Twilight of the Red Tsar
- Thread starter Napoleon IV
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Lost Freeway
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Also, I wonder if this will have any effect on "Communism is a Jewish plot" conspiracy theorists.
For now Italy (the biggest in western europe) is in the hand of Togliatti and is a total Stalin fanboy, so he will suceed in spin the thing in a positive light and keep left unity...but it will be hard this are no more the 30's and another move like this can break the front. The French are probably in the same position.
The other eastern parties don't really count, if Uncle Joe say jump they will just ask how high
It probably won't have much of an effect. Conspiracy theorists are already divorced from reality, and since many of these people deny the Holocaust its not hard to imagine them finding some way to deny this genocide (probably by claiming "Stalin killed plenty of non-Jews as well").
Eastern Europe is looking at another round of purges, while in Western Europe once it becomes clear what's going on it's going to be a disaster. Keep in mind that many Western Communist parties were damaged by Khrushchev's revelations. Now imagine that it comes to light that in addition to doing all that Stalin also decided to reenact the Holocaust (given the death rates in Stalin's gulags it's not an unfair comparison). Communism (at least of the Marxist-Leninist variety) may well end up being as hated as Nazism (for instance the alternate AH.com if it emerges might make supporting Soviet-style Communism an instanban offense).
Another interesting issue is that Jews were a large part of the various Communist parties' bases. For instance 10-20% of Canadian Communist Party members were Jews, as were 7-10% of Communist Party of Great Britain members, and in the 1930s and 1940s a whopping half of all CPUSA cadres were Jews (although this number had dropped significantly by 1953, when the party was only about 5000 strong). Obviously the vast majority of the communist Mapam Party in Israel was Jewish. There were also a lot of Jews in the leadership of these parties (for instance Phil Piratin, circulation manager for the Daily Worker and a former MP for the CPGB, was Jewish). This is arguably for the same reason that many Russian Jews were drawn to Communism: it promises international brotherhood and a world without racism, which sounds great to a persecuted minority. If they realize that the Soviet Union is anti-Semitic it could seriously damage Communism in Western Europe/America.
At the interrogation of Czechoslovak-Jewish Communist Artur London his interrogator said "We'll get rid of you and your filthy race. You're all the same. Not everything that Hitler did was right, but he destroyed the Jews, and he was right about that. Too many of you escaped the gas chamber. We'll finish what he started." Just goes to show how similar Nazism and Stalinism are.
Maybe not that bad, but certainly worse than IOTL. We'll see soon enough.
Frankly, I don't see why this policy can't be enacted OTL as well (for the stalinist apologetics, at least). Just saying.
I don't think there are any open Stalinists (or even Maoists) on this board.
There was a lot of unease in Western European Communist parties during the Slansky trial, for precisely this reason, and the Eastern bloc had to crank up the propaganda machine in order to quiet things down. Radosh and Milton make a good argument that the European Communist parties' sudden interest in the Rosenberg case was intended as a distraction from Slansky.
I'd imagine that a full-scale Stalinist pogrom would do a lot more damage, and I'm not sure any amount of propaganda would be enough to keep many Western Jewish Communists in line. The parties' internal politics might get pretty nasty if the Jews and non-Jews split over doctrinal issues.
guinazacity
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Imagine some communist leaderships in europe denouncing the USSR in anger over that. an even sharper rise of eurocommunism or a large influx on the ranks of the fourth international maybe?
The Jewish Communists are going to have some problems splitting however. Giving up one's faith isn't easy, and it's especially difficult for Jewish-American Communists, who had created a subculture that segregated them from other Jews (and to a certain extent other Communists). There will probably be three factions that emerge: those that keep the faith, those who leave Communism, and those that break with the Soviets but become Socialists, Trotskyists, or other non-orthodox Communists. Those divisions are certain to be very bitter.
Enemies of the People
Enemies of the People
Excerpt from Stalin's Hangman: The Life of Lavrentiy Beria
by Robert Service
In the aftermath of his stroke Stalin began accelerating the campaign against his perceived enemies. The first of these men to go was Beria. Relations between the two men had been fairly cold for a while. As Stalin's longest serving secret police chief Beria knew far too many of the old dictator's secrets. More importantly Beria seems to have had an idea as to what Stalin was planning, going so far as to tell Malenkov “Someday Stalin will crush us like he crushed Zinoviev and Bukharin.” Beria's fall followed the same pattern as most of Stalin's victims. On March 6th Stalin's magnates were allowed to visit him for the first time since his stroke; Beria was not invited. Indeed Stalin told his magnates that he didn't want to see Beria around anymore (the same order had been given several months prior with regards to Molotov and Mikoyan, who were also soon to fall). Sensing which way the wind was blowing Beria's former allies began to dissociate themselves from him. Malenkov refused to talk to him, while Deputy MGB Chief Sergo Goglidze (one of Beria's proteges in the “Caucasian Mafia”[1]) went so far as to write a letter to Stalin denouncing Beria as a spy. Finally on April 1st Beria was completely removed from power, removed from all his posts in the Soviet government. A week later he was arrested.Excerpt from Stalin's Hangman: The Life of Lavrentiy Beria
by Robert Service
Beria was sent to Sukhanovo Prison. There he was joined by many of his former colleagues. Ignatyev and Goglidze used the opportunity to arrest many of Beria's proteges, no doubt with the approval of Stalin. It was obvious that these men, once the most powerful in the Soviet secret police, were too dangerous to be given a public trial. Thus on June 30th they were tried in secret at Sukhanovka. There were 11 men on the dock: Beria, his successor Viktor Abakumov, Jewish MGB agents Nahum Eitingon and Andrei Sverdlov (the latter the son of Yakov Sverdlov, the first Soviet head of state), former Minister of State Control Vsevolod Merkulov, brothers Bogdan and Amayak Kobulov, Interior Minster of the Georgian SSR Vladimir Dekanozov, former head of Stalin's personal security Nikolai Vlasik, Pavel Meshik, and Lev Vlodzimirsky. Their trial lasted only a few hours and ended with all being sentenced to death. The next morning the men were loaded into a van and taken to a bunker outside of Moscow. To prove his loyalty even further Goglidze had volunteered to oversee the execution of his mentor and colleagues. A firing squad, armed with submachine guns, was gathered and the condemned men were chained to the wall. As he was being led to the wall Beria broke down, screaming “Please Sergo don't let me die” and weeping. Annoyed by this Goglidze had Beria gagged. Once everything was ready the execution squad opened fire. The last thing Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria ever said was a muffled scream, cut short by bullets ripping through his body.
Imperialist Plot Unearthed! Traitors in the Highest Levels of the Government!-Published August 3rd, 1953 in Pravda
Today the Tass News Agency reported the arrests of several high-ranking officials, including former Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, former People's Commissioner of Defense Kliment Voroshilov, Presidium member Anastas Mikoyan, and retired Marshal Semyon Budenny for their membership in a terrorist group known as the National Counterrevolutionary Front.
Investigation has established that for years these men have been agents of American, British, Zionist and Turkish intelligence. In this role they shared government and military secrets with foreign powers, organized acts of sabotage, organized the assassination of top Soviet leaders, and a litany of other unimaginable crimes. These insidious traitors helped the Doctor-Saboteurs in their murderous tasks and enabled countless spies to infiltrate all levels of the Soviet government. In this task they were aided by an incompetent police administration, which failed to grasp the evil they were witnessing[2].
Eternal vigilance is the price the Soviet people must maintain if they wish to remain free. Never forget that the capitalists cannot overwhelm us with force, and thus must undermine us with trickery. We must do everything in our power to remove spies and Fifth Columnists.
Excerpt from Stalin's Second Terror by Robert Conquest
The arrests of Molotov and the other thirteen members[3] of the imaginary “National Counterrevolutionary Front” marks the beginning of the Second Great Terror. These men (along with Lazar Kaganovich and Andrei Vyshinsky, both of whom were dismissed in October, and Soviet head of state Nikolai Shvernik) represented the last link between Stalin and era before he became supreme leader of the Soviet Union. It also paved the way for the purging of Soviet society. Stalin had come to believe that the Soviet people were turning weak. Their search for counterrevolutionaries, spies, and wreckers had become somewhat half hearted, and many people in the government, military, and the academies had become far too comfortable in their positions. It is quite possible that Stalin was looking ahead, to what he considered an inevitable conflict with the United States. In his mind purifying Soviet society was a necessity if they ever hoped to defeat capitalism.
On October 12th the defendants emerged from prison, looking haggard and both physically and spiritually exhausted. Like the defendants of the previous show trials they were little more than automatons reciting their lines perfectly (too perfectly in fact. When Safonov was interrogating Mikoyan he skipped a question about the Doctors' Plot. Mikoyan didn't seem to notice, and instead discussed his role in the plot in great detail. Stalin was furious at Safonov's mistake and had him arrested shortly after the trial ended). That they were tortured is obvious. Former Minister of Finance Arseny Zverev (who was given 25 years in the Gulag, but was released in 1962) later recalled “For days they reigned blows on me, leaving my legs and back broken and covered in scars. When this failed to break me they tied my hands behind my back and hung me from the ceiling by my wrists. After two days of this I was in such agony that I couldn't remember my own name.” The trial itself followed the standard Stalinist script. First the defendants linked themselves to the Doctor-Saboteurs (as Molotov put it “I helped Vinogradov become Comrade Stalin's personal physician”) and then began listing off every agency and group that they had worked with to overthrow the Soviet state (by my count the CIA, MI6, the Joint, the National Security Service of Turkey, Mossad, the Nazi intelligence organizations the Abwher and RSHA, and several White Russian emigre groups were all named as conspirators). The defendants confessed to a litany of ridiculous crimes, including attempts on Stalin's life, acts of sabotage, and collaboration with the Nazis. In true Stalinist fashion as the trial wrapped up citizens gathered in Red Square and signed petitions calling for all the defendants to be put to death. The defendants also asked for death; in Voroshilov's words “Having betrayed the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin in the most horrific way imaginable I am unworthy of life. Every moment that I am left breathing is an injustice that I hope will be rectified as quickly as possible.”
Unsurprisingly the court agreed with Voroshilov's assessment. On October 17th he, Molotov, Mikoyan, Budenny, and Andrei Andreyev (another Old Bolshevik) were sentenced to death (the rest were given sentences of 10-25 years in the Gulag). At 5:00 the next morning the guards came to lead the condemned men to the execution chambers. Budenny went to his death bravely, supposedly telling the executioner “Do your job properly. There's no sense in wasting two bullets on me.” He was alone in that regard, for the rest were in various states of panic. Mikoyan and Andreyev broke into tears as they were led down the hall, while Voroshilov collapsed in panic. Unwilling to drag him all the way to the execution chamber the guards simply killed him in his cell. Molotov's death was the most dramatic. As he was led out he began screaming “Someone must tell Koba! This is a mistake, please tell Koba!” (at his execution Grigory Zinoviev did basically the same thing). In his final terrified moments Molotov seems to have found God, for he asked the executioner if he could say a prayer. This request was denied (when Stalin heard the story he burst into laughter and mockingly imitated Molotov saying the Lord's Prayer).
Excerpt from Master of the House: Stalin in the 1950s by Konstantin Chernakov
The Trial of the 14 was just one of the signs of a new terror that emerged, a process the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn has compared to the breaking of the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation. The first step, taken on September 20th, was the rebirth of the MGB troika. A troika (which consisted of a regional Party secretary, a regional prosecutor, and a regional MGB chief) was a body that could hand down summary judgments. The accused didn't get to defend themselves and there was no right to appeal. The troikas were a key element in the First Great Purge and would soon prove their worth during the Second. A few days later the Special Council of the MGB (another body which enacted extrajudicial punishments) was given the right to hand down death sentences, something that had been forbidden after World War II. The third sign was the emptying of the prisons. In Moscow for instance the three great prisons (the Lubyanka, Lefortovo, and Buyruka) saw half of their inmates deported or killed in September and October. The final sign was Mikhail Suslov's visit to the Armenian capital of Yerevan on October 19th. It was a shot for shot reenactment of the trips Stalin sent his cronies on during the First Great Terror. Like the magnates on those trips Suslov came with a list of people (about 450) who were to be destroyed. The Party in Armenia was heavily associated with Mikoyan, and thus it now faced annihilation. By the time Suslov left 15 of the 18 members of the Armenian Presidium, 8 of the 9 members of the Secretariat, and the entire Central Control Commission had been imprisoned. The original 450 people had become 3000, most of whom were shot. It was an appropriately bloody beginning to Stalin's newest war on the Soviet people.
The most terrifying thing about the purges was their randomness. Some categories (such as the intelligentsia, those who had had contact with the West, and ex-prisoners) were targeted, but in many cases the investigators targeted whoever they could find. In part due to fear of the consequences of failing to meet their quotas the troikas would do anything, even going through a phonebook and arresting everyone on the first page they flipped to. The MGB were also required to unearth “conspiracies”, which cast the net even wider. Once a person was arrested they were often subjected to “The Conveyor” a system of torture designed to wear down the victim. A key part of the Conveyor was psychological. Prisoners would be forced to stand or sit without sleeping or moving for days at a time, or locked in boxes and rooms so small that there was no way to move. Being kept in such positions for days created agonizing pain, which when combined with complete exhaustion and other tortures was unbearable. Broken the prisoners would denounce their family, friends, and coworkers, who would then be brought in and tortured. Naturally this meant that the number of prisoners grew exponentially. By the end of the 1953 the troikas had arrested 250,000 people, having executed 90,000 of them.
[1] The Caucasian Mafia was a group of secret policemen that Beria brought with him when he replaced Yezhov. The name comes from the fact that most of them were Beria's associates in Georgia and the surrounding SSRs.
[2] This is the only reference to Beria after his secret execution.
[3] Defendants at the Trial of the 14:
Vyacheslav Molotov
Anastas Mikoyan
Kliment Voroshilov
Semyon Budenny
Arseny Zverev
Andrei Andreyev: Former Chairman of the Central Control Committee and a Vice Premier
Grigory Artyunov: Former 1st Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia
Candide Charkviani: Former 1st Secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia
Ivan Kairov: Former Minister of Education
Aleksandre Mirtskulava: Georgian-Abkhazian leader and ally of Beria
Ivan Kapitonov: Former 1st Secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee
Mikhail Yasnov: Former Chairman of the Moscow City Committee
Otto Kuusinen: Finnish Communist, former leader of the Karelo-Finnish SSR
Pyotr Pospelov: Former editor-in-chief of Pravda
Well, there are been war less bloody than this. It's a nice hit to the economical and technical infrastructure of the URSS...and all done by itself.
Naturally in the Warsaw Pact things will go in a very similar way, addiding damage and victim...and even in the west many will be accused in a obscene way to score point with Moscow and to deflect any blame.
Naturally in the Warsaw Pact things will go in a very similar way, addiding damage and victim...and even in the west many will be accused in a obscene way to score point with Moscow and to deflect any blame.
The demographic crisis Russia is currently suffering from is also going to be that much worse, given that a huge number of Russians are going to be killed or sent to die in the Gulag.
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