Anand
While all the leaders of the revisionist parties work against the interests of the proletariat, the treachery of the renegade Kavita Krishnan reached its zenith when after coming out the CPI(ML) Liberation, she chose to engage in mudslinging on the great teachers of the proletariat. However, her former party too has a lot to contribute in her treachery as it is the one which had created the revisionist political and ideological climate in which a renegade like Krishnan flourished and occupied positions in the central committee and polit bureau.
The party ‘regretted’ Krishnan’s separation and ‘appreciated’ and ‘respected’ her long association and active role within it, despite the false imperialist slandering against Stalin and Mao, that Krishnan had already been indulging in! For a revolutionary proletariat party, throwing out or getting away with the renegades is a good riddance and not a matter for regret. But, the CPI(ML) Liberation, which in some ways happens to be the most degenerate revisionist party, went on to shower its ‘appreciation’ and ‘respect’ on this renegade despite her smear campaign against communism and the glorious legacy of the revolutionary proletariat.
The party did not stop at that, it came out openly in her defence and condemned her critics who were exposing her on social media as trolls. In fact, it is not at all surprising that a shameless renegade like Kavita Krishnan came out in the open. Just as a moribund social-democratic party like CPI could only produce a joker like Kanhaiya Kumar, a nasty and arch opportunist revisionist party like ‘Liberation’ was expected to produce a vile renegade like Kavita Krishnan only. It is to be noted that the party has not given any response to the blatantly false allegations made by Krishnan against the great teachers of the proletariat and the socialist experiments of the 20th century. It has only pleaded her not to resurrect the ghosts of the past at a time when the fight against fascism (only electorally!) should be our priority!
Kavita Krishnan’s Smear Campaign: the Old Wine of Imperialist Propaganda in a New Bottle
Kavita Krishnan claims that after doing extensive studies (?!) in recent years, she has reached the conclusion that the proletarian states of the Soviet Union and China must be included among the most totalitarian regimes of the world which act as a model for the authoritarian regimes across the world till this day. However, even a cursory glance at her claims reveals that she derives her intellectual fodder from the gigantic imperialist propaganda machinery. Whatever she has been vomiting about Soviet Union and Stalin, is the same old rubbish which has been broadcasted by the imperialist propaganda machinery from the cold war era itself. Apart from the misdeeds of the renegades of the working class like Trotsky and Khruschev, the imperialist cheerleaders like Robert Conquest, Solzhenitsyn and Roy Medvedev played an important role in the fabrication of these blatant lies which Krishnan is shamelessly spouting these days.
Talking about the contemporary times, the main sources of Krishnan’s claims are the celebrity historians such as Timothy Snyder and conservative reactionary writers such as Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols who had advocated the US imperialist attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Kavita Krishnan brazenly shares the tweets of these cheerleaders of US imperialism on her profile on regular basis. Just a day before announcing her separation from ‘Liberation’, this shameless renegade had shared the articles of Applebaum and Nichols in the glory of Gorbachev, yet another renegade. Timothy Snyder is not taken seriously even by sincere bourgeois historians and the US historian Grover Furr has aptly exposed the pack of lies mentioned in his book ‘Bloodland: Europe between Hitler and Stalin’.
In India, Krishnan’s source of inspiration is the human rights activists and intellectuals such as Balgopal, who once used to be a sympathiser of the Maoists but latter got disillusioned with Marxism itself. Besides criticising all kinds violence in absolute manner, of late he had started making such infantile claims that the biggest problem with Marxism is that it fails to understand human nature! Even non-Marxist scientist can only laugh at the concept of ‘human nature’. In order to make such a stupid and unscientific assertion, one needs to be sufficiently stupid. There is no such thing as an essential human nature and Marxism shows that the human nature cannot be independent of the nature and character of society. In a class society one can generally talk about the class nature and tendency only. Apart from the natural traits such as eating and defecating and some instincts, a human child is not born with anything else. All other values and ideas are formed in him during the upbringing in a society whose most important aspect is the fact that it is divided into classes (except for the primitive communist society). If such an inane person like Balgopal has become the light house for the idiot and renegade Kavita Krishnan, it is not at all surprising. Birds of the same feather manage to find each other.
Now let us see what are the claims of renegade Kavita Krishnan which she has been making in her idiotic state of mind and how far they are true.
Probing the claims of Kavita Krishnan
As part of the smear campaign of ‘throw mud on Marxism’, Kavita Krishnan, apart from parroting the US imperialist lies regarding the excesses in Soviet Union during Stalin era, shrewdly terms the current China as communist and portrays its social fascist misdeeds as the misdeeds of communism. Not just that, taking cue from Timothy Snyder, she ludicrously makes an analogy of the situation arising out of the war in Ukraine with that of the Second World War, and puts Stalin and Putin in the same bracket, so that the crimes of Putin could be used to defame communism. In the process she uses the terms such as “imperialism” and “fascism” in extremely casual manner, which reveals her idiocy and her ignorance with regard to the basic concepts of Marxism.
Even though the claims which Kavita Krishnan has been making are not new and they have been responded to by various Marxists and writers and historians like Ludo Martens, Grover Furr, Mario Sousa long ago, it is important to rebut them in a point-wise manner because such pack of lies does influence unsuspecting but genuine people who might be unaware about the history of the Soviet Union.
Claim 1 : ‘Stalin Presided over a Totalitarian State’
The tactics of terming socialist Soviet Union as equally totalitarian as Hitler era Germany and of comparing Stalin with Hitler has been adopted by the US imperialism since the cold war era. It was started by Hannah Arendt, an intellectual agent of US imperialism.
She was the one who said for the first time that on the one hand we have bourgeois democracy and on the other hand, totalitarianism; and fascism and communism are two versions of the latter. Since then, this inanity has been reiterated by people ranging from anarchists like Noam Chomsky to the renegades like Kavita Krishnan. They refuse to understand that the bourgeois democracy is nothing but another name of the dictatorship of the capitalist class, while the dictatorship of the proletariat is in reality a democracy for overwhelming majority of the toiling masses and it is just another name for the dictatorship over the owners, traders, contractors, agents, rich farmers and Kulaks.
In a nutshell, the bourgeois democracy is a democracy for a minority while it is a dictatorship for the majority whereas the dictatorship of proletariat or proletarian democracy is the maximum possible freedom and democracy, while it is a dictatorship for a minority of the expropriators.
Through this tactics of drawing sham and false equivalence between Socialism and fascism by terming both Hitler and Stalin as totalitarian, the US imperialism and the intellectual agents and the pen-pushers who survive on the crumbs thrown by the imperialists, kill two birds by one stone. On the one hand capitalism is exempted from hiding the truth of the dictatorship of Hitler being the most extreme form of the capitalist dictatorship, on the other hand, by portraying the dictatorship of proletariat as the dictatorship of an individual, tremendous confusion is spread about socialism.
The truth is that the incredible achievements of Soviet Union within a course of three decades could not be secured under the dictatorship of an individual. It is a complete lie that all the decisions of the Communist Party of Soviet Union were taken at the behest of Stalin. It is a fact of history that at that time the decisions within the party were taken through debates-discussions and voting, for instance, the issue of socialism within a country and that of collectivisation. On all such issues, those who were found acting against the majority through factionalism within the party and even found involved in the sabotage, were expelled from the party and many such people were taken back within the party when they admitted to their mistakes, e.g., Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yevdokimov, Preobrazhensky, Radek etc. Thus, the party was not a monolithic structure running at the behest of one individual.
It is also true that the bureaucratic tendencies were rampant within the party and there was a trend of sycophancy as well. The reason for that was the more fundamental mistake of productivism that led the relations between the party and the class and between the party and the masses to become dormant. This led to bureaucratic deformities and bourgeois distortions within the party, against which even Stalin was waging a symptomatic struggle and which was theoretically critiqued by Mao. There are several written evidences that show that far from promoting such tendencies and habits, Stalin used to wage struggle against them and used to give much emphasis on promoting democracy within party.
For instance, in his speech Organise Criticism From Below, delivered on May 16, 1928 at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, Stalin stated, “The communist bureaucrat is the most dangerous type of bureaucrat. Why? Because he masks his bureaucracy with the title of Party member. And, unfortunately, we have quite a number of such communist bureaucrats”. Again, “From this follows the immediate task of the Party: to wage a ruthless struggle against bureaucracy, to organise mass criticism from below, and to take this criticism into account when adopting practical decisions for eliminating our shortcomings.”
It is different issue altogether that Stalin could not succeed in his struggle in curbing bureaucracy due to his own inclination to the productivist-economistic thesis pertaining to socialist transition. It also needs to be understood that socialist society is a long transition period between capitalist society and communist society, during which the struggle between bourgeoisie and the proletariat continues in newer and more complex ways; the gap between mental labour and manual labour still persists and the thought of the capitalist privileges still exists in the society. Merely abolition of private property does not do away with the influence of bourgeois ideas at ideological and cultural level and mere transformation of property relations cannot be taken as transformation of bourgeois production relations as a whole, even though the key element is certainly transforming the relations of ownership, which inaugurate the protracted historical project of building socialist production relations.
Hence, bureaucracy could not have been abolished by Stalin or earlier Lenin by passing a legislation. The question was to wage continuous political class struggle. Stalin did carry out such a struggle at symptomatic level, although he could not carry it out consistently and at theoretical level. However, as far as the question of Stalin or Soviet party being totalitarian is concerned, it is nothing more than empty vessel of imperialist slandering; anyone who has read genuine Soviet history and not the writings of hired hacks, knows it too well. In fact, such reduction of the whole problem on authoritarianism, etc. only prevents any attempt at the analysis of the real problems of socialist transition.
Similarly, Stalin also waged struggle to promote democracy in the society as well. For instance, he took a firm stand on holding direct elections for the Soviet members, on allowing the members of other urban groups besides the party to contest elections and on allowing public scrutiny of candidates and party members during the mass meetings and election campaigning and secret ballots. All this was being done by Stalin even while numerous types of conspiracies were underway from within and outside the country, and then, the Second World War hampered this effort of creating a democratic atmosphere in the party and state. The bourgeois headquarter established within the party strove to neutralise every effort of Stalin and Stalin, unlike Mao, did no directly go to the masses against the capitalist roaders within the party. Mao’s GPCR was a political revolution by the proletarian leadership of the party by organizing the masses against the capitalist roaders within the party. However, whatever lies and slander is spread against Stalin being a despot, a dictator does not have even a thread of truth.
Claim 2 : ‘Stalin Had Forged An Alliance With Hitler Due to Which Millions Died During the Second World War’
Kavita Krishnan parrots this ridiculous claim of Snyder that before the World War, Stalin-led Soviet Union had signed an agreement with the Hitler-led Germany, which was responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and the three Baltic countries. Like all the Trotskyists and anti-communist propagandists, Kavita Krishnan cites the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in isolation from its context. Like the anti-Stalin imperialist propaganda, she mischievously ignores the long history of the appeasement of fascists by the imperialist countries like Great Britain, France and US. She also does not mention the relentless effort made by Soviet Union even at the cost of being isolated to come up with a collective security pact with these countries in order to deal with the imminent threat of fascism.
It is a fact of history that by 1936, the fascist alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan had come into being. In the same year, Italy attacked Ethiopia. Despite the proposal of Soviet Union, no effective collective action was taken against Italy. In 1938, Nazi Germany occupied Austria and Czechoslovakia. Thus, the Nazis were fast approaching towards the border of Soviet Union. In this situation, instead of taking collective action to deal with the threat of fascism, the western powers were engaged in provoking Hitler to attack Soviet Union.
On 29-30 September 1938, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Daladier met Hitler and Mussolini in Munich and they signed on the ‘Munich pact’ as part of which Czechoslovakia was divided and some important part of it was handed over to Germany. Subsequently, both Britain and France signed non-aggression pact with Germany and provoked it to attack Soviet Union. They even supported the German and Italian invaders in crushing the Spanish republic.
By the beginning of 1939, it was clear that the Second World War could begin at any time. In May 1939, Japan attacked Soviet Union. Precisely at this time when the western imperialists were assuming that Hitler would launch offensive towards the east and Soviet Union would be encircled from both the sides and would collapse within a few days, Stalin played a diplomatic master-stroke through Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, which caught the imperialists off guard. In fact, Stalin, the leader of the world proletariat, deserves praise for this master-stroke because through it, the Soviet Union engaged both the factions of the imperialists into fighting with each other and in the process, it secured crucial two and half years for preparation to war.
As far as Poland is concerned, it needs to be brought to the table that Soviet Union had crossed the Poland border 16 days after Nazi attack when it had ceased to exist as a state; it took control of only those areas which were snatched away by the rulers of Poland in the aftermath of the 1917 October revolution. Kavita Krishnan is so much intoxicated with US imperialist propaganda that she forgot that it was Red Army under the leadership of Stalin which together with Russian people had dealt the decisive blow to the fascist demon in the form of Hitler through its exemplary bravery, courage and immense sacrifices as they lost the lives of 26 million of their citizens.
Claim 3 : ‘Stalin Had Annihilated the Top Leadership Within the Party in order to Remain in Power’
There is nothing new in this claim as well and its strings are attached with Khruschev’s secret speech in the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Soviet Union. Khruschev’s lies have been laid bare by Grover Furr in his book ‘Khruschev Lied’. The truth is that after the murder of Kirov, a leading party leader, on December 1, 1934, the conspiracies of terrorist and subversive activities had started coming to surface. A secret block of Trotskyists and Zinovievites had been made as early as 1932 under the leadership of Trotsky. Its aim was to carry out terrorist activities to assassinate Bolshevik leaders and to prepare for a revolt.
The fact of the formation of this block has been proved on the basis of Trotsky archives which has been made public by Harvard University after 1980. It is true that during 1936-38, in the process of foiling the conspiracy against the Soviet Power, large scale arrests had been made, many among them were sentenced to death and several members were expelled from the Party. It is true that many innocent people also came under the purview of this campaign. But to present it as a form of consciously adopted policies by the party or Stalin is a torture of history.
The truth is that as soon these excesses came to light, Stalin ordered to prevent it and immediately stringent actions were taken. Yezov, the chief of Soviet Police NKVD, who was instrumental in such excesses, was removed and replaced by Laventi Beria after which there was an ebb in the excesses. Yezov was arrested and tried and he was sentenced to death in 1940. It was a continuation of class struggle in the socialist society and in the process of class struggle, not everything develops smoothly like a dinner party and embroidery. During the bourgeois revolutions, there were much worse excesses and violence. No revolution or revolutionary regime in the history has been as violent as the French Revolution. That is why Lenin had pointed out that when the bourgeoisie hurls abuses on the Bolsheviks for violence, they forget their own bourgeois revolutions and the violence by their regimes against the proletariat. However, when it comes to the proletarian revolution, it is expected to be as soft and fragile as a romantic song. Can there be a bigger hypocrisy than this?
Insofar as the Moscow trials were concerned, they were carried out in the presence of the ambassadors of many countries, journalists and authors. Many such people had admitted the trials to be genuine and the confessions by the criminals to be correct. Among them included Edward Devies who was the chief ambassador of US in Soviet Union and himself an advocate; D.N. Print was Britain’s ambassador and the world-renowned lawyer; Anna Luis Strong was an American writer who was expelled from Soviet Union in 1949, which did not stop her from confirming the veracity of these trials in her book ‘Stalin Era’.
Claim 4 : ‘Stalin Was Responsible for the Death of Millions of Peasants in Ukraine and Other Parts of the Soviet Union’
This claim is also quite old that millions of peasants were killed as a consequence of the collectivisation campaign during the first five-year plan that began in 1929 and during the campaign of eliminating the parasitic class of kulaks as a class. Stalin is directly held responsible for these deaths. However, writers like Ludo Martens and Anna Louis Strong have called out these lies years ago. Firstly, the number of deaths are exaggerated so as to present Stalin as a cruel and violent devil. In this way, the process of class struggle during the collectivisation campaign is overlooked. This turbulent process broadly passed through two phases. The anarchy which had come to prevail due to the excessive collectivisation than the estimates during the first phase was corrected during the second phase. In the second phase, the kulaks had waged a revolt against the Soviet state in order to secure their existence as a class. Their armed gangs carried of terrorist acts and acts of sabotage in many places and killed several communists sent by the party. In order to scuttle the collectivisation process, the means of production were damaged on large scale so that the collective farms could not even begin. The matured crops were burnt and the buildings were destroyed. Even rumours were spread and political propaganda were carried out, the illiteracy, cultural backwardness, superstitions and religious faith among the peasants were taken advantage of and they were mobilised against the Bolsheviks. Under these circumstances, the reactionary kulaks and rich farmers were repressed which is natural for a Soviet state. As Mao said, the revolution is not a dinner party or embroidery but rather it is a class war. Only a person who overlooks this naked reality would be disturbed by the revolutionary violence and condemn violence in an absolute manner.
As far as the death of millions of peasants in Ukraine due to famine is concerned, Ludo Martens has shown that even though there was the shortfall of grains, the story of famine is completely fabricated. Hitler’s propaganda machinery and the empire of ‘yellow journalism’ established by William Hurst were behind this story. Douglas Tottle in his brilliant book, ‘Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard’ vividly explains as to how the stories of millions of deaths in Ukraine were fabricated by the Nazi propagandists in their propaganda against Bolshevism and how these stories were used by the imperialist propaganda machinery during the cold war. Thus, in order to defame Marxism, Kavita Krishnan not only takes resort to the imperialist propaganda, she does not mind banking on the Nazi propaganda. Such is the level of degeneration of this shameless renegade!
Claim 5 : ‘‘Global Left’ (?!!) is Favouring Russian Imperialism in the Ongoing Ukraine War’
In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which started as a consequence of Russian imperialist invasion, Kavita Krishnan has been cursing the leftists of the world that they are favouring Russia and not siding with the people of Ukraine. In order to make her assertion authentic, she uses the term such as ‘global left’ as if such a monolithic community indeed exists. It is true that some so-called communist parties (especially the revisionist parties) and the so-called left intellectuals have not held Russia sufficiently responsible for the war and they are mainly targeting US imperialism. However, it is also true that most of the genuine communist revolutionary groups-organizations and parties have put Russian imperialism too, in the dock along with the US imperialism and have termed this ongoing war as an outcome of the rivalry between the two imperialism camps. However, perhaps Kavita Krishnan wants to see herself as a pro-US imperialism ‘leftist’ face at the global level. It could be one of the reasons why she talks a lot about Russian and Chinese imperialism but curiously remains silent on the shenanigans of the US imperialism.
Kavita Krishnan Expresses Her Love for Liberal (Bourgeois) Democracy and the Liberal Camp is Jubilant!
Among the 3 reasons cited by Kavita Krishnan for leaving the party, one was to defend liberal (read bourgeois) democracy. Seeing her immense love for the liberal democracy, the liberals, left-liberals, liberal-left went gaga over it and cheerfully congratulated her. Even when she was within the party, she was close to this camp only, but now she has formally decided to join it. Hence, like all the shrewd revisionists, she uses the term ‘democracy’ without qualifying it with any adjectives like ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’ and takes a pledge to safeguard it. No wonder the rabid anti-communist degenerate writer-intellectuals like Apoorvanand and idiot imposters like Ashok Kumar Pandey showered their praise on her.
In one of her interviews, she said that she did not have done any study on Maoist China. Hence, while attacking China, she cleverly cites the authoritarian nature of the current revisionist regime of China to attack Marxism. Needless to say, in order to know about Maoist China, she would not bother to read the books by authoritative writers such as Edgar Snow, William Hinton and Stuart Schram, and would prefer the imperialist sources only. Anyway, we cannot expect much from an intellectual pigmy like her who once termed the ‘item songs’ as a path for woman’s emancipation and the vulgar song like ‘sarkay lo khatiya’ as an expression of woman sexuality.
Such a person could only be part of a degenerate revisionist party like CPI (ML) Liberation for so many years and it is not surprising that after joining the reactionary camp now, she is openly defaming Marxism and the proletariat. Now, the path towards identitarianism, NGO politics and to become imperialist intellectual agent is widely open before Kavita Krishnan and in fact it is the appropriate destination for her. We wonder whether we will see her representing one the imperialist funding agencies, or intellectual trojan horses of imperialism or some imperialist-funded NGO (obvious, preaching identitarian politics and ideology on women question and more!). Proletariat cannot have any feeling other than that of hatred and disgust towards such degenerate elements.
