Russia After Stalin

See my Stalin.

3

For this description and analysis I must refer the reader to my forthcoming book The Prophet Armed, which is a biographical study of Trotsky.

4

Only quite recently Professor Arnold Toynbee brought upon himself some criticism because he described Communism as a Western — or even a Christian — ‘heresy’.

5

The writer found this letter in the Trotsky Archives at Harvard.

6

This was, of course, even more true of the anti-communists. Thus the Menshevik Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik wrote after Stalin's death: ‘We, who have known personally and often quite closely the leaders of the Bolshevik Party since 1903, and who have met also Stalin as early as 1906 and later have wondered more than once how it happened that all of us… could so underrate him. Nobody thought of him as an eminent political worker…’ (Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, February-March 1953.)

7

It is possible to prove from the internal evidence of Stalin's writings that he became acquainted with Marx's Das Kapital only towards the end of his life.

8

It is interesting to note here the view of Mr. R. Abramovich, the Menshevik veteran who could well celebrate now the fifty years' jubilee of his uninterrupted and increasingly vehement struggle against Bolshevism. In the article from the Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik, quoted above, Mr. Abramovich (we assume he is its author) writes: ‘Thinking about the past it seems to us that the basic reason of our common, evidently incorrect appraisal of Stalin's personality was that we thought in terms of a democratic system, and strangely enough not only we, the Mensheviks, the opponents of the dictatorship, but also its adherents did so.’(My italics—I.D.)

9

This is, for instance, how General Ludendorff and General Hoffmann, the outstanding commanders of the German Army in the First World War and Trotsky's enemies during the Brest Litovsk period, described his military achievement.

10

The present Soviet town population is estimated at 70 millions, nearly 45 millions more than at the beginning of the Stalin era.

11

Students of Soviet agriculture disagree about the extent of the rise in its output. The most extreme critics put it at 20 per cent higher than before collectivization. The official Soviet figure is over 40 per cent. Whatever the truth, the present output is attained with much less agricultural labour; and so output per man-year has risen much more steeply.

12

The ‘re-privatization’ of the British steel industry under Mr. Churchill’s government has no bearing on the argument, because that industry had been nationalized de jure rather than de facto only just before the Conservative Party returned to office.

13

In 1945-6 the author, then a correspondent for British newspapers in Germany, interviewed on this subject hundreds of Soviet ‘displaced persons’. He did not meet a single person among them who reacted otherwise than with amazed indignation to the mere suggestion that public ownership might be replaced by private enterprise in Russia. Only citizens of the countries annexed by Russia in 1939-40 met the suggestion with divided opinions and most often with indifference.

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