Date: 28 Apr 96 03:52:52 EDT
From: "Chris, London" <100423.2040-AT-compuserve.com>
To: marxismlist a <marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU>
Subject: Stalin's murders?


Re Barkley's post to Joe -

Getty, in Getty and Manning eds Stalinist Terror, New Perspectives,
Cambridge 1993, page 41:

Stalin "signed numberous death sentences, including a record 3,167 on
December 12, 1938".

Barkley, and everyone else, concerned with this question, please
get this book this week!

It incorporates a lot of new material. It goes qualitatively
beyond the anti-communist or Trotskyist denunciations. It confirms
a lot of totally unacceptable practices. It gives a lot more detail
about how they came about, IMO in a marxist spirit, and I must warn
people that the higher the power of magnification the more complex
the picture.

On the one hand there is literally human blood spattered on 
Marshall Tukhachevkii's confession. On the other, the record is 
ambiguous about whether Stalin was the first to propose that Bukharin
should be executed. It is clear that sycophants building up the 
cult of the personality also contributed to the events. Another irony
is that the same people, including Stalin, who were responsible
for the purges, were also those who contributed to moderating them.

Stalin is recorded for example as early as 1936 as disagreeing with
his Grand Inquisitor, Ezhov, and writing to regional party secretaries
complaining about excessive repression of the rank and file party 
members. The fact that the same people who instituted the terror, 
brought it under control, accounts for how it went on in a more
grinding form in subsequent decades. Ezhov however was himself executed.

The chapter on Ezhov, who from a recent trashy picture book on Stalin I 
saw, was strikingly good-looking, as well as of proletarian background,
gives some clues as to the extraordinary hold this man had over Stalin
in the period about 1933-6. From circumstantial evidence it is clear
that Stalin, as well as other members of the central committee were
brought in to take part in the interrogation of the victims, after they
had already been softened up to confess to shocking charges of treachery.
Ezhov would thereby have succeeded in implicating Stalin in his guilt,
and the powerful psychological effect of this, I would suggest, cannot
be under-estimated. The scenarios, I continue to submit, must have had
psychological parallels with trials for witchcraft, except it was 
renamed as Trotskyism.

Get this book!

Chris B, London. 


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