On the anniversary month of the Bolshevik Revolution, and it’s time to debunk some anti-communist myths, again. The U.S. ruling class reviles Joseph Stalin, one of the first communist leaders of the Soviet Union (USSR), and so they lie about him.  But they lie about so many things, why would they tell the truth about Stalin. Yet the capitalist slander campaign against Stalin led many authors, university researchers and even ordinary people to dislike Stalin. Why so much capitalist hatred against Joseph Stalin?

First, some facts. After the Russian Revolution, 12 European countries (including the U. S. and Japan) invaded the Soviet Union to kill this new socialist society in its cradle. They were defeated. Instead Stalin led the socialist Soviet Union from being “the poor man of Europe” to a world power that challenged the worldwide empire of the capitalist United States.

Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet Union became powerful enough to defeat Hitler’s Nazis in World War II. Of the 250 Nazi divisions that fought in World War II, 200 of them fought to conquer the Soviet Union...and were defeated. Eighty five percent of German casualties were at the hands of the USSR. It was only after the Soviets began pushing the Nazis back, that the Allies invaded Normandy. The Soviet people and their Red Army suffered huge casualties (20 million dead) and destruction, but it was they that defeated the Nazis.

The Soviet leaders educated all citizens, including college and trade schools. They provided universal health care and employment. Workers had four weeks of paid vacation and received a pension at age 60, women at age 55. They had paid maternity leave and free childcare and they eliminated the centuries-old famines that had racked the Ukraine.

Some charge that Stalin was a dictator, yet he struggled mightily for a new constitution with secret elections so that the entrenched bureaucracy would be challenged. Local Party Secretaries defeated him in this effort.

It is helpful to see the sources of the criticisms of Stalin. The sources of the forced starvation stories in the Ukraine are anti-communist, pro-Nazi sympathizers who left the Ukraine and headed to the Western countries.

In 1956 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his achievements in a secret speech. Khrushchev wanted to take the USSR in a more capitalist direction. Professor Grover Furr documents that of the 61 charges Khrushchev levels against Stalin, 60 can be proven to be false. Needless to say that speech is the source of many of the attacks on Stalin.

Another source of attacks was the writing and organizing of Leon Trotsky. He was a charismatic individual with the emphasis on individual. Trotsky belonged to a different party than Stalin and Lenin. He joined the Bolsheviks when the Russian Revolution was imminent. When Lenin died, Trotsky thought that he should be the next leader. He organized for his ideas. They were publicized widely in the Party, but when it came to a vote, his position lost 724,000 to 4,000. The Bolsheviks and Lenin chose Stalin.

However, he continued to organize against Stalin and the Bolshevik leadership and was finally kicked out of the Party. He secretly continued his anti-Stalin organizing and propaganda. He appealed, not to the workers, but to the capitalists all over the world for support. Capitalists loved his stories because it gave them more ammunition against Stalin. But Furr speaks and reads Russian and English and has had access to Trotsky’s archives as well as the archives of the former Soviet Union. He has written and self-published several books on the period. For those who want to learn what really took place under Stalin’s leadership, please go to his website:https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/

The fact is that college professors who try to write a balanced or a favorable view of Stalin are ostracized by the system. They can’t get published. Those that promote anti-Stalinism get published, paid and praised.

The reason the capitalists hate Stalin is because he helped lead a revolution that threw them out of power. The capitalists who exploit workers, who bring death and destruction, who promote racism and sexism, hate Stalin. They benefit from our ignorance that it is possible to have a system where the capitalists do not exist. But a better world is possible. It’s communism where the workers of the world rule and the capitalists are in the trash heap of history.