LONDON LETTER:For most people today Stalin is a butcher to be ranked on a par with Hitler, who ruled by the fear and sent millions to their deaths in gulags, writes MARK HENNESSY
THE WORLD has gone to seed since Joseph Stalin was in charge, agreed the members of the Stalin Society as they sat in a community hall in King’s Cross in London, just a few hundred yards away from the busy train station.
A large red banner was draped on the back wall and a portrait photograph of Stalin stood on a pedestal to the left as the comrades gathered. The meeting started late – but Stalin Society meetings usually do, said one of the attendees.
On Sunday, they were unhappy about a blog on the Daily Telegraphwebsite that had – although it disapproved of both – questioned why meetings celebrating Stalin can be held in London when one for Hitler would be immediately banned.
The attack was just the latest in a long line from the “imperialist lackeys” in the British press, complained the society’s chairman, Indian-born Harpal Brar, a long-time defender of Stalin’s reputation.
Numbering about 20 souls, the group soon got down to an earnest discussion of Comrade Stalin’s address to the 19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in Moscow in November 1952, finding new enlightenment in every paragraph.
For most people today, Stalin is a butcher to be ranked on a par with Hitler, who ruled by the fear engendered by “The Great Terror” of the 1930s onwards, sending millions to their deaths in the gulags.
But the Stalin Society’s supporters, many of them old enough to remember the days when “Uncle Joe” was briefly revered in the United Kingdom during the second World War, do not see it like that. For them, he remains a hero.
Set up in 1991, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, the society works “to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him”.
Now including members of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), and the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), it expelled its founder, New Zealander Bill Bland over a doctrinal split.
Splits are common among the left. One society member complained that she had been expelled from the Socialist Labour Party after backing a motion that supported North Korea’s right to have nuclear weapons.
Brar has himself been at the centre of a number of them. Having joined the Maoist Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist League he soon departed to become a founder member of a revisionist group, the Association of Communist Workers, before joining former National Union of Mineworkers’ leader Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party.
That relationship ended unhappily after Scargill organised a mass expulsion, leaving Brar and others to complain that they had been thrown out because they had attempted to engage in serious debate rather than petty personal politicking.
From there, Brar moved to form the Communist Party of Great Britain in 2004, becoming its chairman.
Pamphlets and books lay on a table near the door of the King’s Cross meeting room extolling Stalin’s memory, along with one denying his complicity in the murder of Polish army officers in the woods around Katyn, near Smolensk in 1940. Likewise, the Ukrainian famine.
The Soviet Union’s responsibility for the massacre, which has iconic status today for Poland, was accepted in 1991 by Mikhail Gorbachev, revered in much of the West but an arch-sinner in the eyes of the society.
Gorbachev had joined the “disinformation campaign” about Katyn and produced material allegedly from the Soviet archives, which “proved” that the Soviets committed the atrocity and, of course, that they did so on Stalin’s orders.
"Well, we know the interest that the Gorbachevs of this world have in demonising Stalin. Their target is not so much Stalin as socialism," said the pamphlet, The Katyn Massacre, written by Ella Rule, international secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist).
The 1952 speech, given by Stalin just months before his death, highlighted both Stalin’s belief in world revolution and the need for the Soviet Union to give support to fledgling communist movements around the world.
In the eyes of the society, all changed after his death and the succession of Nikita Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin: “Khrushchev was a surrender monkey,” declared the speaker, Ivor Kenna with contempt.
“A single spark can start a prairie fire, some said. Some did not want the capitalists on our back all of the time,” he went on, bemoaning the fact that the “rug had been pulled” from communist groups in Malaya, Vietnam and Korea after Stalin’s death. Some, Kenna went on, believed that the Soviet Union had taken “a smoke break” after Stalin’s death, but the break lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years later. “Revolutions cannot have smoke breaks,” he said passionately.
But the revolution is not finished now that capitalism is in distress, if only comrades can recreate the dynamism shown by the “shock-brigades” set up by Lenin and Stalin in the 1920s, and if the errors of Khrushchev and, later, Leonid Brezhnev and others are avoided.
The pure holders of the revolutionary flame must be wary, warned Brar. Khrushchev succeeded by “running rings among more gifted people”. Too often the gifted have suffered at the hands of the mediocre, he said. Brar, clearly, does not count himself among the mediocre.