Reply to Anil Rajimwale’s “Rejoinder”

COMMUNICATION

Mr Rajimwale (Mainstream April 27, 2013) claims that I have not responded to the points he has made in his criticism of my book on Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous “Secret Speech”.

I believe that I did reply to the points he made. But be that as it may, in this present reply I shall make a special effort to isolate and respond to every “point” Mr Rajimwale raises in his latest riposte.

I would like to make one thing clear: I am not “defending Stalin”. I am defending the truth, as demonstrated by the best evidence and reasonable deductions from that evidence. This is what all Marxists should do.

1. Mr Rajimwale states: “The question is: whether it is permissible for revolutionaries to repress, harass, and kill and murder other revolutionaries.”

My reply: As far as I can determine, Joseph Stalin never did any of these things. Rajimwale is repeating anticommunist lies, lies made all the more plausible since many of them were invented by Leon Trotsky, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and others under the direction of these last.

2. Rajimwale: “Furr himself mentions that Nikolai Ezhov ‘illegally murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens’! These are his own words. And yet he completely spares Stalin of any responsibility, as if he, Stalin, did not know of it at all in the years Ezhov was there!”

My reply: The evidence now available from former Soviet archives shows that Stalin did not know that Ezhov was doing this. Vladimir Khaustov, the very anticommunist editor of a recent collection of primary materials (“The Stalinist Elite at Golgotha 1937-1938”) concedes that Stalin believed the falsified reports that Ezhov’s NKVD was sending him. After his arrest Ezhov himself admitted that he had “shame-lessly deceived the government”.

3. Mr Rajimwale admits that I affirm that Rokossovskii, later a Soviet Marshal, was beaten by the NKVD. But he complains: “Again Ezhov, not Stalin, is responsible, according to Furr.”

My reply: We must clarify what is meant by “responsibility”.

The leader of any country is in a sense ”responsible” for everything that goes on in that country. In the case of crime “responsible” means, for example, ”obliged to take appropriate steps to suppress the criminal behavior and to find the guilty parties and bring them to justice”.

In this sense Stalin was not only “responsible” —that is, obliged to respond when he uncovered Ezhov’s crimes—Stalin actually carried out his responsibility. Ezhov and his henchmen were arrested, investigated, tried, and punished, many by execution, for killing many innocent Soviet citizens.

I discuss this at some length in Khrushchev Lied. My article “The Moscow Trials and the ‘Great Terror’ of 1937-1938: What the Evidence Shows” (July 2010) goes into much more detail still. It is available on my Home Page (http://www.tinyurl.com/grover-furr-research).

However, here Mr Rajimwale appears to be using the word “responsible” to mean “guilty of a crime”. Stalin was not “responsible” in this sense for Ezhov’s massive crimes.

Trotsky, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev were lying when they asserted that Stalin was guilty of these crimes. Their lies continue to be spread abroad by pro-capitalist anticommunists, but also by Trotskyists and by those who still believe Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s lies.

4. Rajimwale asks: “What about Tukhachevsky, Blyukher and many many others?”

My reply: We now have a great deal of evidence that both Tukhachevskii and Bliukher were guilty of conspiring against the Soviet government. My Moscow-based colleague Vladimir Bobrov and I have published an article on Tukhachevsky (available on my Home Page).

My recently-published book on the murder of Sergei Kirov gives some of the strong evidence we now have of Marshal Bliukher’s guilt. (Grover Furr, The Murder of Sergei Kirov. History, Scholarship, and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm. Kettering, OH: Erythrós Press & Media LLC, 2013)

5. Rajimwale: “Repressions under Ezhov were only a continuation of what had been going on earlier; and the repressions continued even after Ezhov was arrested and shot.”

My reply: Khrushchev made this claim in his “Secret Speech”. But it is a lie. In reality there is no evidence of state-sponsored murder before Ezhov.

The mass illegal repressions ceased once Lavrentii Beria replaced Ezhov in November 1938 as Commissar of Internal Affairs.Soon the horrible crimes of Ezhov and his men began to come to light. Hundreds of thousands of cases were reviewed, and the guilty were arrested.

6. Rajimwale: “Whether or not Trotsky committed mistakes is not the issue…”
My reply: It is not a question of “mistakes”.

Trotsky and his followers participated in the conspiracy to murder Sergei Kirov, Stalin, and others. They would never have done so without at least Trotsky’s consent.

Moreover, the evidence now available supports the accusation made at the Moscow Trials that Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan. See the article “Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan” on my Home Page, and my book The Murder of Sergei Kirov.

7. Rajimwale claims that honest Communists such as R. Palme Dutt, Gromyko, and Anna Louise Strong “brought to light” Stalin’s “repressions”. This is false. These people had no independent information. They and many more simply believed and repeated the lies that Khrushchev and his henchmen invented.

8. Rajimwale: “Beatings, tortures and shootings of fellow revolutionaries are no revolutionary acts.”

My reply: These are Khrushchev/Gorbachev lies. Stalin never countenanced any such things.

9. Rajimwale: “[The accused had] no defence counsels, no system at all to frankly state points, no atmosphere of just court proceedings.”

My reply: This is false. The accused at the Moscow Trials either had defense counsel or refused them. The accused made lengthy statements, often strongly denying some of the charges against them while admitting to others.

Anyone who studies the transcripts of the three Moscow Trials of August 1936, January 1937, and March 1938 will immediately see that this is true.

10. Rajimwale: “In fact, the accused gave statements under severe threats and fear of dire consequences. They were intimidated and beaten (as during the Ezhov period), forced confessions were extracted, as was the case with Bukharin and many others.”

My reply: False! There is no evidence at all that the accused in the Moscow trials were threatened, intimidated, beaten, or forced. Both Karl Radek (January 1937 trial) and Nikolai Bukharin (March 1938 trial) specifically stated this.

Stephen F. Cohen, the world’s expert on Bukharin and a scholar who hates Stalin, admitted in print in 2003 that Bukharin was certainly not tortured.

Vladimir Bobrov and I have published articles about Bukharin in which we examine all the evidence in detail. It is clear that Bukharin was not only guilty of the crimes to which he confessed, but to much more besides.

In fact the evidence shows that Bukharin knew about Ezhov’s conspiracy and could have stopped the mass murders if he had exposed Ezhov. Instead he remained silent. Thus Bukharin was accomplice to Ezhov’s massive crimes.

In contrast, Stalin saw to it that Ezhov and his henchmen were stopped, arrested, tried, and punished. Moreover, many—anticommunists admits to more than 100,000—persons falsely convicted under Ezhov were released from detention.

Conclusion

Thanks to the partial opening of former Soviet archives we can now see the startling truth: Everything we have been taught about Soviet history of the Stalin period for almost 60 years is false!

I, my colleague Vladimir Bobrov, and some excellent historians in Russia are beginning to uncover the truth—what really happened, and did not happen, during the Stalin years.

I recommend the articles and books linked on my Home Page (http://www.tinyurl.com/grover-furr-research) and my two books, both of which are available from Amazon.com and from the publisher:

• Khrushchev Lied. The Evidence That Every “Revelation” of Stalin’s (and Beria’s) “Crimes” in Nikita Khrushchev’s Infamous “Secret Speech” to the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, Is Provably False. Kettering, OH: Erythros Press & Media LLC, 2011.

• The Murder of Sergei Kirov. History, Scholarship, and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (Kettering, OH: Erythros Press & Media LLC, 2013).

Grover Furr
Montclair State University
Montclair NJ 07043 USA
E-mail: furrg_nj@fastmail.fm