Another view of Stalin (36 page)

After describing how Stalin defined the status of the army in the socialist society in the twenties, Kolkowicz  wroted:

`The Red Army emerged from this process as an adjunct of the ruling Party elite; its officers were denied the full authority necessary to the practice of the military profession; they were kept in a perennial state of uncertainty about their careers; and the military community, which tends toward exclusiveness, was forcibly kept open through an elaborate system of control and indoctrination ....

`Stalin ... embarked on a massive program intended to provide the Soviet army with modern weapons, equipment, and logistics. But he remained wary of the military's tendency toward elitism and exclusiveness, a propensity that grew with its professional renascence. So overwhelming did his distrust become that, at a time of acute danger of war in Europe, Stalin struck at the military in the massive purges of 1937 ....

`Hemmed in on all sides by secret police, political organs, and Party and Komsomol organizations, the military's freedom of action was severely circumscribed.'

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Roman Kolkowicz,  The Soviet Military and the Communist Party (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 343--344.

Note what the U.S. army most `hates' in the Red Army: political education (`endoctrination') and political control (by political organs, Party, Komsomol and security forces). On the other hand, the U.S. army views favorably the tendencies towards autonomy and privileges for superior officers (`elitism') and militarism (`exclusivity').

The purges are analyzed by Kolkowicz  as a step in the Party struggle, directed by Stalin, against the `professionalists' and Bonapartists  among the superior officers. These bourgeois currents were only able to impose themselves at Stalin's death.

`(W)ith Stalin's death and the division of the Party leadership that followed, the control mechanisms were weakened, and the military's own interests and values emerged into the open. In the person of Marshal Zhukov,  broad sectors of the military had their spokesman. Zhukov  was able to rid the establishment of the political organs' pervasive controls; he introduced strict discipline and the separation of ranks; he demanded the rehabilitation of purged military leaders and the punishment of their tormentors.'

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Ibid. , p. 344.

Zhukov  gave Khrushchev  armed support in the two coups d'йtat of 1953 (the Beria  affair) and 1957 (the Molotov--Malenkov--Kaganovich     affair).

Vlasov

But how could generals of the Red Army have envisaged collaborating with Hitler?  If they were not good Communists, surely these military men were at least nationalists?

This question will first be answered with another question. Why should this hypothesis be any different for the Soviet Union than France? Was not Marshal Pйtain,  the Victor at Verdun, a symbol of French chauvinist patriotism? Were not General Weygand  and Admiral Darlan  strong defenders of French colonialism? Despite all this, these three became key players in the collaboration with the Nazis. Would not the overthrow of capitalism in the Soviet Union and the bitter class struggle against the bourgeoisie be, for all the forces nostalgic for free enterprise, be additional motives for collaborating with German `dynamic capitalism'?

And did not the World War itself show that the tendency represented by Pйtain  in France also existed among certain Soviet officers?

General Vlasov  played an important rфle during the defence of Moscow at the end of 1941. Arrested in 1942 by the Germans, he changed sides. But it was only on September 16, 1944, after an interview with Himmler,  that he received the official authorization to create his own Russian Liberation Army, whose first division was created as early as 1943. Other imprisoned officers offered their services to the Nazis; a few names follow.

Major-General Trukhin,  head of the operational section of the Baltic Region Chief of Staffs, professor at the General Chiefs of Staff Academy. Major-General Malyshkin,  head of the Chiefs of Staff of the 19th Army. Major-General Zakutny,  professor at the General Chiefs of Staff Academy. Major-Generals Blagoveshchensky,  brigade commander; Shapovalov,  artillery corps commander; and Meandrov.  Brigade commander Zhilenkov,  member of the Military Council of the 32nd Army. Colonels Maltsev,  Zverev,  Nerianin  and Buniachenko,  commander of the 389th Armed Division.

What was the political profile of these men? The former British secret service officer and historian Cookridge  writes:

`Vlassov's entourage was a strange motley. The most intelligent of his officers was Colonel Mileti Zykov  (a Jew). He had a been a supporter of the ``rightist deviationists'' of Bukharin  and in 1936 had been banished by Stalin to Siberia, where he spent four years. Another survivor of Stalin's purges was General Vasili Feodorovich Malyshkin,  former chief of staff of the Far East Army; he had been imprisoned during the Tukhachevsky  affair. A third officer, Major-General Georgi Nicolaievich Zhilenkov,  had been a political army commissar. They and many of the officers whom Gehlen  recruited had been ``rehabilitated'' at the beginning of the war in 1941.'

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E. H. Cookridge,  Gehlen:  Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 57--58.

So here we learn that several superior officers, convicted and sent to Siberia in 1937, then rehabilitated during the war, joined Hitler's  side! Clearly the measures taken during the Great Purge were perfectly justified.

To justify joining the Nazis, Vlasov  wrote an open letter: `Why I embarked on the road of struggle against Bolshevism'.

What is inside that letter is very instructive.

First, his criticism of the Soviet rйgime is identical to the ones made by Trotsky  and the Western right-wing.

`I have seen that the Russian worker has a hard life, that the peasant was driven by force into kolkhozes, that millions of Russian people disappeared after being arrested without inquest or trial .... The system of commissars eroded the Red Army. Irresponsibility, shadowing and spying made the commander a toy in the hands of Party functionaries in civil suits or military uniforms ... Many thousands of the best commanders, including marshals, were arrested and shot or sent to labour camps, never to return.'

Note that Vlasov  called for a professional army, with full military autonomy, without any Party control, just like the previously cited U.S. Army.

Then Vlasov  explained how his defeatism encouraged him to join the Nazis. We will see in the next chapter that Trotsky  and Trotskyists  systematically used defeatist propaganda.

`I saw that the war was being lost for two reasons: the reluctance of the Russian people to defend Bolshevist government and the systems of violence it had created and irresponsible command of the army ....'

Finally, using Nazi `anti-capitalist' language, Vlasov  explained that the New Russia had to integrate itself into the European capitalist and imperialist system.

`(We must) build a New Russia without Bolsheviks or capitalists ....

`The interests of the Russian people have always been similar to the interests of the German people and all other European nations .... Bolshevism has separated the Russian people from Europe by an impenetrable wall.'

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Vlasov and Vlasovites.  New Times 44 (1990), pp. 36--40.

Solzhenitsyn

We would like to open a brief parenthesis for Solzhenitsyn.  This man became the official voice for the fiver per cent of Tsarists, bourgeois, speculators, kulaks, pimps, maffiosi and Vlasovites,  all justifiably repressed by the socialist state.

Solzhenitsyn  the literary hack lived through a cruel dilemna during the Nazi occupation. Chauvinist, he hated the German invaders. But he hated socialism even more passionately. So he had a soft spot for General Vlasov,  the most famous of the Nazi collaborators. Although Solzhenitsyn  did not approve of Vlasov's  flirt with Hitler,  he was laudatory about his hatred of Bolshevism.

General Vlasov  collaborated with the Nazis after having being captured? Solzhenitsyn  found a way to explain and justify the treason. He wrote:

`Vlasov's  Second Shock Army ... was 46 miles (70 kilometres) deep inside the German lines! And from then on, the reckless Stalinist Supreme Command could find neither men nor ammunition to reinforce even those troops .... The army was without food and, at the same time, Vlasov  was refused permission to retreat ....

`Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin's .... It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war, confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps solely for the sake of saving one's own marshal's uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?'

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Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn,  The Gulag Archipelago, 1918--1956. An Experiment in Literary Investigation I--II (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 253, note.

So Solzhenitsyn  defended the traitor Vlasov  against Stalin. Let us look at what really happened in early 1942. Several armies had received the order to break the German blockade of Leningrad. But the offensive quickly got bogged down and the front commander, Khozin,  received the order from Stalin's headquarters to withdraw Vlasov's  army. Marshal Vasilevsky  writes:

`Vlasov,  who did not possess many gifts as a commander and, in fact, vacillating and cowardly by nature, was thoroughly inactive. The grave situation for the army demoralised him ever further and he made no attempt to withdraw his troops quickly and covertly ....

`I can with some authority confirm the extremely serious concern which Stalin displayed daily for the 2nd Shock Army and for rendering every possible assistance to them. This is evidenced by a whole series of GHQ directives that I personally wrote primarily to Stalin's dictation'.

Vlasov  joined the enemy while a considerable part of his army succeeded in breaching through the German trap and in escaping.

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A. M. Vasilevsky,  A Lifelong Cause (Moscow: Progress, 1973), pp. 139--141.

Russians were hired in the Nazi army to combat the Soviet people? But, exclaimed Solzhenitsyn,  it was Stalin's criminal rйgime that pushed them to do it:

`(M)en could be induced to enter the Wehrmacht's Vlasov  detachments only in the last extremity, only at the limit of desperation, only out of inexhaustible hatred of the Soviet regime.'

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Solzhenitsyn,  op. cit. , p. 255.

Besides, said Solzhenitsyn,  the Vlasovian  collaborators were more anti-Communist than pro-Nazi:

`(O)nly in the fall of 1944 did they begin to form Vlasov  divisions that were exclusively Russian .... their first and last independent action, dealt a blow --- to the Germans themselves .... Vlasov  ordered his divisions to the aid of the Czech rebels.'

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Ibid. , pp. 258--259.

This is the fable that has been repeated by Nazi and other fascist criminals of all countries: when the German fascists were on the verge of defeat, they all discovered their `national and independent' vocation and remembered their `opposition' to Germany, looking for protection under the wings of U.S. imperialism!

Solzhenitsyn  did not object to the Germans being fascists, but to the fact that they were stupid and blind fascists. If they had been more intelligent, the German Nazis would have recognized the value of their Russian brothers-in-arms and they would have allowed them a certain level of autonomy:

`The Germans, in their shallow stupidity and self-importance, allowed them only to die for the German Reich, but denied them the right to plan an independent destiny for Russia.'

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Ibid. , p. 261.

The war was still raging, Nazism was not clearly defeated, and Solzhenitsyn  was already crying for the `inhuman' lot reserved for the arrested Vlasovian  criminals! He described a scene after the cleaning-up of a Nazi pocket on Soviet territory:

`A prisoner on foot in German britches was crying out to me in pure Russian. He was naked from the waist up, and his face, chest, shoulders, and back were all bloody, while a sergeant osobist ... drove him forward with a whip .... I was afraid to defend the Vlasov  man against the osobist .... This picture will remain etched in my mind forever. This, after all, is almost a symbol of the Archipelago. It ought to be on the jacket of this book.'

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Ibid. , pp. 256--257.

We should thank Solzhenitsyn  for his disconcerting candor: the man who best incarnated the `millions of victims of Stalinism' was a Nazi collaborator.

A clandestine anti-Communist organization in the Red Army

In general, the purges within the Red Army are presented as acts of foolish, arbitrary, blind repression; the accusations were all set-ups, diabolically prepared to ensure Stalin's personal dictatorship.

What is the truth?

A concrete and very interesting example can give us some essential aspects.

A colonel in the Soviet Army, G. A. Tokaev,  defected to the British in 1948. He wrote a book called Comrade X, a real gold mine for those who want to try to understand the complexity of the struggle within the Bolshevik Party. Aeronautical engineer, Tokaev  was from 1937 to 1948 the Political Secretary of the largest Party branch of the Zhukovsky  Air Force Academy. He was therefore a leading cadre.