Horror of Marxian Socialism

This year (i.e. 2007) is the 70^th Anniversary of the Great Purge of Josef Stalin who in 1937, killed 7,00,000 people in firing squads, to wipe out the enemies of the state or enemies of socialism. This was the period when Russian agriculture was socialized through coercion and torture. Twenty thousand trained workers (known as twenty thousanders), having unwavering belief in the creed of Marx and in the dictatorship of the proletariat, were picked up from the factories of Moscow and Leningrad and sent to the villages to initiate collective farming and to train the farmers how run a collective farm. The great socialist leader Josef Stalin ordered these crusaders of collective farming to squeeze religious belief and the sense of private property out of the farmers as water is wrung out of a wet cloth.       

The Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sholokhov narrates how these vanguards of socialism applied their muscle power and compelled the farmers to dump their belongings, including cattle and other domestic animals and tools of agriculture, in the collective firms. Any one who showed slightest reluctance or refused to part with any domestic article or animal, were leveled as enemies of the state and enemies of socialism. The people of Chekha (the internal police and intelligence force) used to pick them up secretly in the darkness of night and send him to gulags or concentration camps.

The unfortunates were then perished in jails or butchered in firing squads and buried in mass graves. Many of them were deported to factories and pushed into industrial furnaces alive. Saddam Hussain, the former president of Iraq used a few of the techniques to exterminate the Kurds. In recent times, the Communist Government of China herds such enemies of the state, like Falung Gong activists, in hundreds, into jet planes and push them into the mid-sea with tied hands and feet. But perhaps Stalin could not use this improved technique as in his time giant jet plane, big enough to carry 400 or 500 hundred people was yet to be developed. In this context, one may recall the massacre of students by the Communist government of China in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989.

On August 9, Hundreds of people, most of them women, gathered at the Butovo firing range at Bagilabukharbayeva, a suburb of Moscow, to mourn the victims who fell to the bullets of the Red Army of the Great Soviet Socialist Republic, propagated to be the heaven of the proletariat. They laid flowers and lit candles under the 12 m (or 40 feet) tall wooden cross they had erected in the memory unfortunates butchered by great Communist leader Stalin. The towering wooden cross now stands also as a testimony of the bloody massacre of thousands of innocent farmers  by the cold blooded killer Josef Stalin.  

The crowd gathered (women wearing colourful headscarves) at the site was led to the execution and burial site by Russia’s Orthodox priests, carrying icons, for a service at the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors, recently built at the Butovo site. It is one of a series of events planned throughout this year to mark the said 70^th anniversary of the Great Purge of 1937.

But there were no representatives of the government present on the spot as the government has shown little interest in observing the occasion. This is in keeping with efforts by Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, to restore Russia’s pride in their Soviet era history by softening the public perception of Stalin’s rule. “We have been ordered to be proud of our past “said Yan Rachinsky, who belongs to a group that is investigating the repressions in Stalin era. “Though there is no other example in history when 700,000 people were killed within one and half years, only for political reasons”, adds Mr Rachinsky.

Though the present Russian government, at the behest of President Putin, is trying to hide the incidents of mass killings and other tragedies that expose Lenin and Stalin as cold blooded killers, the Russians, on the other hand, are trying to refresh their memories of the Communist atrocities by building monuments or holding festivals as described above. Statisticians say the number of people murdered by Josef Stalin exceeds the total casualties in the World War-I.

Soon after the break up of the erstwhile Soviet Union, Mr Jonathan Brent, the executive editor of the Yale University Press, spent six months in Russia negotiating a contract for access to the four of the largest archives in Moscow– the (1) Central Party Archives, the (2) Central Committee Archives, the (3) October Revolution Archives and the (4) Russian State Archives. The materials discovered therein were found to of profound interest to the scholars and historians.

The documents not only disclosed the history of events as they happened, but also highlighted the degree of falsification indulged in by the Communist regime. The Yale University undertook a giant project of publishing the history of Russian Communism in 45 volumes, based on about 250 million files and documents recovered so far. The most of these documents have now been shifted to USA. The documents recovered from the four archives in Moscow illuminate in extraordinary detail the October Revolution in 1917 and the history of the Soviet Communist Party and the inner functioning of the world’s first totalitarian state from 1917 up to its break up in December 1991.

In September 1995, the Yale University brought out the first volume, The Fall of the Romanovs, containing a collection of letters and documents related to the execution of the royal family, after the Revolution of 1917. In the next year, another valuable document, The Diary of Empress Alexandra, right up to the night of her execution, was published. She made her last diary entry on a mid-July night in 1918. Historians believe that a few hours later she was murdered. On that night, Empress Alexandra, her husband Czar Nicholas II, their five children and four other family dependents were herded into a small room in a house in Yekaterinberg, where a 12-man execution team opened fire on them from point blank range with revolvers.

According to Yakov Yurovsky, the leader of the squad, the job was finished with bullets and bayonets and including verification, i.e. feeling the pulse of the victims to ascertain death, took not more than 20 minutes. The documents also revealed that the famous October Revolution was not at all a people’s revolution and hardly a quarter of the Russian people supported it.

Meanwhile, the Yale University Press has published another volume, Stalin’s Letters to Molotov. Vyacheslav Molotov served Stalin as foreign minister and was one of his closest colleagues. The letters reveal Stalin as an intemperate and cold blooded political plotter. Shockingly, even Lenin, so far believed to be not so cruel and less murderous than Stalin, has been revealed to be otherwise.

Harvard historian Richard Pipes and his Russian scholar Yuri Buranov have jointly edited the files obtained from Lenin’s secret archive. Three volumes describe the documentary history Soviet labour camps where millions perished, including those killed during the days of collective farming in 1930s. The documents also disclose that even in the days of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, Russians had lost faith in the totalitarian system and this resentment paved the way for Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika.

There are many similarities between Islam and Marxism. Fundamentally, both the creeds rest on hatred. Islam divides the entire humanity sharply into two groups, Muslims and non-Muslim kafirs and Allah paints these kafirs no better than animals. He commands the Muslims to wage a war (i.e. jihad) against these despicable kafirs, exterminate them en-masse from the face of the earth and thus bring the entire world under the banner of Islam.  The good news for the man is that, one

In a similar manner, Marxism divides the humanity into exploiter class and the exploiting class, asks the exploited class to treat the exploiting class in the same manner as Islam asks Muslims to treat the  kafirs.  A verse of Koran says that, each and every property on the earth belongs to Allah and His Prophet. One may find an echo of this verse in the Communist slogan – “The working class has nothing to lose, but there lies the entire world before them to be won”.

One demon has gone already into extinction and we may hope that the other will also follow the same fate soon.

Dr. R. Brahmachari,

                     Professor,

Department of Applied Physics, University of Calcutta,

 92 Acharya P C Road, Kolkata-700 009.