Stalin has lost in court in a much publicized libel case. Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, charged the paper Novaya Gazeta with libel. Last April, author Anatoly Yablokov accused Stalin of being a “bloodthirsty cannibal” that signed “death lists” and committed “crimes against his own people.” The paper’s editor, a self-described “anti-Stalinist,” was not surprised with the outcome.
The much-hyped trial has social repercussions because Stalin is controversial in Russia.
Last year, Mikhail Gorbachev, who has often been voted one of the country’s most unpopular Russians in polls, denounced efforts to portray Stalin in a positive light. By contrast, over and over, polls demonstrate that Stalin is still very popular amongst the ex-Soviet peoples. For example, in a TV poll last year, Stalin was voted “third best Russian” even though he was an ethnic Georgian. Stalin supporters gathered with signs outside the courtroom. Dzhugashvili’s attorney stated:
“Stalin was a great leader who saved the country and led it to democracy. His constitution was the best ever written. Yes, many innocent people suffered and were killed, but Stalin was not responsible for this. Others were. It’s time to put the record straight.” (1) (2) (3)
A tale of two body counts
Central to Dzhugashvili’s case was that the massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forests in World War II was not carried out by the Soviet Union. Contrary to the newspaper claims, Dzhugashvili’s attorney asserts that the documents that allegedly ordered the deaths of Polish prisoners of war are fakes. And, there is much evidence, including eyewitness accounts to suggest that the Nazis, not the Soviets were responsible. (4) (5) However, in 1990, after decades of denying responsibility and claiming that the massacre was carried out by Nazis, the revisionist Gorbachev administration acknowledged that the Soviets had executed the officers. However, many continue to maintain that the event was staged by the Nazi forces who “discovered” the bodies after further invading Poland. Many maintain that the massacre was staged as propaganda against the Soviet Union, socialism, and Stalin. They claim that the admission by Gorbachev was just a political maneuver by revisionists to discredit socialism. Since the death of Stalin there has been a continual re-writing of the historical narrative. Stalin has been demonized as a bloodthirsty tyrant by both the revisionists that succeeded him in the Soviet leadership and by Western propaganda. It is entirely possible that revisionists and others have forged archival materials in attempts to taint his legacy. After all, in order for the revisionists to legitimize their own claim to power, they have to discredit Stalin.
The alleged Katyn massacre is harped on as a way to discredit Stalin and socialism. Yet, deaths of Red Army prisoners of war aren’t given a second thought. For example, when Poland declared its independence from Russia in 1918, the Polish army under Pilsudski, with French support, invaded Russia in the hopes of crushing the new, revolutionary, Bolshevik regime. As a result of the war, imperialist Poland annexed parts of Belorussia (now Belarus) and Ukraine. What happened to Soviet prisoners of war in this earlier conflict? 165,550 went into captivity, and 75,699 were returned after the war in 1921. Between 1919 and 1921,
Russian sources estimate that 60,000 Red Army soldiers died in Polish captivity. According to Polish sources, about 20,000 died. All sides agree that tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners died in Polish hands. There is a loud outcry over the alleged Katyn massacre yet silence over these undisputed Red Army deaths because the anti-communists are more concerned with smearing Stalin than for justice for the dead. (6)