This is the first part of a series on the book “Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend” by Domenico Losurdo, English translation published by Iskra Books.
In the first chapter of his book, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend, Losurdo goes over the material pressures that necessitated the Khrushchev administration’s character assassination of Stalin after his death.
After the second world war the USSR was isolated by the western world, which elevated it’s socialist project into a pariah status as something not just to be dismantled, but destroyed. Of course the USSR knew this and it was the goal of the Khrushchev government then to “re-brand” (for lack of a better term) the Soviet project into something more palatable to the Capitalist mind. This could be done but for the memory of Stalin. Stalin in all his in all his terribleness, in all his greatness, the hero of the Great Patriotic War, whose militant adherence not just to Lenin, but to Marx; and whose broad popularity not just in the USSR, but throughout the working world; shone too brightly to allow for this kind of broad ideological shift. Something had to be done.
The “cult of personality”, which until that moment had raged, did not allow for more nuanced judgements: it was necessary to cast a god into hell (Losurdo. 2023, p. 14).
A large portion of the Khrushchev report dwells on Stalin’s military prowess, or, in Khrushchev’s opinion, his lack thereof. The report characterizes the Soviet war effort as stymied from a lack of military preparedness and Stalin himself as a bumbling megalomaniac, one who constantly snatched defeat out from the jaws of victory whenever he managed to wrestle the reigns of the war machine away from his helpless staff. Unfortunately for Khrushchev, and revisionist-historians walking in his shadow, that which is written cannot easily be erased. Not only is there a large corpus of Soviet records concerning Stalin’s administrative load and war projects but also records of the Nazi’s response to these tactics.
At the time of Hitler’s invasion, “the industry had produced 2,700 modern aircraft and 4,300 tanks.” Judging by these figures, it cannot be said that the USSR arrived unprepared for its tragic appointment for war. (Losurdo. 2023, p. 15)
Losurdo shows that this idea of the USSR in general, and Stalin in particular, being taken off-guard by the Nazi’s invasion, dubbed Operation Barbarossa, was both under- and overblown.
In the first place, would it be so difficult to believe that the USSR would be unsure of the status of Nazi Germany’s war plans? Hitler had dedicated his entire propaganda machine into telegraphing that an invasion of the United Kingdom was *imminent*, staging faked “leaks” and real troop movements on the Western Front, to that effect. On top of this, an intense wave of misinformation was continually broadcast from the UK and France which had the sole purpose of instigating the Nazis with claims that the USSR would “strike first”, and grandiose narratives of “secret plans” for a Soviet Europe. Even a personal telegram from Roosevelt’s administration, warning of an imminent secret invasion from Japanese troops was not enough to goad Stalin’s people into preemptive action. Needless to say this supposed “invasion” did not occur. It is clear, that the hope in the West was that the Reich and Bolsheviks would cannibalize each other, perhaps even leaving behind only “unclaimed” territory to be carved up like Africa, China, and the Middle-East before them.
In the second place, it was clear that this atmosphere of misinformation created a cautious attitude within the USSR, and *not one person* in Stalin’s administration believed that the current peace with the Nazis was everlasting. In a speech to military graduates, Stalin allayed fears of a Nazi invasion with the historical example of WWI (wherein Imperial Germany was defeated due to it’s inability to handle a two-front war), and yet Stalin still pressured his staff to move forward with his war plans. Almost one million reservists were mobilized, and military targets were camouflaged. Four nights before the initial attack, this force was alerted with the express understanding that a surprise attack from the Nazi’s was on the way.
But the proof of practice is in the pudding’s taste, and once the German invasion was underway military analysts all over the world began writing lottery tickets trying to see who could cash in on the inevitable date when the “insignificant” and “backwards” Red Army would fall to that “superior” example of “Aryan” prowess.
British Intelligence had calculated that the Soviet Union would be “liquidated in 8–10 weeks”; in turn, the advisors of the American Secretary of State (Henry L. Stimson) had predicted on the 23 June that everything would be concluded in a period of time between one and three months. (Losurdo. 2023, p. 21)
There is no shortage of literature, both professional and unprofessional, expressing disbelief at the Third Reich’s wasted opportunity to defeat their “weaker” opponent. Every contradictory excuse is deployed: the plan was flawed, the soldiers were flawed, the weather was flawed, the Bolsheviks got lucky, the Nazi’s got unlucky. Countless war-game fanatics have played through campaign after campaign; endless simulations showing how easy victory could have been. No other great general in history, from Caesar to Napoleon, has had such a grand historical victory taken from them because their opponent maybe had a stomach-ache. The simple truth is the Red Army won, and it won because it was better.
The Nazi invasion moved at a pace that was both terrible and destructive, it was only due to the hard work of Stalin’s administration that, when the invasion occurred, in spite of heavy losses of both land and troops, the Red Army was neither routed nor disorganized. In addition, after the invasion started, the Politburo managed to move thousands of critical factory works out of the line of fire beyond Nazi reach. This, coupled with the heavily industrialization of the Siberian and steppe regions, meant that the output of goods could not be exhausted. Militarily, the invasion force was hounded constantly by insurgent attacks in the rear, and any hesitation in its momentum was immediately met with minor offensives. Anti-air guns around Moscow wreaked havoc on the Nazi’s prized air-force, the Lufftwaffe, which afterwards could only operate at night, and Soviet armored infantry and aircraft was advanced enough to compete with even state-of-the-art Nazi Panzers. The “famished” Red Army did what France and Poland could not: it slowed the unstoppable Blitzkrieg from a lightning’s strike to a turtle’s crawl. During all of this, Losurdo notes, that it was Stalin himself who directed the Red Army’s generals to be cautious and, in those key first months, focus on maintaining an organized defense. Casualties on both sides were almost innumerable, but the gigantic defeat Hitler dreamed of did not exist in reality.
Later having seen the strategic plans of the architects of Operation Barbarossa, Marshall Georgy K. Zhukov recognized the wisdom of the line adopted by Stalin: “Hitler’s command was counting on on us bringing our main forces up to the border with the intention of surrounding and destroying them.” (Losurdo. 2023, p. 24)
The Eastern Front of World War II was by far the Nazis largest and most dedicated front, with over three times the number of battalions fielded there compared its Western counterpart, and that’s not counting re-enforcements from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia. Around 80% of all Nazi casualties were at the hands of the Red Army. It cannot be denied that victory over the Axis Powers would not have been possible without the immense sacrifice, dedication, and perseverance of the USSR. It follows then, that we should be willing to recognize the Stalin administration's strategies, achievements, and influence.
Losurdo points out that, in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, forced population migration was not just a tool for removing political dissidents (so called “fifth-columnists”) but also a tool in helping construct or reconstruct national and ethnic boundaries. There are many examples of this throughout history: Tzarist Russia’s pogroms of Jewish and Germanic peoples, the expulsion of Arabs and Palestinians by refuges of the Holocaust, the forced expulsion of native ethnic Han from Tibet in the name of the 14th Dalai Lama, and—one the largest forced migrations of that century—the partition of India and Pakistan as overseen by the British Empire. Even the United States, that bastion of so-called freedom, is no stranger to these “forced migrations”: the removal and massacres of American Indian Tribes; the violent removal of African Americans from “whites-only” population centers; in the 1920’s—after their labor was no longer necessary—thousands of Chinese workers were unceremoniously deported, and large scale military deportations took place—dubbed Operation Wetback—of over 1 million Mexican-Americans out of the American Southwest.
Nor were the Soviet prison camps for suspected dissidents and German officials an isolated incident. Once the Nazi invasion of France was underway many of the German refugees (most of them Jews and political enemies of Hitler) who fled to France prior to the invasion were imprisoned under suspicions of collusion. In the United States, Japanese citizens, many of whom were born in the United States were given hours to pack up their belongings into a single bag and were taken to concentration camps in the American Southwest. Post World War II, the Soviet’s were not alone in their enforcement of mass imprisonment and migration of German speaking citizens, the program was fervently demanded by the French and Czech governments. In fact along the eastern front it was often only Soviet officers who protected German civilians from violent reprisals. It was clear that the West did not know how to tackle the issue of fascism. Many solutions other than forced migration were considered from chemical castration (Roosevelt) and mass death (Churchill) for the German people (of course those deemed too important or high-ranking would be spared), but it was only the Soviet administration which was concerned with reeducation of the general populace, and it was Stalin himself who fought for the public trials of all responsible for the Holocaust and other war-crimes.
Even an inflexible anti-communist such as Ernst Nolte is forced to recognize that the attitude taken by the Soviet Union towards the German peoples did not present those racist overtones, sometimes found in Western powers. To conclude on this point, if not equally distributed, the lack of “common sense” was wide-spread among the political leaders of the 20th century. (Losurdo. 2023, p. 33)
In his report, Khrushchev admonishes Stalin’s use of mass deportations and stops just short of painting him as a genocidal maniac on par with Hitler (leave that to the Cold War scholars). It’s true that forced migrations are an injustice, but the purpose of Losurdo’s work is to look at Stalin’s actions in their historic context. To argue that Stalin’s only solution to the “German problem” was mass deportations is ahistoric, and to argue that Stalin was alone in its enforcement is hysteria.
Ultimately, the greek tragedy of Khrushchev’s cowardice and revisionism, is that it didn’t even work. The Western world was determined to destroy the USSR, and by willingly disposing of Stalin’s legacy, Khrushchev did their most daunting task for them.