The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification -- Introduction
been crushed by the monstrous bureaucratic machine. Part of it was exterminated physically in the recent
trials; the rest of it is in prison, and every prisoner is in daily danger of following Zinoviev and the others
to their graves.
There are many who seek to still the protesting voice of their conscience, or who rationalize their
subservience to the mighty bureaucracy, by disseminating a cowardly interpretation of the change. "The
former leaders, who shouted so much about world revolution, were primarily agitators, men who fitted in
best with the romantic and heroic period of the revolution. But the world revolution has subsided now,
and what is needed is a new type of leader. Now we need practical men, realists, builders of a new
society, men who are able to fill the commanding positions in economic life, in government
administration, in foreign affairs."
The argument is not only miserably philistine and reactionary, but it is not even in consonance with facts.
The facts are that precisely those men have been wiped out who were not only the Old Guard of
Bolshevism, but the ablest government administrators, the most competent economic directors, the best
equipped representatives of the Soviet republic abroad. Even a partial list of the most prominent of these
men, all of whom have been driven out, imprisoned or murdered by Stalin, will show the devastating
havoc wrought in the country by the bureaucracy in the period of its rise to omnipotence.
Of the first Council of People's Commissars -- the actual Soviet government -- organized in November,
1917, four members died natural deaths: Lenin, Nogin, Skvortsov-Stepanov and Lunacharsky. Still alive
and in Stalinist service are Stalin himself, Miliutin, and the trio who functioned for a few months as the
head of the Army and Navy Commissariat:
Antonov-Ovseyenko, Dybenko and Krylenko. The other commissars were Rykov, now in prison;
Shliapnikov, dying in prison, where he has been confined for years; Lomov-Oppokov and N. F.
Glebov-Avilov, the latter a Bolshevik since 1904, are both in prison now as "wreckers"; Teodorovich,
condemned in November, 1930 as a counter-revolutionary "Kondratievist, "has vanished into some
obscure hole; Trotsky, Soviet Russia's first Commissar of Foreign Affairs, is in Mexican exile, charged
by Moscow with being an "agent of Hitler and the Mikado."
Lenin's deputy as Chairman of the Council -- a post equivalent to that of Prime Minister of France or
England, or President of the United States -- was Leo Kamenev; he was shot in August 1986 as a "Fascist
assassin. "Alexis Rykov, who succeeded Kamenev in that post in 1925, is now in prison accused of the
same crime. Rykov was not only head of the Council of the Soviet Union, but also of the Russian
Socialist Federated Soviet Republic -- Russia proper. When he was removed from that post too, his
successor was Sergei Syrtsov, a Bolshevik for a quarter of a century, head of the Russian Soviet Republic
from 1929 to 1931, removed as a "counter revolutionary plotter, "and still in prison. Also in prison, even
rumored shot, is L. Sosnovsky, once Russia's most popular political writer, the early floor leader and
whip of the Bolshevik group in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets. Driven to
suicide in 1925 was Lutovinov, the secretary of the Central Executive Committee. Worn almost to death
in the Verkhne-Uralsk Solitary Prison is the secretary of this same Committee from 1922 to 1928,
Timofey Sapronov, who joined the party in 1912. Aveli Yenukidze, who succeeded Lutovinov in his
post, and retained it for more than a decade, was suddenly removed in 1985 and imprisoned -- with the
whispered charges that this man, who had been so loyal a servitor of the bureaucracy for years, had
participated in the plot to kill S. M. Kirov. His nephew, Lado Yenukidze, has been imprisoned for nine
years as a Trotskyist. In prison also is V. V. Schmidt, a worker-Bolshevik, for years the head of the
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