Today is the Anniversary of Stalin's Birth

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was born in Gori in the country of Georgia December 21, 1879. Edvard Radzhinsky argues convincingly in his biography of Stalin that Stalin was actually born on that date in 1878, though. The bourgeoisie, especially in the West, views Stalin as being as bad, or worse than, Hitler, a totalitarian dictator who killed millions of Soviet and foreign citizens. Allegations of Stalin's "crimes" are usually based on exaggerations and deliberate lies, spread by dishonest Trotskyists, fascists, revisionists like Khrushchev, and Western secret service agents like Conquest, not that Stalin and the USSR were never wrong. From a working class and intenationalist standpoint what the bourgeoisie call crimes (collectivization, purges, trials of saboteurs and spies, the nonaggression pact with Germany, etc) were instead essentially correct and beneficial policies which helped the majority of people - leading the USSR along Leninist lines towards socialism, defeating Nazi Germany and other fascists, and supporting revolutions and national liberation struggles. At the same time, Alliance Marxist-Leninist argues that within the Soviet Union there was a battle going on between Stalin's true, or revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist faction and revisionists who wanted to restore capitalism. Also Stalin does not deserve credit or blame for everything the USSR did, so it takes analysis to judge the usefulness of policies and whether Stalin deserves credit (or criticism) for a given policy.

The unofficial party line of American and Western historians is against Stalin because he was a revolutionary leader who consolidated Soviet socialism and successfully encouraged indigeneous revolutions worldwide. Compare this to subsequent Soviet leaders who presided over the dismantling of socialism, corrupted the struggles of others (such as the Afghans and unsuccessfully with the Albanians), and in the end encouraged the collapse of the USSR and its allies, who had been reduced to what some call Soviet social-imperialist colonies. It is partly because of counterrevolution in the USSR that the Taliban controlled Afghanistan and then fell to an imperialist occupation, perhaps millions of Iraqis died under the UN sanctions and tens of thousands more in the Iraq War, Haiti is under a brutal UN occupation, and conditions and life spans in the former Soviet Union have fallen while a few get rich off state property almost given away for nothing. For this reason it is obvious that the bourgeoisie should hate Stalin and praise Gorbachev, Deng, and other "communist" leaders. For these reasons I would say that Stalin made a great contribution to the social, economic, and even spiritual progress of humanity (as did the USSR for much of its existence) and to Marxist-Leninist theory and practice.

In the future I will add more details or sources to read for a revolutionary view of Stalin so you can judge this for yourself. The introduction to Bruce Franklin's "The Essential Stalin," an anthology of Stalin's writings, is a useful overview, as are articles at www.allianceml.com, www.plp.org, and www.northstarcompass.org.

Merry winter solstice holidays (today is the shortest day of the year and the beginning of astronomical winter, which is probably why so many holidays mark this time of the year)!