Stalin's Portrait On My Wall

If you can make a heap of all your winnings

And risk them in one turn on pitch-and- toss

R. Kipling

If

Russia is our Motherland

Death is Imminent

V. Nabokov

I am making a heap of all my winnings not for the first time though. It has been a while since I did it before on OEN but I hope my reputation will defend me. This article may offend a lot of my readers. I can't help it; truth is more important than myself. No, I am not hanging Stalin's portrait on my wall. Other people do though. They do it for a reason.

A colleague of mine, a native-born American came to me for an explanation. A rather young man, he read The Gulag Archipelago and recently he learned from the Internet that there were plans in Moscow to put several posters with Stalin on them along the Tverskaya Street during the military parade on May 2010 celebrating the 65^th Anniversary of Victory over Germany in the WWII. This year they apparently plan to have a NATO military contingent taking part in that parade and my colleague was full of contempt for that sudden revival of Stalin's ghost: how could they? After all what the world knows how dare they to honor Uncle Joe?

I can share his feelings. Stalin was a monster in his deeds and a twisted lunatic in his personal life. Through his ruling of Russia in the period from 1929 till 1953 (it doesn't matter that officially the ruling was collegiate) he created and fortified a system which fueled itself on the very people it was supposed to serve. He was an ultimate man-eater and his system ate the Russian citizens. Everyone could be food and the only difference between the people was the time before being served. It was an idea of a giant meat farm with a pasture where people were let out every morning like cattle to graze the grass, moo and wait for a slaughter. Cattle can feel happiness too. Stalin usurped a monopoly on happiness; he literally proclaimed all the people of his country as permanently happy; the proper analogue is an asylum where the psychotics are laughing all the time. Psychiatry never was a respected science in Russia or we would find that apparently all Russian population after Stalin's death needed a treatment for PTSD. The remnants of that bloody system are still in charge in the country and its inhumane standards like syphilis went into the DNA and haunt the generations of the future. The horrible dictator had no soul and no conscience; he either killed or destroyed in the other ways all people close to him; he was incapable of loving even a dog. When he died, he died alone on the floor with no help because people were afraid to enter the room without him calling. He was killed by the very fear he instilled in the others. All of that is true. My colleague definitely had a point.

Then I asked him which US historical figure would he associate with the Victory in the WWII. He immediately named FDR. I then mentioned that FDR was a very controversial character, that even now many people hate him, that he was accused of many covert crimes, including ordering to kill people (the Huey Long story) and that some historians still insist that he orchestrated the Pearl Harbor to drag the USA into war. Still, he said, FDR was the proper victor. He was there when it all started and he died at the helm as a true captain. Victory and FDR are inseparable , same with Churchill and it would be only proper to honor them both on that anniversary day. There, I said, that's the answer- Victory and Stalin are inseparable too.

It was not just some routine war. Four million German soldiers and their allies attacked Russia on June 22, 1941 not to conquer it and then take some contributions or territories. It was an expedition of elimination. The whole Europe had been conquered already and the new Empire proclaimed its New Order which declared that there was only one superior race- Aryan, one superior nation- German and all the others were nothing but servants, slaves, lower human beings whose fate would be decided by their masters in Berlin. That was a burst of medieval barbarism with tanks and airplanes instead of swords and cavalry. Hitler did not want to overtake Russia- he wanted to eliminate the people of it and make it a domain for his new so-called knights. It was an Apocalypse rolling and the fight with Hitler's Germany was the fight for the life on the Earth. That's what was coming and that was a challenge Russia faced, the challenge no nation before faced ever. In sorts it was as if the battle with space aliens because the Nazis were surely not human by any standards. And the leadership in Kremlin, Stalin in particular had to take a responsibility and fight. He did that.

Stalin was the leader of Russia during that war from the start to the end. To achieve victory he had to overcome himself and make many tough decisions which were against the very fabric of who he was. He very quickly made alliances with England, USA and Free France. He abolished the KomIntern and stopped all the communist propaganda on the Allies' territories. He revived and supported the Russian Orthodox Church. For the first time maybe in his own life in his radio address to the Russian people he called them not just official comrades but brothers and sisters. He became a Chairman of the State Committee on Defense, the over-powerful position in the country and remained there till the end. He did not run away, did not abandon his people, did not collaborate with the Germans and did not consider the surrender (although there were periods of horrible depression and doubt). On November 7^th 1941 Russian forces paraded in front of the Kremlin in a traditional parade dedicated to the Revolution and proceeded to the front for a historical battle of Moscow when Vermacht was stopped for the first time. It was the beginning of the end of the Third Reich.

The glorious Russian nation won that war for all Humanity. Casualties were astronomical- about 27 million Soviet people of all nationalities died. Military and civilians- they all were soldiers of light in that Holy War. Every man, woman and child of Russia from Marshal Zhukov to the last little kid gassed by Germans in Eisk orphanage fought to the death with unbelievable courage and honor. And yes, that's true- the overwhelming majority of them considered Joseph Stalin their leader, their savior and their captain. They went to battle with his name and that was their right. I am not debating here his blunders an his mistakes. Obviously, those casualties could be much smaller if it wasn't for his deeds before the war. BUT the overwhelming carnage was DUE TO GERMANS and only to them: they killed the Russian civilians and bombarded children; they developed the machine of death, not Stalin. Murderers are more responsible for the actual murder than those whose mistakes (and yes, even malice) lead to the possibility of murder, is that not?

One of the most malicious slanders of the current Western interpreters of that war is the postulate that those two totalitarian powers were equally evil, that it was a collision of the dark forces on both sides, that Communism is the same as Fascism and that Allies were really the saviors of Humanity. This bizarre perception not only insults the intelligence- it insults the Humanity itself, it insults all those heroes who died in that battle too. Yes, Stalin and his system bore a resemblance to the Hitler's machine but Russian people, unlike Germans never surrendered their soul. Russian civilization endured and even transformed such a horrible ruler as Stalin while Germany and Europe eagerly sold their soul to the Devil and enjoyed it. Europe died in Auschwitz, like one Spanish writer said. Russia survived. Stalin, in his relentless efforts to rule his tragic Utopia again and again could notice that his goals were unachievable, that Russian people, the people of the Soviet Union were not cattle or slaves and never will be, that he had to acknowledge that at least for himself, that the country and its spirit were more powerful than his malice. And in the war he understood that with all the great clarity.

Maybe one of the most tragic paradoxes of that war was that in order to win Stalin had to temporary let go and unleash the inner historical spirit of liberty and honor of the Nation he abused and that Nation in its Noble Fury and Gratitude elevated him up on its wave when it crushed the forces of darkness once and for all. The logic of the just cause, the extraordinary circumstance made a twisted dictator an agent of goodness in a way that maybe never happened before on such scale in the history of Humanity. In the Holy War the better people won. On that day, May 9, 1945 Russian people were the best in the world and their sacrifice made their leader Joseph Stalin honorable and inseparable forever from that Victory. They molded together for better and for worse.

 1  |  2