Plaidoyer pour Staline

All Revolutions have been intoxications of trials of individuals, fed on innocence and guilt, accusations and defences. The Revolution we await will not do so, if at the end of Marxist theory there is, as we believe, the Revolution. This theory knows no personal responsibility, no acquittals or convictions. It knows acts of force, which are social necessity, and have nothing to do with the legal or moral status of the victims, or the perpetrators.

It would be foolish, therefore, if we demanded the floor for the defence of Stalin, a posthumous defendant. It is the acts of indictment against him that must be shamed, for they conclude for the condemnation, in strange concord, come from the exasperated enemies of decades past, when he was hated as a communist and together with the revolutionary communists of the past decades, when in our opinion he had deserted communism, or come from the friends of those same decades who today uncover endless infamies against him.

Either one weaves the history of human societies as res gestae, as feats carried out by supreme men and great leaders, in whose genius the facts are experienced as a film, which eventually ordinary men acted out in masses of extras – or one weaves it, like the Marxists, by looking for the driving causes in the conditions of physical life common to the collective masses, and which set them, neither conscious nor willing, in motion.

If one is still on the first view, it is hardly surprising that the same name made ’immortal’ by the glory of deeds and the believed forging of the subsequent destinies of peoples, revolves around the notoriety of vile deeds and incredible shames, which would classify the common man as a brute, a criminal, a reject of society. Typical, and not new, is the case of Stalin, raised to the altars as an exceptional man, and described as a degenerate and monstrous subject.

This must be remembered, and not explained, for the moment, with a dash of Marxism: that is, by comparing the description of the class and party of which the famous Man was the defender, and then that of the class and party that was the enemy and victim. It is precisely the subjects and followers, out of frenzy or ignoble interest, that have put in the double light, as a rule, all those with the necklace of whose names current history has been written, those whom we for derision say the Battilocchi.

The Wise Man who, when asked for political advice, passed his scythe at a certain height above the ground, cutting off from the red field of poppies the flowers that towered highest over the meadow, knew that he who rises above his fellows by special strength and valour, does so also because he excels in harming and raging, and in the sinister ability to oppress others.

We would resign ourselves as Marxists, and therefore as scholars of history, if we thought that such an extermination of the Greatest or the most vile could ever make that Revolution, of which we are assertors, and whose roots are inherent in all the stalks of the field of human grass, lose a beat.

If we were to follow the historical double-entendre about “special” men – claimed, by our contradictors, to be the engines of general events – a human life would not suffice. Not a single lofty name, prophet or sage, saint or ruler of peoples, demigod or demidemon of the legends that have been passed down to us would escape, not even as reflected in works of literary fantasy; in which in another form men set down their own common traditions. The sublimity, and the deepest shame, we would prove them as touched by all. And for the two reasons all are remembered, or perhaps, better, dreamt of, by mysterious transpositions of the earliest forms of human knowledge and transmission of past data. Useless, then, to look for the key to the Stalin problem in this rigmarole of the man‑cause of history, in which slip both the Dulles gang as well as the Khrushchev gang (just to put it familiarly).

We could probe religions and myths, which are nothing more than the first scriptures of lived social history, not invented according to arbitrariness and chance, but derived by successive deformations from the material conditions of common life, the first examples that identify the good and the bad genius, the saviour of men and the beast that drinks their blood. God, at every stage, is the first model of the Being who is loved and feared at the same time, in the same tremendous extremes.

The first historical characters stand somewhere between the mythical and the human. The tradition that constructs them oscillates between their renown virtues and their horrendous vices. It is indeed the horrid that appears to man, even in non‑ancient times, most suited to raise one man’s pedestal above others.

Of many great leaders and lords and sovereigns, the memory of infamies has in the historical narrative overridden that of merits, and at most has joined the latter without the popular imagination detaching itself from them. Shall we remember the fierce sacrifices and massacres of Assyrian and Egyptian kings that history remembers as foundations and giant works of millenary civilisations? The regulation of the Nile, the pyramids, the cities with sevenfold walls, or the hydraulic reclamation as in fertile Mesopotamia, which Semiramis transformed from a beast-infested forest into a joyful garden between the tamed waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, only to pass into history as a top whore, as it is the sexual side of human deviation that invariably emerges around these resounding names? All this would be too long. And if the great emperors imposed themselves on the peoples, it was not because of the warlike hardships of glorious campaigns, but because they were able to crush the living bodies of prisoners under the wheels of triumphal chariots before their eyes. Is there such a distance from this today? Would the morbid emotion of the civilised American people for a few decimetres of Ike’s intestines be there without the joy of having learned and admired on their screens the magnificent crushing of hundreds of thousands of living bodies, which a Xerxes, a Cyrus, a Tamerlane, a Genghis‑Kan would not have been able to celebrate, under the atomic bombs of Nagasaki or Hiroshima?

Let’s cut to the chase. It is obvious to link to the greatness of the Leaders their sexual exploits with the Favourites of each race, brought to them by all the victories. Octavian falls a few cubits in popularity before Marc Antony and Julius Caesar, for the merit of being the only one not to enter Cleopatra’s alcove. Virility with women literarily pairs well with valour before the enemy, as with Astolfo who epically beats twelve virgins in the night and the following day twelve knights; staking the challenge on his own head.

But even the most vile degeneration and sexual inversion have well seasoned the famed qualities of men of exception. Socrates remains the founder of moral philosophy, despite certain of his jokes with the young Alcibiades, his favourite pupil. To return to Caesar, it is trivial to recall that, according to Suetonius, his loyal legionaries – not his adversaries – sang in triumph, in that Latin that allows one to report rubbish: Hodie Caesar triumphat – qui subegit Gallias – Nycomedes non triumphat – qui subegit Caesarem. True or untrue, is the episode with Nicomedes, king of Bitynia, a historical fact of comparable weight to the overthrow of the classical Roman social form in Gaul and Britain and the origins of the Latin Empire? Are such human events conditioned by the human figure of Caesar, seen here as a omosexual, there as the greatest general, engineer, writer, historian, statesman, of a century remembered as golden, i.e. fruitful of men of prominence – as, according to us Marxists, it was fruitful of a becoming of collective, not personal, forces?

The empire will fall after having had Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, stained in the vulgar belief of all crimes; but the new forces that will pave the way for the new forms will also look like ferocious invaders; Attila Scourge of God will make the grass die under the hooves of his horses, but also germinate an original world: cursed, blessed? Both. With Vandals, Heruli, Goths, Normans, and their kings of famous names, fierce customs and Christian merits.

Hangmen and Fathers of the Fatherland, Saints and Inquisitors, Reformers and Tyrants, flock to the historical memory with the same names, and with the same glorious deeds they cross their paths, without making too much impression on anyone, poisonings, incests, parricides, burnings and whippings… Moral judgement on names makes anyone, of any school, write a drunken and rambling story. Evidently the reasons for it must be sought outside the infamies, as much as the wonderful deeds, of the hallucinating hailstorm of Immortal Names. This had to be done, and was done, by the historical materialists.

Must we still transcribe the two presentations of the French Revolution, from the feudal and the bourgeois sides? Recall the accusations against the beasts of the Terror, Thermidor and Restoration? Contrast the luminous construction that resolves outdated and fatuous apologies and execrations in the living drama of the classes in struggle, in the driving force of the economic struggle, when Marxism appears? And all moral judgement forever pales?

The most recent characters do not escape these norms. The clash of the First World War was linked to the name of Wilhelm of Germany, idol of some, monster of others: a dirty story of assignations with the Count of Eulenburg was the premise. It was always with this propaganda weapon of sexual gossip that political battles were waged, nor was the Vatican ever spared. When Mussolini was at the top, low rumours of illicit love affairs circulated, his secretaries and trustees were slandered, the weapon of waving the family’s dirty linen was used extensively as in all these cases. What was not said about Hitler? The men of the proletariat were also not a few times hit with these low means. Pigs appeared who obscenely explained Engels’ connection to Marx’s family. Yet the history of communism has examples that have silenced everyone: men who perhaps like Marx and Lenin had no other woman but the admirable wife, despite their professed sexual theory. These days, an idiot showed up who spoke of Lenin’s visit to a closed house in Paris instead of the National Library, which would have infected him… But we believe that we have never met anyone so pig as not to speak respectfully of Lenin’s incomparable companion, an outstanding example of a powerful man’s wife, uniquely devoted not so much to her husband as to the party, of which she virulently reminded Stalin that she was not the last of its members. These lofty figures of Jenny and Nadejda can rightfully be joined by Natalia, Trotsky’s widow.

Now you would like to solve the problem of historical address, which is conventionally attached to Stalin’s name, with the true or invented fact – what, in essence, does that matter? – that he would, as old man, have brought to him young women, and almost little girls?!

In this filthy matter, more than the nervous systems that do not hold up, the mouths that take pleasure in telling are filthy. And the politics that links a success to the employment – true or false as they may be – of such miserable resources, only gives a measure of human meanness and insipidity. If we are dealing with those who once called themselves Marxists, the downward slope is of such frightening depth that we are in the presence of brains degenerated a hundred times more pathologically, than some sexual gland whose hormones do not chemically conform to the general rule.

At the end of his study on Stalin, full of incredible material and vindicated by later events in a dramatic way, Trotsky, whom we can never forgive for having been so often a biographer and psychologist, he a great Marxist historian, concludes with this sentence: “The State is me is an almost liberal formula in comparison with the present (1940) totalitarian regime of Stalin. Louis XIV merely identified himself with the State. The Roman pontiffs identified themselves together with the State and the church, but only in the age of temporal power. The Russian totalitarian State goes much further than Caesaro-Papism, because it has subjugated the entire economy of the country as well. Stalin can well say unlike the Roi Soleil: the Society is me.”

The distinction between State and Society is in Marxist and Engelsian theory fundamental. As long as there is a State, they are two distinct and enemy entities. The State is a class machine that weighs down on the body of human society. To erect a State, if Marxism is Marxism, one Man is not enough, one needs a social Class.

Trotsky wrote those words only by way of fierce sarcasm. He did not mean that Stalin had put his heel on the State and on a society of a hundred million men; he would have descended to the level of a Khrushchev who wants us to tremble with Stalin’s little finger.

Lenin also insisted on the psychiatric examination of Stalin in his will. This text may make a great impression, but it is not Lenin’s greatest and most useful. Lenin himself apologises: these things (Stalin’s temper, his rudeness with comrades) seem like minutiae, but they are not…

Lenin, as his wife clearly saw it, wanted to pass on Stalin’s duties to Trotsky, to Zinoviev, to Kamenev. But only because he felt those men were in the path of different forces at the bottom of history, and they would fight, and he like all of us would – if he did not die – fight, on the side against Stalin.

Lenin began to feel ill in March 1922. The first attack of arteriosclerosis blocked his right side and speech on the 26th of May. At the 4th Comintern Congress from 4 November to 5 December 1922 he participated fully: his was a formidable physique; he had recovered. But on 16 December he suffered his second stroke. He wrote his will on 25 December, the postscript on 4 January 1923. On 9 March, a few days after the letter breaking off with Stalin, he suffered the third and most tremendous blow. He seemed to improve slightly in October 1923; he died on 21st January 1924.

But already those who were able to approach Lenin in June 1922, during the Enlarged Executive at which he was unable to speak, were met by a swollen man, his eyes changed, who made visible efforts to remember and speak: although he was precisely of those for whom history is made without men, or without given men, he came out expressing himself to his comrades with a drastic, unrepeatable phrase: we are definitely screwed, boys – roughly.

What Lenin expressed in the last days of his life must therefore be used with circumspection. The recovery of November-December 1922 was undoubtedly the last event that nature could produce, with the help of the most capable doctors available in Moscow, and the incredible work of Nadejda, who after the second stroke had to start teaching him to speak and read like a child. When Trotsky recounts in his book that Stalin wanted to give Lenin the poison he had asked for, he says that the doctor did not rule out recovery and thus expressed himself: the virtuoso will always be a virtuoso. The word, Italian, does not seem to fit. A Man is perhaps the same person for God, the devil, and the law, throughout his life; but he is certainly not always the same thing, for the doctor especially. We shall deal with the matter, briefly and in closing, not according to Trotsky’s brilliant phrase, nor according to the latest, tragic manifestations of Lenin’s thought.

Whoever uses the State, uses it against a part, a class or certain classes of society. The problem is the relationship between State and Society. Society is a natural colony of man‑animals placed by nature in given conditions, which we distinguish into groups of conditions. The State is an organised machine formed in Society, and united with a part of Society. The basis of the State cannot coincide with Society in a uniform manner: this is the lie of democratic and liberal theory.

The theory of Dictatorship teaches us to use a State-machine. A new machine, made after having smashed the traditional one, but still a machine, made with men bound by various cogs.

This machine acts against the defeated but surviving classes, in order to disperse them, with their annexes and stubborn influences; and then disappear.

As long as the machine exists, it is made of men: writers, orators, organisers, soldiers, guards, policemen.

We admit that the machine-State must function with suitable and selected men, who have given qualities, and even bad qualities for traditional morality. For this reason, we will not renounce the historically transitory use of the machine-State, the tool‑State, the weapon-State, the filth-State.

We do not aim to erect a model State, like all the ideologues who are our enemies. We aim, because history imposes it, to rid society of the State, “vaccinating” it with the use of a last State, in certain conditions sharper and harsher than those that preceded it.

When a social form, such as today’s capitalism, grows too old, it can be assumed that the State that will cleanse society of it will have to be particularly heavy-handed. Suppose it is proved that in it some of the party militants will have to employ and perhaps sacrifice themselves to become subjectively ruthless and ferocious; this will not be a historical reason to recoil from the only way of the Revolution.

This is how Lenin and Trotsky spoke and wrote in the time of their full efficiency, they who subjectively would not have enjoyed crushing an ant (Trotsky once spoke to us with his good smile of “plaisir de la chasse”). We have no reason and no party doctrinal interest in Stalin’s sadism, nor do we see in it a key to history. Anyone who wanted to could look him in the face and apostrophise him, as Nadejda did without trembling. Not Stalin’s viciousness or brutality decided this historical game. Far from it!

It was not nature that created a monstrous creature, but history that came to a halt on a difficult type of the machine-State straddling too many conflicting forces, which lacked the decisive force: the proletariat of Europe.

This historical form came to a halt in a monstrous encounter between two now alternative forms: democracy and dictatorship.

The question is not whether the State-machine can have at its summit an individual, a syndicate, or a popular assembly. This is metaphysics, not history.

The Russian revolutionary State was led to use the extreme form of internal terror; and to wallow outside the borders in the – everywhere and always lying – defence of democratic and popular lasciviousness.

All monstrous phenomena emerged from this incest of historical forces, which tendencies, proposals, resistance and oppositions tried in vain to avoid: to stay out of parliaments in the West, to save the workers’ party in Russia from being suffocated by a State of bourgeois peasantry, not to get muddied in anti‑fascist blocs. The overcoming was immature, impossible (even for a reborn young Lenin!) without the revolution of the West.

Out of this incest of historical forces was moulded the Minotaur Stalin, a poor passive form without vitality, fecundity and responsibility; neither beast nor man, not subject to processes of condemnation or rehabilitation.

In the face of today’s miserable explanations, the normality or otherwise of Stalin’s rule could be discussed in the same way as common principles of the validity and rectitude of the handling of States, which go back to common criteria of a basic civilisation.

It is in this attempt of Stalin’s bewildered deificators of yesterday that the error lies: this common ground of the enemy forces of history is missing: only one means of discussion runs between them, and that is force: the one who ultimately has to bite the dust will be wrong. All the rest is filthy prostitution to bourgeois ideology, in which today’s false communists of the West have the excuse of having always, without a moment’s resignation to Marxism, loyally, honestly believed, and in which today they plunge back in, drawing breath. Bourgeois legality is their atmosphere, and they were never out of it: or they would have died. Only a bourgeoisie, which sniffs out its own cadaverous stench, can fear them: they have its own stink.

But Stalin, it is said of Russia, in his last twists and turns, violated revolutionary legality, Soviet legality.

Either Stalin had a mandate to rule a dictatorship, or to respect a legality. Lenin had written: What is dictatorship? He said it himself:

A POWER WON AND MAINTAINED BY THE VIOLENCE OF THE PROLETARIAT AGAINST THE BOURGEOISIE, A POWER “NOT BOUND BY ANY LAW”.

Stalin and his low janissaries had no legality to abide by, which they violated. They were, to their misfortune, and in their irresponsible impotence, again bound, inside and outside the curtain, by the economic juridical and ideological laws of the filthy bourgeois social slime.

When the dictatorship of tomorrow, whether with a Lenin‑like colossus at its head, or with thousands of valiant militants, or with millions of simple proletarians (this has very little relevance), will no longer demand excuses and masks of legality and constitutionality, of popular consensus and emulation of radical enemies, it will proceed high, clear, bright and shining, washed clean of the disgrace that today’s wretched defamers bring upon it, who turn it from a giant renewing force in the history of a world into a fierce toy to be led by the bogeyman’s little finger.

The last of the crimes held against Joseph Stalin is the proposal he made in 1953 to increase by 40 billion roubles the payments of the peasantry to the State, i.e. to the industrial economy, i.e. to the ravenous Russian proletariat. The motivation is lowly reformist, minimalist, it reeks a thousand miles of petty-bourgeois opportunism: Stalin did not go to the place, to the countryside, he did not, believing himself a genius, do the accounts; he asserted that each peasant would only have to eat one less chicken. In fact, each would only give 500 roubles a year, a few thousand lire in real value. The argument that Stalin saw the peasants’ tables covered with geese and turkeys in the films is vile: was it he alone who shot and projected them?! The argument that in certain years the colcoses only got 28 billion from the State as the price of goods, only means that for the land (and the rest) they enjoy they pay derisory sums. They stole it from the Revolution.

Stalin disappears after one last idea that is a regurgitation of Bolshevism in the last of the former Bolsheviks. Shift, in the State capitalist economy, a greater part of the income of the rural semi‑bourgeoisie and its agents, to the wage‑earners.

We must bury, without using mausoleums, the idea, so hard to shake out of our poor heads, that men, be they Stalin, Trotsky or Lenin, can make history. “Three who made a revolution” badly wrote the talented anecdotist Bertrand Wolfe. Three who made a revolution!

All the texts used in Khrushchev’s report have not only been around in Moscow since 1924, they have been printed by Trotsky and around the world for decades and decades. But until now, tens of millions of workers in all countries, hundreds of millions, who would have sworn it a hundred times over, have been made to believe that they were forgeries fabricated by bourgeois agents – the likes of which we all are!

Trotsky therefore said all true things to the letter. Like the one that when at the Central Committee session Kamenev read the “testament”, Stalin, “sitting on the steps of the Presidium tribune, in spite of his self‑mastery, felt small and miserable.” This was before the 12th Party Congress, held in April 1923, Lenin alive but absent.

Do such texts today only serve to destroy Stalin, already dead? And do they not destroy those who knew them for 33 years, time to raise a Christ on the Cross, and now “reveal” them?

Trotsky also recounts Krupskaya’s words: “Volodya (Vladimir’s nickname) used to say: “He (Stalin, whom Nadejda did not name but pointed to by bowing his head towards his Kremlin lodgings) is deprived of the most elementary honesty, of the simplest and most humane honesty.” Speaks a man finished by illness, a woman on the verge of self‑denial and pain, another defeated and exiled man. Volodya, Leon, Nadejda, many of us little men, had to understand that our duty to the cause and the party would be to throw ourselves on Stalin by becoming, if necessary, more dishonest than him. Than Him. By substituting this pronoun, we foolishly gave the false villain Benito, from his very enemies, an idiotic pedestal. We mocked this with our comrades in confinement: what male animal are you talking about?

Even the ardent Trotsky compares Stalin to Nero, to Borgia, and says the Marxist reason: “We are living through an epoch of transition from one system to another, from capitalism to socialism. The customs of the declining empire of Rome were formed during the transition from slavery to feudalism, from paganism to Christianity. The age of the Renaissance marked the transition from feudal to bourgeois society, from Catholicism to Protestantism, and to Liberalism’.

“Nero, too, was a product of his era. But as he died his statues were pulled down and his name erased everywhere. The vengeance of history is more terrible than the vengeance of the most powerful General Secretary. I venture to believe that there is consolation in that.”

All this is great and powerful in such a formidable fighter, in such a champion of human will and courage. However, we, minimal as we are, will rectify, theoretically, and not emotionally, some other phrases in the prophetic passage.

“In both cases (Empire and Renaissance) the old morality had destroyed itself before the new was formed.” Since Marxists do not need to found a new State, they do not need a new morality. And, if they had one, it would not include Revenge, let alone the consolation it brings to the beaten good fighter.

Again: “A historical explanation is not a justification”.

Having once again expressed our admiration for Trotsky, one of the greatest theorists, we propose as an epigraph to Stalin, after the long‑winded epicediums on his desecrated grave, a different and greater thesis.

Always, a historical explanation is a justification.