LENINGRAD AND STALINGRAD —
THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF RUSSIA
80 years ago, on January 27, 1944, the heroic defense of Leningrad ended with a complete lifting of the blockade. A year before that — on February 2, 1943 — the Red Army victoriously completed the grandiose Battle of Stalingrad. Thus, Leningrad and Stalingrad forever became part of the history of Russia.
The new names of Petrograd (in 1924) and Tsaritsyn (in 1925) appeared not at the whim of officials, but at the will of the revolutionary working class of the Soviet country, whose leading group was the Russian working class.
Lenin and Stalin earned the trust and deep respect of the working people through their selfless service to the workers’ cause.
LENIN — LEADER OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT AND DEFENSE OF THE SOVIET POWER
In his first works from the 1890s, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin proved that Russia was on the capitalist path, that the rapidly growing factory-working class was becoming the main force in liberating the country from feudal vestiges (i.e. landlordism, the power of the nobility headed by the Tsar).
Comrade Lenin explained that gaining bourgeois freedoms: the right to form political parties, trade unions, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc., will be more more to the benefit of the Russian working class than of the bourgeoisie. Bourgeois democracy gives the working class the opportunity to organize itself to fight for the establishment of its power. The dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin taught, «is necessary for the establishment of common ownership of the means of production, for the complete abolition of classes, that is, for the transformation of all able-bodied members of society into workers who work 3-4 hours a day in production and thus fully provide for themselves materially, and spend the rest of their time in additional education, participation in the management of public affairs, physical training and sports.
Lenin knew that in order to succeed in the struggle for a classless society (Communism), the working class needed its own political vanguard — the party. Vladimir Ilyich did everything to make the Bolshevik Party such a vanguard. He edited the all-Russian newspaper Iskra, which engaged in revolutionary propaganda and agitation. When Iskra fell into the hands of the Mensheviks (traitors to the workers’ cause), he saw to the production of new Bolshevik newspapers, the most famous of which was Pravda. Lenin contributed to strengthening of the role of workers in party committees. He oriented the Bolsheviks at using all the forms of struggle for the interests of the working class, from strike action to armed rebellion.
During the first Russian Revolution of 1905, the strike committees of the plants and factories of the city of Ivanovo sent their representatives to a common representative body, the Council of Workers’ Deputies. Thus the Russian working class discovered the Soviets as an organizational form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This form means that working class power is built on the principle of representation of factoryies and factory collectives rather than by electing deputies from territorial districts, as bourgeois parliaments are formed. Lenin advocated the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of Soviet power.
Vladimir Ilyich proved that by the beginning of the 20th century capitalism had developed into its highest stage — imperialism, i.e. the period of domination of monopolies. Under imperialism, the uneven development of capitalism increases, that’s why the socialist revolution can initially win in one country, where the socio-economic contradictions have escalated to the limit. Russia was an exactly such country by the end of the First World War.
After the February 1917, Lenin spoke out for the transformation of the bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution with the establishment of the Soviet power. The Soviet power established in October 1917 legalized the 8-hour working day and the liquidation of landlordism. That’s how the aspirations of the working class and the laboring peasantry were realized.
Under Lenin’s leadership, the transfer of factories and plants from the hands of capitalists into the hands of the Soviet state took place. The nationalization of industry created the economic basis for the victory of the Soviet state in the civil war.
Vladimir Ilyich led the defense of the Soviet Republic against the White Armies and foreign invaders sent into Russia by those states that today stand behind the Ukraine’s Bandera regime.
In the conditions of post-war devastation in 1921, Lenin allowed the transfer of small industrial enterprises into private hands while maintaining the commanding heights in the economy for the proletarian state. He was convinced that this temporary retreat would be used for the victory of socialism.
In 1922, with the active participation of Vladimir Ilyich, the Soviet republics voluntarily united into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, under the domination of public ownership of the means of production, ensured the unity of the struggle of workers of all nationalities for the establishment of socialism and led to the eradication of national strife.
The desire of the Soviet working class to immortalize the memory of Vladimir Lenin by naming the city of the victorious proletarian revolution after him is understandable.
This revolution gave to the working class the opportunity to free itself from capitalist exploitation, to open to the working people access to education, health care, to participation in the management of enterprises and the state. This is why the Soviet people heroically defended Leningrad from the Nazi invaders.
STALIN — THE LEADER OF THE STRUGGLE FOR THE VICTORY OF SOCIALISM, SUPREME COMMANDER
Lenin outlined the main tasks of building socialism in our country. To organize the practical struggle for the solution of these tasks fell to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
Stalin, who joined the revolutionary movement at the age of 15 (in 1895), deservedly became Lenin’s successor.
In 1904, the young revolutionary led the organization of the famous strike of tens of thousands of workers in the Baku oil fields, which resulted in the first collective agreement in Russia, providing for a shorter working day and higher wages for workers. The success of the strike inspired the Russian working class to the revolutionary struggle in 1905.
Stalin was always on Lenin’s side in the struggle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. In 1912, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at the suggestion of Vladimir Ilyich.
The Tsarist secret police repeatedly seized the underground revolutionary, who survived imprisonment and exile. But the harsh trials did not break Stalin, but hardened him as an indomitable fighter for the labor cause.
In August 1917, it was Stalin who presented the report of the Central Committee at the VI Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party.
November 6, 1917, he published in the newspaper Pravda the call for the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the establishment of Soviet power.
In the Soviet government, Stalin was the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and simultaneously headed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. Joseph Vissarionovich played an outstanding role in achieving victories of the Red Army at Tsaritsyn, Petrograd, on other fronts of the Civil War.
No wonder that on April 3, 1922 he was elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks.
A few days after Lenin’s death, January 26, 1924, at the Second Congress of Soviets of the USSR Stalin took an oath to preserve and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he steadfastly followed.
Expressing the will of the Soviet working class, the All-Union Central Executive Committee renamed Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad on April 10, 1925.
Under Stalin’s leadership, the working class built a powerful state industry in a decade or so, which was run on the basis of a five-year plan. By 1935, most industrial workers had a 7-hour workday, the shortest in the world.
In agriculture, the dominance of collective and state farms as socialist enterprises was established.
As a result of the labor and struggle of the Soviet working class, led by the Bolshevik Party with General Secretary Stalin, communism was built for the first time in the world, that is, a social order based on public ownership of the means of production. True, it was the first phase of communism, socialism, when class differences still existed.
Stalin knew that while building socialism, the country must prepare for the inevitable aggression from the imperialist states. World imperialism pushed Nazi Germany to attack the USSR.
Stalin as Supreme Commander-in-Chief, was, in essence, responsible for everything: for the transition of the economy to wartime footing, for staffing and providing everything necessary for the army and the navy, for planning and conducting military operations, for the continous work of the rear services.
The further, the more successfully Joseph Vissarionovich dealt with these grandiose tasks, uniting the efforts of the Soviet people in the fight against the Nazi invaders.
That is why during the Battle of Stalingrad «there was no land beyond the Volga» for the Soviet soldiers. That is why they went into battle, shouting «For the Motherland! For Stalin!»
After the victory in the Great Patriotic War, Stalin led the restoration and development of the national economy. He initiated a policy of annual price reductions for consumer goods, which he implemented until his death in 1953.
So, Stalingrad is also a reminder of Stalin’s price reductions.
MAKING THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARIES CHOKE
During the revolutionary upsurge the working class gives cities the names of their leaders, while during the counter-revolution the bourgeoisie and its representatives hurry to erase the memory of them.
Khrushchev, who, during Stalin’s lifetime had praised the leader of the working class louder than anyone else, after his death set out to liquidate the dictatorship of the proletariat. Hiding behind the guise of a «leninist», Khrushchev in his counter-revolutionary aspirations relied on those who put their particular interests above the fundamental interests of the working class, who looked at the proletarian state in the old way: to give it less and worse work, and to snatch more from it for themselves.
This ardent anti-communist painted black the struggle of the dictatorship of the proletariat with domestic and foreign enemies. Wasn’t the Soviet state supposed to suppress (repress) those who sought to destroy it for the benefit of Russia’s eternal enemies? Don’t they repress in today’s Russia the servants of the Banderites, who blow up railroad tracks and power lines, who pass information about military units to the enemy, etc.? For this kind of repressions we should say «thank you» to the state.
Under a smokescreen of slander against Stalin, spuriously contrasting Stalin with Lenin, the scoundrel Khrushchev grouped anti-communist forces in the CPSU. In 1961, at the XXII Congress of the CPSU, he removed from the party program the Marxist-Leninist provision on the dictatorship of the proletariat under socialism, replacing it with the nonsense thesis of a «nation-state.» Counter-revolutionaries, wishing to erase from people’s minds the memory of the outstanding leader of the working class, took Stalin’s body out of the Mausoleum, renamed Stalingrad (Stalin City) to Volgograd (Volga City. As if there were no other cities on the Volga river).
The June 1962 shooting of workers in the city of Novocherkassk who opposed Khrushchev’s price increases for butter, meat and sausage showed that counter-revolutionaries wearing the guise of «Leninists» were at war not just with the memory of Stalin, but at war with the working class. Although Khrushchev was removed from all his posts in 1964, in 1965 his henchmen carried out a reform to break the socialist economy by making profit the main goal of enterprises.
The Communists, loyal to the working class, fought the creeping counter-revolution as best they could, but their strength was not enough to succeed. The anti-Communist leaders within and outside the CPSU, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, did everything they could to complete the counter-revolutionary period, including denigrating the name and cause of Lenin.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO LENINGRAD AND STALINGRAD
It is probably for the best that the destruction of industry by privatizers, the domination of foreign «consultants» in enterprises and state institutions, the rows of beggars on cities’ streets and passages, the rampant banditry and other «charms» of emerging capitalism took place in St. Petersburg and Volgograd. For Leningrad and Stalingrad it would have been savagery and defamation.
Fortunately, the communist past of present-day Russia has made it possible to gather forces in favor of preserving the country, albeit as a capitalist one. They have set a course for the restoration of industry, agriculture, education and healthcare in spite of the opposition by Kasyanov, Kudrin, Ulyukayev, Chubais and their like representatives of big foreign capital in the Russian government.
Convinced of the ruthlessness of American fascism in foreign policy that initiated the coup d’état in Ukraine, the Russian leadership recognized the reunification of Crimea with Russia and supported the struggle of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics against the threat of national oppression of the Russian population by the Banderite regime. This rightful position led to the recognition of these republics and the beginning of a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.
Russian working class has established itself as the main force of the anti-fascist struggle by its hard work at defense enterprises, by sending its representatives to fight against the accomplices of American fascism in foreign policy in Ukraine. This struggle is organized by the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin, the son of a front-line soldier who worked in a factory after the war.
Present-day Russia is a bourgeois country. The bourgeoisie cannot but reach for the larger foreign imperialist capital. Western universities and Russian universities copied from them have grinded out hundreds of thousands of graduates from among Russian citizens who despise the working people and, therefore, Russia. They have settled in their offices and cubicles and are waiting for their time.
Russia’s independence in the long term can only be secured by the power of the working class, which by its position is interested in the progress of domestic production and the social sphere as a whole and is able to withstand all the trials of the struggle for the preservation and development of the country. To succeed in this struggle, the working class must rely on the theory and practice of Lenin and Stalin: first of all, to strengthen the Workers’ Party of Russia and to develop trade unions. Therefore, sooner or later, Leningrad and Stalingrad will reappear in Russia.
А. V. Zolotov, editor-in-chief, Narodnaya Pravda (People’s Truth)
М. V. Popov, Vice-President of the Workers’ Academy Foundation