Narochnitskaya: What threatens Russia with the demonization of the Soviet state?
Whose terror is worse?
Vladimir Kozhemyakin, "AiF": - Natalia Alekseevna, on account of Stalin millions of ruined lives of innocent people. And when you read you, you may get the impression that you justify Stalin’s repressions. Is it so?
Natalia Narochnitskaya: - I must say right away - I am not a Stalinist. The only brother of my father disappeared in 1937, and my father was long considered the brother of the enemy of the people. Moreover, I consider the Bolshevik revolution a tragedy of universal proportions and would prefer to see our history without her, without Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. But there are facts. In the religious wars of Protestants and Catholics, almost a third of the population of Central Europe was exterminated under the slogan “Kill them all! The Lord himself will then dismantle others and his own. ”
And in the dictatorship of Cromwell in the years of the English revolution, and in the revolutionary terror of the heralds of freedom, equality and fraternity of Robespierre and Danton, who invented the guillotine, per capita of the then population was destroyed much more than in the Stalinist USSR. In Vendée alone, 1793 thousand people were killed in 250, including children, and some historians have 400 thousand victims - that's for 25 million of the then French population!
But for some reason in the West they prefer not to recall these "exploits" of their predecessors, demonizing mainly the Stalinist regime. It is unlikely only because Stalin, unlike Cromwell, lived not so long ago.
- What, in your opinion, is the reason that at the same time they keep silent about the same Lenin?
“I still felt a change in perestroika: its ideological gurus, acting under the banner of anti-communism, somehow very consistently spared the orthodox Bolsheviks and ardent revolutionary maximalists. They were silent about the terror of Lenin's guard, in 1980's still unknown to society, because they would have to rehabilitate the object of their crimes - the “united and indivisible” Russia, and it is something alien to all the most ardent Westerners who hate Stalin, but not Lenin and Trotsky.
My father, who during the years of the revolution and the civil war was a high-school student of 11-16 years old, told me that Lenin time was even worse than Stalin's time. Every night, a high school student, an engineer, or a whole family were taken out of the neighboring houses, shots did not subside outside the city. From the red terror in 1922-1924. many more people died without trial than in the Stalinist camps. The Bolsheviks proceeded from the fact that it was not even necessary to seek blame before the revolution for a hostile class, for man is not free in his actions, being a product of social conditions. It is only necessary to calculate how many representatives of the counter-revolutionary classes are to be exterminated as a hindrance to the revolution. Against this background, prosecutor Vyshinsky looks like a model of legality.
In essence, the “1937 phenomenon of the year” was only the second act of the drama after the monstrous twenties, especially 1922-1924, according to the criteria of repression. But among the victims in the 30-e years were already the destroyers of Russia themselves. “A revolution like Saturn devours its children” - Anatol France’s words about the French Revolution are fully confirmed by our history. Remember the story "Children of the Arbat" - there the hero is not outraged by the repression against the "white guard, the true" enemies of the revolution. " He wonders: “Not those are arrested, not those shot” ... And this is almost a reproduction of Trotsky's thoughts. In an absentee dispute published in Berlin with the “victorious Stalinist line,” Trotsky is witting: “All power is violence, not an agreement.” Trotsky calls himself and the Leninist guard the Jacobins - the true revolutionaries, and the Stalin period - the Thermidorian reaction, which began to curtail the French revolution. “And we had such a big chapter when we also ... shot the White Guards and expelled the Girondins ... None of us are afraid of the shootings ... But you need to know who to shoot under which head. (Trotsky's italics - NN) When we shot, we were firmly aware of which chapter. ”
Try to touch Trotsky and even Lenin in the circles of the left intelligentsia, they will pick you up. But from Stalin they made the embodiment of the universal evil of all times and peoples.
This is largely the essence of post-perestroika ideology, whose idols were not at all going to rehabilitate Russia, which we lost. They were different and different in the depressing spirit of the smerdyakovism: “I hate all Russia, sir!”. The late Soviet cosmopolitan intellectual-nomenklatura elite was the closest to the first Bolsheviks - from all generations of the Soviet elite. It was precisely the ideologues of perestroika and 90's that didn’t fall upon the evil of the revolution, not directly at the repressive maxim that was laid in it, but at the Stalin period - because they hated Stalin not so much for repression as for his “great-power chauvinism”, although they didn’t admit it .
But, since you accept and even approve of the destruction of historical Russia by the Bolsheviks, who seized the power that fell out of the helpless hands of the then liberals who led Russia to disintegration and collapse, then you can accept the repressive principle, which is an inevitable part of the revolutionary doctrine. All revolutions always go through a period of repression. And Stalin is no worse in them than Lenin, Trotsky and K.
- You once said: “For some reason, Lenin is always spared for the crushing of a great empire, in which, by the way, the Baltic was not disputed by anyone. So the problem is not repression as such. ” But after all, under Lenin, the country, although it lost territory, but survived, did not fall apart, and then it was the communist project that began to conquer the world and successfully confront its geopolitical rivals. That is, Lenin, too, seems to be “guilty” of the fact that the West subsequently broke off his teeth about Russia. And foreign intervention after the revolution failed, if I am not mistaken, also under Lenin.
- The cliché of Soviet historiography became the thesis that the “whites” were ready to trade in territories, and the Reds proclaimed the defense of the socialist fatherland. But it was the opposite. In 1919, when the Civil War was going on, the unofficial ambassador of the Soviets Litvinov, who met secretly in Stockholm, proposed the annexation of territories, in particular the Baltic States, and in return - the withdrawal of the Entente's troops from Arkhangelsk in order to leave the whites without help at the mercy of the Reds. The Bolsheviks, “for the sake of preserving the revolution’s citadel,” Chicherin wrote, “gave Latvia Latgale, whose population did not want it,” gave Karabakh - “the original Armenian land” (also Chicherin's words) to the Azerbaijanis, because the Bolsheviks won in Baku, and in Armenia the nationalists Dashnaks. All white structures flatly refused to come to the conference planned by Lloyd George on the Princes' Islands, in order not to legitimize the disintegration of Russia, for all the self-proclaimed parts — the Menshevik Georgia, the Central Rada, and others — were also invited there. The Bolsheviks readily agreed.
Finally, it was Lenin's national policy and the division of the country on a national-territorial basis that became a time bomb that exploded in the 1991 year. By the way, the project of Stalin was not so radical - he proposed to make all the republics part of the Russian Federation. Lenin and Trotsky, in their maximalism, insisted on the USSR, so that later in the course of the world socialist revolution, "socialist" France, Germany, etc. would join it.
I think that against the background of obvious reverence for Lenin, the particular hatred of the West and our Westerners for Stalin is not due to his contribution to the atrocities that, of course, took place. The fact is that Stalin was completely free from admiration for Western history and saw through all the plans of his Western partners, knew how to beat them. Therefore, in the West, he is demonized not for repression, where he was not the first, but for creating a great new power on the spot of Russia, transforming the country into a geopolitical force that is equal to the whole West, an obstacle in its path.
Let us recall the essence of Khrushchev's "cult" of Stalin: it completely satisfied the long-term interests of the West. Out of the entire period of mass repression (1920-e - the beginning of 1950-x), only “1937 year”, “the cult of Stalin” and “Stalinism” were made in the minds of Soviet people the only symbol of horror. Such a half-truth, which is more dangerous than a lie, allowed us now to link with terror and to morally devalue the restoration of state foundations (even the memory of war), and not the essence of what was done to Russia.
“But President Boris Yeltsin, speaking at the beginning of the 1990s before the US Congress, said about the USSR:“ The communist idol that sowed social discord, hostility and unprecedented cruelty everywhere on Earth ... ”
- I regard the destruction of the USSR as a crime and I want to protect the Soviet history from defilement. For some reason, it’s considered here, since a person calls to respect Soviet history with respect, he must also glorify the revolution. But the USSR of my generation was not a pure implementation of the Bolshevik plan, its ideology was changing very seriously! Millions of Soviet people are not descendants of ardent revolutionisers of subversion, they are descendants of those who joined the party in the trenches of Stalingrad. They had nothing to do with the fiery Bolsheviks, who plotted a world revolution in Geneva cafes. Ordinary Russian people, yesterday's peasants, combined communist ideals with a desire to create on their land, and not with the idea of worldwide destruction. They loved, created, were loyal to the family and the Fatherland, worked not for fear, but for conscience, rushed into the burning house to save their neighbor. Finally, with an unprecedented feat of self-sacrifice, they repelled Hitler’s aggression and defeated fascism, with their “blood redeeming Europe with freedom, honor and peace.” After the war, the enormous potential was created by the titanic labor of the people, which was so thoughtlessly and criminally squandered in 1990.
“Based on this logic, Hitler is a criminal because he committed genocide in foreign countries, and Pol Pot and Stalin destroyed their own people — and this is an internal historical process. It turns out to be a discrepancy - in the fact that one is called a criminal, and in relation to others we allow it. Why is that?
- The answer to this question is connected with the redistribution of the world that is developing before our eyes after the collapse of the USSR. The justification of the shameless offensive on the position of Russia is not just a belittling of our Victory, but a distortion of the very meaning of the Second World War, its outcome. New generations are being suggested that the bloody struggle was fought not for the historical existence of the peoples, but for the triumph of the “American democracy”. Ideas about the identity of the Hitler Reich and Stalin’s USSR, about the war as a clash between two totalitarianisms that competed for world domination, are being introduced into the public consciousness. In this logic, the Yalta-Potsdam system should be declared first as a relic of an outdated power balance policy, and then a temporary result of the struggle against two totalitarian regimes: the West had to temporarily put up with one of them in order to crush the other one and then for half a century weaken and destroy former ally.
But after all, the most important outcome of Yalta and Potsdam was the restoration of the actual succession of the USSR in relation to the geopolitical area of the Russian Empire, combined with the newly acquired military might and international influence. Our Victory restored in place of great Russia a force capable of restraining the aspirations of anyone who wished to make the world unipolar. This, in turn, predetermined the subsequent “cold” opposition to its results. Today, an already non-communist Russia is experiencing an increasing geopolitical pressure.
Crowned despots
- Do you think that Stalin in the West is hated for the restoration of the territory of the historic Russian state. Why for the same thing do not hate other collectors of land - Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, other Russian emperors and empresses?
- Even as they hate! Read the famous American Russian writer Richard Pipes. His historical pamphlets about Russia are filled with contempt. Constant hints of misery and lack of culture of Russia adorn the section on the Mongol invasion: "If Russia was rich and cultural as ... - followed by the names of states - China, Persia, etc., - then the Mongols would have occupied it, because it was wrong, then they simply bestowed a tribute. ” Although the same Kiev surpassed many Western European cities in wealth and culture, second only to Italian. And read Engels, the monument to which they managed to erect against the Cathedral of Christ the Savior: the Slavs, he argued, were not just insignificant trash of history: they "were everywhere oppressors of all revolutionary nations, never had their own history, and only with the help of an alien yoke were forcibly raised to the first step civilization ".
And they don’t write about Ivan the Terrible, although Catherine de Medici ruined several times more people for one Varfolomeevsky night than he did in 30 years! At the same time, he daily repented, uttering all the names from his synodic of the tortured, but she did not repent. No one in the West is embarrassed by their crowned despots, they are only proud of their public affairs. It is funny that the Bolsheviks thought of themselves as successors of Robespierre, the Jacobins, who, by the way, invented "revolutionary terror". And the West is looking for the roots of Bolshevik extremism not at all in its own history, not among the Jacobins and religious fanatics of the bloody Reformation, but in Genghis Khan! Marsh Budyonny, in the opinion of the West, is the tramp of the hoofs of the Asiatic wild hordes.
- You said: “Let's separate and reject the revolutionary project that directly implied repression, the destruction of the so-called hostile classes, condemn it, but we will not tolerate it in the fight against external aggression, against the enemy, because the trouble happened not with the state, but with the Fatherland ". That is, do you propose to write off Stalin repression at the expense of victory in the war?
- Again, the question comes from the “axiom”, as if Stalin’s atrocities — both in scale and type — are something that falls outside of human history, an unforeseen deviation from the noble goals of the revolution. But, as I have already said, it was the Bolshevik revolution and the doctrine that directly prescribed and predetermined the repressive period, in which there were Lenin and Stalin stages, and Lenin was not better, but worse. However, at the end of the Stalin period, there was the Great Victory, and Russia in the image of the USSR became a great power ... The West, who demonized Stalin not at all from philanthropic bona fide denial and condemnation of the repressive principle in history, must be debunked, challenged all the geopolitical and legal acts of the second half of the XX century .
- What are the consequences of trying to put Stalin and Hitler on the same level?
- They are obvious. Isn't this already happening? Now the worldview is being implanted, which radically changes the whole idea of the twentieth century. and creates a denial of Russia as a historical phenomenon, including in terms of denying the victory of the USSR in the war against Hitler Germany, and put communism on a par with fascism. While we ourselves trampled on the graves of our fathers, in some parliaments there were calls to declare the USSR a criminal state to be tried, and therefore question all decisions taken with its participation, its signatures under the most important territorial documents, under the UN Charter, etc. But the successor of those positions that were conquered, including with blood, is today's Russia ...
Do not question the identity of our Kuril Islands? Doesn't the Baltic claim compensation for being in the USSR? Although under the Teutons, they were prepared for the role of swineherdlings and maids without education, barely able to read geographical signs in German. Further, they will demand to annul the signature of the USSR under the most important international legal acts. And this is a treaty system in the field of armaments, and the UN Charter with its veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council. In order to challenge the geopolitical and legal decisions of the second half of the twentieth century, we need demonization of the victorious USSR, which is impossible without demonizing its then leadership.
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