's personal responsibility for the war's outbreak and progression. Above all, this book details the vast Soviet preparations for an invasion of Europe in the summer of 1941 with the goal of Sovietizing central and western Europe. Suvorov is not alone in his view. It is also affirmed by a number of non-Russian historians, such as American scholar R. H. S. Stolfi in his 1991 study Hitler's Panzers East: World War II Reinterpreted (reviewed by me in the Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal).

In spite of rigid Soviet censorship, Suvorov has succeeded in digging up many nuggets of valuable information from publicly available Soviet writings that confirm his central thesis. Icebreaker is based on the author's meticulous scouring of such published sources as memoirs of wartime Soviet military leaders, and histories of individual Soviet divisions, corps, armies, fleets, and air units.

'Second Imperialist War'

A central tenet of Soviet ideology was that the Soviet Union, as the world's first Marxist state and bulwark of "workers' power," would eventually liberate all of humanity from the yoke of capitalism and fascism (the "last resort of monopoly capitalism"). While Soviet leaders might disagree about the circumstances and timing of this process of global liberation, none doubted the importance of this objective. As Suvorov notes:

Initially the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" was made up of only a handful of constituent republics. Lenin and the other Soviet leaders intended that more republics would be added to the USSR until it encompassed the entire globe. Thus, writes Suvorov, "the declaration accompanying the formation of the USSR was a clear and direct declaration of war on the rest of the world."

Hitler understood this much better than did the leaders of Britain, France or the United States. During a conversation in 1937 with Lord Halifax, one of Britain's most important officials, he said: "In the event of a general war [in Europe], only one country can win. That country is the Soviet Union." In Icebreaker, Suvorov explains how in 1939 Stalin exploited the long-simmering dispute between Germany and Poland over Danzig and the "Polish Corridor" to provoke a "second imperialist war" that would enormously expand the Soviet empire.

Stalin anticipated a drawn-out war of attrition in which Germany, France and Britain would exhaust themselves in a devastating conflict that would also spark Communist uprisings across Europe. And as the Soviet premier expected, "Icebreaker" Germany did indeed break up the established order in Europe. But along with nearly everyone else outside of Germany, he was astonished by the speed and thoroughness with which Hitler subdued not only Poland, but also France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia and Greece. Dashing Kremlin expectations that a "second imperialist war" would quickly usher in a Soviet Europe, by July 1940 Hitler was effectively master of the continent.

Soviet Preparations

Throughout history, every army has had a basic mission, one that requires corresponding preparations. An army whose mission is basically defensive is accordingly trained and equipped for defensive war. It heavily fortifies the country's frontier areas, and employs its units in echeloned depth. It builds defensive emplacements and obstacles, lays extensive minefields, and digs tank traps and ditches. Military vehicles, aircraft, weapons and equipment suitable for defending the country are designed, produced and supplied. Officers and troops are trained in defense tactics and counter-offensive operations.

An army whose mission is aggressive war acts very differently. Officers and troops are trained for offensive operations. They are supplied with weapons and equipment designed for attack, and the frontier area is prepared accordingly. Troops and their materiel are massed close to the frontier, obstacles are removed, and minefields are cleared. Maps of the areas to be invaded are issued to officers, and the troops are briefed on terrain problems, how to deal with the population to be conquered, and so forth.

Carefully examining the equipping, training and deployment of Soviet forces, as well as the numbers and strengths of Soviet weaponry, vehicles, supplies and aircraft, Suvorov establishes in great detail that the Red Army was organized and deployed in the summer of 1941 for attack, not defense.

Peculiar Tanks

Germany entered war in 1939 with 3,195 tanks. As Suvorov points out, this was fewer than a single Soviet factory in Kharkov, operating on a "peacetime" basis, was turning out every six months.

By 1941 everyone recognized the tank as the primary weapon of an army of attack in a European land war. During this period, Suvorov shows, the Soviets were producing large quantities of the well armed "Mark BT" tank, predecessor of the famed T34 model. "BT" were the initials for the Russian words "high speed tank." The first of this series had a top speed of 100 kilometers per hour, impressive even by today's standards. But as Suvorov goes on to note, this weapon had a peculiarity:

Airborne Assault Corps

Similarly designed for offensive war are paratroops. This most aggressive form of infantry is employed primarily as an invasion force. Germany formed its first airborne assault units in 1936, and by 1939 had 4,000 paratroops. And the USSR? Suvorov explains:

As part of the planned invasion, in early 1940 orders were given for large-scale construction of airborne assault gliders, which were produced in mass quantity from the spring of 1941 onward. The Soviets also designed and built the remarkable KT "winged tank." After landing, its wings and tailpiece were discarded, making the KT instantly ready for combat. The author also describes a variety of other offense-oriented units and weapons, and their deployment in June 1941 in areas and jumping-off points right on the frontiers with Germany and Romania. All these weapons of offensive war became instantly useless following the Barbarossa attack, when the Soviets suddenly required defensive weapons.

Suvorov tells of a secret meeting in December 1940 attended by Stalin and other Politburo members at which General Pavel Rychagov, deputy defense minister and commander of the Soviet air force, discussed the details of "special operations in the initial period of war." He spoke of the necessity of keeping the air force's preparations secret in order to "catch the whole of the enemy air force on the ground." Suvorov comments:

Suvorov also reports on the dismantling in June 1941 of the Soviet frontier defense systems, and the deployment there of masses of troops and armor poised for westward attack.

Stalin Preempted

During the period just prior to the planned Soviet invasion, the USSR's western military districts were ordered to deploy all 114 divisions, then stationed in the interior, to positions on the frontier. Thus, remarks Suvorov, June 13, 1941, "marks the beginning of the greatest displacement of troops in the history of civilization."

Such a massive buildup of forces directly on the frontier simply could not be kept secret. As Suvorov notes, Wilhelm Keitel, Field Marshal and Chief of Germany's armed forces High Command, spoke about the German fears during a postwar interrogation:

In 1941, Admiral N. G. Kuznetsov was the Soviet Navy minister, as well as a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. In his postwar memoirs, published in 1966, he recalled:

Suvorov believes that Hitler's preemptive strike came just two or three weeks before Stalin's own planned assault. Thus, as Wehrmacht forces smashed Soviet formations in the initial weeks of the "Barbarossa" attack, the Germans marveled at the great numbers of Soviet tanks and other materiel destroyed or captured -- an enormous buildup sufficient not just for an assault on Germany, but for the conquest of all of Europe. Suvorov writes

As devastating as it was, Hitler's assault was not fatal. It came too late to be successful. "Even the Wehrmacht's surprise attack on the Soviet Union could no longer save Hitler and his empire," Suvorov writes. "Hitler understood where the greatest danger was coming from, but it was already too late." With great effort, the Soviets were able to recover from the shattering blow. Stalin succeeded in forming new armies to replace those lost in the second half of 1941.

As Suvorov repeatedly points out, the widely accepted image of World War II, and particularly of the roles of Stalin and Hitler in the conflict, simply does not accord with reality:

A Soviet Europe?

An intriguing historical "what if" is to speculate on the fate of Europe if Stalin, and not Hitler, had struck first. For example, a less rapidly successful German campaign in the Balkans in the spring of 1941 could have forced the postponement of Barbarossa by several weeks, which would have enabled Stalin to strike the first blow.

Could German forces have withstood an all-out Soviet assault, with tens of thousands of Soviet tanks and a million paratroopers? With the advantage of striking first, how quickly could Stalin have reached Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Madrid? Suvorov writes:

Partially answering his own question, Suvorov states: "If Hitler had decided to launch Operation Barbarossa a few weeks later, the Red Army would have reached Berlin much earlier than 1945."

Suvorov even presents a hypothetical scenario of a Soviet invasion and occupation of Europe, replete with Stalinist terror and oppression:

In Suvorov's scenario, a camp called Auschwitz is captured early on by the advancing Soviets. In response to the question, "Well, what was it like in Auschwitz, pal?," a Red Army man replies: "'Nothing much, really' The worldly-wise soldier in his black jacket shrugs his shoulders. 'Just like at home. Only their climate is better'."

Actually, "what if" historical speculation is normally uncertain because key factors are often simply imponderable. In this case, one such factor is Soviet morale. While it is certainly true that Soviet troops fought bravely and tenaciously in 1941-1943 defending their home territory, they may not have fought with the same fervor and morale in an invasion of Europe. The tenacity and endurance shown by Red Army troops in Hungary and Germany in 1944 and 1945 is not necessarily indicative, because these soldiers were bitterly mindful of more than two years of savage fighting against the invaders, and of stern occupation, on their home territory.

Another imponderable is the response of Britain and the United States to an all-out Soviet invasion of Europe. If Soviet forces had struck westward in July 1941, would Britain and the United States have sided with Stalin and the USSR, or would they have sided with Hitler and Germany, Italy, France, Romania, Finland, Hungary, Denmark, and the rest of Europe? Or would Roosevelt and Churchill have decided to remain aloof from the great conflict?

Anyway, when Hitler did launch his preemptive strike against Soviet Russia, Roosevelt and Churchill immediately sided with Stalin, and when the Red Army took half of Europe in 1944-45, neither the British nor the American leader objected.

What can now be stated with certainty -- thanks to the work of Suvorov and other revisionist historians -- is that in smashing the great Soviet military buildup in 1941, Hitler dashed Stalin's plan to quickly conquer Europe, and that, in spite of his defeat in 1945, Hitler saved at least the western half of Europe, and tens of millions of people, from the horrors of Soviet subjugation.

Author bio

Joseph Bishop studied history and German at a South African university. Currently employed in a professional field, he resides in the Pacific Northwest with his wife and three children.

This lecture was delivered by Professor Vadim Rogovin at the University of Melbourne

I would like to thank the organisers of this meeting for giving me the opportunity to speak to such a large gathering at this major university in Australia. Today I will be talking about some of the most tragic events in modern history -- events about which many books and articles have been written, but about which there is much that is enigmatic and misunderstood. These historical phenomena are sometimes referred to as the Great Purges, or the Great Terror, or sometimes simply as 1937. They have few analogies in history.

Of course the twentieth century has seen no small amount of mass terror and even genocide directed against civilian populations. In Hitler's concentration camps more people died than in Stalin's camps and prisons. During World War I, in the space of a few days, more than a million Armenians were killed.

These instances of ethnic genocide usually were not accompanied by demagogy which was as sophisticated as in the Soviet Union. In most cases the victims were not forced to confess to horrendous crimes which they had never committed.

Our country, Russia, saw three civil wars in the space of 20 years and then was forced to bear the burden of a world war.

The first civil war unfolded from 1918 to 1920. It was a war in which the revolutionary masses rose up against those who, with the help of foreign interventionists, were trying to retain their privileges.

This civil war had much in common with other civil wars following revolutions in other countries. For instance, there is very much in common between the Russian civil war and that which unfolded in the 1860s in the United States. Trotsky found so much in common between the Russian and American civil wars that he intended to write an entire book devoted specifically to this question.

The second civil war to which I am referring lasted approximately six years from 1928 to 1933. It took the form of violent, forced collectivisation unleashed by the Stalinist clique against the peasantry as a whole and turned into a virtual nationwide civil war.

There are many parallels for this civil war. For instance, there was the Vendée uprising of the peasants against the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century.

But for the third civil war, the phenomena we refer to as the Great Purges, it is impossible to find an appropriate historical analogy.

Never before in history were hundreds of thousands of people torn away from their apartments, thrown into prison, subjected to torture, made to confess to crimes, and then either exterminated or sent to concentration camps. It is no surprise that today, even 60 years after the Great Terror, it is difficult for many people to address these questions calmly.

Not long ago at my lectures in England I came up against many different opponents. One old English Stalinist told me that any talk about the Great Terror was just an example of bourgeois propaganda. He heaped praise upon Stalin whom he felt had saved England during World War II.

To justify his praise of Stalin he said that 27 million people had died in the Soviet Union during that war. I answered by noting that 27 million people was approximately half the population of Great Britain at that time. I then asked him what would he say about Churchill if, on the eve of a war, he had wiped out the flower of the nation, including many of the officer corps, and as result of his outrageous blunders the country lost almost half its population.

Another opponent at my London lecture, a Ukrainian nationalist, asked why I paid so much attention to the terror which was directed largely against the Bolsheviks, but ignored the terror against the Ukrainian people, which he said killed 15 million people.

Here we have a typical example of how anti-communists attempt to greatly exaggerate the victims of the Great Terror. Solzhenitsyn for example gives the figure of 60 million people who supposedly perished in the camps and in the prisons.

If you walked around Moscow today during the pre-election campaign you would find similar figures at various stands set up by pro-Yeltsin forces. They display posters which say "don't forget the communists destroyed 60 million people in our country". These figures, which exaggerate the number of victims by about 12 times, are supposed to arouse the population.

And of course by comparison the number of people who have died in the war unleashed by Yeltsin in Chechnya is insignificant. And by comparison, the shelling of the Russian Supreme Soviet at the White House in October 1993 is insignificant. Only about 1,000 people died in the course of that action.

The Yeltsin forces say that if the communists come back to power they will launch a terror which will sweep away tens of millions of people. These figures are cited even though in the 40 years after Stalin died in 1953 there were virtually no political executions in the Soviet Union. The day after Stalin died, the new wave of terror he had been preparing was stopped by his successors and a process of mass rehabilitations was begun.

Most people ignore whom the terror was directed against. Reliable figures show that during the entire period of Soviet history, approximately four million people were accused and convicted of crimes against the state. Of those, approximately 700,000 to 800,000 were shot.

These figures are staggering by any measure, but we have to supplement them with other figures. For instance, approximately one half of the total victims were thrown into prison during a two-year period -- 1937 and 1938. During those two years over six times more people were shot than during the entire remaining period of Soviet history.

The second feature of the Great Terror is that its major targets were communists. Of the two million people who were repressed during that two-year period, over half of them were members of the party at the time of their arrest.

Moreover, at the beginning of the Terror there were approximately one and a half million people who had earlier been in the party, but had been expelled for belonging to various oppositions. Very many of these people were arrested and exterminated during the Great Terror.

There is another myth about the Great Terror which is both supported and spread by many different political tendencies. You can find this myth in Krushchev's secret report on Stalin's crimes delivered to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, or in the works of open anti-communists such as Robert Conquest and Solzhenitsyn.

This myth says that virtually the entire population of the Soviet Union was reduced to a stunned silence by the terror, and either said nothing about the repression, or blindly believed in and supported the terror. This myth also claims that the victims of the repression were completely innocent of any crimes, including opposition to Stalin. They were, instead, victims of Stalin's excessive paranoia. Since there was no serious opposition to the regime of Stalin, according to this myth, the victims were not guilty of such opposition.

In order to refute these myths one simply must turn to various dossiers and case histories which have recently come to light and been published.

For example there is the case of the world-renowned physicist and future Nobel laureate, Academician David Landau. It would seem that this young physicist and scholar, who was busy with his own work, not a member of the party and seemingly uninvolved in politics, would have been guilty of nothing and therefore arrested without any foundation.

Recently the dossier of his case was published. During the investigation Landau was presented with an anti-Stalinist leaflet which he had helped to reproduce and was getting ready to distribute. The communist Kopets, who was a colleague of Landau, admitted to having written the leaflet. He arranged for it to be reproduced and attracted Landau and other students and physicists into this conspiracy. They intended to distribute the leaflet at a May Day demonstration in 1938.

Recently many examples of such leaflets have been published. They were written by people we know little about, but people who wrote from a consistent communist position, and who called for a struggle against Stalin and his clique because they had betrayed socialism. The content of these leaflets can only be interpreted as a call to overthrow the existing political system, or to be more precise, Stalin and his clique.

Of course these are isolated incidents, but prior to the unleashing of the Great Terror there was a much more widespread, more serious, and well-organised opposition to Stalinism as a regime which had veered ever more widely away from the ideals of socialism.

This battle against Stalin began back in 1923 with the formation of the Left Opposition. The inner party struggle unfolded in ever sharper form throughout the 20s.

Thousands and thousands of communists took part in this opposition, openly in the early days and then, after opposition groups were banned, in illegal underground forms against the abolition of party democracy by the Stalinist party clique.

They spoke out against forced collectivisation and the erroneous methods of industrialisation which were leading to great deprivation for the vast majority of the Soviet people. They spoke out against the growing system of privileges and social inequality. The bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class and was consolidating its position and privileges.

A significant change took place in the level of opposition in 1932 when it became clear that the adventurist policies of the Stalinist leadership had led the country to an extremely sharp economic and political crisis.

At that time in 1932, not only the old opposition groups became more active, but they were joined by layers of newly-formed opposition groups. Among those perhaps the most interesting is the so-called Riutin group.

Riutin was an old Bolshevik who underwent a very complex evolution. During the 1920s he was a fervent Stalinist but by 1930 he came to the conclusion that he had been wrong on many points and that a new struggle had to be taken up against the Stalinist bureaucracy. He sought ways of uniting with the Left Opposition, with Trotskyists.

The Riutin group published a document of more than 100 pages called the Riutin platform. It exposed both the economic and political crisis throughout the country on all basic questions. Stalin and his clique feared this document so much that they refused to distribute it to members of the Central Committee who were discussing Riutin's expulsion. The Central Committee proceeded to condemn Riutin and vote against the platform without having read it.

At the same time, thousands of Trotskyists who had not capitulated remained in exile or in prison throughout the country. Among them were many prominent party members. Two choices stood before each of these oppositionists. Either they could sign a letter of capitulation and return into the fold of the bureaucracy to secure positions -- or they could refuse to sign such declarations and remain languishing in prison camps or in exile in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union.

It is interesting to note that dozens and dozens of oppositionists in exile were brought back into Moscow when the first Moscow Trial was being prepared in 1936. Not a single one of them who had refused to sign a letter of capitulation agreed to give false testimony. For that reason, they were not included in the first Moscow Trial, but were murdered during the secret pre-trial interrogations.

It is significant that in 1932 many representatives of different opposition tendencies began to discuss the need to form a united anti-Stalinist bloc to overthrow Stalin's leadership and carry out new policies.

The Riutin platform stated that by now all the previous differences which had existed in the Party paled before the new dividing line which pitted communists against each other. Either you were for the Stalinist clique and the crimes it was committing against the people, or you were for returning the party to Lenin's principles of socialism by driving out the Stalinist clique.

Ivan Smirnov, one of the former leading members of the Left Opposition who had formally capitulated and then returned to opposition activity, went on an official business trip to Berlin in 1931. He established contact with Trotsky's son Leon Sedov and began to discuss the need to coordinate efforts between Trotsky and his son in Mexico and Europe and the newly-formed opposition bloc consisting of old and new tendencies in the Soviet Union.

Although many members of these opposition tendencies were arrested at the end of 1932 and in early 1933, not a single one of them gave information about the formation of this single united anti-Stalinist bloc. Only in 1935 and 1936, when a new wave of arrests followed the murder of Kirov in December of 1934 and many people were subjected to the worst tortures, did the secret police, the GPU, find out about the existence of the united bloc from 1932. This was one of the main factors which drove Stalin to unleash the Great Terror.

When we look back now upon the Moscow Trials we can see that 90 percent of what was said by those put on trial was a fantastic conglomeration of lies. They confessed to being agents of the Gestapo, spying for foreign governments, conducting sabotage, etc. But about 10 percent of what was alleged was true. They did try to establish contact among themselves and fight for the overthrow of Stalin's clique.

The Great Terror was caused not only by Stalin's increasing fear of the growing communist opposition in the Soviet Union. It was also tied up with serious foreign policy issues. Stalin became more and more alarmed at the growing influence of Trotsky's ideas as he gathered more supporters in the movement to found the Fourth International.

Although all the official communist parties abroad remained completely subservient to the Comintern, which was in turn manipulated by Stalin, nevertheless more opposition Trotskyist groups grew up in virtually every country in support of the Fourth International.

In the archives of the Comintern one can find many documents, largely prepared for internal use, which testify to the fact that the opposition had major influence in almost every country, that often it exerted strong influence in the trade unions and the socialist parties, and that its numbers were reaching several thousand in some countries.

In Spain, where the outcome of the civil war would help determine whether there would be a second world war, there existed a powerful Marxist party, the POUM; although it broke from the Fourth International, it did carry out consistent anti-Stalinist policies. Stalin's fear that the Fourth International might increase its influence and become a threat to the Stalinised Comintern in many countries forced him to conclude that he must unleash the Great Terror. It swept away thousands of victims, not only in the Soviet Union but abroad.

We should never forget that at that time, about half the regimes in capitalist Europe were either fascist or semi-fascist totalitarian regimes. Many communists, socialists and democratic-minded people fled from these countries and sought political asylum in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union there were tens of thousands of foreign communists and communist sympathisers, almost all of whom perished during the Great Purges.

There are many accounts of how terrible the lives of these political emigrants were in the Soviet Union, even if they came from bourgeois democratic countries. For instance, Audrey Blake, the wife of a leading Australian communist, wrote that in the 1930s all foreign information was blocked and any discussion of Trotsky's ideas was anathema.

I had a chance to meet with many surviving former communists in the United States who said that all Trotskyist literature was banned. The fear of their leaders was so great that they refused to allow them to read such material. However the consequences of the Great Terror cannot simply be measured by the murder and arrest of thousands and thousands of victims in the Soviet Union, of people extremely dedicated to the October revolution and to socialism. It goes beyond that.

When the news of the Great Terror reached the west, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, recoiled in horror before the ideas of socialism. Under other circumstances, they would have been prepared to take part in the communist movement, the greatest international political movement in world history. But they were repulsed by what they saw and the ideas of socialism became discredited in their eyes.

Those leaders who survived the Great Terror in the various communist parties had largely degenerated, and were bound to Stalin because they had taken part in the persecution of their own comrades.

Among those who played a very foul and ignoble role in the 1930s are those who to this very day are respected as fighters against Stalinism.

Among these is Imre Nagy, the Hungarian communist leader who played an important role in the leadership of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Documents have emerged which show that Nagy was in the Soviet Union as a political emigrant starting in 1929. By 1930, he had become a paid agent of the NKVD, and due to his denunciations, dozens of Hungarian, German and other communists were arrested.

Although there is no direct evidence that shows that Tito, the Yugoslav communist, was a paid agent of the NKVD, many documents show how enthusiastically he carried out the purges of the Trotskyists in the Yugoslav communist party. In Moscow alone over 800 Yugoslav communists were arrested.

In 1939 Tito returned to Yugoslavia as head of the party and demanded that the purge be continued and deepened. He entrusted this task to other communists, including Milovan Djilas.

Djilas, who became a famous dissident in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, does not mention his role in the purges in his memoirs but he does relate the following interesting incident. In 1942 at the height of World War II, an old Yugoslav communist was arrested. He had survived the 1937 purges only because he had refused to go to Moscow. He subsequently published a book called "The Balance of the Soviet Thermidor", in which he described the persecution of Yugoslav and other communists in Moscow. Djilas relates that although this man was arrested on Tito's orders and severely tortured and beaten, he refused to admit to being a foreign spy.

If we talk about the consequences of the Great Terror in the Soviet Union and abroad what we can say is that the Bolshevik type of consciousness virtually disappeared.

This type can be characterised by adherence to the ideals of socialist equality, social justice and internationalism and the refusal to allow one's high position in the party to result in privileges for oneself. It can also be characterised by a willingness to sacrifice for the cause.

If it had not been for the Great Purges it would have been very difficult for Stalin to pursue the extreme changes in political line which he carried out. The vast majority of those who fell victim in the Great Terror were raised and trained in the genuine spirit of anti-fascism. If they had remained alive, if they had not been exterminated, it would have been much more difficult for Stalin to sign the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact in 1939. And if not for that pact, World War II might not have begun in the same way.

If those who perished in the Great Terror, true internationalists, had not been killed, Stalin would have found it very difficult, if not impossible, to unleash the anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union which practically became official government policy after World War II.

A whole wave of people sometimes referred to as the new recruits or the newly chosen of 1937, began to rise to high posts in the party, economy, government and the military. They occupied leading posts of which they had never before dreamed.

The people who occupied these positions had no ties to Bolshevism and no ideological adherence to Marxism. As a result they proved to be extremely susceptible to the crudest forms of corruption which corroded the body politic in the USSR. These people remained in power in the Soviet Union for almost 50 years. And they cultivated a new generation of absolute cynics who were completely indifferent to the moral and ideological life of the nation.

The existence of such people in positions of power, directing the intellectual life of the country, helps to explain why they so easily managed to shatter the existing system over the last 10 years. First they cracked the ideological shell of society, then they destroyed it politically.

Up until now, history has shown that when there is a sharp transformation of the social structure, this change is reflected in the personnel which occupy leading positions of power. In Russia and the many republics of the former Soviet Union, however, that has not been the case. Those who head the regimes in Russia, Ukraine, the Baltics and many other former republics are those who were former members of the party nomemklatura, the old party bureaucracy and elite. To call these people Bolsheviks or Leninists is a complete mockery of the truth.

What characterises them is a complete lack of ideological principles, coupled with a nationalist orientation which is extremely hostile to the ideals of Bolshevism.

So, although it happened decades ago, the consequences of the Great Terror are still being felt in our country and in the 15 new states which have formed in the ruins of the Soviet Union; and all of these nations are facing catastrophic conditions.

An interview with Nathan Steinberger

7 April 1997

Professor Nathan Steinberger (87) and his wife Edith (89) are among the handful of former members of the German Communist Party (KPD) who escaped with their lives from the Stalinist prison camps in the Soviet Union. Despite their terrible experiences, they have not surrendered their socialist convictions.

Born in 1910 in Berlin in a Jewish-orthodox family, Nathan joined the Jewish Socialist Youth Movement as a youngster and later the Communist Youth Association Of Germany (KJVD). He became a leader of the Socialist Students Association and joined the Communist Party in 1928. While studying national economy from 1929 to 1932, he became an assistant to August Wittfogel. On Wittfogel's recommendation he was called to Moscow in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, and offered a place in the International Agricultural Institute under the command of the Executive Committee of the Comintern (ECCI). There, in 1935, he completed his studies.

Two years later, together with thousands of German and Austrian emigrants who sought refuge in the Soviet Union from the Nazi dictatorship, he was arrested. After spending two months in the Moscow prison Butyrka, Steinberger was sentenced without trial. From 1937 to 1946 he endured forced labor in the eastern Siberian camp of Dalstroy in Kolyma. The convicts of the camp, mainly political prisoners, were completely isolated. Visits from relatives were not allowed.

At first Nathan's wife Edith was ostracized for being the spouse of an "enemy of the people." She was deprived of party membership or any kind of support. When the German invasion began in 1941 she was arrested and deported to a camp in the Karaganda in Kazakhstan. She had to leave her six-year-old daughter in the care of Soviet friends. She did not see her daughter again for 14 years.

A year after the end of the war, Nathan and Edith were released from the camps and sent, still separated, into "eternal exile." Only in 1952 was Edith allowed to visit her husband in Madagan. In 1955 they were rehabilitated and reunited with their daughter. They were then allowed to return to East Berlin.

In February 1956 the Central Party Control Commission of East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) recognized their "uninterrupted party membership" and for a short period Nathan Steinberger held a position in the National Planning Commission. From 1960 to 1963 he was Professor of Economy at the Meissen high school and then worked at high schools in Berlin and Potsdam.

"Because I have remained a socialist,
I am a declared opponent of Stalinism"

Ulrich Rippert and Verena Nees interviewed Nathan Steinberger in his flat in Berlin.

* Your life was closely bound up with the tragic experiences of Stalinism. A year before Hitler came to power, you arrived in Moscow and a few years later you were arrested and spent nearly 20 years in a Stalinist gulag. What were you accused of?

According to the minutes of the investigation and the verdict against me, I was accused of "counterrevolutionary Trotskyist activity." The supporters of Trotsky's Left Opposition had already been sent into exile or deported to the penitentiary camps of the NKVD (Stalinist Secret Police, forerunner of the KGB) in the '20s.

In 1937 virtually all of them were executed. But the accusation of "Trotskyism" was directed against anyone who was suspected of having a critical attitude towards Stalinist policies.

The miserable "proof" for my "Trotskyist activity" was the fact that when I was 16 years old, I had joined a youth group which orientated itself on the line of Karl Korsch. I was therefore expelled from the KJVD for a short time. In the '20s Korsch had taken sides with the Left Opposition led by Trotsky in the Soviet Union.

The examining magistrate also tried to deduce a criminal link because my brother and I knew Nathan Lurje. At the beginning of my studies in Berlin in 1929, he belonged to the Communist Students leadership and in 1936 was condemned, together with Zinoviev, as a "Trotskyist criminal" and executed.

My fate was not that of an individual. It was shared by the entire German emigration and was integral to the purges in the Soviet Union at that time, to which probably millions of people fell victim. Entire groups of the population, entire layers of society considered to be dangerous, became victims of Stalin's repression.

What happened in the Soviet Union from 1936 to 1938 was simply a massacre. It was incomprehensible. I can't say whether hundreds of thousands or millions were killed. From a statistical standpoint, those publicly condemned to death during the Moscow Trials represented only a very small minority of the total number of victims. The judicial inquiries against the 55 accused were show trials. They were all condemned to death or to long-term sentences in camps, and then executed either right away or after a short stay in a camp.

These show trials were used to give the impression abroad that everything was done within the legal framework. In reality, the accused had been prepared over a long period by the NKVD through hearings and torture until they were absolutely destroyed as individuals--burned out and bled white. When Zinoviev, Kamenev and the others "confessed," they were not themselves anymore. They were puppets.

It was not possible for Stalin to organize the same travesty for millions of people as had been carried out in the Moscow Trials. At least 80 percent of the prisoners never saw the inside of a courtroom. They were sentenced to between 5 and 25 years imprisonment in a camp following so-called special counseling.

As far as the death sentences or sentences to life imprisonment went, they pretended to stick to the constitution because death sentences were only allowed to be pronounced by the courts. They organized trials which were closed to the public and lasted half-an-hour or an hour at most, and were merely a formality. The accused had absolutely no opportunity to make a statement on the list of charges. Whether someone was guilty or not was totally irrelevant. There were no lawyers at all.

The first wave of purges started in 1928-29, as forced collectivization began. That was a bloody slaughter of the peasants. The number of victims was immeasurable. Whoever was suspected of having a vaguely critical opinion of forced collectivization was arrested and shot or sent to a labor camp. Many peasants who had only acquired their property through the October Revolution resisted these coercive measures. They sold their livestock, their equipment and even their seeds. All grain supplies were taken away from them. As a result there was a famine, in which hundreds of thousands died.

The second wave of purges, which started in 1935, mainly hit the population in the towns--workers, clerical employees, students and members of the intelligentsia who held firmly to the aims of the October Revolution and increasingly came into conflict with the Stalinist apparatus.

The grumbling discontent of the masses regarding the bureaucratic deformation of the Soviet state further intensified due to the lack of food and industrial consumer goods. However, this growing opposition did not erupt in open upheavals or mass strikes, at least as far as I can judge. Stalin's persecutions were directed in the first instance against the old Bolsheviks and against those Communists who had entered the party in the hardest, leanest years of the civil war.

Stalin dreaded and hated most of all this sincere, revolutionary heart of the party. From these elements emerged the leaders of the different left-wing and right-wing opposition groups who resisted the establishment of Stalin's dictatorship.

When the general discontent threatened to overwhelm large parts of the party, as well as the cadre belonging to the nomenklatura (bureaucratic apparatus), Stalin struck his deadly blow. It was a preventive civil war against any potential opponents. That was Stalin's theory and practice: one had to eradicate root and branch every single possible source of organized opposition.

* Why did Stalin persecute the emigrants from Nazi Germany, Poland and from elsewhere, foreign Communists like you and your wife?

To be allowed to emigrate to the Soviet Union was a great privilege. The émigrés were not critical towards Stalin or the Comintern, but as a rule reliable officials, loyal supporters of the party leadership who did not get involved in inner-party opposition groups. Their application for asylum was only approved after a thorough examination of their history in the party.

Even more inexplicable then was their horrendous persecution. But for Stalin, all the old Communists who had entered the party as revolutionaries, whether they defended the party line or not, were potential opponents.

The Polish Communist Party, which, like the German Party, had strategic value for Stalin's foreign policy, was particularly hard hit by the purges. In 1937 all the Polish officials were summoned to Moscow for counseling in the Ljublanka and not one of them came out of the Ljublanka alive. In 1938 the Polish party was dissolved. Of the leading Polish officials, the only survivors were those who could not accept the invitation to come to Moscow because they were imprisoned in Poland.

Proportionately the German group of émigrés was small because Stalin did not want a large emigration of Germans Communists. It would have been difficult for him following the criticism of the Comintern's policies in Germany prior to 1933, policies which had contributed to Hitler's victory.

Between 1933 and 1936 around 6,000 people, including family members, came from Germany and Austria to the Soviet Union. It can be said with absolute certainty that 80 percent of them died. When I myself was arrested on May 1, 1937, half of the German émigrés had already been arrested, by 1938 at least 70 percent. At the beginning of the war, the remaining 30 percent were arrested and deported. None of my friends who were sent to the gulag survived. My wife and I belong to the very few who came back alive from Kolyma or other places of exile or gulags.

Most of the emigrants from Nazi Germany were falsely and arbitrarily accused of sympathizing with the fascist regime--a quite absurd accusation addressed to KPD members who had only barely escaped the hands of the Gestapo. The Hitler government and its messengers in Moscow showed their open satisfaction with Stalin«s terror against the German refugees. The Gestapo realized with astonishment that a number of top communist officials, at the head of the fascist "wanted" list, had been dispatched by the NKVD.

* What role did Ulbricht and other leaders of the KPD play, who survived and later took up leading positions in the GDR?

The leading cadre of the KPD were singled out by Stalin for destruction. As many members of Thaelmann's Central Committee were assassinated by the NKVD as by the Gestapo. This cooperation between the NKVD and the Gestapo did not rest upon formal agreements, but it was in line with the preparatory measures leading to the conclusion of the German-Soviet Pact in 1939.

With regard to Thaelmann, who in Germany had loyally carried out Stalin's policies, my opinion is that Stalin not only abandoned him, but effectively delivered him to the Gestapo. It would have been easy during the Stalin-Hitler pact to exchange him for a few Nazi spies. But as later Soviet archive material revealed, Stalin reacted dismissively to the request for assistance by Thaelmann's wife.

Those among the leading German party officials in the Soviet Union who did survive had blood on their hands. They had saved their lives by following the orders of the NKVD without a word of protest and signed what was necessary to deliver members of the party to the organs of oppression. Walter Ulbricht was one of them and he played a particularly foul role, but also Herbert Wehner and even Wilhelm Pieck, who was more decent than the rest. After 1945 at least he tried to obtain the liberation of surviving party members, including ourselves.

* In earlier publications you indicated that Stalin worked for the destruction of the international Communist movement and the Comintern before its official dissolution in 1943. Could you elaborate on that?

The entire hope of the left was the world revolution, or at least the revolution in additional European countries. The Bolshevik Party as a whole had sworn itself to this line. Lenin and other leading Bolsheviks were conscious of the fact that the political power they had conquered was only the first step and they could only pave the way for the building of a socialist order of society if highly industrialized countries followed the example of the agrarian country, Russia. Masses of people were filled with the same idea and the Communist International was founded in this spirit in 1919.

But the hope of further revolutions disappeared with the defeat of the workers in a number of countries. Stalin's victory was basically linked up with this fact.

After Bukharin had been expelled from the Political Bureau as the last member of the opposition and had lost his position as general secretary of the ECCI (Executive Committee of the Communist International), the effective leadership of the Comintern lay in Stalin's hands. The theory of "building socialism in a single country" was declared the guiding principle and with it the Comintern was subordinated to the foreign policy of the apparatus in Moscow.

As a schoolboy I could not understand why the Left Opposition fought against the thesis of "socialism in a single country." Only later did I realize that in this question lay the real dividing line between the ruling layer in the Soviet Union and the Opposition.

The KPD was the first to feel the effects of Stalin's course in the Comintern. Adapting to the left turn the Soviet Communist Party took in 1928 in order to justify forced collectivization, the KPD was also committed to an extreme left course. The danger of fascism was minimized and instead the "social fascism" of social democracy was declared to be the main danger.

Later the German émigrés were blamed for the defeat in 1933, although Stalin himself was responsible. Stalin thought one could certainly work with fascism regarding foreign policy. The whole "social fascism theory" was geared towards this. Stalin had no points of conflict at all with Mussolini's Italian fascism. Okay, fascism was anticommunist, but Churchill and Stresemann were anticommunists too.

For Stalin there were the same imperial tendencies in Germany, England, France and so on. They could be partners or opponents of the Soviet Union, irrespective of who was actually in power. While the KPD fought against the "social fascism" of the German Social Democrats (SPD), Stalin sought out links with the leadership of the German Reichswehr (Imperial army) and held secret talks over collaboration against Poland.

* The Moscow Trials were supported by many West European and American intellectuals who were either members or sympathizers of the Communist parties, like Leon Feuchtwanger. What do you think of that?

It was not only Feuchtwanger. Romain Rolland, Ernst Bloch and others belonged to this group as well. That they were party in the first place to the Moscow Trials through their role as witnesses is outrageous. How could they be witnesses? Feuchtwanger could not even speak Russian. They had no possibility of speaking with the prisoners and no independent information at all. Even if they had understood Russian, they would only have heard what was printed officially. No one we knew believed the so-called confessions of the accused. But Bloch and Feuchtwanger wanted to believe them.

* What do you think of the widespread opinion that Stalinism had already begun with the October Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, and that the October Revolution had been a coup and not a revolution?

The events, above all those following 1928/1929, stood in total contradiction to the October Revolution of 1917. The October Revolution was a real revolution of the people and not a coup. The Bolsheviks were able to gain the confidence not only of the workers, but also of the peasants, who at the time made up the majority of the population. They went along with the demands of the peasants. Making the landowners hand over their property to the peasants was decided by the Soviet Congress at its first meeting after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Contrary to this, Stalin's regime was consolidated through the bloody suppression of the peasants.

In my opinion, what was crucial was the lack of an organized opposition of the Lefts against it. Although most of Trotsky's supporters had already been sent into exile before 1928, expelled from the party and imprisoned, I think the Lefts did not fully realize the meaning of forced collectivization at the time.

Bukharin, who led the right-wing opposition, did not realize it either. Although he had seen that forced collectivization was madness, he did not understand the deeper meaning of this Stalinist action. Stalin's priority was above all to prevent the opposition of the peasants and the working class from meeting up. The elimination of the peasants' opposition, therefore, struck at the roots of the October Revolution.

To explain that Stalinism is the consequence and continuation of Bolshevism, which is an opinion widely held, is a complete distortion of reality. The Stalinist coup meant the liquidation of the ideals of the October Revolution.

* The Trotskyists have always warned the workers that the Stalinist bureaucracy would destroy the Soviet Union and restore capitalism. When this happened in 1991 through the dissolution of the USSR, there was no opposition. What do you think of this development?

That is the big question which no one ever poses. The mighty Soviet Union, which defeated fascism, collapsed, and no one rose up in its defense. The only answer is that it collapsed because it was a Stalinist regime. Stalinism exterminated and disarmed all of those forces which would have been able to develop something new and progressive inside the system.

It might seem as if everything followed a Marxist muster in the Soviet Union: capital was expropriated, the Opposition was suppressed and the whole thing was described as socialism. Then came the "victory against fascism." But to see things in this way is naive. Nationalized property is not the same thing as socialism. Such illusions have played a big role in mystifying Stalinism.

* In 1955, following your rehabilitation, you returned to Berlin with your wife and daughter. What were conditions like at that time in the GDR and what experiences did you have?

The GDR was established on the model of the Soviet Union. However the Soviet Union could not carry out show trials in Berlin, which was an open city. In the GDR, as in the USSR, there was a so-called planned economy -- with a few differences and certain privileges with respect to the Soviet Union, because the industry here functioned as a supplier for the Soviet Union. The Soviet economy had raw materials and an extensive war industry, but manufacturing industry was at a low level. The Soviets could make rockets, but not saucepans.

I would describe the GDR as Stalinist-type socialism, lacking perhaps the most horrendous features of Stalinism. Internally the planned economy was completely hollow. That became clear at the point when it was confronted with competition. It could not keep up, lost its supply markets in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and collapsed.

* In contrast to the GDR, the workers in the Soviet Union actively built the first workers state in the course of the October Revolution. In the GDR nationalization took place from above. Do you see an important difference there?

Yes, of course. The October Revolution and the civil war were supported by broad masses of the workers and party members, who regarded themselves as the avant-garde of the International. But the GDR from the very beginning was based on deceit. That is why nothing remains today of the GDR.

Over Christmas 1955, as I returned to Berlin, the so-called thawing out period under Khrushchev was taking place. We never considered going to West Berlin. We thought the end of Stalin would surely bring about a revival of socialism. Stalin was finished and the replacement of Ulbricht was planned. We, and all the survivors of the gulags, were very warmly welcomed. I was immediately appointed to the post of deputy head of the planning commission. However we were required to be silent about our experiences in the Soviet camps.

Then the uprising in Hungary was crushed and the hopes of an end to Stalinism and a revival of socialism disappeared. Ulbricht was once again firmly in the saddle. I lost my post in the planning commission. Fortunately, I was not regarded as suitable for a post in the nomenklatura.

I never made a secret of the fact that I was an anti-Stalinist. So they sent me off with praises to an academic career and I became a professor of economy in Meisen, Potsdam and finally Berlin-Karlshorst.

Of course I was put under surveillance. Following reunification (in 1990) we were among the first to receive our old Stasi files from the "Gauck" Office (set up by the Bonn government to investigate the activities of the East German secret police). From these files it is clear that there were attempts to organize an investigation against me. But it was too tricky for them to prosecute someone who had spent 20 years in a Soviet labor camp. Bearing in mind that I am a Jew, they probably considered labeling me as a Zionist.

* Unlike many others, and in light of what you have gone through, you have held onto your socialist convictions. What persuaded you?

Precisely because I have remained a socialist, I am a declared opponent of Stalinism. The Soviet Union did not collapse because it was a socialist state, as the anticommunists always claim, but because everything socialist was destroyed by Stalin. He discredited socialism in the foulest way possible and contributed decisively to the crisis of the workers movement following the end of the Soviet Union.

Stalin's ideas had nothing in common with genuine socialism. For example, before collectivization there were currents among the peasants which supported cooperatives or agricultural communes and community-based cultivation. One such was the Swiss commune, which, under Lenin's instigation, was organized by Fritz Platten, a friend of mine. It consisted of a number of Swiss comrades, for the most part not themselves peasants, but people who were convinced of the idea of a socialist utopia. Lenin had told them: bring your tractors and show how it can be properly organized. There were many other examples of communes, for example, that of Christen.

Stalinist collectivization stood in the most vulgar contradiction to Lenin's conception. The first step of the forced collectivization was the immediate dissolution of the communes and the handing over of their property to the state. The comrade in charge of the Swiss commune at that time went straight to Moscow to protest.

One of the quotes which was repeatedly cited by Stalin concerned the difference drawn by Marx between socialism and communism. It was posed as follows: socialism is the struggle against equalization, and communism, which guarantees genuine socialist equality, that is something that rests in the clouds. This is typical of the way Stalin used Marxist quotations.

The term socialism today has become very problematic. Reaction compounds the problem to the extent that it labels every anticapitalist movement as socialist/Stalinist. This makes it even more important to clarify the differences between socialism and Stalinism.

What does it mean to be a socialist? I often asked my students this question. None had an answer. You have to return to Marx to really understand what socialism is.

He said socialism stands for freedom, equality and fraternity. Today one would say solidarity instead of fraternity. And that means real freedom and genuine equality, and not just accepting the bourgeois framework, i.e., not merely in a juridical sense. Socialism is totally bound up with the concepts of freedom and equality.

Vinnytsia -- The Katyn Of Ukraine

A Report by an Eyewitness

Excavations in Vinnytsia

The Commission at work

Some special incidents of the tragedy in Vinnytsia

How the NKVD operates

Statistics of the tragedy

Bibliography

Review

Russian Specialist Lays Bare Stalin's Plan to Conquer Europe

'Second Imperialist War'

Soviet Preparations

Peculiar Tanks

Airborne Assault Corps

Stalin Preempted

A Soviet Europe?

Author bio

An interview with Nathan Steinberger

7 April 1997

"Because I have remained a socialist, I am a declared opponent of Stalinism"

"Because I have remained a socialist,
I am a declared opponent of Stalinism"