Can Stalin Be Loved?

In one of the latest episodes of the engaging series "Host," initiated by prominent Iranian journalist Sadegh Saba and broadcasted by Radio Farda, Ibrahim Golestan took on the role of "host." The program was titled: "Why does Ibrahim Golestan love Stalin and Reza Shah?" Without the slightest compassion, the personality, described by Mr. Saba as "one of the most prominent literary figures and one of the most influential intellectuals in Iran over the past half-century," portrays a version of Stalin that is astonishing and even unbearable for a large portion of those familiar with contemporary world history. The most disturbing aspect of his remarks about the former Soviet dictator is the complete lack of sympathy for the millions of victims who were slaughtered by one of the most brutal political regimes in the history of human civilization, tortured in the dungeons of Moscow and Leningrad, agonizingly buried in nameless graves in the gulags, or perished in Ukraine during a famine instigated by the "God of the Kremlin." Can one speak so irresponsibly in the face of this great tragedy of the twentieth century? From Mr. Golestan's words, it appears that he considers this great bloodshed necessary for achieving a "historical human success" and even praises Stalin for being "pragmatic" in serving his "idealism." He expresses his anger towards history's judgment of the "Red Tsar" by stating: "Stalin has been stuffed into strange wrappers of realities and insults." Is this the only reaction one can expect from an intellectual in the face of the sea of blood and mountains of suffering left by Stalin? It seems that the ninety-four-year-old Mr. Golestan remains entirely faithful to the political beliefs of his youth, showing no inclination to revise even the most controversial aspects of them. He has apparently kept the image of Stalin, during the time he was seated on the throne of history as the "father of the peoples of the world" and idol of the "toilers of the world," untouched in the storage of his mind. While it is regrettable that intellectuals, especially in Iran, praised Stalin during World War II and even a decade afterward, it is not unforgivable. Hundreds of writers, poets, painters, and filmmakers around the world during that era, from French Louis Aragon to Chilean Pablo Neruda, English Bernard Shaw, and Turkish Nazim Hikmet, were effectively serving a powerful regime that came to power after the October (or Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917 and reached the peak of global authority following Stalin's consolidation of power in the late 1920s. This astonishing apparatus, based on a totalitarian ideology that explained nature, history, and economics, captivated the world, and only a very few intellectuals of that time had the courage to stand against it. However, from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the present, the world and human civilization have transformed, and many historical realities, including those concerning the phenomenon of communism and its record, have been unveiled. With all the documents and books about the Stalin era published over the past few decades, the laudatory statements about this fearsome figure of the twentieth century indicate a deep rift that has emerged between a segment of Iranian intellectuals and the transformations of the times. This rift is a remnant of the deadly constraints that provided a favorable environment for major failures in the intellectual space before the Islamic Revolution. Today's younger generations of intellectuals in Iran blame their predecessors for their inability to overcome these constraints. The Khrushchev Report Between October 1917 and the early 1950s, the voices of the few who reached the West and reported on the hell created in Russia were effectively silenced under the pressure of the vast Soviet propaganda apparatus and its multitude of foreign supporters. However, in 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it was Khrushchev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, who exposed some of Stalin's crimes. Khrushchev's report at the Twentieth Congress was a real earthquake for the entire "socialist camp" and the global communist movement. This report emphasized the execution of about a million members of the Soviet Communist Party, including the majority of the members of the Central Committee elected at the Nineteenth Congress, while a large portion of the horrific crimes committed against ordinary people remained hidden. The Khrushchev report also detailed how the execution of prominent officers and mass purges in the Red Army severely weakened the Soviet defense force and created the conditions for its astonishing collapse against Nazi Germany in the early stages of the war. Following Khrushchev's report and the exposure of the cult of personality surrounding Stalin, many intellectuals left the ranks of communist parties outside the "communist camp." Nevertheless, this report was very incomplete. In the following years, the secrets of Stalin's horrific crimes quickly came to light. Some intellectuals who had fallen into the trap of Stalinism, ashamed and regretful of this great deception, became tireless explorers of Soviet history and communism. The dimensions of the crime are indescribable. During the Moscow Trials of 1937 and 1938, known as the "Great Terror," an average of 1,600 people were executed daily over a period of fifteen months. A document has been obtained showing that on December 12, 1937, Stalin and Molotov signed a list of 3,167 prisoners condemned to death and then went to the cinema. It was during these terrifying years of the 1930s that the leaders of the October Revolution (or coup) and former companions of Lenin and Stalin, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin, were tried and executed under the most humiliating conditions possible. Ibrahim Golestan speaks about the most terrifying period of Stalin's terror in the Soviet Union: "You see, Lenin died early. But Stalin still had to deal with the trials of 1936 and 1937. He still had trouble and had to fight. There were first-rate people. Bukharin wrote to Stalin: 'Comrade Stalin, what have I done to be pressured so much?' What he had done was to come weakly. Stalin wanted them not to come weakly. If this statement is correct, it means that because Stalin wanted to do great things, and because his opponents were creating trouble (trials) for him, he had to eliminate all of them, especially since he had to prepare the grounds for war with Germany. Such shocking statements, which perhaps can only be uttered in a few countries like North Korea, are a great injustice to the millions of victims of Stalin's crimes and deny historical realities from their very roots. Stalin was not waiting for war, and in 1939, by signing a pact with Hitler and dividing Poland, he became more assured that Germany would not attack the Soviet Union. If Stalin was truly thinking of war, he would not have killed the majority of Soviet generals. Hitler and Stalin praised each other and learned from each other's experiences. Historians say that Stalin was caught off guard by the German attack. The great chance of "Red totalitarianism" was that in its battle against "Brown totalitarianism" (National Socialism), it found itself alongside England and America and was able, in addition to the patriotic sentiment of the Russians who had no choice but to defend their homeland, to rely on significant military assistance from the West. It was through this historical opportunity that the Marxist-Leninist system was saved from collapse, and its leader, Stalin, was able to become not only the "leader of the global proletariat" but also the victor of the "Great Patriotic War" and seize half of Europe. The specter of Stalinism After the revelations of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarding Stalin's crimes, even from those who were complicit in this bloodshed, the system left behind by the "Red Tsar" cracked, and the myths surrounding it, which had deceived a large part of humanity, collapsed one after another. Other events, such as the publication of Solzhenitsyn's book titled "The Gulag Archipelago," deepened the rift, and then hundreds of pamphlets, documents, and testimonies throughout the "communist camp," as well as from cadres who separated from communist parties in other countries, detailed the events of the Stalin era and the system left behind by him. Even today, nearly twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, efforts to understand the roots of this great crime and its horrific consequences continue. One of the latest manifestations of this effort is the works of Svetlana Alexievich, the Nobel laureate in literature in 2015, especially the book "Second-Hand Time," which shows how the specter of the Stalinist system and ideology has cast a shadow over successive generations and continues to weigh heavily on the lives of their survivors even in the post-communist era. Iranian researchers and historians have also scrutinized this dark period. Touraj Atabaki, a professor of social history of the Middle East and Central Asia at Leiden University in the Netherlands, recently provided a list of the first-generation leaders of Iranian communists in the 1920s and 1930s who sought refuge in the "land of the toilers" with love and hope but were destroyed during Stalin's purges. Among the victims of the firing squads are names of leaders such as Soltanzadeh, Karim Nikbin, Abolqasem Zareh, Morteza Alavi, Kamran Asadi, Abdolhossein Hesabi, Kamran Aghazadeh, Hossein Sharghi, and Reza Ladban Esfandiari (brother of Nima Yushij). Other researchers, such as Atabak Fathollahzadeh, have addressed the fate of Iranians who fell victim to the gulag (in Magadan, no one grows old). For decades, no one knew about the painful fate of these unfortunate individuals. Due to this ignorance, subsequent generations of Iranian communists, like their predecessors, naively sought to achieve the paradise of socialism by seeking refuge in "Uncle Yusuf's house" and ended up in hell. The phenomenon of Stalin is not limited to Russia and its satellites. The "Red Tsar" devised a method of politics and governance that was later exported worldwide, from Maoist China to Pol Pot's Cambodia and North Korea under the Kim Il-sung dynasty. Based on this method, a minority group, using whatever it deems necessary, seizes power on behalf of the "toilers," discarding any opposing force as a "enemy of the people" into the "dustbin of history," and does not hesitate to unleash a bloodbath to maintain power. The millions of victims across the "socialist camp" over several decades were either dismissed as lies or treated with indifference. Stalin was right to say that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is merely a statistic. Today, however, the dimensions of this great crime are increasingly revealed as a manifestation of the bloody realities of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there are still those like Ibrahim Golestan who, instead of addressing the number of the dead, prefer to emphasize the "historical human success" that supposedly the people of the Soviet Union achieved thanks to comrade Stalin. What achievements in Stalin's system and its successors allow Mr. Golestan to speak of "historical human success" in the Soviet Union? Contrary to the Bolsheviks' fabrications, had Russia not fallen into the misery of "Marxism-Leninism" before the October (coup) Revolution, it could have been led down a path similar to that of Western European countries. However, under the communist regime, the people of the Soviet Union and its satellites sank into a "kitchen economy" for several decades, and standing in line for hours in front of mostly empty stores (except for vodka) became a normal part of daily life. In a book about Stalin, Robert Conquest, the Anglo-American historian, writes that after the death of Maxim Gorky, the famous Soviet writer, the "NKVD" (the predecessor of the "KGB") came across his personal notes, one of which described Stalin's face. According to Conquest, Gorky wrote in his notes: "Imagine a cock that has been fattened thousands of times. Such a creature is the most terrifying and dangerous living being one can imagine." With this analogy, Gorky referred to Stalin, who was a bloodthirsty monster, but in essence was just a cock. Can such a creature be loved?