The value of Stalin for modern society. Round table
27 February in Moscow in the Independent Press Center held a round table "The importance of Stalin for modern society. To the 60 anniversary of the death." Participants: Mikhail Delyagin, Andrei Fursov, Mikhail Veller, Svyatoslav Rybas, Anatoly Baranov, Yuri Boldyrev.
Mikhail Delyagin: We are opening a new format of our work today: we are holding the first meeting of the “Free Thought” intellectual club. This club is organized by the magazine "Free Thought", which was published from 1924 onwards, under the name "Bolshevik", and from 1952 to 1991 years - under the name "Communist", who is older, he remembers. He was the main theoretical journal of our country in the field of social sciences, and we intend to regain this position in time.
Today we are discussing a topic, the relevance of which can be easily seen by simply looking at each other for the number of people in this room (more than 65 people came to the round table; not all of them were in the room).
Of course, each participant in the discussion will say that he is closer to him personally. However, I hope that we will hear the answers to the following questions:
- how Stalin is perceived in modern Russian society, what feelings and ideas this figure evokes today, with which it is associated;
- what lessons can modern Russian society draw from the era of Stalin and what lessons does it actually draw from it today?
- What are the main reasons for the relevance of Stalin's figure for Russia, and, perhaps, for the world?
Despite the considerable time that has passed since the death of Stalin, he continues to arouse the enormous interest of Russian society both as a person and as, first of all, a figure of world-wide scale. It comes to the fact that Mr. Radzinsky, a man who is not seen in particular sympathy for our past, very sincerely says that Stalin does not seem to have gone anywhere and is still alive - and even describes the relevant related events from own life.
Attention to Stalin is not just inexorably strengthened, but at the same time it is becoming more and more benevolent, even among those who categorically reject the repression associated with his name.
An attempt to aggressively liberal get-togethers to unleash the campaign of “de-Stalinization” failed with a phenomenal disgrace, rallying against themselves people who in a nightmare could not imagine that they had something in common.
And I know the authors of the “de-Stalinization”, and they, in my opinion, didn’t have anything particularly bad in mind: they just came up with a topic on which, it seemed to them, you could easily and gladly cut money. Their idea in itself was completely devoid of sacred meaning and was not systemic, was not ideological: just liberal gentlemen in search of another dozen.
But they touched Stalin - and as a result, their names became curses, and their campaign turned into a common noun.
And in the “Name of Russia” competition, as you remember, Stalin, to the dismay of the organizers, was in the lead until political necessity, as far as can be judged, did not provoke interference in the counting of votes.
A significant part of Russian society, differently related to this perspective, connects the future of our country with the return of Stalin, as a historical phenomenon.
And the growing relevance of Stalin as far as he is historically distant from him is a phenomenon that deserves careful and comprehensive discussion.
Our first speaker will be Svyatoslav Yuryevich Rybas, a writer, co-author of the fundamental work “Stalin. Fate and strategy. As a true Democrat, I believe in an absolutely voluntaristic order that this is the best that is written about Stalin in our country, and maybe in other countries as well, although, given the quality of the Stalinist, it can hardly be considered a compliment.
Svyatoslav Rybas: Thank you. Good day. What am I interested in? By being the grandson of the White Guard, who, as a high school student, was mobilized into the Volunteer Army in the Donbass, this whole so-called Moscow campaign, evacuation, Gallipoli, Bulgaria, and all his ancestors came back. And he was the head of the mine, the leader in the coal industry and the Hero of Labor. Not social work - there was the title of "Hero of Labor."
I wrote a biography of not only Stalin, but also Stolypin, the White Guard general Kutepov, Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko. In my view our story - not a narrow mine in which we extract information about a particular hero, but rather a wide field in which all our heroes fit and interact.
Why did Stalin arise and why, first of all, why is he alive? 60 years old as a man died, but is of great interest. I will tell you that Stalin appeared as a political figure and, accordingly, the first de-Stalinization began in 1912, when he was elected a member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and this hero himself was in the Vologda exile and could not take any part in the Prague Conference. But his idea triumphed and, in general, for all times, the Soviet idea that the party needed to be built differently than the Leninist and immigrant communist or Bolshevik circles suggested, not on the basis of foreign immigrant circles, but at the party organizations of factories.
Already from here you can draw a mental line to the construction of socialism in one particular country. This is the first.
Second: Stalin was confronted with the fact that modernization, about which not only the Bolsheviks speak, but also the current authorities, was a failure. This is the modernization of Witte-Stolypin, which could work out. Because Stolypin's reform meant a gentle entry into the market, a soft attraction of the excess rural population to the factories. Then there was about 30 million hidden rural unemployment and about 10 million so-called angry begging, which, as you understand, was also very explosive.
But this reform was failed because it touched very large interests of the ruling and economic circles. The plot of 1916 of the year against Emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich was prepared not by the Bolsheviks, but by the elite, which included the entire progressive bloc of the Duma, that is, three quarters of it. The conspiracy included generals, financiers, industrialists, Westerners, Moscow Old Believers and the Moscow group as a whole.
This conspiracy drew a line to the smooth, soft development of the Russian Empire and brought it down. He brought down because the ruling elite did not quickly enter into the demands of the industrial revolution. This is well written by Max Weber. Being in Germany, he wrote several newspaper articles about the fate and prospects of Russia. And in one of the articles he wrote that the royal regime would fail because of the inconsistency with the requirements of the industrial revolution.
And he pointed out - I quote literally: “Only a long socio-revolutionary dictatorship can eliminate these difficulties. Under the social-revolutionary government, I do not mean any special flayers, but simply such a political leader for whom the “young” in Russian conditions are private land ownership — and this was mainly landowner property and feudal in its essence — not is an unconditional shrine. Are there such people in Russia, I do not know, but they can come to power for a long time if peace is concluded. ” This refers to the world in the First World War.
In general, all this was done by the Bolsheviks and carried out modernization with live-life, one might say, enthusiasm, using the words of the philosopher Weber, since they no longer had any other means.
I can also say that Stalin emerged as a result of the crisis of the end of 1880's, this is a global agricultural crisis, which was caused by the fact that cheap grain from the USA and Canada appeared in the European grain market, which then approximately matched the current oil and gas markets. and australia. The reason for the appearance of cheap grain is the industrial revolution: the construction of dry cargo ships, mass mechanical tillage, and conveyor loading, and huge vessels with grain, having come to Europe and Russia, extinguished its prices.
As a result of this crisis, the well-being of the Stalinist family was destroyed: his father, who was a prosperous artisan and kept auxiliary workers, had good orders, was ruined. His maternal uncles, who kept a roadside restaurant, were killed. And the family collapsed from the lower segment of the middle class down into poverty.
Only thanks to the will of the mother, who was literate, she learned to be a dressmaker-modist and began to earn a living, did Stalin receive an education. His mother pulled her son out of poverty literally by the ears.
When they say that Stalin is uneducated, this is today's point of view, and, as historian Solovyov said, heroes must be judged by the laws of their time. Known to you, Hegel pointed out that the main thing in the hero's fate is not his character, which is of secondary importance, but the historical circumstances in which he is.
So, Stalin finished the spiritual school with honors, then did not finish the Tbilisi seminary, but finished four classes and received a certificate of the right to teach in elementary school.
His library consisted of 20 thousands of volumes, most of which have his marks, and, as we know, the current course of higher education implies that the student must read at least 100 books.
That is, Stalin was very seriously prepared, and this is an interesting remark by Josef Schumpeter, an ally of Hayek, an Austrian political scientist and economist. He wrote in his work "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" 1945 of the year that he did not meet the equal to Stalin in terms of intellectual level in the modern world.
That is, this assessment is completely objective, and several completely different sources coincide in it.
The main thing in Stalin's fate is, of course, the complete scrapping of economic, cultural, mental, folk, if you will, the foundations of Russia, when the “third revolution”, that is, collectivization, was carried out.
Collectivization was a continuation and the flip side of the medal of the failed Stolypin reforms. If we take historical analogies, I recall the 16th century in England and the so-called “bloody legislation”. When the economic conditions of the European market demanded, in connection with the growth in the number of cities, the development of wool production — people simply needed clothes — a so-called “fencing” occurred. The peasants were driven off the land, and those who did not submit were punished in three ways: they were whipped, their ears were cut in half, they were sent to penal servitude and galleys.
But when Churchill talked with Stalin, arriving in Moscow in August 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he asked about the worst period. Stalin replied: collectivization. And Churchill, knowing his story perfectly well, of course, did not mention either “bloody legislation”, or Henry VIII, or fencing — he simply said that our nation could not have made such sacrifices in such a short period.
Here is the key word of Stalin's whole life: “a short period”. He was determined not by Stalin, but by the economic, political, conditions for the development of the Russian Empire. Stalin closed this cycle.
Why is he still alive? Appeal to Stalin is not an appeal to a historical figure or not so much an appeal. This is today primarily a form of public criticism.
Why do we keenly perceive it? Because the gigantic successes that were achieved by tremendous sacrifices — no one denies and should not deny — were not in vain, and we still use the results of socialist modernization. Therefore, while conducting de-Stalinization, a part of our elite wants and cannot at the same time achieve that there is a better way, and we will offer you this way now.
The results of the 20 years we have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that we are going the wrong way. Stalinism will not return, as neither “bloody legislation”, nor Stolypin, nor the Romanovs can return - this is all history. But the sharpness of the fights implies that we are fighting for people's brains.
I recall Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev, who himself already admitted in his last works, that, they say, we wanted to beat Lenin with good Lenin, then with good Plekhanov to beat bad Lenin, then with good Plekhanov and in general to discredit all Soviet power.
This dynamic, this line is now expressed by the fact that our opponents want bad Stalin to discredit good Putin, and then go on to discredit him further.
This, of course, may be an exaggeration, but I think that this is the dynamics.
And after all, it was realized, this idea of the great - really great! - political analyst Brzezinski, that for the collapse of the ideological support of Russia, Hitler should be equated to Stalin. This is also successfully implemented, as you know.
Therefore, speaking of the significance of the figure, we are talking about the real struggle that is happening today.
Joseph Vissarionovich does not participate in it: he must be the object of study for historians, archivists and nothing more. We must relate to him, as well as Churchill, who gave the order to drown the French fleet in Oranta during the war for the fear that this fleet could go to Germany. And, as Churchill writes in his work, after that the whole world understood that we would fight to the end. The victims, in principle, were not interested, because the lot of the great politician is not to look at the victims. They do not look: the result is important to them.
And finally: there was such an economist, a very famous one, Evgeny Samuilovich Varga, a participant in the Hungarian revolution, then immigrated here, headed the Institute of Economics, wrote reports for Stalin. In his memoirs “To reveal through 25 years”, he writes that this is a lie, that reports were written to Stalin: he wrote them himself. Yes, I used the sources, our advice, but I wrote it myself.
And Varga said: Stalin’s fault is not that a million or more people died during his reign. About a million, by the way: according to statistics, 1921 people were shot from 1954 to 642.980 year. And Varga says: this is not the point, but that Stalin allowed the degeneration of a democratic, working-class state with an element of bureaucracy into a completely different, bureaucratic state. This is his terrible mistake, writes Varga - and indicates that the payment for this will follow.
And we saw that the Brezhnev state was completely bureaucratic, and the current state - completely bureaucratic or not completely, is the question - but essentially the same thing.
Therefore, I would like to draw conclusions from this: forget Stalin, think about your children, think about the future of Russia, thank you.
Mikhail Delyagin: Now with great pleasure I give the floor to Mikhail Iosifovich Weller, a writer.
Mikhail Weller: With gratitude, continuing the previous speaker, I would like to say that, in my opinion, such a stormy, so high-ranking discussion of the figure and the role of Stalin in recent years is, in essence, an ersatz-politician. Since real politics is absent and comes down to the elementary serving of the interests of big business with political goals, and the need for political life lives in a person, in a political animal, we discuss Stalin and, in the absence of a stamp, write on simple. Because in the present conditions there is essentially nothing to discuss, everything is clear to everyone.
To understand any figure, you need to understand the whole system of concepts, ideas and realities within which it lives. To do this, one needs to imagine the essence of social progress and the essence of the state that people mostly do not imagine for themselves, although there are different points of view. Therefore it is necessary to ride only over bumps, over the tops.
Much has been said over the past 25 years about imperial syndrome - usually in a negative context. The imperial syndrome means that a person would like to live in a mighty state, which, moreover, even won someone, pulled, annexed, and as a result became so healthy. And we are told that this is bad.
Question: Is it really bad?
After all, if we recall the history of small humane states, it turns out that, firstly, small states were no more humane than big ones, and, secondly, the story is completely different from what people usually imagine. The essence of social progress is that for centuries and millennia more and more have been accomplished, sorry for the wrong turn, more and more maximum actions.
Everything else can fluctuate, but the increase in energy turnover is a completely rigid, the only unshakable reporting system. Thus, large states, beginning with the most ancient Dvorichchia, Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Kingdom, were distinguished by the fact that they forced people to work beyond their means and took away the majority of the products of their work. And from these surpluses, which were squeezed out with sweat and blood, science, culture, technology, cultural development, and so on were formed. Although those who built the pyramids instead of resting, it was hardly liked much.
Thus, when we talk about a great person, we are not talking about how human she is. “My brother, if the subjects say that the king is good, the kingdom he failed,” said Napoleon fairly, and this was included in all the textbooks.
We are talking about the scale of the deeds.
And besides, you can't do everything at the same time.
Great rulers, carrying out reforms, overcame colossal resistance. Not because they were so humane and wise, but around were stupid bastards: this is the objective resistance of the social environment. The more you change, the more the environment resists, such is the normal historical and social inertia.
Thus, the sea of blood was shed, and then much calmer periods began. But in order for these periods to come, the previous shaking was, unfortunately, historically necessary. You can look at the history of Greece, the history of Rome, the history of Persia, the history of anything.
Stalin, having come in such a period, not only faced the need for reform.
As for socialism in one single country, it is absolutely clear that this is nothing more than a tactical slogan, because all Soviet power, the whole idea of communist internationalism was aimed at a world revolution. The Soviet Union, which included all the republics of the entire globe, was recorded in the statutes of the Comintern. The Soviet Union was considered as a springboard for the accomplishment of the World Revolution.
This turned out to be somewhat different, the real story is all more or less imagined.
The essence lies in the fact that for most peoples who at one time, in the XIII century, underwent Mongol aggression, Genghis Khan was a fascist, but for the Mongols, Genghis Khan was the greatest man in their history, a hero, a builder of the state. He made the greatest empire, and in general, the Mongols existed, thanks to him.
Question: why the Italians need Caesar? Which is not 2000 years, but, nevertheless, you know, the rating of the person is high, and exactly the same with every nation with its historical leader.
Because the task of man is not that the purpose of the party was the good of the people. Putin’s first installation speech, when he was a candidate, exactly repeated all these reports that were written by the Communist Party: so that you feel good, so that you feel satisfying, so that you feel calm.
This is fine with the field mouse, but the person is arranged a little differently, the person thinks he wants to live happily, and actually makes the devil know what, sometimes to his own detriment, because the person needs to reorganize everything around him to the maximum extent.
And when a person is looking for the meaning of life, then translated from Russian into Russian the meaning of life means that a person is involved in some big common cause, transpersonal, which is more, higher, more significant than himself, for which, in fact, it is not a pity, give back and life.
This means that human life does not exist by itself, but is being pushed on to something.
And a great leader is the personification of pushing each person’s personality to something single.
It is difficult for us today to understand what is described, say, by Dumas in the Viscount de Brazhelone: that nobles could die on the battlefield with the words "Long live the king!" But it lasted for centuries, and they did not go crazy. However, when the fans are fans of singers and artists, it is a little clearer to us.
Man is arranged in such a way that he needs to personalize his main aspirations in the person of the leader, king, king, secretary general. This is a ritual phenomenon.
We, brought up in more or less democratic notions, are not entirely clear, but it was always and when convinced that Stalin was a superman, everything is ours, our God-God says whole-heartedly “Long live Stalin” - that means the same as “long live the king”: it means “long live our people, our greatness, our history, our truth”.
Man is created in such a way that people group society out of themselves. This is objective, apart from desire: this is how we are. One of the forms of self-organization of society: the pack chooses a leader from its ranks, and then itself obeys this leader. Because she decided so. And Stalin is just such a leader.
Everyone understands what they say, of course, not about the real Joseph Dzhugashvili - a small, dry-faced man, pockmarked, narrow chest, physically weak. They talk about the great mythical Stalin, about the mustache leader with a pipe from the Kremlin, who never sleeps, who has a window in the office at night, after which all the money on party fees, which goes twice as high as his boots and thinks only of the greatness of the people, is left.
For we are arranged in such a way that when we think of Petersburg, everyone knows that tens of thousands died who beat larch piles in the swamps, but we identify ourselves with those who remained to live. Although the majority came from the peasants, and not from the nobility, but still we like it, and somewhere deep down in our hearts we strongly welcome and approve the construction of St. Petersburg, despite the sacrifices, because we have survived, we are the winners.
When it comes to mythological personalities, everyone associates themselves with the winners, because the victims are upset, as everything is settled in the ground, and only that remains on top.
And finally, the last: peoples have their own destiny and their own life, for the last hundred years it has been more or less canonized and described.
Say, the great French people broke through the era of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the great never happened again, and the great British people broke through the period from Great Elizabeth Tudor and ending with the Second World War, that was all that ended, a certain systemic potential jumped out. In Rome, there was obviously a peak of greatness from Caesar to Andrian, and similarly in Russia, the peak of greatness — not humanism, not lightness, not good, but just greatness and power — was in the era of the Soviet Union.
And Stalin is the first personification of this power of the Soviet Union.
Why will the mythological Stalin always be studied, will always be remembered, and various novels and plays will always be composed, and nothing can be done about it? Because we passed our peak, no matter how they say "no, no, Russia is immortal." All are mortal, even the solar system. It is about this peak that has been passed - in the person of one person - we continue to talk. By the choice of the country of the way it has almost nothing to do.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much, and while we are doing industrial gymnastics with microphones, I want to respond to the idea of Svyatoslav Y. Rybas, which seems to me very interesting.
After all, the shale revolution threatens to do with the modern energy market — in its meaning an analogue of the grain market of the 80 of the 18th century — the same thing that happened then: it threatens to bring prices down sharply. And it turns out that in the years through 40 - and given the fact that world processes are developing faster and faster, perhaps even earlier, l - we may well see the emergence of new political figures at about the same level and about the same motivation.
Please Andrei Ilyich Fursov, historian.
Andrei Fursov: Dear colleagues, more than twenty years have passed since the destruction of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was demolished to the accompaniment of the de-Stalinization campaign, which was arranged by the perestroika punks. And, apparently, for 20 years, these people and their ideological heirs should have calmed down.
But nothing like that.
From time to time, companies start de-Stalinization, and Mikhail Gennadyevich correctly said that this was partly due to the desire to "cut the headstock."
But after all, someone “gives grandmas” to this, and I would like to speculate about who hates Stalin and for what. 60 years have passed since his death, 20 years there is no Soviet Union, but hatred remains and it is really real.
Inside the country, during the life of Stalin himself, he was hated by two groups of the Soviet establishment.
One can be conventionally called the left globalists: those who strove for the world revolution are guardsmen of the cardinals of the world revolution of Lenin and Trotsky. They believed that Stalin had betrayed the cause of the revolution when he began to dismantle the structures of the left-wing globalists, the Comintern, for example, when he began to abolish the holidays. By the way, colleagues, who remember how the holiday was originally called, which later became known as the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution? So before 1936, how was it called?
Replica from the audience: First day ...
Andrei Fursov: Exactly, the First Day of the World Revolution. In 1936, it was canceled, and in 1943, it became known as the Day of the Great October Revolution.
In the same year 1936, the term “Soviet patriotism” first appeared, that is, this turn begins.
The second group, which, naturally, could not love Stalin, is part of the nomenclature that was oriented towards consumption. As you know, the nomenclature is a layer that is characterized by a very tightly ranked hierarchical consumption.
Naturally, a significant part of the nomenclature wanted to consume much more. And this consumption course, which led to the transformation of the nomenclature into a quasi-class, and the people who were personifiers of this course, naturally, were incompatible with Stalin. They did not like him, hated him, and Stalin answered them the same.
When Stalin learned that the nomenklatura workers who had been evacuated to Samara, wanted to arrange special schools for their children, he called them a “cursed caste.” And when Stalin said that as the construction of socialism proceeded the class struggle and resistance to this process would increase, he meant not traditional layers like the kulaks and so on, as some of us believe, he meant the nomenclature. And perestroika showed this, as Nabokov would say, with glass clarity.
The paradoxical link of these two groups - the left globalists, who dreamed of the world revolution, and those who sought to consume - and put, conditionally speaking, the Trotsky-Bukharinist, which went down in history right-left bloc.
These people hated Stalin in the Soviet establishment.
And the transformation into the main task of the CPSU "meeting the growing material needs of Soviet citizens," introduced in 1961 in its program, was a victory for consumerism, the consumer line of the nomenclature.
In parallel with this, the Soviet nomenclature was integrated into the world market, the world system. For me, the most powerful visual example of this is the photograph: Kosygin in Canada, being the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, sits in the headdress of an American Indian under the portrait of the Queen of England.
This is very symbolic, it is a memory of the future nomenclature.
And who hated and hates Stalin, who and what could not and cannot forgive him outside the country?
It must be said that Stalin three times broke the plans of the globalists, tore the "road maps" of globalization. Here, colleague Rybas talked about the crisis of the end of 80's: he absolutely accurately recorded the date from which everything rolled.
But, in addition to the agricultural crisis, two more important events occurred in the 80s.
By the 80 years, practically the whole world was divided and exhausted. Therefore, in the 1884 year at the Berlin Conference, it was decided that countries that cannot develop their own natural resources should open up to the world, and if they cannot or do not want to open up, then they need to be opened by force. It was officially announced that Africa was meant, but for the sake of Africa, then no one would do anything about it: it was about Russia. Alexander III had strong nerves, and nothing came of it.
However, besides this, since 1888, the British have set themselves the task of destroying the current Germany by then, and by bleeding it with Russia.
It was a globalist plan, and Stalin ripped it off three times: in 1927-29, when he launched the country from the world revolution to building socialism in one particular country: in 1943-44, when he defeated the Wehrmacht; and in the 1952 year, to which, in fact, the country was restored. Not for 20, as Western economists believed, but in just 7-8 years.
In addition, Stalin showed a real alternative to globalism: it is a neo-imperial formation, which is anti-capitalist in its essence.
The Hitler regime was not an alternative to the new world order, on the contrary, it was a brutal experiment of the Western elites to create a new world order that included a two-loop control system, a neo-Orda SS system, and a party. And in this sense, all attempts to equate Hitlerism to Stalinism are initially doomed to failure due to their anti-historical nature: they were two systems that were fundamentally different in their attitude to capitalism.
Although such attempts have been made and will be undertaken. Since the goal-setting of the current Western elite is very close to the Nazi - just almost identical, if you look closely - then constant attempts to compromise alternatives to it seem inevitable.
In addition, Stalin is undoubtedly the key figure in the whole of Russian history, and when Yakovlev spoke - I quote not literally, of course - that we are breaking not the Soviet Union, but the entire thousand-year paradigm of Russian history, the main figure through which it broke, was Stalin.
Why?
Because Stalin is not just a man, it is a phenomenon.
By the way, Stalin himself understood this very well. Once he told his son Vasily, who complained that he was badly treated at school and underestimated: do you think you are Stalin? - No, you are not Stalin; think I'm Stalin? - No, and I'm not Stalin. Then he showed his portrait: here he is - Stalin.
So, Stalin connected the line of the world revolutionary movement and Russia. And besides, Stalin tied together the revolutionary line within Russia and the line of imperial, autocratic Russia, and he did this very consistently.
The key dates of this process, as I said, are 1927-29 of the year, 1936 of the year, 1943 of the year - the dissolution of the Comintern, although de facto this was done before, plus the anthem, epaulets and so on - and finally 1952 of the year - renaming VKP (b), in the CPSU.
It is very interesting that there are people who understand this perfectly well even in the West.
For example, the enemy of communism is Melnik-Botkin. This is the grandson of Botkin, a doctor who, if the shooting of the royal family took place exactly where it is believed, then he was shot in 1918 year.
So, Melnik-Botkin - the head of the French special services under de Gaulle. He recently gave a very interesting interview in which he said that by the year 1917 there was a lot of nightmare in Russia, and the most positive thing that happened in Russia was Joseph Stalin, who built the country.
By the way, Botkin, unlike many of our people, called an almost exact number of those shot or convicted to be shot for political reasons. He called the 700 of thousands, his colleague Rybas gives a slightly more accurate figure, but these, naturally, are not millions or tens of millions, as our, so to speak, liberalist public asserts.
And finally, what I want to say: Stalin gave us an absolutely fantastic gift - he gave us the nineties and zero years.
Indeed, from the moment when Russia in the 16th century appeared as a major power, the axis of European politics is the destruction of this power on the principle of “nothing personal.” Just an objective need to eliminate the geo-economic, geopolitical competitor.
And each time the West lacked a little bit.
For example, after the first Time of Troubles, we could be taken with bare hands, but in the West there was a Thirty Years War, and by the time it ended, we had a space to inhale and could already beat the Poles.
After the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia could also be taken barehanded, but in Europe there were wars for the Spanish inheritance, the Austrian inheritance, and we again jumped out.
After the civil war, we too could be taken with bare hands, but Stalin played on the contradictions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans, the British and the Americans, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.
But after 1991, there might not have been such a respite, because the West was one, - but we still had nuclear weapon, we had a Stalinist foundation. And these 20 years that end, are a gift from the Stalin era.
I do not agree that Stalin must be forgotten - no, Stalin must be remembered.
Should we forget Churchill? Also not necessary: the enemies must be remembered.
I think we did not pass the peak of our history. Once Chernomyrdin said: they say, Russia has exhausted the limit of revolutions. I then thought: yes, who are you? Gray warden, will you tell if Russia has exhausted the limit on the revolution or not?
Therefore, I think we should be more careful with such formulations, and as for Stalin, I want to end with a quote from Charles de Gaulle, who said the following: “Stalin did not become a thing of the past, he disappeared in the future.” Thank.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much. Yuri Y., please.
Yuri Boldyrev: When Mikhail G. invited me to this event, I honestly told him that I was not an expert on Stalin. To which Mikhail Gennadyevich said that, they say, you are a specialist in society. That is, following the explanations of Mikhail Gennadyevich, we are talking about Stalin, talking about our society, about our state, about our present and future. What did I think was important in connection with this?
First, the figure of Stalin, like any powerful figure, in conditions of extreme concentration of mass media in the hands of the union, the government, the oligarchy, under the conditions of the developed technologies of manipulating society, is constantly used to rigidly divide society. Moreover, for a split, not between those who rob us, kill, destroy, on the one hand, and all the rest, on the other, but for a split between equally haves, equally suffering from what is happening now. And there are, unfortunately, good reasons.
I will give an example. I had a wonderful head of my secretariat in the Accounts Chamber 13 years ago, now his anniversary is just in time, Boris Mikhailovich Lapshov. Once he was a director of a large defense enterprise, a deputy of the Allied Congress, deputy minister of industry, then worked in the Accounts Chamber. Honest, wonderful, cleverest man, but when he was small, he was deprived of his mother: she didn’t say anything at a meeting on a collective farm, and that’s all for 10 years, in my opinion, without the right to correspond.
And so, no matter how widely he sees the world, no matter how deeply he understands everything that we are discussing here — when it comes to Stalin, he cannot overcome this physical feeling that he is the enemy of his family.
It must be said that a huge part of the population of our country is in the position of this contradiction between the readiness to accept all that what our distinguished colleagues said here and the memory that here are my parents, my ancestors suffered innocently.
I say this not in order, in spite of my colleagues, to somehow belittle the role of Stalin, to slander him. I specifically emphasize that it is precisely because of such a contradiction that this person is constantly purposefully thrown into discussions to split the society. And if I'm not an expert on Stalin, I am here now for something, then only for one thing: to remind the majority of our fellow citizens again and again that our task, so that we can consolidate society and revive the country, is to prevent so that the manipulators from the outside and the manipulators from the inside, who sold themselves to puppeteers from the outside, for fun of Chubais and companies, were split into those who are against Stalin and those who are for him.
When any respected by me General Ivashov raises a toast to the great political figure Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, it is important for me that our people understand: he raises a toast not to repress simple, normal, honest people, he raises a toast to that symbol, which was spoken about here now, for the character of a person who in one way or another served to build a powerful, strong, nationally oriented state. This is the first.
The second. We have already decided to submit the Comintern, and all the desire for a world revolution as a pronounced negative. It seems that we were the only ones who aspired to a global project.
But this is not true!
It was said here that heroes should be evaluated by the standards of their time. And when and who in the world, having received for this opportunity, did not seek to extend its influence to the whole world? Show me those.
And what, at the time when Stalin and the Soviet Union were in their prime, - didn’t the British Empire at that time strive to expand and extend its influence to everything? Didn’t the French Empire compete with it, how could it? Is it further, already in 40-50-s of the twentieth century, the United States, destroying the old empires, didn’t they strive to create a new, well, excuse me, the imperialistic mechanism, albeit on new rails, with other mechanisms, with the removal responsibility for the population of the colonies, but with the preservation of all key management mechanisms?
We do not need to go to extremes: everyone who carries a mission, the idea that they are building a new world - for themselves or for themselves - quite naturally strive to spread this world as widely as possible. And to blame for this is the Soviet Union, namely Stalin, from my point of view, inappropriate.
What transition moment is important for us? I don’t know whether Andrei Ilyich agrees with me or not, but many said that the key figures of the Russian revolution before Stalin viewed Russia as firewood for the world revolution, but Stalin, while maintaining the course of the world revolution or the spread of a global project, however for all cruelty, he no longer considered this territory as something that could be burned in the firebox of a global project.
Now we are shown programs about the armed forces of the Soviet Union, which until the very 1991-92 of the year stood in Germany and were ready to seize Europe, but it seems to me that the idea that the Soviet Union alone was so aggressive and trying to enslave the whole world, - this is not true, this is a lie.
Next is the next lie. We regard the atrocities of the times of Stalinism as divorced or going beyond the level of civilization that was around. It seemed that there was no such thing in England, like there was no such thing in France, but this is also a lie. The fact is that cruelty was not in the metropolis - and what happened in the British Empire as a whole? What was going on in the colonies of Great Britain, what human rights were there? What was going on in the colonies of France at this time, in Indochina? We know this even from feature films, although this story is clearly from the other side, we simply have no one to imagine: there are no such forces that would own mass media and bring to us what was happening in Vietnam, Cambodia and other colonies in those very times when we had the horrors of Stalinism.
If we relate one to the other, then the horrors of Stalinism, which, indeed, were horrors, already look like they are not so out of place, let's be honest.
Moreover, the idea that we could not do all this and calmly agree that there are stronger, smarter Europeans - the French or the Germans who would realize our territory as their project - this idea, you know, is simplistic, weak-willed and in fact inadequate.
It seems to us that we could not be treated as with Africa, but in reality we could.
The brightest example is given by the relations between Japan and China. What the Japanese did with their brothers in race in China before the point that European historiography considers the beginning of World War II is a nightmare. How many were destroyed there as a result of the direct genocide of brothers by race?
I always assume that a big politician, a statesman can pin hopes on something, can have an idea such as the Czechs had - they say, think, surrender to the Germans, we will live under them, as we used to live near Austria-Hungary, nothing terrible, - but he has no right to be sure of it.
He is obliged to concentrate all possible efforts in order to prevent his people from becoming dependent on another's will. Because this alien will is never known in advance.
And one more very important thing. The figure of Stalin today is used completely demagogically, even in order to take in his companions the forces that are completely opposite to him.
Recently, we had a program about Rosfinagentstvo on the third television channel. And even representatives of the financial-speculative community, defending the idea of transferring our financial resources to a joint-stock company, gave an example: it was said that Stalin was implementing the interests of the Soviet Union through some kind of corporation under Stalin.
That is, this figure is so powerful that even our ideological, ideological opponents are trying to find some examples to prove that they are acting in the interests of Russia just as Stalin acted.
And the last. The most serious danger in the current situation probably lies in the fact that, on the one hand, splitting society, and, on the other hand, based on the fact that modern politics is of a sociological nature, the authorities, manipulators measure what is happening in society, try process and measure again, and, seeing the opinion of society, they try to appropriate, to equip those heroes that society has.
Accordingly, there is a danger that the present authorities, not serving the society, not adopting the goals and objectives of becoming an independent, sovereign, self-sufficient state, nevertheless, under the cover of the idea of returning to the best of the past, will adopt elements of barbarous cruelty related to the goals of building a national independent state.
I see that my colleagues do not agree, they do not see such a threat. But I, unfortunately, see such a threat.
I know that dividing people into thieves and murderers is the deepest ideological error. Because when the question is about stealing an extraordinary scale, when the question is about avoiding responsibility for the destruction and plunder of the country, there is no such crime, including a bloody one, which will not be addressed in order to cover up the tracks and defend keep yourself in power.
In this sense, it seems to me that it is important to see the figure of Stalin and that period as integral and in no way allow, in my view, a possible and dangerous substitution of concepts.
When the “Stalinists” conditionally take on armament, our present authorities are whimsing, when it launches the idea that we were occupied 20 years ago, and all those who oppose the current irresponsibility of power are agents of the US State Department, under the cover of it, under the cover of return to the ideas of a hard, strong state, the bureaucracy nevertheless continues its dirty deed in plundering and destroying our country. This is what we together should not allow. Thank.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much.
And I, while we again move the microphones to the other end of the table, while I tell a funny story from life. When I held a round table on corruption in 2007 for the year, the first, simply by status, was a remarkable person, then a senator, a former deputy minister of finance in the governments of Gaidar and Chernomyrdin, whose private aircraft literally the day before Americans put their fighters on to ask him, probably , intimate questions about his financial well-being. It was interesting to the Americans, but absolutely not to ours. Ours probably knew it all, and that was fine with them.
And this senator began to say: they say, I do not know in what capacity I was invited here. And then one of the journalists very clearly said: "As an exhibit, of course."
And the quietest, most intelligent professor with glasses and a Chekhov's beard from the Ministry of Industry and Energy ended that round table. Everything was already said about corruption by that time, and he spread his hands and said: “You know, I myself am from a family of repressed people, I know a lot about 1937 for a year, I really dislike Stalin. But. understand, because apart from 1937, these people will understand nothing: in principle they do not understand another language, they are not able to understand! ”
This was said by a very intelligent and very understanding person, very sincerely, at least six years ago.
Now I ask Anatoly Yurevich Baranov, the chief editor of the portal Forum.msk.
Anatoly Baranov: I’m probably the only Stalinist here, because I was kicked out of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for neotrotskism.
Nevertheless, I would like to draw attention to the fact that, unlike some of the subsequent leaders of the country, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a moral person in some sense forgotten today in the Russian political sense.
He was a man of a certain idea, represented a certain socio-political trend in this paradigm and existed, and she followed his whole life - unlike today's politicians, where they usually say one thing, think another, and do the third.
Of course, this is the difference not only of Stalin, but of all the politicians of that generation, starting with Lenin and Trotsky. Of course, the policy of all these people was ideological, and it is certainly sorry for being straightforward, it was aimed at building communism, that is, at building a new, classless society in which the exploitation of man by man will be excluded. It was such a simple idea familiar to many from the university.
Another thing is that at that moment, when the October coup was accomplished and the Bolsheviks had already begun to implement some kind of real politics, reality, naturally, began to sharply correct the ideals. Again, decency manifested itself: these people suffered from this, as Lenin suffered, who had to go first to the rather wildish policy of war communism, continue the tsarist policy and the policy of the interim government on the surplus, and then go to the NEP. For a human idea, this was a traumatic fact.
The same was, as I understand it, with Trotsky, who, from the high rise of the October Revolution, turned to the mud of the civil war, and then engaged in tedious questions of a national economic nature.
Moreover, this concerned Stalin, who dealt with these boring and very often unpleasant issues longer than anyone else. This problem of the incompatibility of the ideal with practice is not a purely Stalinist problem, not a problem of the Bolsheviks. This is probably a universal problem. But, nevertheless, when we talk about reading this page of our history, we should not forget all the time that it is not necessary to read it vulgarly: they say, the prerequisites for development were created, and after them it somehow went on by itself .
The tragedy of the Bolsheviks was that the prerequisites were created, and "by itself" after that were arranged in an exceptional way through the knee.
We know from our own experience that the Stalinist thesis about the growth of the class struggle in the course of building socialism is inherently correct, but we cannot forgive both ourselves and why this class struggle was so brutal. Still, the class struggle may suggest less bloody forms of its implementation.
Nevertheless, we know perfectly well, but for some reason we don’t want to recall from history that the creation of prerequisites for the construction of capitalism did not at all relieve the remnants of feudalism and even earlier formations. And economic liberalism, that is, the freedom of private property and entrepreneurship, does not at all entail a social and political liberalism, freedom, equality and fraternity - does not at all entail.
Take at least the United States, where slavery - not serfdom as a relic of feudalism, but natural slavery - persisted longer than others, and the remnants of this slavery have already been canceled by Kennedy. The prerequisites were there, but real freedoms, real human rights, democratic principles were given in a very stubborn and hard struggle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, mainly under Stalin, because he got a long period.
When the construction of a new socio-economic structure did not lead to the kingdom of freedom at all, the road to the kingdom of freedom was built, but it was not possible to build the kingdom of freedom itself. This is significant. I understand this: since Stalin never refused anywhere from the postulates of Marxism, that is, he remained until the end a very consistent Marxist, the discrepancy between theory and reality could not but traumatize him. It also traumatized his entourage and the whole society.
Why does this injury not heal?
Why are we now interested in Stalin, who died already 60 years ago?
Because Stalin in this regard is for us a living example of what may well happen to us even during our lifetime. We understand perfectly well that everything that has a beginning has an end. And capitalist relations based on private property will sooner or later come to some kind of phase transition. Whether it will be communism in the classical Marxist interpretation, whether it will be some other formulation and some other form, we will see, but “there is an opinion” that this phase transition has already begun, and not necessarily in Russia.
Like any such phase transition, it is accompanied by very serious public consequences. There is absolutely no reason to believe that 100 has become so much more humane and advanced over the years that the costs of this phase transition process do not wait for us. And it is possible that these costs will be significantly higher than in the Stalin period.
If only because modern politicians, unlike the politicians of the Stalinist generation, are not so decent people, not so consistent supporters of ideas. They think one thing, say another and make the third. This, unfortunately, does not inspire much optimism in the beginning phase transition to another socio-economic structure.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much. Now I will add what I did not hear, maybe because I didn’t always listen carefully, but what I think is important.
The first. As for Stalin's oblivion: he who forgets a story condemns itself to its repetition. And I would not like very much, including from the experience of my family, to live under the new Stalin, even if it were not the source of civil war, but the fruit of a very humane Soviet education.
I have said many times and I repeat once again that I do not like Putin. But against the backdrop of the fact that before our eyes and, alas, sometimes with our unwitting participation, he replaces him, he will seem to be a democrat and a humanist, and about the same now it seems to us Brezhnev is a kind and pleasant grandfather.
The second. From the modern point of view, the dictatorship of the proletariat was terrible, but in its time it was more democratic than its modern bourgeois democracy.
Third. My teachers in economic modeling, being Soviet-sixties democrats, put enormous effort into experimentally, using mathematical models, to prove that collectivization was a tragic mistake and one could prepare for war differently. They threatened 10 years of life - and mathematically, flawlessly proved that for our country there was no other way to prepare for war. That is, the Stalinist policy was the only possible way to avoid that, according to Stalin, we were “crushed”.
The main reason, from my point of view, according to which Stalin is relevant today, is the insignificance of our modern leadership. We still live in Stalin's greatcoat and over the years since 60’s death, no other clothes have been built, as the tailors say.
Not very good, from my point of view, but an exceptionally intelligent man, Andrei Karaulov, said a wonderful phrase: “Stalin’s brutality was caused by his hyper-responsibility”.
The fear and hatred of the liberals towards Stalin are caused, among other things, by their animal fear of responsibility for the crimes they committed and their deep hatred for a person who really lived not for money, but for something else.
One of our very well-known writers today, who “worked through perestroika”, after the 11 attack of September 2001, at one of the round tables devoted to him, said literally the following: “Anyone who can theoretically give his life for anything is a geek which deserves preventive extermination. "
This was said in today's St. Petersburg, three kilometers from the Piskarevsky cemetery - without any hesitation.
A very hard-nosed, consistent and knowledgeable Stalinist on my direct question, was Stalin right, answered with the following formula: "Stalin was wrong because the system he created gave birth to Gorbachev."
Very interesting is the attempt to democratize 1936 of the year. After all, the Stalin constitution was not just the most democratic fig leaf in the world - it really was, as written in the book of Svyatoslav Yuryevich on the basis of documents, there was a serious deep attempt at democratization, and 1937 was an uprising of the bureaucracy for this particular year.
And when we look at the time of Stalin, based on the ideals and values of today, it is not bad to recall that even in war the acquittals were about 10% of civilian court sentences, and now less than 1%.
Some social mechanisms that were curtailed after the death of Stalin are useful today.
I will name two: the first is a small business, because under Stalin a small business, called an industrial co-operation, and working, including, besides the planned system - if, of course, he wanted - gave 6% of industrial production.
Svyatoslav Rybas: Also on defense.
Mikhail Delyagin: They produced televisions, radios, and more.
And the second is the cost accounting system, which was used in the military-industrial complex and in many other areas.
During her time, everyone who worked in the workshop at that moment received an award for the improvement of manufactured products - and half of the award was divided equally among all. And the person who came up with the improvement, and the boss who beat him, received the second half of the prize.
As a result, the production cost of the Mosin rifle, which remained roughly unchanged from 1898 to 1938 a year, over the next few years, its production was reduced by more than half. This is a historical fact.
Dear friends, does one of the roundtable participants want to add anything?
Svyatoslav Rybas: First, Stalin was not an orthodox Marxist. So, when they entered into an agreement with Mao Zedong, Stalin literally forced him to sign an agreement to create in Xinjiang (this is a well-known geopolitical corridor to Asia) several joint ventures in the aircraft industry, shipbuilding, air transport and oil production, in which the share of capital was equal, but management was all Soviet. Then Khrushchev eliminated this, but Stalin, no matter how Mao Zedong resisted, foresaw the possibility of Mao's hesitation, and he laid the safety mechanisms.
Stalin very realistically approached the post-war, after 1945 year, time, and they agreed with Roosevelt literally about dividing the world. He and Roosevelt generally had an alliance (and Roosevelt in the US today curses many for this), because they realized that they had a common rival: the British Empire. And in the "big three" the union of Stalin and Roosevelt was directed against Churchill. And this union, if not for the sudden death of Roosevelt 12 on April 1945, was to be realized in some concrete decisions.
As Valentine Falin told me, on 13 on April 1945, Roosevelt planned a speech in the Senate about relations with the Soviet Union and the development of a long-term strategy. Say it, there would be no “cold war”.
As for family wounds, I also have these wounds, but, in principle, they should be healed today.
A very important thing: when Stolypin carried out his reform, there were 10 million peasant farms, and after the revolution, when the peasants received landowner land, in the Soviet Union there were already 20 millions of peasant farms that, according to the results of the NEP, were in no way interested in industrializing and supplying grain state at fixed prices. It was impossible to liquidate this situation by any other means besides accelerated modernization, collectivization.
About 1937 year. Mikhail Gennadievich said that Stalin had innovations in the draft constitution. I will say which ones: it meant the multi-party system, which hit primarily on the party apparatus, which already then became an obstacle in development. Now, the late Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, head of foreign intelligence (PSU of the KGB of the USSR), told me - and he has one of his works - that at that time, in the 30s, there were 4 million denunciations. Denunciations were a mass phenomenon, and no Stalin could inspire them. It was the struggle of post-revolutionary anarchy against statehood in its purest form. Perhaps, on this I finish, thank you.
Andrei Fursov: I would like to literally say the words 2 about the Comintern’s line on unleashing the world revolution and Stalin’s attitude to it.
Stalin, naturally, at the level of rhetoric, since he called himself a student of Lenin, had to follow certain rules. But his entire policy from the middle of the 30s — and, perhaps, even before — was aimed at creating a quasi-imperial, neo-imperial structure on an anti-capitalist basis.
His policy towards the Comintern was very tough. For example, the intelligence of the Comintern was excellent, but it had to be crushed because she was playing on the other side. Stalin had, however, his own personal intelligence, but, nevertheless, this resource had to be sacrificed.
If we look at what happened after World War II: if Stalin was striving for a world revolution, then communist regimes would be imposed everywhere. And everything happened exactly the opposite.
Stalin, for example, by no means wanted communist China. He offered the Americans the division of China into two parts: Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
Stalin generally preferred the left-wing nationalist regimes — for example, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, for example, was not recognized for several years, and the Vietnamese were very offended. They recognized it already de facto, that is, Stalin’s course was not on the World Revolution, but on a different scheme for controlling the world.
I am very glad that it was said here about the existence of agreements with Roosevelt. We can only guess about their essence, but the fact is that, as Stalin once said, “there are intentions, circumstances, and the logic of circumstances is stronger than the logic of intentions”.
Roosevelt represented state monopoly capitalism, which could tolerate systemic anti-capitalism, which was the Soviet Union. But after the Second World War, a new young predatory faction of the world capitalist class arose - the corporatocracy, whose representative was Truman. They could not coexist with systemic anti-capitalism. Hence, death seems to be violent, Roosevelt and many other things.
The final report "Day-TV" on the round table:
Mikhail Delyagin: We are opening a new format of our work today: we are holding the first meeting of the “Free Thought” intellectual club. This club is organized by the magazine "Free Thought", which was published from 1924 onwards, under the name "Bolshevik", and from 1952 to 1991 years - under the name "Communist", who is older, he remembers. He was the main theoretical journal of our country in the field of social sciences, and we intend to regain this position in time.
Today we are discussing a topic, the relevance of which can be easily seen by simply looking at each other for the number of people in this room (more than 65 people came to the round table; not all of them were in the room).
Of course, each participant in the discussion will say that he is closer to him personally. However, I hope that we will hear the answers to the following questions:
- how Stalin is perceived in modern Russian society, what feelings and ideas this figure evokes today, with which it is associated;
- what lessons can modern Russian society draw from the era of Stalin and what lessons does it actually draw from it today?
- What are the main reasons for the relevance of Stalin's figure for Russia, and, perhaps, for the world?
Despite the considerable time that has passed since the death of Stalin, he continues to arouse the enormous interest of Russian society both as a person and as, first of all, a figure of world-wide scale. It comes to the fact that Mr. Radzinsky, a man who is not seen in particular sympathy for our past, very sincerely says that Stalin does not seem to have gone anywhere and is still alive - and even describes the relevant related events from own life.
Attention to Stalin is not just inexorably strengthened, but at the same time it is becoming more and more benevolent, even among those who categorically reject the repression associated with his name.
An attempt to aggressively liberal get-togethers to unleash the campaign of “de-Stalinization” failed with a phenomenal disgrace, rallying against themselves people who in a nightmare could not imagine that they had something in common.
And I know the authors of the “de-Stalinization”, and they, in my opinion, didn’t have anything particularly bad in mind: they just came up with a topic on which, it seemed to them, you could easily and gladly cut money. Their idea in itself was completely devoid of sacred meaning and was not systemic, was not ideological: just liberal gentlemen in search of another dozen.
But they touched Stalin - and as a result, their names became curses, and their campaign turned into a common noun.
And in the “Name of Russia” competition, as you remember, Stalin, to the dismay of the organizers, was in the lead until political necessity, as far as can be judged, did not provoke interference in the counting of votes.
A significant part of Russian society, differently related to this perspective, connects the future of our country with the return of Stalin, as a historical phenomenon.
And the growing relevance of Stalin as far as he is historically distant from him is a phenomenon that deserves careful and comprehensive discussion.
Our first speaker will be Svyatoslav Yuryevich Rybas, a writer, co-author of the fundamental work “Stalin. Fate and strategy. As a true Democrat, I believe in an absolutely voluntaristic order that this is the best that is written about Stalin in our country, and maybe in other countries as well, although, given the quality of the Stalinist, it can hardly be considered a compliment.
Svyatoslav Rybas: Thank you. Good day. What am I interested in? By being the grandson of the White Guard, who, as a high school student, was mobilized into the Volunteer Army in the Donbass, this whole so-called Moscow campaign, evacuation, Gallipoli, Bulgaria, and all his ancestors came back. And he was the head of the mine, the leader in the coal industry and the Hero of Labor. Not social work - there was the title of "Hero of Labor."
I wrote a biography of not only Stalin, but also Stolypin, the White Guard general Kutepov, Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko. In my view our story - not a narrow mine in which we extract information about a particular hero, but rather a wide field in which all our heroes fit and interact.
Why did Stalin arise and why, first of all, why is he alive? 60 years old as a man died, but is of great interest. I will tell you that Stalin appeared as a political figure and, accordingly, the first de-Stalinization began in 1912, when he was elected a member of the Russian Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP, and this hero himself was in the Vologda exile and could not take any part in the Prague Conference. But his idea triumphed and, in general, for all times, the Soviet idea that the party needed to be built differently than the Leninist and immigrant communist or Bolshevik circles suggested, not on the basis of foreign immigrant circles, but at the party organizations of factories.
Already from here you can draw a mental line to the construction of socialism in one particular country. This is the first.
Second: Stalin was confronted with the fact that modernization, about which not only the Bolsheviks speak, but also the current authorities, was a failure. This is the modernization of Witte-Stolypin, which could work out. Because Stolypin's reform meant a gentle entry into the market, a soft attraction of the excess rural population to the factories. Then there was about 30 million hidden rural unemployment and about 10 million so-called angry begging, which, as you understand, was also very explosive.
But this reform was failed because it touched very large interests of the ruling and economic circles. The plot of 1916 of the year against Emperor Nikolai Alexandrovich was prepared not by the Bolsheviks, but by the elite, which included the entire progressive bloc of the Duma, that is, three quarters of it. The conspiracy included generals, financiers, industrialists, Westerners, Moscow Old Believers and the Moscow group as a whole.
This conspiracy drew a line to the smooth, soft development of the Russian Empire and brought it down. He brought down because the ruling elite did not quickly enter into the demands of the industrial revolution. This is well written by Max Weber. Being in Germany, he wrote several newspaper articles about the fate and prospects of Russia. And in one of the articles he wrote that the royal regime would fail because of the inconsistency with the requirements of the industrial revolution.
And he pointed out - I quote literally: “Only a long socio-revolutionary dictatorship can eliminate these difficulties. Under the social-revolutionary government, I do not mean any special flayers, but simply such a political leader for whom the “young” in Russian conditions are private land ownership — and this was mainly landowner property and feudal in its essence — not is an unconditional shrine. Are there such people in Russia, I do not know, but they can come to power for a long time if peace is concluded. ” This refers to the world in the First World War.
In general, all this was done by the Bolsheviks and carried out modernization with live-life, one might say, enthusiasm, using the words of the philosopher Weber, since they no longer had any other means.
I can also say that Stalin emerged as a result of the crisis of the end of 1880's, this is a global agricultural crisis, which was caused by the fact that cheap grain from the USA and Canada appeared in the European grain market, which then approximately matched the current oil and gas markets. and australia. The reason for the appearance of cheap grain is the industrial revolution: the construction of dry cargo ships, mass mechanical tillage, and conveyor loading, and huge vessels with grain, having come to Europe and Russia, extinguished its prices.
As a result of this crisis, the well-being of the Stalinist family was destroyed: his father, who was a prosperous artisan and kept auxiliary workers, had good orders, was ruined. His maternal uncles, who kept a roadside restaurant, were killed. And the family collapsed from the lower segment of the middle class down into poverty.
Only thanks to the will of the mother, who was literate, she learned to be a dressmaker-modist and began to earn a living, did Stalin receive an education. His mother pulled her son out of poverty literally by the ears.
When they say that Stalin is uneducated, this is today's point of view, and, as historian Solovyov said, heroes must be judged by the laws of their time. Known to you, Hegel pointed out that the main thing in the hero's fate is not his character, which is of secondary importance, but the historical circumstances in which he is.
So, Stalin finished the spiritual school with honors, then did not finish the Tbilisi seminary, but finished four classes and received a certificate of the right to teach in elementary school.
His library consisted of 20 thousands of volumes, most of which have his marks, and, as we know, the current course of higher education implies that the student must read at least 100 books.
That is, Stalin was very seriously prepared, and this is an interesting remark by Josef Schumpeter, an ally of Hayek, an Austrian political scientist and economist. He wrote in his work "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" 1945 of the year that he did not meet the equal to Stalin in terms of intellectual level in the modern world.
That is, this assessment is completely objective, and several completely different sources coincide in it.
The main thing in Stalin's fate is, of course, the complete scrapping of economic, cultural, mental, folk, if you will, the foundations of Russia, when the “third revolution”, that is, collectivization, was carried out.
Collectivization was a continuation and the flip side of the medal of the failed Stolypin reforms. If we take historical analogies, I recall the 16th century in England and the so-called “bloody legislation”. When the economic conditions of the European market demanded, in connection with the growth in the number of cities, the development of wool production — people simply needed clothes — a so-called “fencing” occurred. The peasants were driven off the land, and those who did not submit were punished in three ways: they were whipped, their ears were cut in half, they were sent to penal servitude and galleys.
But when Churchill talked with Stalin, arriving in Moscow in August 1942, during the Battle of Stalingrad, he asked about the worst period. Stalin replied: collectivization. And Churchill, knowing his story perfectly well, of course, did not mention either “bloody legislation”, or Henry VIII, or fencing — he simply said that our nation could not have made such sacrifices in such a short period.
Here is the key word of Stalin's whole life: “a short period”. He was determined not by Stalin, but by the economic, political, conditions for the development of the Russian Empire. Stalin closed this cycle.
Why is he still alive? Appeal to Stalin is not an appeal to a historical figure or not so much an appeal. This is today primarily a form of public criticism.
Why do we keenly perceive it? Because the gigantic successes that were achieved by tremendous sacrifices — no one denies and should not deny — were not in vain, and we still use the results of socialist modernization. Therefore, while conducting de-Stalinization, a part of our elite wants and cannot at the same time achieve that there is a better way, and we will offer you this way now.
The results of the 20 years we have passed since the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that we are going the wrong way. Stalinism will not return, as neither “bloody legislation”, nor Stolypin, nor the Romanovs can return - this is all history. But the sharpness of the fights implies that we are fighting for people's brains.
I recall Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev, who himself already admitted in his last works, that, they say, we wanted to beat Lenin with good Lenin, then with good Plekhanov to beat bad Lenin, then with good Plekhanov and in general to discredit all Soviet power.
This dynamic, this line is now expressed by the fact that our opponents want bad Stalin to discredit good Putin, and then go on to discredit him further.
This, of course, may be an exaggeration, but I think that this is the dynamics.
And after all, it was realized, this idea of the great - really great! - political analyst Brzezinski, that for the collapse of the ideological support of Russia, Hitler should be equated to Stalin. This is also successfully implemented, as you know.
Therefore, speaking of the significance of the figure, we are talking about the real struggle that is happening today.
Joseph Vissarionovich does not participate in it: he must be the object of study for historians, archivists and nothing more. We must relate to him, as well as Churchill, who gave the order to drown the French fleet in Oranta during the war for the fear that this fleet could go to Germany. And, as Churchill writes in his work, after that the whole world understood that we would fight to the end. The victims, in principle, were not interested, because the lot of the great politician is not to look at the victims. They do not look: the result is important to them.
And finally: there was such an economist, a very famous one, Evgeny Samuilovich Varga, a participant in the Hungarian revolution, then immigrated here, headed the Institute of Economics, wrote reports for Stalin. In his memoirs “To reveal through 25 years”, he writes that this is a lie, that reports were written to Stalin: he wrote them himself. Yes, I used the sources, our advice, but I wrote it myself.
And Varga said: Stalin’s fault is not that a million or more people died during his reign. About a million, by the way: according to statistics, 1921 people were shot from 1954 to 642.980 year. And Varga says: this is not the point, but that Stalin allowed the degeneration of a democratic, working-class state with an element of bureaucracy into a completely different, bureaucratic state. This is his terrible mistake, writes Varga - and indicates that the payment for this will follow.
And we saw that the Brezhnev state was completely bureaucratic, and the current state - completely bureaucratic or not completely, is the question - but essentially the same thing.
Therefore, I would like to draw conclusions from this: forget Stalin, think about your children, think about the future of Russia, thank you.
Mikhail Delyagin: Now with great pleasure I give the floor to Mikhail Iosifovich Weller, a writer.
Mikhail Weller: With gratitude, continuing the previous speaker, I would like to say that, in my opinion, such a stormy, so high-ranking discussion of the figure and the role of Stalin in recent years is, in essence, an ersatz-politician. Since real politics is absent and comes down to the elementary serving of the interests of big business with political goals, and the need for political life lives in a person, in a political animal, we discuss Stalin and, in the absence of a stamp, write on simple. Because in the present conditions there is essentially nothing to discuss, everything is clear to everyone.
To understand any figure, you need to understand the whole system of concepts, ideas and realities within which it lives. To do this, one needs to imagine the essence of social progress and the essence of the state that people mostly do not imagine for themselves, although there are different points of view. Therefore it is necessary to ride only over bumps, over the tops.
Much has been said over the past 25 years about imperial syndrome - usually in a negative context. The imperial syndrome means that a person would like to live in a mighty state, which, moreover, even won someone, pulled, annexed, and as a result became so healthy. And we are told that this is bad.
Question: Is it really bad?
After all, if we recall the history of small humane states, it turns out that, firstly, small states were no more humane than big ones, and, secondly, the story is completely different from what people usually imagine. The essence of social progress is that for centuries and millennia more and more have been accomplished, sorry for the wrong turn, more and more maximum actions.
Everything else can fluctuate, but the increase in energy turnover is a completely rigid, the only unshakable reporting system. Thus, large states, beginning with the most ancient Dvorichchia, Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Kingdom, were distinguished by the fact that they forced people to work beyond their means and took away the majority of the products of their work. And from these surpluses, which were squeezed out with sweat and blood, science, culture, technology, cultural development, and so on were formed. Although those who built the pyramids instead of resting, it was hardly liked much.
Thus, when we talk about a great person, we are not talking about how human she is. “My brother, if the subjects say that the king is good, the kingdom he failed,” said Napoleon fairly, and this was included in all the textbooks.
We are talking about the scale of the deeds.
And besides, you can't do everything at the same time.
Great rulers, carrying out reforms, overcame colossal resistance. Not because they were so humane and wise, but around were stupid bastards: this is the objective resistance of the social environment. The more you change, the more the environment resists, such is the normal historical and social inertia.
Thus, the sea of blood was shed, and then much calmer periods began. But in order for these periods to come, the previous shaking was, unfortunately, historically necessary. You can look at the history of Greece, the history of Rome, the history of Persia, the history of anything.
Stalin, having come in such a period, not only faced the need for reform.
As for socialism in one single country, it is absolutely clear that this is nothing more than a tactical slogan, because all Soviet power, the whole idea of communist internationalism was aimed at a world revolution. The Soviet Union, which included all the republics of the entire globe, was recorded in the statutes of the Comintern. The Soviet Union was considered as a springboard for the accomplishment of the World Revolution.
This turned out to be somewhat different, the real story is all more or less imagined.
The essence lies in the fact that for most peoples who at one time, in the XIII century, underwent Mongol aggression, Genghis Khan was a fascist, but for the Mongols, Genghis Khan was the greatest man in their history, a hero, a builder of the state. He made the greatest empire, and in general, the Mongols existed, thanks to him.
Question: why the Italians need Caesar? Which is not 2000 years, but, nevertheless, you know, the rating of the person is high, and exactly the same with every nation with its historical leader.
Because the task of man is not that the purpose of the party was the good of the people. Putin’s first installation speech, when he was a candidate, exactly repeated all these reports that were written by the Communist Party: so that you feel good, so that you feel satisfying, so that you feel calm.
This is fine with the field mouse, but the person is arranged a little differently, the person thinks he wants to live happily, and actually makes the devil know what, sometimes to his own detriment, because the person needs to reorganize everything around him to the maximum extent.
And when a person is looking for the meaning of life, then translated from Russian into Russian the meaning of life means that a person is involved in some big common cause, transpersonal, which is more, higher, more significant than himself, for which, in fact, it is not a pity, give back and life.
This means that human life does not exist by itself, but is being pushed on to something.
And a great leader is the personification of pushing each person’s personality to something single.
It is difficult for us today to understand what is described, say, by Dumas in the Viscount de Brazhelone: that nobles could die on the battlefield with the words "Long live the king!" But it lasted for centuries, and they did not go crazy. However, when the fans are fans of singers and artists, it is a little clearer to us.
Man is arranged in such a way that he needs to personalize his main aspirations in the person of the leader, king, king, secretary general. This is a ritual phenomenon.
We, brought up in more or less democratic notions, are not entirely clear, but it was always and when convinced that Stalin was a superman, everything is ours, our God-God says whole-heartedly “Long live Stalin” - that means the same as “long live the king”: it means “long live our people, our greatness, our history, our truth”.
Man is created in such a way that people group society out of themselves. This is objective, apart from desire: this is how we are. One of the forms of self-organization of society: the pack chooses a leader from its ranks, and then itself obeys this leader. Because she decided so. And Stalin is just such a leader.
Everyone understands what they say, of course, not about the real Joseph Dzhugashvili - a small, dry-faced man, pockmarked, narrow chest, physically weak. They talk about the great mythical Stalin, about the mustache leader with a pipe from the Kremlin, who never sleeps, who has a window in the office at night, after which all the money on party fees, which goes twice as high as his boots and thinks only of the greatness of the people, is left.
For we are arranged in such a way that when we think of Petersburg, everyone knows that tens of thousands died who beat larch piles in the swamps, but we identify ourselves with those who remained to live. Although the majority came from the peasants, and not from the nobility, but still we like it, and somewhere deep down in our hearts we strongly welcome and approve the construction of St. Petersburg, despite the sacrifices, because we have survived, we are the winners.
When it comes to mythological personalities, everyone associates themselves with the winners, because the victims are upset, as everything is settled in the ground, and only that remains on top.
And finally, the last: peoples have their own destiny and their own life, for the last hundred years it has been more or less canonized and described.
Say, the great French people broke through the era of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the great never happened again, and the great British people broke through the period from Great Elizabeth Tudor and ending with the Second World War, that was all that ended, a certain systemic potential jumped out. In Rome, there was obviously a peak of greatness from Caesar to Andrian, and similarly in Russia, the peak of greatness — not humanism, not lightness, not good, but just greatness and power — was in the era of the Soviet Union.
And Stalin is the first personification of this power of the Soviet Union.
Why will the mythological Stalin always be studied, will always be remembered, and various novels and plays will always be composed, and nothing can be done about it? Because we passed our peak, no matter how they say "no, no, Russia is immortal." All are mortal, even the solar system. It is about this peak that has been passed - in the person of one person - we continue to talk. By the choice of the country of the way it has almost nothing to do.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much, and while we are doing industrial gymnastics with microphones, I want to respond to the idea of Svyatoslav Y. Rybas, which seems to me very interesting.
After all, the shale revolution threatens to do with the modern energy market — in its meaning an analogue of the grain market of the 80 of the 18th century — the same thing that happened then: it threatens to bring prices down sharply. And it turns out that in the years through 40 - and given the fact that world processes are developing faster and faster, perhaps even earlier, l - we may well see the emergence of new political figures at about the same level and about the same motivation.
Please Andrei Ilyich Fursov, historian.
Andrei Fursov: Dear colleagues, more than twenty years have passed since the destruction of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was demolished to the accompaniment of the de-Stalinization campaign, which was arranged by the perestroika punks. And, apparently, for 20 years, these people and their ideological heirs should have calmed down.
But nothing like that.
From time to time, companies start de-Stalinization, and Mikhail Gennadyevich correctly said that this was partly due to the desire to "cut the headstock."
But after all, someone “gives grandmas” to this, and I would like to speculate about who hates Stalin and for what. 60 years have passed since his death, 20 years there is no Soviet Union, but hatred remains and it is really real.
Inside the country, during the life of Stalin himself, he was hated by two groups of the Soviet establishment.
One can be conventionally called the left globalists: those who strove for the world revolution are guardsmen of the cardinals of the world revolution of Lenin and Trotsky. They believed that Stalin had betrayed the cause of the revolution when he began to dismantle the structures of the left-wing globalists, the Comintern, for example, when he began to abolish the holidays. By the way, colleagues, who remember how the holiday was originally called, which later became known as the Day of the Great October Socialist Revolution? So before 1936, how was it called?
Replica from the audience: First day ...
Andrei Fursov: Exactly, the First Day of the World Revolution. In 1936, it was canceled, and in 1943, it became known as the Day of the Great October Revolution.
In the same year 1936, the term “Soviet patriotism” first appeared, that is, this turn begins.
The second group, which, naturally, could not love Stalin, is part of the nomenclature that was oriented towards consumption. As you know, the nomenclature is a layer that is characterized by a very tightly ranked hierarchical consumption.
Naturally, a significant part of the nomenclature wanted to consume much more. And this consumption course, which led to the transformation of the nomenclature into a quasi-class, and the people who were personifiers of this course, naturally, were incompatible with Stalin. They did not like him, hated him, and Stalin answered them the same.
When Stalin learned that the nomenklatura workers who had been evacuated to Samara, wanted to arrange special schools for their children, he called them a “cursed caste.” And when Stalin said that as the construction of socialism proceeded the class struggle and resistance to this process would increase, he meant not traditional layers like the kulaks and so on, as some of us believe, he meant the nomenclature. And perestroika showed this, as Nabokov would say, with glass clarity.
The paradoxical link of these two groups - the left globalists, who dreamed of the world revolution, and those who sought to consume - and put, conditionally speaking, the Trotsky-Bukharinist, which went down in history right-left bloc.
These people hated Stalin in the Soviet establishment.
And the transformation into the main task of the CPSU "meeting the growing material needs of Soviet citizens," introduced in 1961 in its program, was a victory for consumerism, the consumer line of the nomenclature.
In parallel with this, the Soviet nomenclature was integrated into the world market, the world system. For me, the most powerful visual example of this is the photograph: Kosygin in Canada, being the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, sits in the headdress of an American Indian under the portrait of the Queen of England.
This is very symbolic, it is a memory of the future nomenclature.
And who hated and hates Stalin, who and what could not and cannot forgive him outside the country?
It must be said that Stalin three times broke the plans of the globalists, tore the "road maps" of globalization. Here, colleague Rybas talked about the crisis of the end of 80's: he absolutely accurately recorded the date from which everything rolled.
But, in addition to the agricultural crisis, two more important events occurred in the 80s.
By the 80 years, practically the whole world was divided and exhausted. Therefore, in the 1884 year at the Berlin Conference, it was decided that countries that cannot develop their own natural resources should open up to the world, and if they cannot or do not want to open up, then they need to be opened by force. It was officially announced that Africa was meant, but for the sake of Africa, then no one would do anything about it: it was about Russia. Alexander III had strong nerves, and nothing came of it.
However, besides this, since 1888, the British have set themselves the task of destroying the current Germany by then, and by bleeding it with Russia.
It was a globalist plan, and Stalin ripped it off three times: in 1927-29, when he launched the country from the world revolution to building socialism in one particular country: in 1943-44, when he defeated the Wehrmacht; and in the 1952 year, to which, in fact, the country was restored. Not for 20, as Western economists believed, but in just 7-8 years.
In addition, Stalin showed a real alternative to globalism: it is a neo-imperial formation, which is anti-capitalist in its essence.
The Hitler regime was not an alternative to the new world order, on the contrary, it was a brutal experiment of the Western elites to create a new world order that included a two-loop control system, a neo-Orda SS system, and a party. And in this sense, all attempts to equate Hitlerism to Stalinism are initially doomed to failure due to their anti-historical nature: they were two systems that were fundamentally different in their attitude to capitalism.
Although such attempts have been made and will be undertaken. Since the goal-setting of the current Western elite is very close to the Nazi - just almost identical, if you look closely - then constant attempts to compromise alternatives to it seem inevitable.
In addition, Stalin is undoubtedly the key figure in the whole of Russian history, and when Yakovlev spoke - I quote not literally, of course - that we are breaking not the Soviet Union, but the entire thousand-year paradigm of Russian history, the main figure through which it broke, was Stalin.
Why?
Because Stalin is not just a man, it is a phenomenon.
By the way, Stalin himself understood this very well. Once he told his son Vasily, who complained that he was badly treated at school and underestimated: do you think you are Stalin? - No, you are not Stalin; think I'm Stalin? - No, and I'm not Stalin. Then he showed his portrait: here he is - Stalin.
So, Stalin connected the line of the world revolutionary movement and Russia. And besides, Stalin tied together the revolutionary line within Russia and the line of imperial, autocratic Russia, and he did this very consistently.
The key dates of this process, as I said, are 1927-29 of the year, 1936 of the year, 1943 of the year - the dissolution of the Comintern, although de facto this was done before, plus the anthem, epaulets and so on - and finally 1952 of the year - renaming VKP (b), in the CPSU.
It is very interesting that there are people who understand this perfectly well even in the West.
For example, the enemy of communism is Melnik-Botkin. This is the grandson of Botkin, a doctor who, if the shooting of the royal family took place exactly where it is believed, then he was shot in 1918 year.
So, Melnik-Botkin - the head of the French special services under de Gaulle. He recently gave a very interesting interview in which he said that by the year 1917 there was a lot of nightmare in Russia, and the most positive thing that happened in Russia was Joseph Stalin, who built the country.
By the way, Botkin, unlike many of our people, called an almost exact number of those shot or convicted to be shot for political reasons. He called the 700 of thousands, his colleague Rybas gives a slightly more accurate figure, but these, naturally, are not millions or tens of millions, as our, so to speak, liberalist public asserts.
And finally, what I want to say: Stalin gave us an absolutely fantastic gift - he gave us the nineties and zero years.
Indeed, from the moment when Russia in the 16th century appeared as a major power, the axis of European politics is the destruction of this power on the principle of “nothing personal.” Just an objective need to eliminate the geo-economic, geopolitical competitor.
And each time the West lacked a little bit.
For example, after the first Time of Troubles, we could be taken with bare hands, but in the West there was a Thirty Years War, and by the time it ended, we had a space to inhale and could already beat the Poles.
After the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia could also be taken barehanded, but in Europe there were wars for the Spanish inheritance, the Austrian inheritance, and we again jumped out.
After the civil war, we too could be taken with bare hands, but Stalin played on the contradictions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans, the British and the Americans, the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers.
But after 1991, there might not have been such a respite, because the West was one, - but we still had nuclear weapon, we had a Stalinist foundation. And these 20 years that end, are a gift from the Stalin era.
I do not agree that Stalin must be forgotten - no, Stalin must be remembered.
Should we forget Churchill? Also not necessary: the enemies must be remembered.
I think we did not pass the peak of our history. Once Chernomyrdin said: they say, Russia has exhausted the limit of revolutions. I then thought: yes, who are you? Gray warden, will you tell if Russia has exhausted the limit on the revolution or not?
Therefore, I think we should be more careful with such formulations, and as for Stalin, I want to end with a quote from Charles de Gaulle, who said the following: “Stalin did not become a thing of the past, he disappeared in the future.” Thank.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much. Yuri Y., please.
Yuri Boldyrev: When Mikhail G. invited me to this event, I honestly told him that I was not an expert on Stalin. To which Mikhail Gennadyevich said that, they say, you are a specialist in society. That is, following the explanations of Mikhail Gennadyevich, we are talking about Stalin, talking about our society, about our state, about our present and future. What did I think was important in connection with this?
First, the figure of Stalin, like any powerful figure, in conditions of extreme concentration of mass media in the hands of the union, the government, the oligarchy, under the conditions of the developed technologies of manipulating society, is constantly used to rigidly divide society. Moreover, for a split, not between those who rob us, kill, destroy, on the one hand, and all the rest, on the other, but for a split between equally haves, equally suffering from what is happening now. And there are, unfortunately, good reasons.
I will give an example. I had a wonderful head of my secretariat in the Accounts Chamber 13 years ago, now his anniversary is just in time, Boris Mikhailovich Lapshov. Once he was a director of a large defense enterprise, a deputy of the Allied Congress, deputy minister of industry, then worked in the Accounts Chamber. Honest, wonderful, cleverest man, but when he was small, he was deprived of his mother: she didn’t say anything at a meeting on a collective farm, and that’s all for 10 years, in my opinion, without the right to correspond.
And so, no matter how widely he sees the world, no matter how deeply he understands everything that we are discussing here — when it comes to Stalin, he cannot overcome this physical feeling that he is the enemy of his family.
It must be said that a huge part of the population of our country is in the position of this contradiction between the readiness to accept all that what our distinguished colleagues said here and the memory that here are my parents, my ancestors suffered innocently.
I say this not in order, in spite of my colleagues, to somehow belittle the role of Stalin, to slander him. I specifically emphasize that it is precisely because of such a contradiction that this person is constantly purposefully thrown into discussions to split the society. And if I'm not an expert on Stalin, I am here now for something, then only for one thing: to remind the majority of our fellow citizens again and again that our task, so that we can consolidate society and revive the country, is to prevent so that the manipulators from the outside and the manipulators from the inside, who sold themselves to puppeteers from the outside, for fun of Chubais and companies, were split into those who are against Stalin and those who are for him.
When any respected by me General Ivashov raises a toast to the great political figure Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, it is important for me that our people understand: he raises a toast not to repress simple, normal, honest people, he raises a toast to that symbol, which was spoken about here now, for the character of a person who in one way or another served to build a powerful, strong, nationally oriented state. This is the first.
The second. We have already decided to submit the Comintern, and all the desire for a world revolution as a pronounced negative. It seems that we were the only ones who aspired to a global project.
But this is not true!
It was said here that heroes should be evaluated by the standards of their time. And when and who in the world, having received for this opportunity, did not seek to extend its influence to the whole world? Show me those.
And what, at the time when Stalin and the Soviet Union were in their prime, - didn’t the British Empire at that time strive to expand and extend its influence to everything? Didn’t the French Empire compete with it, how could it? Is it further, already in 40-50-s of the twentieth century, the United States, destroying the old empires, didn’t they strive to create a new, well, excuse me, the imperialistic mechanism, albeit on new rails, with other mechanisms, with the removal responsibility for the population of the colonies, but with the preservation of all key management mechanisms?
We do not need to go to extremes: everyone who carries a mission, the idea that they are building a new world - for themselves or for themselves - quite naturally strive to spread this world as widely as possible. And to blame for this is the Soviet Union, namely Stalin, from my point of view, inappropriate.
What transition moment is important for us? I don’t know whether Andrei Ilyich agrees with me or not, but many said that the key figures of the Russian revolution before Stalin viewed Russia as firewood for the world revolution, but Stalin, while maintaining the course of the world revolution or the spread of a global project, however for all cruelty, he no longer considered this territory as something that could be burned in the firebox of a global project.
Now we are shown programs about the armed forces of the Soviet Union, which until the very 1991-92 of the year stood in Germany and were ready to seize Europe, but it seems to me that the idea that the Soviet Union alone was so aggressive and trying to enslave the whole world, - this is not true, this is a lie.
Next is the next lie. We regard the atrocities of the times of Stalinism as divorced or going beyond the level of civilization that was around. It seemed that there was no such thing in England, like there was no such thing in France, but this is also a lie. The fact is that cruelty was not in the metropolis - and what happened in the British Empire as a whole? What was going on in the colonies of Great Britain, what human rights were there? What was going on in the colonies of France at this time, in Indochina? We know this even from feature films, although this story is clearly from the other side, we simply have no one to imagine: there are no such forces that would own mass media and bring to us what was happening in Vietnam, Cambodia and other colonies in those very times when we had the horrors of Stalinism.
If we relate one to the other, then the horrors of Stalinism, which, indeed, were horrors, already look like they are not so out of place, let's be honest.
Moreover, the idea that we could not do all this and calmly agree that there are stronger, smarter Europeans - the French or the Germans who would realize our territory as their project - this idea, you know, is simplistic, weak-willed and in fact inadequate.
It seems to us that we could not be treated as with Africa, but in reality we could.
The brightest example is given by the relations between Japan and China. What the Japanese did with their brothers in race in China before the point that European historiography considers the beginning of World War II is a nightmare. How many were destroyed there as a result of the direct genocide of brothers by race?
I always assume that a big politician, a statesman can pin hopes on something, can have an idea such as the Czechs had - they say, think, surrender to the Germans, we will live under them, as we used to live near Austria-Hungary, nothing terrible, - but he has no right to be sure of it.
He is obliged to concentrate all possible efforts in order to prevent his people from becoming dependent on another's will. Because this alien will is never known in advance.
And one more very important thing. The figure of Stalin today is used completely demagogically, even in order to take in his companions the forces that are completely opposite to him.
Recently, we had a program about Rosfinagentstvo on the third television channel. And even representatives of the financial-speculative community, defending the idea of transferring our financial resources to a joint-stock company, gave an example: it was said that Stalin was implementing the interests of the Soviet Union through some kind of corporation under Stalin.
That is, this figure is so powerful that even our ideological, ideological opponents are trying to find some examples to prove that they are acting in the interests of Russia just as Stalin acted.
And the last. The most serious danger in the current situation probably lies in the fact that, on the one hand, splitting society, and, on the other hand, based on the fact that modern politics is of a sociological nature, the authorities, manipulators measure what is happening in society, try process and measure again, and, seeing the opinion of society, they try to appropriate, to equip those heroes that society has.
Accordingly, there is a danger that the present authorities, not serving the society, not adopting the goals and objectives of becoming an independent, sovereign, self-sufficient state, nevertheless, under the cover of the idea of returning to the best of the past, will adopt elements of barbarous cruelty related to the goals of building a national independent state.
I see that my colleagues do not agree, they do not see such a threat. But I, unfortunately, see such a threat.
I know that dividing people into thieves and murderers is the deepest ideological error. Because when the question is about stealing an extraordinary scale, when the question is about avoiding responsibility for the destruction and plunder of the country, there is no such crime, including a bloody one, which will not be addressed in order to cover up the tracks and defend keep yourself in power.
In this sense, it seems to me that it is important to see the figure of Stalin and that period as integral and in no way allow, in my view, a possible and dangerous substitution of concepts.
When the “Stalinists” conditionally take on armament, our present authorities are whimsing, when it launches the idea that we were occupied 20 years ago, and all those who oppose the current irresponsibility of power are agents of the US State Department, under the cover of it, under the cover of return to the ideas of a hard, strong state, the bureaucracy nevertheless continues its dirty deed in plundering and destroying our country. This is what we together should not allow. Thank.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much.
And I, while we again move the microphones to the other end of the table, while I tell a funny story from life. When I held a round table on corruption in 2007 for the year, the first, simply by status, was a remarkable person, then a senator, a former deputy minister of finance in the governments of Gaidar and Chernomyrdin, whose private aircraft literally the day before Americans put their fighters on to ask him, probably , intimate questions about his financial well-being. It was interesting to the Americans, but absolutely not to ours. Ours probably knew it all, and that was fine with them.
And this senator began to say: they say, I do not know in what capacity I was invited here. And then one of the journalists very clearly said: "As an exhibit, of course."
And the quietest, most intelligent professor with glasses and a Chekhov's beard from the Ministry of Industry and Energy ended that round table. Everything was already said about corruption by that time, and he spread his hands and said: “You know, I myself am from a family of repressed people, I know a lot about 1937 for a year, I really dislike Stalin. But. understand, because apart from 1937, these people will understand nothing: in principle they do not understand another language, they are not able to understand! ”
This was said by a very intelligent and very understanding person, very sincerely, at least six years ago.
Now I ask Anatoly Yurevich Baranov, the chief editor of the portal Forum.msk.
Anatoly Baranov: I’m probably the only Stalinist here, because I was kicked out of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation for neotrotskism.
Nevertheless, I would like to draw attention to the fact that, unlike some of the subsequent leaders of the country, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a moral person in some sense forgotten today in the Russian political sense.
He was a man of a certain idea, represented a certain socio-political trend in this paradigm and existed, and she followed his whole life - unlike today's politicians, where they usually say one thing, think another, and do the third.
Of course, this is the difference not only of Stalin, but of all the politicians of that generation, starting with Lenin and Trotsky. Of course, the policy of all these people was ideological, and it is certainly sorry for being straightforward, it was aimed at building communism, that is, at building a new, classless society in which the exploitation of man by man will be excluded. It was such a simple idea familiar to many from the university.
Another thing is that at that moment, when the October coup was accomplished and the Bolsheviks had already begun to implement some kind of real politics, reality, naturally, began to sharply correct the ideals. Again, decency manifested itself: these people suffered from this, as Lenin suffered, who had to go first to the rather wildish policy of war communism, continue the tsarist policy and the policy of the interim government on the surplus, and then go to the NEP. For a human idea, this was a traumatic fact.
The same was, as I understand it, with Trotsky, who, from the high rise of the October Revolution, turned to the mud of the civil war, and then engaged in tedious questions of a national economic nature.
Moreover, this concerned Stalin, who dealt with these boring and very often unpleasant issues longer than anyone else. This problem of the incompatibility of the ideal with practice is not a purely Stalinist problem, not a problem of the Bolsheviks. This is probably a universal problem. But, nevertheless, when we talk about reading this page of our history, we should not forget all the time that it is not necessary to read it vulgarly: they say, the prerequisites for development were created, and after them it somehow went on by itself .
The tragedy of the Bolsheviks was that the prerequisites were created, and "by itself" after that were arranged in an exceptional way through the knee.
We know from our own experience that the Stalinist thesis about the growth of the class struggle in the course of building socialism is inherently correct, but we cannot forgive both ourselves and why this class struggle was so brutal. Still, the class struggle may suggest less bloody forms of its implementation.
Nevertheless, we know perfectly well, but for some reason we don’t want to recall from history that the creation of prerequisites for the construction of capitalism did not at all relieve the remnants of feudalism and even earlier formations. And economic liberalism, that is, the freedom of private property and entrepreneurship, does not at all entail a social and political liberalism, freedom, equality and fraternity - does not at all entail.
Take at least the United States, where slavery - not serfdom as a relic of feudalism, but natural slavery - persisted longer than others, and the remnants of this slavery have already been canceled by Kennedy. The prerequisites were there, but real freedoms, real human rights, democratic principles were given in a very stubborn and hard struggle. The same thing happened in the Soviet Union, mainly under Stalin, because he got a long period.
When the construction of a new socio-economic structure did not lead to the kingdom of freedom at all, the road to the kingdom of freedom was built, but it was not possible to build the kingdom of freedom itself. This is significant. I understand this: since Stalin never refused anywhere from the postulates of Marxism, that is, he remained until the end a very consistent Marxist, the discrepancy between theory and reality could not but traumatize him. It also traumatized his entourage and the whole society.
Why does this injury not heal?
Why are we now interested in Stalin, who died already 60 years ago?
Because Stalin in this regard is for us a living example of what may well happen to us even during our lifetime. We understand perfectly well that everything that has a beginning has an end. And capitalist relations based on private property will sooner or later come to some kind of phase transition. Whether it will be communism in the classical Marxist interpretation, whether it will be some other formulation and some other form, we will see, but “there is an opinion” that this phase transition has already begun, and not necessarily in Russia.
Like any such phase transition, it is accompanied by very serious public consequences. There is absolutely no reason to believe that 100 has become so much more humane and advanced over the years that the costs of this phase transition process do not wait for us. And it is possible that these costs will be significantly higher than in the Stalin period.
If only because modern politicians, unlike the politicians of the Stalinist generation, are not so decent people, not so consistent supporters of ideas. They think one thing, say another and make the third. This, unfortunately, does not inspire much optimism in the beginning phase transition to another socio-economic structure.
Mikhail Delyagin: Thank you very much. Now I will add what I did not hear, maybe because I didn’t always listen carefully, but what I think is important.
The first. As for Stalin's oblivion: he who forgets a story condemns itself to its repetition. And I would not like very much, including from the experience of my family, to live under the new Stalin, even if it were not the source of civil war, but the fruit of a very humane Soviet education.
I have said many times and I repeat once again that I do not like Putin. But against the backdrop of the fact that before our eyes and, alas, sometimes with our unwitting participation, he replaces him, he will seem to be a democrat and a humanist, and about the same now it seems to us Brezhnev is a kind and pleasant grandfather.
The second. From the modern point of view, the dictatorship of the proletariat was terrible, but in its time it was more democratic than its modern bourgeois democracy.
Third. My teachers in economic modeling, being Soviet-sixties democrats, put enormous effort into experimentally, using mathematical models, to prove that collectivization was a tragic mistake and one could prepare for war differently. They threatened 10 years of life - and mathematically, flawlessly proved that for our country there was no other way to prepare for war. That is, the Stalinist policy was the only possible way to avoid that, according to Stalin, we were “crushed”.
The main reason, from my point of view, according to which Stalin is relevant today, is the insignificance of our modern leadership. We still live in Stalin's greatcoat and over the years since 60’s death, no other clothes have been built, as the tailors say.
Not very good, from my point of view, but an exceptionally intelligent man, Andrei Karaulov, said a wonderful phrase: “Stalin’s brutality was caused by his hyper-responsibility”.
The fear and hatred of the liberals towards Stalin are caused, among other things, by their animal fear of responsibility for the crimes they committed and their deep hatred for a person who really lived not for money, but for something else.
One of our very well-known writers today, who “worked through perestroika”, after the 11 attack of September 2001, at one of the round tables devoted to him, said literally the following: “Anyone who can theoretically give his life for anything is a geek which deserves preventive extermination. "
This was said in today's St. Petersburg, three kilometers from the Piskarevsky cemetery - without any hesitation.
A very hard-nosed, consistent and knowledgeable Stalinist on my direct question, was Stalin right, answered with the following formula: "Stalin was wrong because the system he created gave birth to Gorbachev."
Very interesting is the attempt to democratize 1936 of the year. After all, the Stalin constitution was not just the most democratic fig leaf in the world - it really was, as written in the book of Svyatoslav Yuryevich on the basis of documents, there was a serious deep attempt at democratization, and 1937 was an uprising of the bureaucracy for this particular year.
And when we look at the time of Stalin, based on the ideals and values of today, it is not bad to recall that even in war the acquittals were about 10% of civilian court sentences, and now less than 1%.
Some social mechanisms that were curtailed after the death of Stalin are useful today.
I will name two: the first is a small business, because under Stalin a small business, called an industrial co-operation, and working, including, besides the planned system - if, of course, he wanted - gave 6% of industrial production.
Svyatoslav Rybas: Also on defense.
Mikhail Delyagin: They produced televisions, radios, and more.
And the second is the cost accounting system, which was used in the military-industrial complex and in many other areas.
During her time, everyone who worked in the workshop at that moment received an award for the improvement of manufactured products - and half of the award was divided equally among all. And the person who came up with the improvement, and the boss who beat him, received the second half of the prize.
As a result, the production cost of the Mosin rifle, which remained roughly unchanged from 1898 to 1938 a year, over the next few years, its production was reduced by more than half. This is a historical fact.
Dear friends, does one of the roundtable participants want to add anything?
Svyatoslav Rybas: First, Stalin was not an orthodox Marxist. So, when they entered into an agreement with Mao Zedong, Stalin literally forced him to sign an agreement to create in Xinjiang (this is a well-known geopolitical corridor to Asia) several joint ventures in the aircraft industry, shipbuilding, air transport and oil production, in which the share of capital was equal, but management was all Soviet. Then Khrushchev eliminated this, but Stalin, no matter how Mao Zedong resisted, foresaw the possibility of Mao's hesitation, and he laid the safety mechanisms.
Stalin very realistically approached the post-war, after 1945 year, time, and they agreed with Roosevelt literally about dividing the world. He and Roosevelt generally had an alliance (and Roosevelt in the US today curses many for this), because they realized that they had a common rival: the British Empire. And in the "big three" the union of Stalin and Roosevelt was directed against Churchill. And this union, if not for the sudden death of Roosevelt 12 on April 1945, was to be realized in some concrete decisions.
As Valentine Falin told me, on 13 on April 1945, Roosevelt planned a speech in the Senate about relations with the Soviet Union and the development of a long-term strategy. Say it, there would be no “cold war”.
As for family wounds, I also have these wounds, but, in principle, they should be healed today.
A very important thing: when Stolypin carried out his reform, there were 10 million peasant farms, and after the revolution, when the peasants received landowner land, in the Soviet Union there were already 20 millions of peasant farms that, according to the results of the NEP, were in no way interested in industrializing and supplying grain state at fixed prices. It was impossible to liquidate this situation by any other means besides accelerated modernization, collectivization.
About 1937 year. Mikhail Gennadievich said that Stalin had innovations in the draft constitution. I will say which ones: it meant the multi-party system, which hit primarily on the party apparatus, which already then became an obstacle in development. Now, the late Leonid Vladimirovich Shebarshin, head of foreign intelligence (PSU of the KGB of the USSR), told me - and he has one of his works - that at that time, in the 30s, there were 4 million denunciations. Denunciations were a mass phenomenon, and no Stalin could inspire them. It was the struggle of post-revolutionary anarchy against statehood in its purest form. Perhaps, on this I finish, thank you.
Andrei Fursov: I would like to literally say the words 2 about the Comintern’s line on unleashing the world revolution and Stalin’s attitude to it.
Stalin, naturally, at the level of rhetoric, since he called himself a student of Lenin, had to follow certain rules. But his entire policy from the middle of the 30s — and, perhaps, even before — was aimed at creating a quasi-imperial, neo-imperial structure on an anti-capitalist basis.
His policy towards the Comintern was very tough. For example, the intelligence of the Comintern was excellent, but it had to be crushed because she was playing on the other side. Stalin had, however, his own personal intelligence, but, nevertheless, this resource had to be sacrificed.
If we look at what happened after World War II: if Stalin was striving for a world revolution, then communist regimes would be imposed everywhere. And everything happened exactly the opposite.
Stalin, for example, by no means wanted communist China. He offered the Americans the division of China into two parts: Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
Stalin generally preferred the left-wing nationalist regimes — for example, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, for example, was not recognized for several years, and the Vietnamese were very offended. They recognized it already de facto, that is, Stalin’s course was not on the World Revolution, but on a different scheme for controlling the world.
I am very glad that it was said here about the existence of agreements with Roosevelt. We can only guess about their essence, but the fact is that, as Stalin once said, “there are intentions, circumstances, and the logic of circumstances is stronger than the logic of intentions”.
Roosevelt represented state monopoly capitalism, which could tolerate systemic anti-capitalism, which was the Soviet Union. But after the Second World War, a new young predatory faction of the world capitalist class arose - the corporatocracy, whose representative was Truman. They could not coexist with systemic anti-capitalism. Hence, death seems to be violent, Roosevelt and many other things.
The final report "Day-TV" on the round table:
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