We agree with the rather pointed observation of Roy A. Medvedev that from the point of view of Western Liberalism this is the "first comprehensive study of the Great Terror of the 1930s" in Stalin’s Soviet Union. What is left unstated is that this round of history-writing on Stalin destroys all the previous Western so-called scholarship on Stalin and that is why it is "first."
Past writings on Stalin in the West served to justify the Cold War and Western military and spying expenditures in particular. They had little relationship to reality. Perhaps the current agenda of Getty is to taunt the Russians into releasing more NKVD/KGB archives, because The Road to Terror bases itself on party archives excluding those of the secret police in the Soviet Union. That's not to say that the party is not foremost, but with the publication of Getty’s works, the old Cold War Liberals may find themselves spurred to dig up secret police archives or egg on the Russians to open them.
The agenda of opening the secret police archives is not one MIM can parse easily. After all, it remains true that Russians have more to gain from leaving open the possibility of returning to the road of Lenin and Stalin than the West does by reading about secret police methods--from the point of view of the proletariat. The Russians may soon return to the Soviet road, but the Amerikans surely will not. Hence, the question of opening the secret police archives more than they are now is one of whether non-Westerners would benefit from that or suffer from having secrets revealed to the Western imperialists.
Getty is a Liberal echoing post-modernism on "Master Narratives" (pp. 17-18 and onwards) for some purposes in handling Stalin. Yet Getty is really the first bourgeois scholar to look at Soviet government documents and read them seriously with an eye to pseudo-theories and ideologies propagated by the West. We at MIM pointed out before that our critic Robert Tucker understands some aspects of Marxist-Leninist ideology of Stalin’s day, but Getty provides a more complete picture of implementation and administration, including crucial statistics on imprisonment and execution, each step of the way under Stalin.
Though Getty no where addresses the comparative statistics of imprisonment, informed and careful readers will realize that there is no chance to find Stalin more repressive than contemporary Amerika by total numbers except for 1937 and 1938, when there was a round of executions that added up to the six digits. If we start in 1923, when Lenin became incapacitated, we will find 414 executions a year and ranging up to a high of 20,201 in 1930 if we exclude 1937 and 1938. (p. 588) These "ordinary years" involved more death penalties than the united $tates applies in an ordinary year percentage-wise and absolutely, but not so much more that we can say the united $tates is more "freedom-loving" than Stalin's Soviet Union was. The united $tates puts so many more people in prison for so much longer that the percentage of life-years of the population spent under imprisonment repression is higher in the united $tates than Stalin's Soviet Union, even if we count each execution as a repression of a whole life-time, say the equivalent of 75 years imprisonment. Those of us concerned about what states allow greater liberty to their own populations have no reason to prefer the united $tates over Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Of course, when it comes to wars made on other countries, there is no comparison, with just the number of civilians killed in Lebanon in July and August 2006 by u.$.-backed Zionists comparable to the executions by secret police under Stalin in a normal year, the difference being that I$rael and Lebanon are much smaller populations than the 140 million and growing population that Stalin dealt with. Getty mentions that Stalin era modernization compares with what Americans did in colonial times (p. 7)--which includes decimation of the indigenous peoples of Africa and North America.
In 1937, the Germans passed disinformation through Czechoslovakia believed by England and Russian emigres that the Russians had a fascist coup afoot in the military. A bloodbath followed with a real emergency crackdown which Getty claims ended up being completely arbitrary and decided at the local level with quotas for executions coming from Stalin. As MIM has pointed out, the fascist coup rumors turned out true in several other European countries that fell to fascist subversion. Getty says over and over again that Stalin and his Politburo fell for “paranoia,” but clearly the rest of Europe was not “paranoid” enough about fascism.
Though Getty himself uses a "civil tone" and has kind words and references even for British disinformation agents like Robert Conquest, MIM would say Getty's work is rather destructive, and dove-tailing with the upsurge of post-modernism. While adopting an absolutist Liberal humyn-rights posture without demonstrating that such a posture has been adopted anywhere in the world successfully, Getty condemns Stalin. To this day, MIM can say that people like Getty are idealists, condemning Stalin from on-high. Nonetheless, Getty’s work is much more "reality- based" than the Western academic work that preceded him.
In the past, the Western left-wing of parasitism bought into the military establishment’s stories about Stalin’s "totalitarianism" and the like, at least 50% of the way. The left-wing of parasitism proved gullible when it came to the claims of libertarians, anarchists and the right-wing of parasitism against Stalin. Without its own compass, the left-wing of parasitism in the West had no way of knowing that so many claims about Stalin were just too far off to become any further "untethered from reality" as George F. Will puts it. MIM is not surprised, because these same people have no grip on reality capable of telling them that the minimum wage worker of the West is in fact petty-bourgeoisie, an international exploiter. People unable to tell that the West is one petty- bourgeois mass with a sprinkling of lumpen, migrant workers and imperialists are not going to have the capability to judge Stalin correctly either.
One question that Getty is right to raise is whether or not the public at-large can really interpret a question such as "Trotskyism." Mao said that Stalin distrusted the masses too much and documentary evidence would be hard to refute along these lines, with Molotov saying that the Soviet Union just could not fall to confusion the way the rest of Europe did and thus "we did not trust." So the question arises when the Politburo puts out the call for vigilance against "Trotskyism," should the Politburo be obliged to refer to people with concrete organizational ties (p. 21) or can it refer to a general line that Trotskyism upholds and let lower levels of the party and the people decide what that is. According to many, if we put out a general call to attack "Trotskyism," as a line, even Soviet masses knowledgeable of their own history do not really know what that is and simply make use of the day's theme to exact revenge on persynal enemies that they will conveniently dub "Trotskyist." This notion also came up in the Cultural Revolution, that people did not go deeply into political line and instead continued with their clan or career feuds.
As a response, one coming from Mao suggests that leaders should protect the people. At the same time, he trusted the people enough to let them fight out their line struggles. Likewise in the Soviet Union, Stalin made completely democratic use of informers (who could be anybody) and local party "troikas" to draw up execution lists of the so-called "Great Terror" of 1937-8.
While Bolshevik Central Committee members themselves had long ago accepted that blood is the price of revolution, one might wonder if the people outside the Central Committee should become involved. Yet in both the so-called "Great Terror" and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the real democratic impulse was to let people become involved in life-and-death issues themselves. It was so during the American Revolution of 1776 and even moreso with Stalin and Mao.
In 1937 and 1938 there was no use of legal channels. At the same time, one cannot say that anyone could guarantee their own safety. It was a case where the Central Committee majority itself found itself executed or retired bit by bit. So we cannot say that this fit of violence protected a particular elite. Stalin's own family faced purges and of course, Bukharin was among his closest friends. If we believe books published on the matter, including by a self- alleged assassin, Stalin himself died from an assassin's work aided by Beria.
So one view of reducing the distinction between rulers and ruled is to let the ruled take part in life-and-death questions. Let all rulers take the risk of being justly or unjustly executed. That is why there is some truth to Getty’s charge of "self-destruction of the Bolsheviks." In reality, based on prison statistics, we cannot say Amerikan politics is more freedom-loving than Stalin- era politics in the Soviet Union. Nor does the united $tates preserve an even bigger role of participation to the people via its concept of so-called democracy. While Amerikans pull a lever every two years to choose between candidates with no difference, Soviet citizens could monitor their officials and get them executed, to put matters at their most extreme. What the Liberal critics really object to is that the Soviet elite under Stalin faced even greater risk than the people below. At the same time, it's not hard to see why this approach might enamor a people to its government despite widespread repression.
This same jibe in the very title of Getty's book and in all the magazine pulp articles on the Cultural Revolution says that the communists destroyed their own party. In the Cultural Revolution in particular this disorder came with new ideas and requirements for people to think for themselves. All of Stalin's closest aides and friends also said they never knew if they would be executed after visiting him.
Getty and the like of Italy's Gramsci suggest that "hegemony" is the preferable road to "domination." In such a view, in normal times, one should be able to set up a more smoothly operating system of class hegemony that is more stable than the more risky strategies of direct repression.
The trouble comes in evaluating a context of war and even normal patterns of everyday violence. If we accept that the Stalin era came with three-quarters of a million executions including over 600,000 in 1937 and 1938 in which anyone who showed the slightest wavering could end up dead, then the question remains whether that is actually a higher level of violence than in other societies. No doubt from the point of view of the well-fed intellectual petty-bourgeoisie mindful of its rights to "dissent" and waver, 1937 and 1938 were stains on the reputation of communism. Where we question the Liberals is not on that point but whether people threatened with death by hunger, homelessness, inadequate health care and Nazi war would have done better without Stalin. The experience of other governments in the world suggests not. It's easy to talk about social problems killing millions a year and even use rhetoric of socialism, but to accomplish what Stalin did in mortality reduction, education and economic advance has proved very difficult. Other countries that accomplished such advances disproportionately benefitting the toilers did so with even greater violence than Stalin employed. We must also ask what the cost of not allowing people to take life-and-death questions into their hands is including the violence that may occur because the people do not confront themselves with their own democratic needs adequately; although in ordinary times even Stalin did make use of a court system. 1937 and 1938 are not like all other years in humyn history.
Getty's implicit philosophical criticism of Stalin is idealism. It's not that anyone else in the world succeeded in bringing the proletariat the kind of advances Stalin did. Rather Getty is like the teacher who grades without a curve using a test of Absolute Humyn Rights. Like the disappointed teacher who finds that no one in the class of 200 (countries) scored over 50%, the idealist feels free to flunk everyone who took the test and condemn in the name of God-in-Oh- So-High-Heaven--whether idealists like Getty name such a god or not. In contrast, the materialist is apt to understand that if there are 200 pupils and a teacher thinks they have all failed, then that teacher is at fault for being a poor teacher, grader or test-maker. No matter what they say, idealists are siding with the more imperfect against the more perfect, because comparisons with Heaven or the ideal world are not relevant.