Stalin146;s archipelago

Fifty years ago, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili or Josef Stalin as he later re-christened himself died in Moscow. The horrors unleashed d...

Fifty years ago, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili or Josef Stalin as he later re-christened himself died in Moscow. The horrors unleashed during Stalin8217;s rule of Russia are still being unearthed. Stalin which literally translates as 8220;man of steel8221; was responsible for the deaths of thousands of artists, scientists, priests and intellectuals who perished in the notorious Gulag. The Great Leap Forward into industrial growth and the promised heightened production of the collective farms were only the outward face of the Soviet Union. Within, the state had become a paranoid and militarist entity that systematically crushed all dissent, a process which Alexander Solzhenitsyn has written about evocatively. By the 1960s Stalinism had become discredited in the international community, except of course in the eyes of our own revolutionary comrades, who continued to name their children after someone whom the rest of the world denounced as a mass murderer.

After the disillusionment of the Chinese invasion, when the Communist Party of India split in 1964, the CPI remained loyal to the Soviet Union and broadly to a Stalinist alliance of bourgeoisie and working class. Yet notwithstanding the armed uprisings of Telengana and Punnappra-Vayalar in the independence period, the CPI was simply unable to re-invent itself to suit Indian conditions in its obsession with comrade Stalin8217;s teachings. The party line led the CPI to commit the 8220;tactical error8221; of not joining the Quit India movement, for which, and for other 8220;mistakes8221;, it has been forced to apologise.

Today, Stalin8217;s children have been overtaken by market, mandir and mandal and are left clinging to Das Kapital wondering why the workers and peasants are no longer paying them any attention. The physicist Andrei Sakharvov once wrote about the 8220;type of hypnosis8221; that afflicted many educated people during Stalin8217;s rule, a hypnosis that made them blind to the dictator8217;s savage regime. A similar hypnosis obviously affected our own comrades, who in their hero-worship of a dictator became blind to their own country.