Date: Sat, 11 Oct 1997 02:02:53 -0400 (EDT)
From: Siddharth Chatterjee <siddhart-AT-mailbox.syr.edu>
Subject: M-I: Mao Tse-Tung on Stalin: 2



Continued from Part 1

___________________________________________________________________

[From

  "On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"
 As published in People's China, 16th April 1956]
........................
 
 Leaders of Communist Parties and socialist states in various fields
 are duty bound to do their utmost to reduce mistakes, avoid serious
 ones, endeavour to learn lessons from isolated, local and temporary
 mistakes and make every effort to prevent them from developing into
 mistakes of a nation-wide or prolonged nature. To do this, every
 leader must be most prudent and modest, keep close to the masses,
 consult them on all matters, investigate and study the actual
 situation again and again and constantly engage in criticism and
 self-criticism appropriate to the situation and well measured. It was
 precisely because of his failure to do this that Stalin, as the chief
 leader of the Party and the state, made certain serious mistakes in
 the later years of his work. He became conceited and imprudent.
 Subjectivism and one-sidedness developed in his thinking and he made
 erroneous decisions on certain important questions, which led to
 serious consequences.
 
 With the victory of the great October Socialist Revolution, the people
 and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the leadership of
 Lenin, established the first socialist state on one-sixth of the
 earth. The Soviet Union speedily carried out socialist
 industrialization and collectivisation of agriculture, developed
 socialist science and culture, established a solid union of many
 nationalities in the form of a union of the Soviets, and the formerly
 backward natonalities in the Soviet Union became socialist
 nationalities.
 
 During the Second World War, the Sovet Union was the main force in
 defeating fascism and saving European civilization. It also helped the
 peoples in the East to defeat Japanese militarism. All these glorious
 achievements pointed out to all mankind its bright future - socialism
 and communism, seriously shook the rule of imperialism and made the
 Soviet Union the first and strong bulwark in the world struggle for
 lasting peace.
 
 The Soviet Union has encouraged and supported all other socialist
 countries in their construction, and it has been an inspiration to the
 world socialist movement, the anti-colonialist movement and every
 other movement for the progress of mankind. These are the great
 achievements made by the people and the Communist Party of the Soviet
 Union in the history of mankind. The man who showed the Soviet people
 and Communist Party the way to the great achievements was Lenin. In
 the struggle to carrry out Lenin's principles, the Central Committee
 of the Commmunist Party of the Soviet Union, for its vigorous
 leadership, earned its credit, in which Stalin had an ineffaceable
 share.
 
 After Lenin's death Stalin, as the chief leader of the Party and the
 state, creatively applied and developed Marxism-Leninism. In the
 struggle to defend the legacy of Leninism and against the enemies of
 Leninism - the Trotskyites, Zinovievites and other bourgeois agents -
 Stalin expressed the will and wishes of the people and proved himself
 to be an outstanding Marxist-Leninist fighter. The reason why Stalin
 won the support of the Soviet people and played an important role in
 history was primarily because he, together with the other leaders of
 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, defended Lenin's line on the
 industrialization of the Soviet state and the collectivization of
 agriculture. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by carrying out
 this line, brought about the triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union
 and created the conditions for the victory of the Soviet Union in the
 war against Hitler; these victories of the Soviet people conformed to
 the interests of the working class of the world and all progressive
 mankind.
 
 It was therefore also quite natural for the name of Stalin to be
 greatly honoured throughout the world. But, having won such high
 honour among the people, both at home and abroad, by his correct
 application of the Leninist line, Stalin erroneously exaggerated his
 own role and counter- posed his individual authority to the collective
 leadership, and as a result certain of his actions were opposed to
 certain fundamental Marxist-Leninist concepts which he himself had
 propagated. On the one hand, it was recognized that the masses were
 the makers of history, that the Party must keep in constant touch with
 the people and that inner-Party criticism from below must be
 developed. On the other hand, the cult of the individual was accepted
 and fostered, and the arbitrariness of a single person prevailed. Thus
 Stalin found himself in a contradiction on this question during the
 latter part of his life, with a discrepancy between his theory and
 practice.
 
 Marxist-Leninists hold that leaders play a big role in history. The
 people and their parties need forerunners who are able to represent
 the interests and will of the people, stand in the forefront of their
 historic struggles and serve as their leaders. But when any leader of
 the Party or the state places himself over and above the Party and the
 masses instead of in their midst, when he alienates himself from the
 masses, he ceases to have an all-round, penetrating insight into the
 affairs of the state. As long as this was the case, even so
 outstanding a personality as Stalin could not avoid making unrealistic
 and erroneous decisions on certain important matters. Stalin failed to
 draw lessons from isolated, local and temporary mistakes on certain
 issues and so failed to prevent them from becoming serious mistakes of
 a nation-wide or prolonged nature. During the latter part of his life,
 Stalin took more and more pleasure in this cult of the individual, and
 violated the Party's system of democratic centralism and the principle
 of combining collective leadership with individual responsibility. As
 a result he made some serious mistakes such as the following:
 
 he broadened the scope of the suppression of counter-revolution; he
 lacked the necessary vigilance on the eve of the anti-fascist war; he
 failed to pay proper attention to the further development of
 agriculture and the material welfare of the peasantry; he gave certain
 wrong advice on the international communist movement, and, in
 particular, made a wrong decision on the question of Yugoslavia. On
 these issues, Stalin fell victim to subjectivism and one-sidedness,
 and divorced himself from objective reality and from the masses.
 




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