Reviewed by E.Y.

Depending on your political journey in the left sphere, you may come early or much later to the question of Stalin. I came to Stalin much later. To me, Stalin was an obvious monster (perhaps along with the more low-profile Pol Pot), the manifestation of all the great mistakes which we should learn to avoid repeating in the future, when we finally get our chance to rebuild socialism.

How many dedicated Bolshevik revolutionaries did you become enthusiastic about, who you only later learned had their lives ended in Stalin’s great purge?

The impotent who was delinquent in handling WWII; the chauvinist who betrayed so many revolutionary movements to build socialism in one country; who stole the soul of an entire revolution and degenerated it into state capitalism, imperialism, totalitarianism, or another awful state just like its Western adversaries, if not worse; who, through his paranoid and ruthless thirst for power, single-handedly turned the beautiful October revolution into a one-man dictatorship; caused the defeat of the communists in China in 1927, signed the non-aggression treaty with his counterpart Hitler and occupied Poland; orchestrated the Holodomor; Kyrov’s assassination … just to touch the surface of his crimes.

Ah no. There was always a tension there for me. I mean aren’t we materialists? How could an entire revolution be brought to its knees by just one evil man? An evil man whose personal life was ironically not so dissimilar from those other dedicated revolutionaries that we know. Was there really no historical context? And then comes the data. The outrageous fact that almost the entire bloodbath directed by this horrific monster happened in just two years between 1937-38, more than a decade after his ascendance to power. Nobody had told me this before. A moment of revelation. I felt betrayed. Did he go insane suddenly? Is this how dictators operate, just as Arendt hypothesises, pointing to elective affinities among all of them?

As a socialist, your attention is perhaps turned to the most notable victim of Stalin: comrade Trotsky. You read as much of the works by, on or against him, or on the historical context of the rift in the Communist Party, to be able to discern the good guys from the bad. But alas, certain facts stand in the way of a decisive judgement.

Losurdo’s book is a timely intervention at this point in your political journey. He touches upon many of the allegations raised against Stalin (and briefly on Mao in the 8^th chapter), either by the bourgeois propagandists or the anti-Stalinist left, mainly of the existing Trotskyist persuasion.

Losurdo’s Stalin is not a hero, but a leader contextualised in the predicaments of his time. Part of a history that is squeezed and rewritten by the preachers of the capitalist camp to show how Stalin and Lenin, and the infernal apparatus of repression called communism, which ascended to power in 1917 in Russia, were utterly and unambiguously evil.

Losurdo unpacks and debunks many of the omissions and reductions in that historiography. He points to the genocide and crime from the history of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, to all the leaders involved and the “thinkers” who endorsed them, to help us understand the historical dialectics at work in forming events of significance.

Losurdo walks you through the material context of the simplified and vulgarised historical narrative we hear from the mainstream, or from that segment of the left obsessed with their moral purity complex. With Losurdo, you don’t come to love Stalin or hate Trotsky and Stalin’s other opponents either. Perhaps your respect for those fighters who made that history and had to deal with its dilemmas will increase. But more than anything else, you learn what to look for in history when reading it as a materialist and as a Marxist.

To get a flavour of that historiography and of what it can offer, let’s now dig out a few themes and excerpts from the text.

On idealist historiography

Losurdo confronts that approach to history that focuses exclusively or predominantly on individual leaders and actors at the expense of examining the material balance of forces and the socio-economic and geopolitical context of actions, as if everything can be done at all times by the will of good leaders. For example, he writes:

the two approaches criticized here [in this book], which rely respectively on the category of crime (or criminal insanity) or betrayal, have a common feature: they tend to focus on the criminal or traitorous nature of single individuals. In fact,
they refrain from understanding the actual historical development and historical efficacy of social, political, and religious movements that have exerted a global power of attraction and whose influence is spread over a very long period of time.¹

…

[They have] the fault of disappearing real and profane history, which is replaced by the history of a wretched and mysterious corruption and distortion of doctrines raised a priori into the Empyrean of purity and holiness.²

On liberal historiography’s demonising through “elective affinities”

He specifically attacks Arendt’s formulation of elective affinities between dictators as her tribute to the Cold War ideology. He writes:

it is still necessary to distinguish the role of ideology from the role of objective conditions (the exceptional gravity of the danger and the widespread shortages that characterize the USSR). In comparison, it is much simpler to reflexively deduce everything to ideology and thereby equate the concentrationary universes created by both “totalitarian” ideologies [i.e. Nazism and Communism], rather than engaging in more complex analysis.³

…

What is most striking in these texts [of Arendt and those who put Stalin at par with Hitler as dictators] is the absence of history and even, in a certain sense, politics. Colonialism, imperialism, the World Wars, the struggles for national liberation, and the different and opposing political projects all disappear.⁴

…

It is only a gift to Cold War ideology when Arendt asserted that Hitler had “never intended to defend the ‘West against Bolshevism’” and that on the contrary he had “remained ready to ally himself to Stalin to destroy it.”⁵

As Losurdo cites Hitler’s own words:

Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and
too blind to comprehend this, I will be forced to reach an understanding with
the Russians, turn and strike the West, and then after their defeat turn back
against the Soviet Union with all the forces united through me.⁶

On the history of the early Soviet Union

Losurdo calls the three decades after the revolution the “Second Time of Troubles” in Russian history. And in discussing the internal rivalries of the Bolshevik party in 1920s and 30s, he sets the ground for an extended understanding of the dilemmas the revolution found itself in in the face of all the hostilities from the imperialist powers of the time. Losurdo writes:

As far as the ruling group of Soviet Russia is concerned, it came to power at a time when—in the words of a Christian witness, sympathetic to the changes brought about by October 1917—“pity has been killed by the omnipresence of death,” and it was forced to face a very prolonged state of exception, in a situation characterized—to quote the analysis of one of the authors of The Black Book of Communism—by an “unprecedented brutalization,” generalized and “without any possible terms of comparison with that known to Western societies.”⁷

…

In the three historical decades of Stalin-led Soviet Russia, the main feature was not the blossoming of a party dictatorship into autocracy, but rather the repeated attempts to move from the state of exception to a condition of relative normality, attempts that failed because of reasons both internal (abstract utopia and messianism preventing a recognition of achievements) and international (the permanent threat hanging over the country in the wake of the October Revolution), and because of the intertwining of the two.⁸

…

Messianism … admittedly powerfully stimulated by the horror of the First World War [was] yet intrinsic to a vision that expects the disappearance of the market, of money, of the state, of the legal norms. Disappointment or indignation at the failure of all this to come to pass further stimulated conflict, and a conflict which was not possible to regulate through purely “formal” juridical norms, insofar as they are themselves destined to disappear. The result was an additional violence that cannot be justified by referring to the state of exception or to “supreme emergency.” In this sense, moral judgment coincides with political judgment.⁹

…

[and in forgetting to consider this,] Edgar Quinet’s assessment of the French Revolution comes to mind: “The Terror had been the first calamity; the second, which destroyed the Republic, was the trial of the Terror.”¹⁰

The looming shadow of the war and the ensuing frenzy

To Losurdo, it is especially important to understand how the political evolution of the Soviet Union in the inter-war period was in response to a broad consciousness of the looming threat of German mobilisation against the revolution. Something that was in part promoted and made possible with the support of the American and British ruling classes.

At the end of November 1925, the treaty of Locarno is signed. Drawing France and Germany closer together, it mended relations between the Western powers that had fought each other during the First World War, thus formalizing the USSR’s isolation: it’s not hard to find voices seeking “a European crusade against communism.” And in Moscow, top-level figures like Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev dramatically stress the rising risk of an invasion.

At the end of November 1925 the Treaty of Locarno was signed. Bringing France and Germany closer together, it recomposed the rift between the Western powers that had confronted each other during the First World War and thus facilitated the isolation of the USSR; and there was no shortage of voices calling for “a European crusade against communism.” And so in Moscow, leading figures such as Zinoviev, Radek and Kamenev dramatically underlined the danger of aggression that was looming.¹¹

…

It can be understood then why, at the end of the 1920s, the collectivization of agriculture appeared to be an obligatory way to dramatically accelerate the industrialization of the country and to ensure in a stable way the supplies that the cities and the army needed: all in anticipation of the war.¹²

Indeed, as Losurdo quotes American historian Arno J. Mayer:

Leaving aside the human costs, the economic achievements of the First Five- Year plan were astonishing.¹³

Losurdo continues:

[I]n Soviet Russia, terror emerged in the period of time from the First World War, which opened the Second Time of Troubles, and the Second World War, which threatened to inflict upon the country and the nation as a whole an even more colossal catastrophe: the destruction and enslavement explicitly enunciated in Mein Kampf. And the terror emerged in the course of a forced industrialization campaign that aimed to save country and nation, and in the course of which the horror of ferocious repression on a large scale was interwoven with real processes of emancipation (the massive spread of education and culture, prodigious vertical mobility, the emergence of the welfare state, the tumultuous and contradictory protagonism of social classes hitherto condemned to total subalternity).¹⁴

Thus, as Losurdo quotes German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who was in Moscow in 1937, the start of the major phase of the Great Purge:

In the Moscow of 1937, everyone takes account of the future war with absolute certainty.¹⁵

The significance of Losurdo’s Stalin

In the author’s own style, “to sum up”, many of the choices following the October revolution (and in the later revolutionary experiences) were not between freedom and tyranny, between killing and not killing or between remaining loyal or betraying the high ideals of socialism. Rather, revolutions in a hostile environment find themselves in a dire impasse that has to be dealt with.

In the case of the Soviet Union, if comrade Trotsky was in command, he may have handled the situation somewhat better (or worse) than comrade Stalin. What matters about that history today is not Stalin or Trotsky or Luxemburg or any other revolutionary figure. The future will not reincarnate them. What will most likely be repeated though, is the unfavourable material conditions that the ship of the revolution has to sail through to ultimately come to the shores of our collective emancipation and communism.

Messianists, as Losurdo calls them, even if their politics can be judged as ultra-leftist, also deserve a defence. They were not able to look at this history in retrospect as we can. How far the ship of the revolution could get close to shore without being broken and sunken was not known to them. They were the daring spirit of the revolution who paid a price. After all, the dialectic of pushing forward for a breakthrough, or remaining cautious and consolidating before being overstretched, is the defining characteristic of all emancipatory struggles against a powerful oppressing force.

Still, the key point remains: are we prepared to see events through the lens of solidarity with actually existing struggles, and to maintain our loyalty (even critical loyalty) to projects that may become badly deformed under the weight of hostility thrown at them by the international capitalist system? Are we able to understand that, until the worst of the worst is dismantled, all progress towards absolute truth is incomplete and interim in form and character? Or do we expect the best of our ideals to be materialised within a mode of production that is actively in the business of crushing anything that challenges its dominance?

Can we tell the story of the red revolutions of twentieth century history without reference to the brutality that they were born out of, the lack of reliable allies to count on, or the fragility of the hatchling that has stepped into history?

Certainly, the capitalist ruling class does everything to bury that context by appealing to a purist and decontextualized perception of morality. Losurdo’s book is a masterful polemic against this false consciousness.

Notes

1. Domenico Losurdo, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend (Seattle: Iskra Books, 2023), 324. ↩︎
2. Losurdo, Stalin, 322. ↩︎
3. Losurdo, Stalin, 153. ↩︎
4. Losurdo, Stalin, 178. ↩︎
5. Losurdo, Stalin, 187. ↩︎
6. Ernst Nolte Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozial-
   ismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt a.M.-Berlin.: Ullstein, 1987), 313-4. Cited in Losurdo, Stalin, 184 ↩︎
7. Losurdo, Stalin, 269-70. ↩︎
8. Losurdo, Stalin, 135. ↩︎
9. Losurdo, Stalin, 270. ↩︎
10. In Bronisław Baczko, Come uscire dal Terrore: Il Termidoro e la Rivoluzione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989), 191. Cited in Losurdo, Stalin, 292. ↩︎
11. Losurdo, Stalin, 126-7. ↩︎
12. Losurdo, Stalin, 129. ↩︎
13. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 630-1. Cited in Losurdo, Stalin, 129. ↩︎
14. Losurdo, Stalin, 155. ↩︎
15. Lion Feuchtwanger, Mosca 1937: Diario di viaggio per i mieiamici, (Milan: Mondadori, 1946), 76-7. Cited in Losurdo, Stalin, 188. ↩︎