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Joseph StalinPros:Collectivized agriculture and ended famines. Did so despite enormous resistance. Without this, industrialization would have been impossible.Industrialized the nation, enabling the creation of weapons to defeat Hitler. Hitler’s plan was to conquer and exterminate all Jews and communists, half of the Slavs, and enslave the remainder.Annexed the Eastern Bloc and moved fascist collaborators, bringing stability to these regions for decades to come.Took a semi feudal, peasant agrarian nation and turned it into the world’s second largest industrial economy, doubled the life expectancy, brought freedom from homelessness, healthcare, education, retirement, guaranteed employment, free daycare, and other benefits to all citizens. After Stalinism was abandoned by Khrushchev the death warrant for the USSR was signed. It would only be a matter of time.Cons:In hindsight the purges should not have happened.The Doctor’s Plot was caused by atherosclerosis, as deduced by his private physician on autopsy. This can cause a strengthening of some inclinations, such as suspiciousness becoming paranoia.The Katyn Massacre was cruel.USSR mortality numbers2.76 million. This list is here, with sources: death toll 2.pdfThis is the death toll of the actions of the USSR.The Holomodor was not intentional and should not be counted. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?All the other numbers you are used to hearing have been shown to be inflated and exaggerated, many fabricated.This document is based on reliable research from respected authors and official figures.The Black Book of Communism has been shown to be a fraud. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most biased book you’ve ever read?This includes the Great Purges, the NKVD Polish repressions, the transfer of various populations that resulted in death, the gulags, etc. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Why did Stalin kill the kulaks?Gulag numbers are here: number of gulag.pdf 1,053,829 died in the gulag. But it must also be remembered that this includes people who died from natural causes. The death toll went up during WWII because everyone in the nation was on food rations so there was no starvation, but sick people and older people sometimes succumbed out of the stress. There were also outbreaks of diseases that caused deaths. Solzehnitsyn Lied pdf.pdf,The Great Purges included 777, 975. But this includes a large number that were sentenced to execution but it was never carried out. The Great Purges were not as top down as one might guess. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Was Stalin central to the Great Purge of the 1930's?The PurgesIt has been shown that the purges were more complicated than one might imagine. Russia had always been under great pressure from attack on all sides. Within a few years Russia had seen the Tsar overthrown, a bloody civil war sponsored by 18 imperialist nations, conspiracies within his own party as discovered earlier in an undercover sting called “Operation Trust.” 37 volumes of conspiracies and treachery were discovered. The intelligence services would arrest people and then torture them until they admitted they knew something, believing that something had to be happening given the threats from outside the country, particularly the Nazis and Japan. People would say anything to make the torture stop. This led to more arrests and tortures. Members of the party, the factory workers, and everyone in the society believed there were conspiracies afoot. Stalin was terrified of the revolution being toppled. He also knew that Germany planned on invading for certain by 1939 and the country was not ready. Production shortfalls led to the belief by members of the party that there was intentional sabotage. This led to the estimation that based on intelligence (faulty) that it was “for certain” there were a certain number of traitors. This led to quotas. The individual members of the party at the lower levels began to increase their numbers to give the impression of loyalty so they wouldn’t be blamed. The entire thing became its own system of feedback loops. As documents have not been released it is not known how many conspiracies there were, or how they could know. This is not the first time this has happened in history.During the Red Scare in America a sense of great fear and paranoia overcame the American public. Each accusation led to more, and the paroxysm of fear overcame the bourgeoisie in America. It reached critical mass, ruining the lives of many before people took a step back and stopped it. This also happened with the ramp up to the Iraq war after 911. America was terrified after the attack. It felt powerless. It was reported that Dick Cheney almost had a nervous breakdown. The response was to pressure the intelligence services to find out who caused 911 and to root out the terrorists. This led to expectations. The intelligence services began to see conspiracies where they did not exist. Anything that could remotely be seen as negative was. There became a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. This led to a mass hysteria in the U.S. It was rumored that Saddam was developing biological weapons that would be released to terrorists. The U.S. invaded Iraq. It would be found there were no WMDs. The U.S. also started the “War on Terror,” which saw conspiracies where they did not exist. Torture began to be used to get information, but this information was unreliable. It led to false accusations which led to more arrests. Then drone attacks, indefinite detention, and black op cites. The large scale surveillance program began. Likewise, the Salem Witch Trials took on a similar tenor. Mass accusations, paranoia, murders, and more repression. Feedback loops of torture, accusations, more torture followed. But somehow they never seemed able to get to the root of the problem. Enemies were everywhere and nowhere. People were tortured with the expectation that they would say something incriminating. Protestations of innocence were regarded as lies. But then the torture led to them getting whatever they wanted to hear because torture is an unreliable way to get information as people will say anything to make the torture stop.Released documents show no disparities in Stalin’s agreement to the repressions and his own personal thoughts. They confirmed he believed they were real. There was no indication that they repressions were done for cynical, self serving purposes. Stalin knew that purging the military would make the country more weak, but he feared conspiracies more. The conventional wisdom was that people were working with Trotsky, who was collaborating with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet Union. After the civil war there were a number of Tsarists, fascists, and others who had indeed has some conspiracies. But the extent of this is unknown. And it wasn’t just Stalin that expressed these fears. The fears went all the way down to the factory worker level.Source: The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, by James HarrisThe issue of Stalin’s legacy and the Soviet Union is an interesting study in how we know what we know1. Historians are influenced by the cultural norms and bourgeois influences of society. History is also written by the victors.2. Propaganda has a cognitive framing effect. It creates associations between images and narratives that are false. But we see propaganda based narratives so much, and they are repeated by so many, they become the prevailing cognitive “frame” used when thinking about an issue.3. Goebbels talked about this in reference to propaganda. Edward Bernays was one of the leading advertising experts in the U.S. He used Freudian psychoanalysis to tap into the deepest and most basic subconscious desires and urges in people. Prior to this advertisers relied upon rationality to sell a product. When selling cars they would talk about the practicality of the car, the build quality, etc. After Bernays you would see a car commercial with someone driving fast, a beautiful woman in the car, and images related to status. You might see the person driving the BMW going to a cocktail party in a swanky part of the city while a valet drives the car away. Beautiful people await. All of these are appeals to subconscious desires, such as status, sex appeal, money and power. Bernays used these techniques to convince America to stop being isolationist and enter the WWI. Goebbels directed an enormous amount of energy creating propaganda against the Soviet Union and communism. After WWII the U.S. government hired former Nazis to work on “fighting communism” and creating propaganda against the Soviet Union. The U.S. even waived prosecution against them for war crimes in exchange for these services. The U.S. government also used its resources to demonize Stalin and communism. Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation that brought in mainstream journalists to demonize the Soviet Union. This was only one of many anti-communist operations.4. The primary purpose of schooling is socialization. This means teaching students to value the things required to work in a modern industrial and office environment. The bells are like a work bell. Listening to the teacher and following directions is like following a line foreman. Being on time means arriving to work on time. Even lunch break is similar. Socialization also requires conformity. This means accepting the narrative espoused by the teacher in history.5. There were many primary source documents about actions done by Stalin and the USSR only just released within the last few decades. And many are still not released. The primary narrative about Stalin was written by Robert Conquest. Conquest was a rabid anti-communist. Due to a lack of historical records and the influence of Nazi propaganda from the Hearst publishing machine and others, there was significant “gap filling” used in writing his narrative. This was the “frame” for other historians to consider, including Applebaum. This narrative became so ingrained in the minds of people that others started repeating it, such as journalists and other writers. This narrative also happened to go along well with demonizing the Cold War enemy. The military industrial complex depended on the evils of communism to justify massive defense budgets. Presidents also wanted to use the Cold War and Soviet “aggression” to justify wars in Korea and Vietnam. Now that the Soviet Union is gone Russia was quickly replaced as the “bad guy” to justify the bloated military budget of the U.S. The real reason for the bloated military budget was economic—many representatives in Congress have military bases, production of armaments, or have constituents that join the military for jobs—thus the military industrial complex has become an essential part of the U.S. economy.6. The “Evil Empire” narrative of the Soviet Union and Stalin have become so ingrained that academics that look at new information and attempt to correct the historical record are labeled “Stalin apologists,” which they equate to being a Holocaust denier. Thus there is great peer pressure and risk of becoming a pariah due to scorn from others that don’t want to be associated with someone like that. Many scholars would rather just not bother with it.7. In the Soviet Union the oligarchs and elites benefit from the demonization of Stalin and the USSR because it is against their interest to have the Soviet Union resurrected. Marx taught that the social classes of different nations have more similarites in interests than do different nations. Proof of this is how the artistocracy in Europe would sometimes not even know the language of the nation they were governing, such as Catherine the Great, who had to learn Russian.8. In many respects Hitler and the Nazis did more to harm communism than anyone. By effectively using propaganda against communism it created the false “mainstream narrative” in the West that communism “Doesn’t work,” “killed 100 million people,” “starved and imprisoned millions,” and “always leads to mass death.” Attempts by historians to attack these lies using newly released primary sources is met with eye rolls, claims of being “The same as the Holocaust deniers.” It even becomes a form of moral judgment against the person stating the truth, “What kind of person denies such atrocities? Do you support mass murder?” Thus members of the left distance themselves from Lenin, Stalin, and the Soviet Union. And by cutting themselves off from the rich writings of Lenin and Stalin one loses an important source of real historical examples of the achievements of Marxism Leninism. A similar example would be if the Apostles were labeled as sex offenders and mass murderers. The de-Stalinization by Khrushchev in his “Secret Speech” had a devastating effect on the faith in the Soviet Union. In fact it was so devastating it was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In fact during the Gorbachev period dissidents played a litany of anti-Stalin and anti-USSR propaganda on TV. It was this and the showing of the lives of rich American movie stars that led the people to lose their faith in the Soviet Union and socialism. Sadly, they would find out all too brutally what capitalism really meant—austerity, starvation, homelessness, massive inflation, and poverty. To this day Russia has not recovered. A recent poll showed that 60% of those living in the former Soviet Union said they miss it. Stalin has a 55% approval rating. Many now say that had they known what would happen they would have fought hard for the Soviet Union.The GulagIS THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO BY ALEXANDER SOLZHENITSYN AN ACCURATE DEPICTION OF WHAT THE SOVIET UNION WAS LIKE?No.His wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIAKenneth Neil Cameron in his short biography on Stalin:"[Stalin's role in the war] was recognized by the Soviet people, and by the end of the war he was regarded as the savior of the nation.The record shows that the tribute was well deserved. Had Stalin not won the fight for industrialization and defeated the Trotskyists and Bukharinites, the USSR would have become a Nazi province. Had he not had the foresight to build a metallurgical industry in the Urals, the Red Armies could not have been supplied with arms. Had he not industrialized the economy and introduced mechanized farming, he would have had neither a base for producing arms nor a mass of soldiers trained in the operation of machinery. Had he not signed a nonaggression treaty with Germany, the USSR might have been attacked 22 months sooner. Had he not moved the Soviet armies into Poland, the German attack would have begun even closer to Moscow. Had he not subdued General Mannerheim's Finland, Leningrad would have fallen. Had he not ordered the transfer of 1,400 factories from the west to the east, the most massive movement of its kind in history, Russian industry would have received a possibly fatal blow. Had he not built up the army and equipped it with modern arms, it would have been destroyed on the frontiers.He did not, of course, do these things alone. They were Party decisions and Party actions, and behind the Party throughout was the power, courage, and intelligence of the working class. But Stalin stood at all times as the central, individual directing force, his magnificent courage and calm foresight inspiring the whole nation."From Stalin: Man of Contradiction, pg. 107 (1987)Alexander Finnegan's answer to What if the devil met Stalin?Was Joseph Stalin a bad person?Growing up I was terrified of my father. He had a terrible temper. Whenever I heard the sound of footsteps I knew that pain wouldn’t be far behind. My heart would race. I just had to be strong and take it. If I cried he made it worse.“I’ll give you something to cry about” he would say, the smell of alcohol on his breath.I developed smallpox. It scarred my cheeks badly.“Hey Pock Pock” the kids at school would say, mocking me. I hated them, but if I cried it made it worse. I had to be strong like I was dealing with my father. I learned that crying won’t get you anywhere. You have to be strong, like steel.I was very devout. My mother entered me into the seminary where I studied theology. I went to every mass and devotion. It was quiet there, peaceful.One day I came across the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in a bookstore near the cafe. I had never seen anything like that. He managed to perfectly capture the injustice I saw in this world. He offered scientific answers as to why capitalism was exploiting people. On Friday afternoons I used to go for a walk through the city. The aristocrats would ride by in their carriages, the women dressed up so fancily. Not long after the workers would pass by, their clothes tattered, dirt on their faces, weary. They used to spend most of their money at the bar after work. Kind of like my father did. He was unhappy too. He hated his job.“Why do some do so well while others suffer?” Marx offered explanations that made sense. I spent my free time reading more and more. I started talking with the other seminarians about Marxism. Some were interested, but many were against it. One of them turned me in. He was extremely conservative.I was summoned.“Our kingdom is not of this earth” the formation director said to me. I told him about the ideas of Marx, and that there is hope for something now, in this world. After a meeting with the other supervising priests I was dismissed for passing out Marxist literature.Fast forward a few years…The desire to make change didn’t go away. It had become a spiritual matter for me to stop the exploitation, alienation and oppression of capitalism. If others couldn’t do it, I was going to damn well try. I joined an upstart group of other Marxists called the Bolsheviks. I met Trotsky and Lenin. Trotsky was a genius, and also very eccentric. He believed in free love, communal living, communal raising of children, and he was an atheist. He wrote extensively and was extremely energetic. Lenin had a near religious devotion to Marx. He had so much charisma. People were inspired just listening to him. He believed that with the right people, with those willing to do what it takes, he could overthrow the Tsar and institute a Marxist society.1924The multiple gunshots Lenin suffered from assassins took everything out of him. There were times when he looked half dead from exhaustion. But he kept pushing himself, afraid everything would fall apart without him. I could tell, as could others, that his health was declining. It also became clear that someone would have to assume his position. Trotsky naturally wanted it. I think he expected it. Some expected him too, while others thought it should be me. I wasn’t the public speaker that Trotsky was. But I am far more practical, especially in administrative matters.We all knew that socialism could never be safe so long as there were even one capitalist nation on earth. The Paris Commune taught us that. The imperialists would stop at nothing. But Trotsky sometimes didn’t know when to slow down. He wanted worldwide revolution, all the time. That wasn’t the right way to do it. You have to strengthen the home front before you engage in never ending war. When Lenin’s time came I feared it was going to get ugly. Trotsky wasn’t going to happily go away if he didn’t run the whole show.circa 1930Germany hasn’t turned out well. The Nazis are growing in power. They have hypnotized the nation. Judging by the speeches Hitler is giving it won’t be long before there is another war. In Mein Kampf Hitler laid out very clearly his hatred for Jews and communists. He calls them “JudeoBolsheviks.” We are 50–100 years behind the West in industrialization. Russian troops were slaughtered in WWI. We have no tanks, no planes, nothing. We have 5–10 years to prepare by industrializing or they will smash us.I ordered a 5 Year Plan to industrialize. It became clear that the only way we were going to be able to feed those in the cities after moving them from the farms was to collectivize and update the farming techniques. I convinced many members of the party but some are unconvinced. After the announcement of the collectivization the kulaks went crazy. They slaughtered half the livestock needed to farm. Some killed the families of government officials. They encouraged the farmers to grow less food.“They wanna take 30% for the cities, we’ll grow 30% less,” they chanted.Clearly they weren’t math majors. Many were hiding grain to speculate on the prices, hoping requisition fees would go up. People in the cities are going to starve and these people don’t give a damn. I ordered the soldiers to assist the turning over of the grain. I had to have them removed or everybody would have starved. The Western media is calling this genocide. Genocide would have been if I just had all of them shot, but I didn’t.To make things worse there was a famine in the Ukraine from drought, sabotage, an increase in the birth rate, and more people in the cities not farming. Goebbels told Hearst, the newspaper publisher in America that I caused the famine intentionally. They even used recycled photos from earlier famines to really play it up. I ordered everyone in the nation to be on rations until the famine subsided. They brought me a copy of the newspaper. Goebbels has only the best working with him. And Hearst might as well have a swastika tattooed on his arm. They have a contract together to publish pro Nazi fake news.Some criticized me for collectivizing. But after the famine I was proven right. But tales of me and the “Holodomor” never went away.Circa 1937I received word that Trotsky had been collaborating with the Japanese and the Germans to overthrow me. Trotskyites, Tsarists, and social democrats have been conspiring. Even some members of the military are in on it. I had their phones bugged, and my spies have confirmed it. A few years prior we ran an undercover operation called Operation Trust. We discovered a vast array of conspiracies, spies, double agents, and plots seeking to overthrow the government. It filled 37 volumes! Later we would discover even more disturbing news. What hurt the worst was that Tukhachevsky and Bukharin were in on it! Who can you trust? I have already had attempts on my life. Why should it be different for me than Lenin? He took three bullets. The Americans are wanting us destroyed too. We have had sanctions for years. They won’t accept gold, only grain for payment. They want us to starve. Even during the famine they would take no less than grain. I lock my room at night. Nobody is permitted to enter. The American media said I was “paranoid.” How can you be paranoid when you have had attempts on your life? You can’t win with anybody. You have to remain strong, because you are fundamentally alone. I have terrible dreams.It became clear that there was a cancer in the party. And if not cut out it would destroy the whole body of state. I ordered a purge to root out the conspirators. Trotsky fled. I put the top officials on trial. The evidence was clear. Most confessed publicly. We had journalists from America there too. They admitted to conspiring to overthrow the government, do away with the collectivization of agriculture, reinstate the NEP and the let the kulaks and private property be, and roll back the gains we made for the people. The problem is that there was no going back. The Germans were going to attack. We weren’t growing enough food to feed those industrializing the nation in the cities. But without that we wouldn’t have the tanks, planes, guns and other arms we need to fight the Germans. The Lend Lease from the Americans can only go so far. Losing was not an option. Losing meant extermination at the hands of the Germans. Bukharin said he felt sorry for the kulaks having been moved. But how sorry would he feel when the Germans brought worse atrocities? You have to be strong. You can’t let emotion get in the way. Nazis don’t care about compassion. It is just like when I knew my father was coming up the stairs. Crying only made it worse. You just have to face it, no matter how hard it was going to be. Meanwhile the purges started to take on a life of their own at the lower levels. Some made false accusations as to be spiteful. I issued an order to reign it in. The process was ugly, but there was no other choice. It was a horrible time. People don’t know what it is like to live during these times of crisis. You have to make very tough choices. FDR has had to do the same thing. All leaders do.Most of the purges involved firings. The more serious offenders were sent to the gulag. The West doesn’t have anything like them. They are work camps. Men and women are together. They aren’t cells. People move around, go to movies, can write letters, go to cultural events, and do other things. But they are expected to work hard. During the war we were low on food so everyone had rations. The older and sicker people didn’t hold up well. There have been outbreaks of typhoid. Most people admitted go home. They are paid for their work, and the workday is 8–10 hours per day. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these Tsarists didn’t write a bunch of lies about his experience to garner support from the West. They would probably even give him a Nobel Prize in literature!Sometimes the weight of carrying all this feels like it is too much. I have even resigned several times. But the people won’t let me. I don’t know what is going to happen after I am gone. I need to implement some way to weed out corruption, greed, and stagnation. It has to be a meritocracy and remain ideologically sound. If not the Soviet Union will fall. I see so much incompetence, weakness, and dishonesty around me. The future depends on our future leaders. All it takes is even one leader not up to the task, someone foolish and easily wooed by approval from the West. Someone who trusts too much. Capitalists can never be trusted.People think I have no feelings. They think it is easy, or that I have god like control over everything. I am not a dictator. I have to work with the Politburo too. I feel like the only adult in the room. Somebody has to be a steady hand at the ship of state. The only one who really understood was FDR. Churchill is a sop. Given the number of fascists in the Eastern Bloc I worked out a deal to bring them in to the Soviet Union at Yalta. I can’t leave fascist governments in control at the border. We would never be safe like that. We can’t let Germany reunite, either. Germans are too aggressive. They are better off split up. In fact I had to work very hard to keep the spies and operatives out. Truman told me about the A bomb at Potsdam and used it just to prove the point.I try to enjoy the little things—a glass of Georgian fruit wine, a good cigar, or spending time with family. For my birthday they wanted to read one of my old poems that I wrote in my youth, but I was too embarrassed. It feels like those days were so long ago.Somebody asked me what would happen if the Soviet Union was destroyed.“There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries. The working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost,” I said.I pray that day never comes.I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy.— Ioseb Besarionis dze JughashviliSourcesContents Another View of Stalin by Ludo Martenshttps://mltheory.files.wordpress... Kruschev Lied by Grover FurrS-300 in Syria – a preliminary assessment...Stop Spreading Nazi Propaganda: on HolodomorOrigins of the Great PurgesNew Study Supports Idea Stalin Was PoisonedLet’s Be Honest – Stalin Was Less of a Criminal Than Churchill, Truman, and LBJWhy doesn’t the Soviet Union exist any more? Part 5: Perestroika and glasnost - Invent the Futurenumber of gulag.pdfSolzehnitsyn Lied pdf.pdfLeft Anticommunism: The Unkindest Cuthttps://msuweb.montclair.edu/~fu...Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland in September 1939?The Holodomor Hoax: Joseph Stalin’s Crime That Never Took PlaceAlexander Finnegan's answer to How much of Stalin's paranoia was based on actual assassination plots?Alexander Finnegan's answer to How true is the claim that most Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is regurgitated directly from Nazi propaganda?Alexander Finnegan's answer to Did Stalin really kill 60 million people?Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most insane fact about the present that would be nearly impossible to describe to someone in from the past?https://www.quora.com/share/Why-has-history-forgotten-that-Stalin-had-signed-a-peace-pact-agreement-with-Hitler-to-invade-Poland-after-Germany-did-meaning-Stalin-was-a-willing-Axis-member-until-Hitler-attacked-the-Soviet-Union-1?ch=10&share=63d3b959Alexander Finnegan's answer to What are the least known facts about Communist Russia?

FearStalin was motivated primarily by fear, not hate. He had aerophobia, the fear of flying and only got on a plane a few times in his life.In 1925, a group of high-ranking Soviet officials based in the Caucasus crashed near Tiflis (Tbilisi) while flying to Sukhumi. Leo Trotsky was meant to be on the same flight, but at the last moment decided to take the train. Prominent Soviet military theoretician Vladimir Triandafillov was killed in another air crash in 1931. Two years later the same fate befell one of the creators of the Soviet Air Force Pyotr Baranov.Stalin was shocked by these deaths, and personally initiated internal commissions to find out why the tragedies occurred. From time to time he even banned leading officials from traveling by plane. Those who ignored him were severely reprimanded.However, there were two times when the Soviet leader took to the skies. In 1943 he attended the Tehran Conference and flew there and back via Baku. Stalin refused to fly in any Soviet aircraft and arrived in Iran’s capital on an American Douglas C-47 Skytrain (belonging to the Soviet Air Force) with an escort of 27 fighters.3 things Stalin feared mostHe also suffered from toxicophobia, and this increased during the Great Purge. This fear was well founded, considering he was poisoned to death by one of his top lietenants.New Study Supports Idea Stalin Was PoisonedStalin also suffered from hypnophobia, the fear of dying in his sleep. He stayed up late every night and worked until he passed out from exhaustion.During the Great Purge he was absolutely terrified of a coup, as were other members of the society, who voted for the purges. Stalin was presented with intelligence reports claiming there were real threats and that a coup was inevitable.It has been shown that the purges were more complicated than one might imagine. Russia had always been under great pressure from attack on all sides. Within a few years Russia had seen the Tsar overthrown, a bloody civil war sponsored by 18 imperialist nations, conspiracies within his own party as discovered earlier in an undercover sting called “Operation Trust.” 37 volumes of conspiracies and treachery were discovered. The intelligence services would arrest people and then torture them until they admitted they knew something, believing that something had to be happening given the threats from outside the country, particularly the Nazis and Japan. People would say anything to make the torture stop. This led to more arrests and tortures. Members of the party, the factory workers, and everyone in the society believed there were conspiracies afoot. Stalin was terrified of the revolution being toppled. He also knew that Germany planned on invading for certain by 1939 and the country was not ready. Production shortfalls led to the belief by members of the party that there was intentional sabotage. This led to the estimation that based on intelligence (faulty) that it was “for certain” there were a certain number of traitors. This led to quotas. The individual members of the party at the lower levels began to increase their numbers to give the impression of loyalty so they wouldn’t be blamed. The entire thing became its own system of feedback loops. As documents have not been released it is not known how many conspiracies there were, or how they could know. This is not the first time this has happened in history.During the Red Scare in America a sense of great fear and paranoia overcame the American public. Each accusation led to more, and the paroxysm of fear overcame the bourgeoisie in America. It reached critical mass, ruining the lives of many before people took a step back and stopped it. This also happened with the ramp up to the Iraq war after 911. America was terrified after the attack. It felt powerless. It was reported that Dick Cheney almost had a nervous breakdown. The response was to pressure the intelligence services to find out who caused 911 and to root out the terrorists. This led to expectations. The intelligence services began to see conspiracies where they did not exist. Anything that could remotely be seen as negative was. There became a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. This led to a mass hysteria in the U.S. It was rumored that Saddam was developing biological weapons that would be released to terrorists. The U.S. invaded Iraq. It would be found there were no WMDs. The U.S. also started the “War on Terror,” which saw conspiracies where they did not exist. Torture began to be used to get information, but this information was unreliable. It led to false accusations which led to more arrests. Then drone attacks, indefinite detention, and black op cites. The large scale surveillance program began. Likewise, the Salem Witch Trials took on a similar tenor. Mass accusations, paranoia, murders, and more repression. Feedback loops of torture, accusations, more torture followed. But somehow they never seemed able to get to the root of the problem. Enemies were everywhere and nowhere. People were tortured with the expectation that they would say something incriminating. Protestations of innocence were regarded as lies. But then the torture led to them getting whatever they wanted to hear because torture is an unreliable way to get information as people will say anything to make the torture stop.Released documents show no disparities in Stalin’s agreement to the repressions and his own personal thoughts. They confirmed he believed they were real. There was no indication that they repressions were done for cynical, self serving purposes. Stalin knew that purging the military would make the country more weak, but he feared conspiracies more. The conventional wisdom was that people were working with Trotsky, who was collaborating with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet Union. After the civil war there were a number of Tsarists, fascists, and others who had indeed has some conspiracies. But the extent of this is unknown. And it wasn’t just Stalin that expressed these fears. The fears went all the way down to the factory worker level.Source: The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, by James HarrisStalin ApologizedKonstantin Rokossovsky was one of the great heroes of WWII, the mastermind behind the defeat of the German army. Rokossovsky respected Stalin. Stalin even apologized to him for his imprisonment.“It happened during one of dinners in the Stalin residence in Kuncewo. The whole elite of the Soviet Union was invited, including most important activists of the communist party and the highest ranking officers of the Red Army. Stalin in his snow-white uniform stood up and walked slowly to Rokossovsky’s chair.“Were you beaten down there?”“Yes…”Stalin turned around in silence, walked outside to his garden and came back with the bouquet of thorny roses. He didn't cut them by scissors, he used his own hands. They were completely bloodied. He gave the roses to Rokossovsky with those bloodied hands:“I’m sorry…”Brain disease contributed to his paranoiaIt's one of the great questions of history, and indeed philosophy: what does it take to create a Hitler or a Stalin? What circumstances does it require to produce such evil? Newly released diaries from one of Joseph Stalin's personal doctors suggest that, in Stalin's case, illness could have helped to contribute to the paranoia and ruthlessness of his rule over the Soviet Union.Alexander Myasnikov was one of the doctors called to Stalin's deathbed when the dictator fell ill in 1953, and, in diaries that have been kept secret up to now, he claims that Stalin suffered from a brain illness that could have impaired his decision-making."The major atherosclerosis in the brain, which we found at the autopsy, should raise the question of how much this illness – which had clearly been developing over a number of years – affected Stalin's health, his character and his actions," Dr Myasnikov wrote in his diaries, excerpts of which were published for the first time in the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets yesterday. "Stalin may have lost his sense of good and bad, healthy and dangerous, permissible and impermissible, friend and enemy. Character traits can become exaggerated, so that a suspicious person becomes paranoid," the doctor wrote.In what could be another fascinating insight into the inner world of Stalin, purported excerpts from the secret diaries of Lavrentiy Beria, one of the most unpleasant and bloodthirsty members of Stalin's inner circle, also surfaced this week. The Beria diaries, excerpts of which appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, are to be released by a controversial publishing house that has previously published books whitewashing Stalin-era crimes, and there is no independent verification yet that they are genuine. If they are, they would prove invaluable to historians as an insight into the warped mind of Beria as well as into the inner workings of the Soviet hierarchy.The diaries refer to Stalin by his revolutionary nickname "Koba" and are filled with coarse language and swearing. The entries start in 1938, when Stalin called on Beria to leave his native Georgia and travel to Moscow to work as the deputy to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the feared NKVD secret police and known as "the bloodthirsty dwarf". The NKVD had just conducted the "Great Purge", when hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens had been shot.Yezhov himself was shot in 1940 and Beria took over his position as head of the NKVD, becoming one of Stalin's most trusted lieutenants.The alleged diaries occasionally show a softer side to Beria, expressing regret about the life he had ended up leading. "I like nature, and fishing, but when is there time for that now?" he wrote during the height of the Second World War, in 1943.Beria's diaries, if genuine, also shed new light on events during the Second World War. When in August 1942 Winston Churchill travelled to Moscow to meet Stalin, the allies were suspicious of each other, and Beria claims he advised Stalin that the best way to win concessions from the British Prime Minister would be to get him drunk.After the visit, Beria wrote: "These are not funny times, but we have all had a laugh. Koba told me that my advice about Churchill came in handy. Churchill agreed, got completely drunk and lost the plot. Koba told us about it and laughed... Afterwards, he said: 'It's good when you know the weaknesses of your enemy in advance.'"On the evening of 10 May 1945, the day after Soviet troops celebrated victory, Beria notes that Stalin started crying. "Again we spent the evening with Koba... He was even softer, and he even had to brush away a tear."Stalin died in 1953, and Beria was arrested shortly afterwards and shot, before the Soviet Union began a gradual retreat from the bloody excesses of the Stalin period. "I would suggest that the cruelty and suspicion of Stalin, his fear of enemies... was created to a large extent by atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries," Dr Myasnikov wrote in his diaries. "The country was being run, in effect, by a sick man."Striking notes: Extracts from the diariesAlexander Myasnikov* "I would suggest that the cruelty and suspicion of Stalin, his fear of enemies... was created to a large extent by atherosclerosis of the cerebral arteries. The country was being run, in effect, by a sick man."* "Death was expected at any moment. Finally it came, at 9.50pm on 5 March... Party leaders quietly filed into the room, as well as Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, son Vasily and security detail. Everyone stood without moving in ceremonial silence, for a long time. I don't even know how long – maybe half an hour or more."Lavrenty Beria* "I remember the picnics Koba [Stalin] and I had in the mid-1930s. He with his big moustache, and me all young and thin, in a shirt with an open collar, chopping wood for the fire. And fresh trout. It was good back then."* "Today I saw tears in Koba's eyes for the first time. I told him about Stalingrad, about how people are fighting. When I reach that point, I just swear a lot and feel better. But he tries to keep it together, and what about his heart? He couldn't hold it in."* "[Churchill] got completely drunk and lost the plot. Koba told us about it and laughed... Afterwards, he said: 'It's good when you know the weaknesses of your enemy in advance.'"Source: Brain illness could have affected Stalin's actions, secret diariesStalin Offered TroopsPrior to signing the non agression pact with Hilter, Stalin offered a million troops to stop Hitler from invading. But the Poles refused to allow passage for them, and the offer was declined. Not yet ready to get into a full scale war and hoping to buy time, Stalin signed the non agression pact. It was not a military coalition to fight together, it was a peace agreement. In fact the USSR was not the only signer of this agreement type, it was the last to do so.Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler's pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany's other neighbours.The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin's generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.But the British and French side - briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals - did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 - just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin's offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents."This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement," said Gen Sotskov, 75.The Soviet offer - made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov - would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany's borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals."Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany - double the number Hitler had at the time," said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. "This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks."When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain's lack of preparation for the looming conflict.The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians."The detail of Stalin's offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance."The declassified archives - which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 - reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938."At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on," Gen Sotskov said."It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia's surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country."Stalin's sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. "The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome."Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 - in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annexe the Sudetenland - Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country's military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression."Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler's signature on it," Gen Sotksov said.The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 - five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia - suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin's controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency."It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming," said Gen Sotskov.A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.It was only two years later, following Hitler's Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about - by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.Source: Stalin 'planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact'Alexander Finnegan's answer to Was Joseph Stalin a bad person?The HolomodorDuring the Ukrainian famine Stalin actually did all he could to alleviate the famine in the Ukraine. The famine was caused by drought, sabotage from kulaks, a spike in birth rates prior to the famine, and the fact that famines were common in this region for centuries.Stalin ordered grain sent to alleviate the famine.This was the farming technique used prior to Stalin’s collectivization.Yields were greatly improved by updating farming technology and collectivizing, permitting the industrialization of the cities by successfully reducing the needed number of farmers.Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?Tales of it being deliberate were lies fabricated by Nazis and disseminated by the American Nazi supporter and newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. Photos from previous famines were used to put together the story.Alexander Finnegan's answer to How true is the claim that most Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union is regurgitated directly from Nazi propaganda?The GulagSolzhenitsyn’s wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s“Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA

Few people know what communism even means.Communism—Marx said that capitalism will give rise to automation to eliminate labor costs. Competition will lead to automation. But this will displace so many jobs that unemployment will rise, causing misery and suffering that would make the Great Depression look like nothing. People will rise up and seize the means of production for themselves. Workers will own the means of production and manage themselves. A new age will begin, the age of communism. Society will become moneyless, stateless, and classless. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”“Communism”—colloquialism. In America the term “communist” is used to describe Marxist Leninist socialist nations like the USSR, China, and Cuba. As indicated by the definition above, these nations did not meet the definition of true communism as they still used money and still had a state. Colloquialisms are words that are everyday meanings used by people but which are not accurate.Socialism—Workers own the means of production. There is still money and a state.2. There were millionaires in the Soviet Union. And no, this was not illegal.3. Under socialism, everyone is required to work unless they are sick, elderly, or a caregiver. Jobs were guaranteed. Many believe that under socialism some just lounge around while others work hard and are poor. That is not the case at all.4. When you work you can save your money. Some people made more than others. More education meant higher pay. You didn’t work and turn over your entire salary and then receive an allowance.5. The means of production were publicly owned. Personal property was yours.6. You could leave your home to your kids in the USSR in the form of a life estate.7. Lenin was not a dictator. He was often overruled by members of the party. So was Stalin.8. The workers wanted the purges and voted for them in 1937.9. Stalin tried to resign several times but he was talked out of it.10. It has been shown that the purges were more complicated than one might imagine. Russia had always been under great pressure from attack on all sides. Within a few years Russia had seen the Tsar overthrown, a bloody civil war sponsored by 18 imperialist nations, conspiracies within his own party as discovered earlier in an undercover sting called “Operation Trust.” 37 volumes of conspiracies and treachery were discovered. The intelligence services would arrest people and then torture them until they admitted they knew something, believing that something had to be happening given the threats from outside the country, particularly the Nazis and Japan. People would say anything to make the torture stop. This led to more arrests and tortures. Members of the party, the factory workers, and everyone in the society believed there were conspiracies afoot. Stalin was terrified of the revolution being toppled. He also knew that Germany planned on invading for certain by 1939 and the country was not ready. Production shortfalls led to the belief by members of the party that there was intentional sabotage. This led to the estimation that based on intelligence (faulty) that it was “for certain” there were a certain number of traitors. This led to quotas. The individual members of the party at the lower levels began to increase their numbers to give the impression of loyalty so they wouldn’t be blamed. The entire thing became its own system of feedback loops. As documents have not been released it is not known how many conspiracies there were, or how they could know. This is not the first time this has happened in history.During the Red Scare in America a sense of great fear and paranoia overcame the American public. Each accusation led to more, and the paroxysm of fear overcame the bourgeoisie in America. It reached critical mass, ruining the lives of many before people took a step back and stopped it. This also happened with the ramp up to the Iraq war after 911. America was terrified after the attack. It felt powerless. It was reported that Dick Cheney almost had a nervous breakdown. The response was to pressure the intelligence services to find out who caused 911 and to root out the terrorists. This led to expectations. The intelligence services began to see conspiracies where they did not exist. Anything that could remotely be seen as negative was. There became a genuine belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. This led to a mass hysteria in the U.S. It was rumored that Saddam was developing biological weapons that would be released to terrorists. The U.S. invaded Iraq. It would be found there were no WMDs. The U.S. also started the “War on Terror,” which saw conspiracies where they did not exist. Torture began to be used to get information, but this information was unreliable. It led to false accusations which led to more arrests. Then drone attacks, indefinite detention, and black op cites. The large scale surveillance program began. Likewise, the Salem Witch Trials took on a similar tenor. Mass accusations, paranoia, murders, and more repression. Feedback loops of torture, accusations, more torture followed. But somehow they never seemed able to get to the root of the problem. Enemies were everywhere and nowhere. People were tortured with the expectation that they would say something incriminating. Protestations of innocence were regarded as lies. But then the torture led to them getting whatever they wanted to hear because torture is an unreliable way to get information as people will say anything to make the torture stop.Released documents show no disparities in Stalin’s agreement to the repressions and his own personal thoughts. They confirmed he believed they were real. There was no indication that they repressions were done for cynical, self serving purposes. Stalin knew that purging the military would make the country more weak, but he feared conspiracies more. The conventional wisdom was that people were working with Trotsky, who was collaborating with Germany and Japan to overthrow the Soviet Union. After the civil war there were a number of Tsarists, fascists, and others who had indeed has some conspiracies. But the extent of this is unknown. And it wasn’t just Stalin that expressed these fears. The fears went all the way down to the factory worker level.Source: The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s, by James Harris11. 60% of former members of the USSR miss it. Russian nostalgia for Soviet Union reaches 13-year high12. The USSR did not collapse due to Stalinism. It collapsed because it abandoned Stalinism. Mismanagement Killed the Soviet Union13.14. Communism is not like being a little bit pregnant. Levels of capitalism vs socialism fall on a spectrum. China is socialist with a Leninist NEP style of socialism with some private property and markets. The land in China is owned by the government, and leases are given. 66% of industry is owned by the state. 86% of businesses have Communist Party cells in them. Children learn Marxism in school. The financial sector is owned by the state. The fundamental direction of the economy is planned. Either you are pregnant or not. When it comes to political systems, it isn’t so black and white. That is why there is a political spectrum, with left, center left, center, right center, right wings.There has been much discussion about whether Venezuela is socialist, whether China is socialist, etc.At its core a socialist country is at least a system where the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned.In reality there are many mixed economies around the world. For example, the U.S. has many socialist elements, such as Social Security, some state owned industries that belong to the public, progressive income taxes, etc.My concern is when systems are named socialist or capitalist for propaganda purposes, untethered to any policies.In the USSR Lenin permitted some private ownership and small businesses during a period of crisis after the war with the Whites. Stalin later did away with this and nationalized most private property that constituted the means of production. We will call this Stalinism, which is a form of Marxism Leninism. On the political spectrum Lenin’s NEP style is still socialism, given the restrictions on enterprise, the heavy regulation of the system, but permitting from some market style elements.Stalinism would fall further to the left of this system. Modern China is Marxist Leninist because it is a one party Communist state, 66% of industries are still state owned, the economy is planned, but there are market systems that permit some business and 86% of industries still have communist party cells in them. A large factor too is that the land is still owned by the state. This is crucial. The government issues leases for use. Because the system is working well, propagandists want to claim this is capitalism. But strangely, if you were to propose this same model in the U.S. people would freak out about it being socialism. The U.S. is objectively different in its form of economic system than China. China’s banking system is owned by the state. In America the big banks are privately owned. The economy is primarily market based in the U.S. Land is privately owned. There are two corporate based political parties, with elections of representatives and the President. In China the leader is chosen by the party. The U.S. style of capitalism is based on deregulation, privatization, free trade, and liberal democracy. China is the opposite. Based on any reasonable criteria, China is socialist, but different from the type of socialism we saw under Stalin and even under Lenin. However, the economic system of China has much more in common that Lenin’s NEP than it does in the U.S. version of neoliberal capitalism. None of these systems, however, are “pure.” They are mixed economies, falling on a political spectrum.Consider Venezuela. People say it is “socialist.” Yet 80% of the wealth is held by 200 ultra rich oligarch families. The oil reserves are nationalized. It is a market economy with many social programs, like health, education, and some housing. This is more like a social democracy like Norway, not the U.S., but also not China or Cuba.In the U.S., systems which do well are labeled capitalist, because according to them, capitalism is so wonderful. But systems that fail are socialist, because “socialism always fails.”How the Chinese government works15. 90% of Americans work for a boss. Altruism and ingenuity have absolutely nothing to do with the completion of their jobs. They are asked under both systems to perform a task or get fired. Same thing. In both systems your boss doesn’t care about whether you really meant to pickup that trash or build that house—you do it according to spec and get paid.16. The Gulag Archipelago was meant to be fiction. Solzhenitsyn’s wife told the truth very clearly:A 2003 article regarding the death of Solzhenitsyn’s wife put it like this:“In her 1974 memoir, Sanya: My Life with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”…, she wrote that she was ”perplexed” that the West had accepted ”The Gulag Archipelago” as ”the solemn, ultimate truth,” saying its significance had been ”overestimated and wrongly appraised.”Pointing out that the book’s subtitle is ”An Experiment in Literary Investigation,” she said that her husband did not regard the work as ”historical research, or scientific research.”She contended that it was, rather, a collection of ”camp folklore,” containing ”raw material” which her husband was planning to use in his future productions.”The Gulag Archipelago shouldn’t be taken seriouslyFurther, Solzehenitsyn was a right wing radical and extremist.“But there's something else that makes him more complex than just a victim of tyranny and a crusader against it. Once in America and feted by Western leaders, he urged the US to continue bombing Vietnam. He condemned Amnesty International as too liberal, opposed democracy in Russia, and supported General Franco.”Mark Steel: A reactionary called SolzhenitsynThe other accounts of the gulags from letters written by prisoners depicts a whole different reality.“Well-known accounts of Stalin-era labor camps like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” and Gustaw Herling’s “A World Apart” imply, in their very titles, that detention sites were almost entirely cut off from the rest of Soviet society – islands divided from the country’s “mainland,” or underworlds into which prisoners disappeared, never to be heard from again.In fact, most Stalin-era labor camp inmates theoretically enjoyed at least some letter-writing privileges. Although rules varied depending on where and when a prisoner was held, often inmates could receive an unlimited amount of correspondence through the official camp mail system (though this was heavily censored).The amount they could send depended on the crime, with harsher limits for political offenders. In the 1940s, inmates sentenced for political crimes were often limited to sending only two to three letters home per year. But some political prisoners, like Formakov, managed to get around these constraints and send steady streams of letters through a mixture of official and illicit channels.”“In a separate series of letters, Formakov describes the stage shows he performed in as part of a camp cultural brigade. In a letter to his wife dated March 9, 1946, Formakov explained that the sunny attitudes the inmates who participated in these shows had to assume were often very much at odds with their reality:“We had a concert on the 8th in honor of International Women’s Day. I served as the emcee… You act as master of ceremonies, make some witty remarks, and then head backstage, release your soul, and you just want to wail… For this reason, I never let it go; my soul is always in a corset.”In addition to letters on standard lined notebook paper and mass-produced postcards, Formakov sent handmade birthday and Christmas cards. In one case, he carved a special anniversary greeting into birch bark for his wife. He wrote and illustrated short stories for his two children (Dima, five years old at the time of Formakov’s first arrest in July 1940, and Zhenia, born in December 1940). And he decorated the pages of some of the letters he sent with pressed wildflowers.”In letters from Stalin's labor camps, a window into Soviet political oppression“But his letters – both those sent through official channels and those smuggled out – capture many details that rarely figure in the memoirs of labor camp survivors. For instance, in a letter dated August 10, 1944, Formakov describes the surreal experience of going to the camp club to watch the 1941 American musical comedy “Sun Valley Serenade,” which had just been purchased by Soviet authorities and would have been a hot ticket in Moscow. Similarly, in a communication dated Oct. 27, 1947, he references rumors of an impending devaluation of the ruble, which suggests that – despite the Soviet state’s efforts to keep plans for a December 1947 currency reform secret – news had leaked, even to distant labor camps.Such passages support recent research by scholars Wilson Bell and Golfo Alexopolous, who have noted that labor camps were far more intertwined with the rest of Soviet society than previously thought.”Other accounts have also corroborated these facts.The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA““Humanitarian” lies serve to brainwash the population into supporting imperialist wars. Fed by far-right propaganda, and funded by the CIA, the mainstream “news” outlets describe the Soviet labour camps – also known as the “the Gulags” – as Stalin’s means to repress pro-democracy dissidents and to enslave the Soviet masses. However, the same CIA that, through Operation Mockingbird, gave the US military almost-total control over mainstream press in order to foster anti-Soviet disinformation (Tracy 2018), has recently released declassified documents that invalidate the slanders surrounding the Gulags.The CIA which conducted various anti-Soviet operations for almost five decades, and whose staff strived to obtain accurate intelligence about the USSR, cannot be said to have any bias in favor of the USSR. Therefore, the following declassified CIA files that surprisingly “confess” in favor of the Soviet Union are particularly valuable.”“The Conditions of the PrisonsA 1957 CIA document titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:1. Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas2. From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.3. For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.4. Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.5. Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.6. A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.7. In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.The following are excerpts of the CIA document, underlined and put together for the reader:“According to page four of another CIA (1989) document titled “The Soviet Labour System: An Update,” the number of Gulag prisoners “grew to about 2 million” during Stalin’s time.These figures match Soviet statistics as well, from declassified Soviet achieves. The following is a 1954 declassified Soviet archival document (Pyakhov), an excerpt of which is translated into English:“During the period from 1921 to the present time for counterrevolutionary crimes were convicted 3,777,380 people, including to capital punishment – 642,980 people to the conent in the camps and prisons for a period of 25 years old and under – 2,369,220 into exile and expulsion – 765,190 people.“Of the total number of convicts, approximately convicted: 2,900,000 people – College of OGPU, NKVD and triples Special meeting and 877,000 people – courts by military tribunals, and Spetskollegiev Military Collegium.“It should be noted… that established by Decree … on November 3, 1934 Special Meeting of the NKVD which lasted until September 1, 1953 – 442,531 people were convicted, including to capital punishment – 10,101 people to prison – 360,921 people to exile and expulsion (within the country) – 57,539 people and other punishments (offset time in detention, deportation abroad, compulsory treatment) – 3,970 people…Attorney General R. RudenkoInterior Minister S. KruglovJustice Minister K. Gorshenin”The Soviet archives remained declassified for decades, only to be released near or after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition, after Stalin died, the pro-Stalin head of the NKVD (Soviet interior ministry) Lavrenty Beria had already been executed by Khrushchev, a staunch anti-Stalinist (History in an hour 2010). These facts make it very unlikely that the Soviet intelligence would have a pro-Stalin bias.The Italian-American historian Michael Parenti (1997, pp. 79-80) further analyzes the data provided from the Soviet archives:“In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. At about that time, there began a purge of the purgers, including many intelligence and secret police (NKVD) officials and members of the judiciary and other investigative committees, who were suddenly held responsible for the excesses of the terror despite their protestations of fidelity to the regime.“Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies…. [T]he great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as ‘the largest system of death camps in modern history’.“Almost a million gulag prisoners were released during World War II to serve in the military. The archives reveal that more than half of all gulag deaths for the 1934-53 period occurred during the war years (1941-45), mostly from malnutrition, when severe privation was the common lot of the entire Soviet population. (Some 22 million Soviet citizens perished in the war.) In 1944, for instance, the labor-camp death rate was 92 per 1000. By 1953, with the postwar recovery, camp deaths had declined to 3 per 1000.“Should all gulag inmates be considered innocent victims of Red repression? Contrary to what we have been led to believe, those arrested for political crimes (‘counterrevolutionary offenses’) numbered from 12 to 33 percent of the prison population, varying from year to year. The vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offenses: murder, assault, theft, banditry, smuggling, swindling, and other violations punishable in any society.”Thus, according to the CIA, approximately two million people were sent to the Gulag in the 1930s, whereas according to declassified Soviet archives, 2,369,220 up until 1954. When compared to the population of the USSR at the time, as well as the statistics of a country like the United States, the Gulag percent population in the USSR throughout its history was lower than that of the United States today or since the 1990s. In fact, based on Sousa’s (1998)research, there was a larger percentage of prisoners (relative to the whole population) in the US, than there ever was in the USSR:“In a rather small news item appearing in the newspapers of August 1997, the FLT-AP news agency reported that in the US there had never previously been so many people in the prison system as the 5.5 million held in 1996. This represents an increase of 200,000 people since 1995 and means that the number of criminals in the US equals 2.8% of the adult population. These data are available to all those who are part of the North American department of justice…. The number of convicts in the US today is 3 million higher than the maximum number ever held in the Soviet Union! In the Soviet Union, there was a maximum of 2.4% of the adult population in prison for their crimes – in the US the figure is 2.8% and rising! According to a press release put out by the US department of justice on 18 January 1998, the number of convicts in the US in 1997 rose by 96,100.”ConclusionSeeing the USSR as a major ideological challenge, the Western imperial bourgeoisie demonized Stalin and the Soviet Union. Yet after decades of propaganda, declassified archives from both the US and USSR together debunk these anti-Soviet slanders. Worth our attention is the fact that the CIA – a fiercely anti-Soviet source – has published declassified documents debunking the very anti-Soviet myths it promoted and continues to promote in the mainstream media. Together with declassified Soviet archives, the CIA files have demonstrated that the bourgeois press has lied about the Gulags.Notes13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery. (n.d.). Retrieved August 28, 2018, from 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of SlaveryCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1989). THE SOVIET FORCED LABOR SYSTEM: AN UPDATE (GI-M 87-20081). Retrieved February 12, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000500615.pdfCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA). (2010, February 22). 1. FORCED LABOR CAMPS IN THE USSR 2. TRANSFER OF PRISONERS BETWEEN CAMPS 3. DECREES ON RELEASE FROM FORCED LABOR 4. ATTITUDE OF SOVIET PRISON OFFICIALS TOWARD SUSPECTS 1945 TO THE END OF 1955. Retrieved January 5, 2018, from https://www.cia.gov/library/read...Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’. (2017, June 08). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from Hillary and Bill used ‘slave labour’Игорь, П. (n.d.). Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли «жертвы репрессий»? Retrieved August 28, 2018, from Книга: За что сажали при Сталине. Невинны ли "жертвы репрессий"?Parenti, M. (1997). Blackshirts and reds: Rational fascism and the overthrow of communism. San Francisco, Calif: City Lights Books.Sousa, M. (1998, June 15). Lies concerning the history of the Soviet Union. Retrieved August 27, 2018, from Lies concerning the history of the Soviet UnionThe Death of Lavrenty Beria. (2015, December 23). Retrieved August 31, 2018, from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2...Tracy, J. F. (2018, January 30). The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know. Retrieved August 28, 2018, http://fromhttps://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cia-and-the-media-50-facts-the-world-needs-to-know/5471956 “Source: The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA17. Famines were common in Russia and China for centuries. Stalin never deliberately starved anyone, nor did Mao. After Stalin collectivized agriculture there were no more famines. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the history of famines and starvation in Russia 1850-present day?18. The claims that Stalin and Mao killed 100 million people are lies. Even the authors of the book, The Black Book of Communism, now admit the numbers are not true. Alexander Finnegan's answer to What is the most biased book you’ve ever read?19. A single mother in the USSR could live without worrying about homelessness, lack of electricity and heat, healthcare for her children, food, education, and being unemployed. Daycare was free if she worked. She would receive paid maternity leave, paid vacation, equal pay as a man, and the infant mortality rate was lower than in America. Alexander Finnegan's answer to Is it true that a single mother with one job was able to live well in the Soviet union?20. It was a meritocracy. The child of an unskilled worker could study all the way through college and graduate school to become a leading scientist. Educational cost was no barrier.21. Housing was provided to everyone. There was no risk of homelessness.22. Russia was a developing nation before socialism. Then it was a superpower. After the collapse of the USSR it became a developing nation again. There is no middle class, mass emigration, a negative birth rate, and massive inequality. The Eastern Bloc nations, except for Poland, have fared even worse. Ukraine is almost a failed state.