La Cause du Peuple – May 8, 1945, victory in Europe of the Socialist Revolution over fascism
We hereby share an unofficial translation of an article published by La Cause du Peuple.
On May 2, 1945, the Battle of Berlin ended with the surrender of the Nazi forces defending the Reich’s capital. Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. At 10:43 p.m. on May 8, 1945, the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany was ratified at Red Army HQ in Berlin. In Asia, Japanese fascism surrendered on August 15, 1945. The most barbaric war in history has come to an end, with the Allied forces victorious over the world’s fascist coalition forces. The toll is incomparable: 2.5% of the world’s population, or 60 million people, were wiped out by genocidal imperialism.
What political assessment should we revolutionaries draw from the Second World War? Commemorative issues should be of little importance to us; we need only look at the underlying ideological and political questions. Today, imperialist propaganda portrays the Americans as the great liberators of fascism in Europe and Asia. D-Day (June 6, 1944) is said to be the most important event of the war in Europe, and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan sealed the fate of fascism.
We must make it clear that all this is a lie propagated to conceal the true role of the USSR, of Stalin, of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the USSR, of the socialist system, but also of the Chinese Communists, and of the Communist strategy of Protracted People’s War, led by Chairman Mao, which will be dealt with in another article. We don’t deny the role of the USA or the British in the anti-fascist war, but it was not they who destroyed the fascist war machine.
As materialists, we have to start from the facts: 26 million Soviets, including 11 million soldiers, died mainly as a result of the famine provoked by the Nazis to exterminate the Slavic population of their “vital space”, i.e. for the creation of their colonial Empire. By way of comparison, 416,000 US soldiers died and very few civilians, and the United Kingdom about the same number (with 30,000 civilians). France, though a power defeated by the Nazis, had more deaths. The Soviets destroyed 5 million Nazi (and Allies) soldiers and took 4 million prisoners. It was in the East that the Nazis lost the war in human and material terms, not elsewhere.
The question is what defeated the Nazis: the cold, the size of the territory, the mass of “muzhiks” (Russian peasants) who could be sacrificed at will… as the Nazi propaganda never stopped repeating and which continues to be propagated by the bourgeois media, or something else. The question is how the USSR was able to endure the most barbaric war of extermination in human history without collapsing. The Nazis, first and foremost, but also the other imperialists (US, UK, France) thought that the USSR was just a “rotten house”, and that if they broke down the door, the whole system would collapse. The imperialists wrongly believed that collectivization and the purges carried out by the Party and the Red Army were nothing more than terrorist measures against the people, and that these peoples would rise up as one to welcome their “liberators”. Even the most honest historians today find it hard to accept that it was the Socialist Revolution, the socialist state (the dictatorship of the proletariat), the Communist Party led by Stalin and his pre-war policies that defeated Nazism.
The Nazis were the first to be more than surprised by the fierce resistance put up by the Soviets, even to the point of recognizing the superiority of the socialist state over the Nazi state. This unprecedented historical fact was not the result of chance, but of a determined struggle led by Comrade Stalin to give the Communist Party the right line for the development of socialism as the material basis of the war against Nazism. The Soviets knew as soon as Hitler came to power that he represented the most virulent faction of German imperialists, and that his aim was to give the German monopolies what they sorely lacked: a colonial empire. Since Germany couldn’t compete with the British navy, the colonial empire would come at the expense of the populations of Eastern Europe (Central Europe and the USSR). Stalin, a visionary guided by Marxism-Leninism, knew right from the start that a powerful industrial base was needed to avoid losing the war of extermination, i.e. to speed up the development of socialism, the only way to make up for the USSR’s lag in the face of the imperialists. The struggle against the various deviations in the CP(b)US lasted 13 years, and was based on the struggle between the red line of socialist revolution and the black line of a return to capitalism. The great struggle to collectivize agriculture focused on this issue. Historical lies have said that Stalin was against the peasants: this is absolutely false. He was against the Kulaks, the wealthy peasants and landowners who materially and ideologically held great power in the USSR, the remnants of feudalism and capitalism in the countryside. Not only were they against Soviet power, they also hijacked harvests and waged vast sabotage campaigns. The battle for collectivization was not without its deviations, which were acknowledged by Stalin himself (see “The vertigo of success 1930”). This important document was even brandished by peasants during revolts against these deviations and against the kulaks, demanding that local authorities follow the line of Stalin and the Central Committee.
Collectivization accelerated industrialization, which was not achieved at the expense of the countryside, but in a dialectical relationship with it. Collectivization led to the modernization of agriculture, which was made possible by industrialization itself. The USSR underwent unprecedented economic, social and cultural development under Stalin, and the figures speak for themselves. Stalin’s policies constantly strengthened the worker-peasant alliance under the leadership of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. The proof being that the majority of Red Army soldiers were peasants during the war. The development of socialism (economic, social and cultural), and the great struggles within the Party, led to the emergence of a new generation of determined Communists, loyal to the Party and its Leader, and to the Revolution. The Moscow Trials were the conclusion of a 13-year struggle against the right-wing in the Party, which had never wanted to submit to the majority. The Trials strengthened the Party and put a lasting stop to the economic sabotage organized by underground cells in the Party and the USSR. The purges in the Red Army also strengthened the Army by crushing possible traitorous factions. At the end of 1918, the Red Army consisted of 5,000 Red commanders, 6,000 political commissars and… 165,000 former Tsar officers! Was Stalin mad to think that a number of high-ranking soldiers in the Red Army could have gone over to the enemy?
Were there any excesses? Certainly, that’s the way it is with any revolutionary process. To think that the struggles in the CP(b)SU, collectivization, the purges in the Red Army, the Moscow Trials, have nothing to do with the class struggle is to understand nothing of the titanic battle involved in the struggle under socialism for the triumph of said Socialist Revolution. It denies that the class struggle continues after the conquest of Power in even more acute forms.
It was Troskysm, directly serving bourgeois interests, that spread all the lies about Stalin’s USSR, and today the bourgeoisie has adopted Trotskyist theses as its own.
Stalin knew that they had no more than 10 years to create a powerful USSR, and history has shown that he was absolutely right about everything. The revolutionary process of bringing about the triumph of the proletarian line in the CP(b)SU prepared the ground for the defense of the USSR by developing Communist cadres ready to do anything in defense of the Revolution and important strategic reserves.
This struggle was not just internal to the USSR; it was waged in conjunction with the Communist International to develop a broad world Anti-Fascist Front that helped defeat Nazism. The proletariat and masses of the world, led by the Communist Parties, carried the anti-fascist line of defending the Soviet Union, the only Red base for the Revolution. Throughout the occupied countries, they unleashed armed resistance, a veritable war of anti-fascist national liberation. This immense battle forced the imperialists and reactionary governments to support the defense of the USSR against Nazism, and to take part in this war for civilization. To think that this was a foregone conclusion is to forget the strong connivances with Nazi Germany. The German militaristic effort would not have been possible without US, British and French capital. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, used by the bourgeoisie to smear Communism, Socialism and Stalin, was one of the Soviet leader’s greatest coups. It bought precious time to continue rearmament and, in the end, cost the Wehrmacht dearly in Operation Barbarossa. Similarly, the Winter War against Finland was deliberately provoked by the French and British, whose main enemy was the USSR. Finland was ready for a largely positive land swap, but the “Allies” pushed for war.
War is the continuation of politics by other means, so it was Stalin’s political choices that made the miracle possible. Stalin remained in command of Moscow, as close to the front as possible, while the Nazis retreated into the capital’s suburbs. At this crucial moment in contemporary history, when the Moscow elite was on the verge of collapse, Stalin made a memorable report on the 24th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, and a speech at the Red Army Review in Moscow’s Red Square united all the peoples of the Soviet Union, restoring confidence in the final victory of the Communist Party and its leader. These documents are of immense historical significance, and should be studied by all sincere revolutionaries.
We therefore understand that it was the Communist Party, its leader, the social and political system, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Socialist economic regime that eradicated Nazism, the most barbaric offshoot of the capitalist mode of production, from the face of the earth. The question of political organization runs throughout the article, leading to the conclusion that the proletariat and the popular masses can do anything if they have a Communist Party forged to meet the historic challenges. All this should be enough to restore Stalin to his rightful place in history: the architect of victory over Nazism.
Our times could be mistaken for those of the early 1930s, but that would be to forget that the wheel of history doesn’t turn backwards. It’s obvious that the foundations of what created Nazism, the most aggressive imperialist monopolies plunged into crisis, are at work to plunge humanity back into a bandit war aimed at the colonial redrawing of the world. Macron’s war-mongering policies serve the same masters who plunged humanity into darkness, but it is the same forces that can and will defeat this calamity: the proletariat led by the Communist Party. For the first time in history, we can ward off the imperialist world war of robbery through the coordinated action of the proletariat, the masses of the people, the peoples of the world, who are far more aware of what is at stake at the moment, and who are heated up by the crisis of imperialism. And if that fails, we’ll turn the coming inter-imperialist war into its own tomb, and eradicate this genocidal system from the face of the earth forever. The only thing that must keep us on our toes is the Reconstitution of the Communist Party, and we too have 10 years.
