Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 09:45:50 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: RE: Again on Zarembka


Mark Jones writes today: "Where have I justified 4 million murders? This
is the kind of slander which makes debate with Zarembka all-but
impossible."

Paul Zarembka had said: "If four million Communists were murdered and
imprisoned in forced labor campus in the United States or India or Brazil
and Mexico would we glorify it and explain it away (the need for
industrialization, encirclement by fascists, or whatever)?"

I (P.Z.) reply:  Mark, read my sentence!  It has a compound subject.  
You have to do an addition to get the 4 million.  Add "murdered" to
"imprisoned", or "imprisoned" to "murdered".  Then you have to compare
populations levels then in the Soviet Union to the populations levels now
in 1) United States, 2) India, and 3) Brazil and Mexico.  The answers will
come out differently for the three.  Let's set aside the population levels
then and now, and go back to the numbers for the Soviet Union in the
1930s.  (I volunteer for the population numbers and then calculations
when we get that far.)

As to numbers, I reproduce below my initial posting of Tucker (February
17)--which you never responded to--deleting items not directly connected
to this issue of what death and imprisonment of Communists.  But before
doing so I will add Alvin Gouldner, "Stalinism: A Study of Internal
Colonialism" in Maurice Zeitlin, POLITICAL POWER AND SOCIAL THEORY, 1980,
pp. 209-259:

Gouldner,  p. 215: Between 1929...and 1939, about twenty million Soviet
citizens were killed.  They were shot, or died of famine, disease or
exposure, directly resulting from the punitive actions of the Soviet
government."

p. 233: "Sakharov maintains that in '1936 to 1939 alone, more than 1.2
million party members, half the total membership, were arrested.  Only
500,000 regained freedom.  The others...were shot (600,000) or died in
camps.'  By 1939, 60 percent of those who had been Party members in 1933
were no longer members."

p. 233: "The terror of the late 1930s thus destroyed the old Communist
Party..." [with the following footnote:] "Stalin killed and tortured more
Communists than any other dictator in the 20th century, whether Hilter,
the Czar, the Shah of Iran, or the Chilean Junta.  That he regarded the
Communists as so intransigently menacing to his regime was perhaps the
last generous historical testimonial ever made to Communists."  [P.Z.
Gouldner forgot to include some 500,000+ Communists and alleged Communists
killed by the Suharto regime in Indonesia--still in power, and of course
I do not share his reference to "last generous..."]

Mark, I thought you said you said (February 21), "I hope you will forgive
me if I bow out of this correspondence at this point"?  

Paul

*******************************************************************************
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 1997 23:57:21 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-ACSU.Buffalo.EDU>
Reply-To: marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: M-I: RE: "Personally I no longer think Stalinism was bad" (Mark Jones)

Robert C. Tucker, STALIN IN POWER, THE REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE, 1928-1941
Norton, 1990:

CHAPTER 11, "THE CONGRESS OF VICTIMS:

	"In brief, party people opposed to him [Stalin] were shit.  So he
reasoned at the end of 1927.  Now, six years later, he believed that
the party was swarming with such people; and he knew what to do about
it.  He was going to organize a terroristic purge."

CHAPTER 15, "THE FORGING OF AUTOCRACY I"

	"...those accused of treason or of connections with the traitors
constituted an Old Bolshevik Who's Who, soon to become a Who Was
Who..." (p. 374).
	
	"...he [Stalin] conspired against the military establishment by
fabricating a Tukhachevsky-led conspiracy against the Soviet state. 
The name he have to the fabricated conspriacy was: 'Anti-Soviet
Trotskyist Military Organization in the Red Army'." (p. 379-80).

CHAPTER 16, "THE FORGING OF AUTOCRACY II"

	"Among the organizations struck by the terror storm was the NKVD
itself." (p. 432).

	"Within nine days of the trial [of Tukhachevsky et al], 980
military commanders and high-ranking political officers in the army were
under arrest as participants in the alleged military conspiracy.  They too
were tortured into giving false depositions and these in turn led to
the arrest of a host of other innocent men.  The great military
massacre was now under way, and Russia would very nearly pay with her
life for Stalin's success in bringing it off." (p. 438).

	"At appalling cost to the country, Stalin managed to overthrow the
collective party regime bequeathed by Lenin without any over sign that
this was happening." (p. 439, original italized from "without" onward).

CHAPTER 17, "THE TERROR PROCESS"

	"Suffice to say here that no major nation has ever suffered state
terrorism of such ferocity as Russia did then, that those arrested and
put to death or consigned to slave-labor camps numbered in the
millions, and the grief and hardship borne by their loved ones defy
computation." (p. 441).

	"According to the historian Volgonov, who has had access to
pertinent archival sources, from four and a half to five and a half
million persons were arrested in 1937 and 1938, and from 800,000 to
900,000 of them received the death penalty.  The others in nearly all
cases went to prisons or labor camps from which few ever returned". (p.
474).

CHAPTER 18, "TERROR, RUSSIAN NATONALISM, AND FOREIGN POLICY"

	"During the Great Purge, no group was more totally terrorized than
foreign communists who had sought asylum in Russia or simply gone there
to work or study....A young Italian woman lying on the floor in a
jammed women's cell [in Lubianka in 1936] said in French, 'You've had a
fascist coup.'  When Russian women prisoners remonstrated, she said,
'What else if they're arresting Communists?'  They replied, 'What are
you saying?  The Communist Party is still in power,' to which she
answered, 'Why are you trying to trick me?  This is a fascist coup for
certain.  I know what one looks like.' Later she was shot." (p. 506).

	"In fact, so savage was the terror against foreign Communists in
Stalin's Russia of 1937-38 that arrested Communists in all
anti-Communist countries other than Germany had a much greater chance
of survival". (p. 507).

	"As the intervention in Spain wound up, Russians who had gone
there to risk their lives in the antifascist fight, and who survived, came
home, in most cases, to death in Russia." (p. 524).
	
	"What virtually all the Russian and foreign Communists who fought
in Spain and survived to come to Moscow must have shared was deep
anti-fascist conviction.  This was enough to make them a political
liabilty to a Stalin bent on doing business with Hitler."  (p. 525).








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