Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1878. Many readers of Lenta.ru are outraged by the tonality of the texts devoted to the Generalissimo and his legacy: especially often in the comments goes to editors Andrei Mozzhukhin and Andrei Borisov, as well as special correspondent Mikhail Karpov. Well, let's hear the other side. In honor of Stalin's birthday, the chief Stalinist historian of Russia, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Yuri Zhukov, lives among the faded wallpaper and leather Stalinist folios, under the shade of high Stalinist ceilings, and Lenta.ru special correspondent Mikhail Karpov went.
Among professional historians, Stalin has few defenders. Why?
Zhukov: You see, it is easiest to scold. It is very easy to scold by hanging all the dogs on one person. But after that, it is difficult to launder, because you have to sit in the archives, read old newspapers and magazines, compare all this, study, see what actually happened, what Stalin wrote, what he said, what was published, what was not. It takes years. But who today will allow himself to work for years for a penny? And in science they pay almost less than teachers at school. And that is why, not in the historical community, but in general among the so-called political scientists and so-called historians, there are many who throw mud at anyone on request. Moreover, for them, in general, Stalin is an unknown figure. She does not touch them, and nevertheless they are happy to work on this topic for 30 pieces of silver of their own. All this is extremely simple and clear.
So who, in your opinion, pays those candidates and doctors of historical sciences who publish works …
ABOUT! Sorry! There is no such. The doctor of historical sciences who writes [about Stalin] is me. There are no candidates. There is another doctor of sciences, Oleg Khlevnyuk. His latest book on Stalin begins by writing about being commissioned by Yale University. Khlevnyuk gave them the manuscript, they made comments on it, and so on. He does not hide it! Moreover, at the beginning of the book, he writes: "This book is not for the author of" Another Stalin. " The author of "Another Stalin" is in front of you. Why? Because if Khlevnyuk operates like a magician with his fingers, deceives the reader, then I scrupulously pull out everything that is, both for and against.
And Oleg Budnitsky?
Budnitsky is, sorry, not a historian. This, as they said at the time of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, is a crackpiper, and nothing more. He chases the line - the more he writes, the more he gets. Therefore, unfortunately - and I have said this more than once - I am the only one seriously dealing with this topic. Moreover, I constantly appeal to my colleagues with an appeal: guys, I cannot grasp the immensity, study everything. I am missing something, please go to the archives, dig, find errors in me, correct me, complete.
Frame: the film "The Fall of Berlin".
Promotional video:
Deathly silence. Well, who will go to the archive for five to seven years to write something for which he will receive practically nothing? In our god damned homeland, everything is done for money and for the sake of money, and nothing more. Nobody needs the truth.
You, as a Soviet historian, worked both during Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's times …
Khrushchev was even an author for me once, when I worked at the Novosti press agency - so old I am! And I was on Trubnaya Square when Stalin was buried!
So, was it possible in those days, after the XX Congress of the CPSU, after the debunking of the personality cult, to study Stalin?
No. Everything was extremely simple. Khrushchev - he did not really talk about Stalin, he only blamed his own guilt, his crimes and crimes like him, the first secretaries of regional and regional committees blamed on Stalin.
There is an old concept: a thief is the first to shout “Stop the thief!” To divert attention from himself. When, after the XX Congress, Khrushchev read his report, everyone who had previously been with Stalin was alive, working, in power. It was impossible to lie in their eyes. Therefore, Nikita came up with this tricky thing - he started talking about repression. Undoubtedly, yes, they did. For what they were imprisoned, how much - these are details, it does not matter. The main thing is that they planted. That's what he was talking about.
Left, right, kulaks and first secretaries
So when and why?
Planted from the summer of 1937 to the late autumn of 1938, and many were planted. But for some reason I alone among historians tried to understand why this happened. I offered my own explanation of this problem, which turned out to be infinitely simple.
By this time, Stalin was completing his revolution from above. He did a lot - for example, in 1934, the teaching of history and geography was restored in schools and universities. They returned the classics of Russian literature to the curriculum, again began to celebrate the anniversaries of Pushkin, Lermontov, Belinsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky. Russian history and Russian culture returned. Only thanks to Stalin did we, the USSR, join the League of Nations, and this was not accepted by all leftists.
Finally, the main thing: Stalin directed the preparation of the new constitution, which, according to the opinions of all lawyers dealing with constitutional problems in general, is still one of the most democratic. An electoral law was to appear as an appendix to it. According to it, direct elections were introduced. And in our country, since 1905, they have always been multi-stage. Before the revolution and after, there were significant groups of the population who did not have the right to vote or be elected. At the first level, they voted in secret by raising their hands at meetings.
Finally, Stalin insisted that the vote be alternative. In my book "Another Stalin" I even published a sample ballot paper, which shows that at least two people must apply for one seat. It meant a simple thing. The first secretaries - regional committees, regional committees, city party organizations - would never have passed.
Why?
After collectivization, which was carried out with huge excesses, after industrialization, which took place with huge mistakes due to the fault of these first secretaries, it became clear that they would not pass. And since they are not elected, the Central Committee will tell them: they say, dear comrade, the people did not entrust you to lead, and therefore you cannot remain in your post, and come on, my dear … What kind of education do you have? Two classes? That's fine. Go to study, get a secondary education, higher.
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Joseph Stalin (2nd from left) and People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR Kliment Voroshilov (left) talk with pilots and parachutists at the airfield in Tushino / Photo: Ivan Shagin / RIA Novosti.
Then all these first secretaries began to write to the Central Committee: "They agree to alternative elections, but not now, now the NKVD has opened a secret underground counter-revolutionary organization that is preparing a coup, and until we deal with them, there should be no alternative elections." It was they who initiated the mass repressions. Every first secretary hastened to write how much he wants to shoot and send to the camps.
You mean there was a conspiracy between them?
Yes, of course, there was a conspiracy during the plenum, at which this law on elections was discussed. Stalin was faced with an alternative: either he agrees with these repressions, or five minutes later one of the first secretaries speaks out and says that Stalin is an opportunist, betrayed the ideals of the revolution and Lenin's precepts and therefore cannot remain in the ranks of the party, we exclude him. Of course, in an hour or two he would no longer be among the living.
But then, when it was possible to stop this terrible avalanche, Stalin dealt with them. It was then that their heads flew, and Khrushchev spoke about them after the XX Congress in his report. Not about those people who accidentally fell into the millstones of history, not about real criminals who made counterfeit money, bandits, rapists, murderers, spies …
But, at least, the counterfeiters and bandits were not judged according to political articles
No. But you forget one small detail. Today no one remembers what the 58th and 59th articles were. Each of them contained 15-17 points, independent articles that were considered political. There was smuggling, illegal border crossing, speculation in gold and currency, making counterfeit money, criminal negligence and much more. Therefore, indeed, under the 58th and 59th Articles, as today, only with long terms, the same number of people were imprisoned.
But the most important thing is that among them there was a small group of these very political bureaucrats who, during the Civil War, due to the fact that they ran ahead of the regiment with a saber or a revolver, made fiery speeches, advanced along the party line and became the first secretaries. Yes, they knew how to call, lead, but no more.
They all had no education. It’s also good if, like Khrushchev’s, two classes of a parish school. Some had not a parish church, but a Jewish religious school heder, where they memorized the Talmud. It cannot be called education either. Only a few had completed or incomplete higher education, often obtained abroad. There were a hundred of them for the whole party. And it was they who were in the highest positions.
But, for example, when Magnitogorsk or Kuznetsk metallurgical plants were being built, local party organizations were headed by people who had no idea about algebra. But they had, as it seemed to them, to lead the engineers. They needed knowledge to lead, and this knowledge was not there.
Who replaced them?
At a party conference held in early 1941, on the eve of the war, Malenkov, making a report, naturally read and corrected by Stalin, said: “We do not need party members even with pre-revolutionary experience, we need engineers, doctors, scientists, teachers, let and non-partisan . This is what Stalin was guided by in the 1930s.
He realized long ago that our party - first the RSDLP of the Bolsheviks, then the RCP (b), the VKP (b), the CPSU - was created in the underground with two tasks: seizing power and retaining it. She fulfilled them by the mid-1920s, and therefore it was then that the party crisis began, which consisted in the fact that various groups in the party leadership offered their own vision of the country's future life.
Joseph Stalin. Frame: the film “Normandie-Niemen. Monologue.
To put it simply, then there were three groups. Leftists: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek. The second group is the rightists: Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky. And Stalin's centrist group is not my discovery, not my inventions. So it was said then at the plenary sessions of the party.
Conditionally, was Stalin a candidate "for stability"?
No. In the summer of 1923, Stalin realized that there would be no world revolution. One of his notes has survived, in which he writes that if power passes to the German communists, they will not hold it even for a few minutes. The main stake then was placed on the inevitability of a world revolution. Of course, not all over the world at once and not in South America, but in Europe, and above all in Germany. It was about this in Pravda in the fall of 1923 that Zinoviev published a series of articles in which he explained to semi-literate readers why it was beneficial.
Stalin reads a newspaper while relaxing. Photo from the personal archive of E. Kovalenko / Photo: RIA Novosti.
He explained it this way: Germany is the most developed industrial country in the world. We are agrarian and backward. If we combine them, our economy will be ideal and no one will ever trample on us. In addition, the Germans have an organized, disciplined proletariat, which Russia did not yet have. And as soon as the revolution takes place in Germany and we unite into a single country, then everything will work out. In other words, the left believed that the revolution, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow, will surely take place and will remove all our economic problems.
The rightists believed that yes, the world revolution would take place, but not soon, but in many years. Therefore, the main thing for us now is to live up to it, to somehow survive. Stalin, unlike those and others, believed that there would be no world revolution at all. Therefore, we need to focus on building socialism in one country, without waiting for help from abroad. He never said "build socialism"! He said "get busy building socialism."
What was it?
This idea was ideally developed by Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, who since 1921 practically did not deal with Lubyanka affairs. He was engaged in economics. At first he restored the railways, somehow, but established the movement of trains. Then he made a proposal to immediately industrialize the country.
Dzerzhinsky said: well, we are a peasant state, but our yield is lower than in Holland, Germany and France. Why? Because, firstly, we do not have nitrogen fertilizers. This means that it is necessary to create a chemical industry for agriculture. Secondly, we plow on horseback, but the whole world has long forgotten about it. We need tractors - where can we get them? We need to build tractor and combine factories, which means we need a powerful metallurgical base, which we have is weak. This means that it is necessary to build metallurgical plants, for the operation of which it is necessary to develop deposits of iron ore, non-ferrous metals, and so on.
Image: Globallookpress.com
He painted a systematic picture of industrialization aimed at lifting the country out of poverty. Bukharin most actively opposed him, who believed that our main support was the kulaks. In the magazine "Kommunist" he appealed to the peasants with the appeal "get rich!" At the same time, until now no one can count how many of these kulaks we had. Then they believed that about 15 percent, but immediately made a reservation that for bribes in the village council they gave false certificates, and the fist became, as it were, not a fist.
But the criteria of "kulak-middle-peasant-poor peasant" were very vague
I give a pre-revolutionary characterization of the kulak, published at the beginning of the twentieth century in one of the encyclopedias. This is a member of a peasant community who, together with all the community members, owns land, which is then divided into pieces by eaters. But besides this, the kulak has either a mill, or a crusher, or a shop, or a smithy. This allows him to set the prices of his products that he wants, keeping the whole community in his fist.
But under Soviet rule, he had no right to own all this
Under the Soviet regime, there were restrictions, but, as it turned out very quickly (and they talked about it openly both at plenums and at congresses), the kulak owned an average of 100-150 hectares of land, while the poor on average had no more than five hectares … To cultivate such an area, no family is enough. Therefore, the kulaks hired laborers - hired workers, but paid them a pittance. For example, a woman is hired for a bag of rye and a scarf. Translated into money, she worked literally for free. At the same time, the number of fists increased continuously.
By what means?
There were also middle peasants who were disintegrating - some went into kulaks, some into poor peasants. To be considered a middle peasant, a peasant had to own two horses. But there was no veterinarian - glanders, and the horses died. What to plow on? On the children, on the wife? The middle peasant passed into the category of farm laborers.
The right aimed the country at supporting the kulak. Well, all right, he would have gathered a good crop and everything was in order. From 1925 to 1927, when there were excellent harvests, the country decided to take advantage of this, sell grain abroad earlier than others at the maximum price and with this money buy tractors and threshers for the same peasants. But a fist would not be a fist if it hadn’t thought: “aha, now they give me this much with a good harvest. And where is the guarantee that there will be a good harvest later? What if there will be crop failure or drought? Then I will sell this bread ten times more expensive."
Victor Govorkov's poster "And we will defeat the drought!" / Image: Fine Art Images / Diomedia.
The so-called kulak strike began. They didn’t give away their grain according to the law, by the way. This is where the fight began at the very top level. It ended with the fact that at first the extreme left, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, were expelled from the Politburo and the Central Committee, but the main thing began in 1929. It was then that a party conference took place, at which the battle between Stalin and Bukharin ended in a draw. On the one hand, it adopted a five-year plan for the development of industrialization. But at the same time it was decided that the money for it would not be taken from where the left had offered - from the kulak, from the Nepman - but only from income from foreign trade. Like a draw.
But six months later, a great crisis began. Not a single country wanted to buy anything, only sell. And we have already bought on credit and metallurgical plants, and the Gorky automobile, and the Stalingrad tractor and so on. We needed to pay our debts. Only then, in November 1929, did Stalin become Stalin. Bukharin was expelled from the Politburo, and the leader's hands were untied. He could squeeze everything he could out of the kulaks and Nepmen, and with the last bit of strength, but carry out industrialization.
Initially, Stalin himself fought for NEP, and then he turned it down
No. Stalin was never a defender of NEP. What we call War Communism was characteristic of the economies of the countries that fought in the First World War. It just dragged on for us because of the Civil War. But everyone understood that this was a wartime economy. And so it was curtailed in the spring of 1921 and introduced the same as before - nothing has been invented yet.
But large-scale industry was in the hands of the state
The whole tragedy lies in the fact that when NEP was introduced, we practically did not have any large-scale industry. Firstly, the equipment is outdated - it was bought abroad at the beginning of the century, machines and machine tools cannot work for 20 years. Secondly, there was no fuel for the operation of these enterprises and there was no raw material. Therefore, in 1921, a third of the industry was simply liquidated, closed as unnecessary, and a third was mothballed. A third remained - textile factories, and that was all. No one has ever admired NEP except Bukharin and Rykov. And even Stalin even more so.
But the political system of the state remained socialist, and at the heart of economic life there was a conditionally market economy focused on small and medium business
NEP began with the restoration of everything that had been before the revolution. Stock exchanges were opened - it was possible to speculate in currency. But the NEP showed at once that in our country what is called normal capitalism is impossible. The Napmans earned money on speculation, on resale.
Any capitalist system is based on speculation
No. They don't make money on resale. Please note that abroad, when a product is issued, it has a barcode. This is the price assigned by the manufacturer. The seller buys goods with a 6-10 percent discount.
But wait, the barcode contains the country of origin, information about the manufacturer and a unique product code …
And the price! If you go to Europe, turn on the advertisement of the product, its price will be immediately indicated, be sure. It is included in the barcode, and the store cannot sell the product at a higher price than the manufacturer has appointed, otherwise it will be deprived of its trade license, fined and imprisoned.
And maybe less?
Can. And more expensive - no. And the store receives income from the difference in wholesale delivery, which is 6-10 percent lower, and the cost indicated in the barcode. This is what a store can handle.
To this day, one person buys goods in our country, according to the law, abroad, in bulk, resells it to a small wholesale dealer at an even higher price, and they are already selling products in stores at an inflated price. We now have what it was under the NEP, which did not create a single plant or factory, but there were fat Nepmen and Nepmen who walked along Kuznetsky Most with dogs.
Therefore, NEP focused not so much on trade as on the restoration and strengthening of agriculture. But agriculture was completely restored by 1925, and then it received only income - moreover, it was restored due to significant state assistance. And the kulaks repaid so much for all the good - they started a kulak strike, squeezing bread.
That is, do you consider collectivization to be a response to this kulak strike?
For three years! And here - the task is to receive income through foreign trade. By the way, you know, bread was not at all the main export item of the USSR - it was oil and oil products, timber …
Was oil the main export item of the USSR in the 1920s?
The fact of the matter is, even then, oil was in the first place in foreign trade. Moreover, we have created in Great Britain and Germany Anglo-Russian and German-Russian joint stock companies for the sale of motor gasoline. And all cars in Germany in the 1920s, before Hitler, and in Great Britain were driven by our gasoline. When the Fuhrer found out about this, he made a scandal and instantly liquidated this company.
We even sold horns and hooves. Do you remember Ostap Bender? Imagine, it really was an export item.
Did she give a lot?
It does not matter! What we could, we all put up for sale. If only to build what you decided to build.
And so, Stalin expelled Bukharin from the Politburo in November 1929. Why? The world crisis, nobody buys anything from us. And what to do? To declare the adopted five-year plan a mistake? And Bukharin wanted to do just that - and then all his supporters, including Stalin, would have fled from the Politburo and the party. Stalin achieved the opposite: he expelled Bukharin, and in February 1931 took full responsibility for the implementation of the five-year plan.
Joseph Stalin. Photo: RIA Novosti
There was such a party asset: they gathered directors of enterprises - built, under construction - and Stalin said that we have everything - coal, ore, and non-ferrous metals, we can create anything, but we have no industry, and therefore we weak and defenseless. According to him, we have always been attacked because we are rich and vast, but weak.
Are you talking about the tasks of business executives at the First All-Union Conference of Socialist Industry Workers?
Yes, this famous speech. Then Stalin said: if we do not create a powerful industry in 10 years, they will destroy us. He was mistaken for several months. The war did not start in February 1941, but in June. And Stalin's greatness lies in the fact that he understood that without industry they would crush us within a week. In the most difficult period - the global crisis - he nevertheless decided to complete the five-year plan, albeit reduced to a minimum.
And what prevented the opponents from attacking the USSR while it was weak?
They themselves were weak, torn apart by contradictions, each country thought only of itself, saved itself, but not others. To attack us, it was necessary to act together. By the way, it was then that the Pope called for a crusade against Soviet power. But they did not support him, because everyone was not up to it.
Five-year plan and enthusiasm
On the other hand, Agatha Christie has a novel called Murder on the Orient Express, and in its text, when the train departs, they discuss our first five-year plan, admiring it.
In his book Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky described how the image of the USSR created by Soviet propaganda in the West did not coincide with reality. Maybe that's how it was?
No, we can say that as soon as Trotsky was thrown out of the country, he found one single target for pouring out his bile: Stalin. Therefore, everything that was connected with Stalin, and everything that Stalin did, Trotsky threw mud at. It is impossible to study our history from his scribbles, there are almost all lies and distortion of facts.
It is necessary to study the current situation according to the documents of our country. Yes, it was very difficult in the first five-year plan - cards were introduced, there were no pants, no shoes, no shoes … nothing. But people worked. It was then that the word "enthusiasts" appeared. They worked knowing that they were hungry, shoeless, undressed, but they were creating their own future and the future of their children. Theirs, not someone else's. Not some oligarch - they worked for themselves. And when a person works for himself, he does not think about anything.
Photo: PastVu
Now I want to cite a funny fact: in 1875, Jules Verne published the book The Mysterious Island. Five Americans find themselves on a desert island, and because there is an engineer among them, they successfully overcome all difficulties. Around the same time, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote the fairy tale "How a man fed two generals." There is an engineer, we have a man. The situation of Shchedrin's fairy tale continued until the first five-year plan. For half a century we have been in the same wild state. And after that we became a normal country.
Of course, the capital and the big cities lived relatively well compared to the provinces. But what was happening far from Moscow and Leningrad?
People who think so will never tell you that near Moscow there is the city of Kolomna, in which a huge machine-building plant has been located since the pre-revolutionary period - steam locomotives were built and so on. And only in the first five-year plan there was a sewerage and water supply. Liberal historians will never tell you about this. They will not say that we were a wild, uncivilized country, and only starting from the first five-year plan began to resemble a normal one.
Maybe if the NEP continued, the market economy would improve the situation of citizens much faster?
This year, I think, this market economy [in our country] is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Tell me, what powerful factories did the new capitalists build? And what about the money that went offshore? And our new capitalists feed on everything that was built under Stalin. When was the Norilsk plant built? Second five-year plan. Metallurgical plants - Magnitogorsk, Kuznetsk? The first five-year plan. Gorky automobile? Second five-year plan. Etc. They are still eating up the corpse of the Soviet regime and the Soviet economy. They themselves have not created anything and will not create anything.
That Nepman capitalism was doomed to the same fate. Therefore, it never occurred to anyone to expect from the Nepmen that they would build at least a large textile mill, they could only trade. And remember, in "Dead Souls": the bridge, and on it the shops, and in them the merchants. This is the ultimate dream of the Nepmen of the 1920s and the new bourgeoisie of today - to trade.
You talked about the general enthusiasm, but something was not particularly noticeable already in the 70s
It began to fade from about 1950.
But many people talk about what an upsurge there was under Khrushchev
Don't tell me here! They used to say: what are you telling me about the sea when I myself am a sailor. I lived at that time, and Nikita was not called anything else as "our fool", "maize". Degradation began with Khrushchev.
Why?
In January 1944, Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov proposed the Politburo to approve their draft of a large administrative reform. In accordance with it, the party was removed from the solution of issues of economy, culture, life. All this passed into the hands of Soviet, that is, state, bodies. Stalin signed this project. Filled up. They did not let me through, they did not let me go to the plenum
Stalin was an omnipotent figure. Who would argue with him?
Do you know how many times Stalin suffered a complete, crushing defeat? The same 1937 - this is his defeat. Instead of alternative elections and the peaceful elimination of incompetent, illiterate party cadres, he received a massacre in response. What's this? He did not want this, he did not strive for this.
Yezhov and "Tangle"
Is there documentary evidence that he did not want reprisals?
In my book "Another Stalin" I present an analysis of the telegrams that arrived in his name in the first and second half of 1937. First half - the first secretaries write: "We earnestly ask you to authorize the arrest of such and such a plant director or chief engineer." Everywhere follows the Stalinist hand: "Refuse." Not a single pros.
Who, then, organized the mass arrests?
NKVD. By the way, then at the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs was the same former first secretary of the regional committee - Yezhov. They were peas from a single pod. They defended their bureaucratic power and high position.
I wonder how Yezhov got into this position after Yagoda?
Under Yagoda, he headed the party control commission. That is, the same NKVD, only peaceful, without uniforms. They simply moved from the civilian to the military wing of the same organization.
But did Stalin affirm it? Why did he do it?
Because he didn't know what would happen next. Moreover, Stalin insisted that he, unlike Yagoda, investigate a case called the "Tangle" of an organization that was going to arrest Stalin, Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, Voroshilov. There are documents to this effect. In this secret organization, the military were represented: Tukhachevsky and these other … marshals …
Do you think there really was a conspiracy?
Everything is documented!
Any confession can be beaten out under torture
When two people were arrested, the first persons of this conspiracy - Yenukidze, who for many years was the secretary of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, and the commandant of the Kremlin Peterson - both at the time of arrest (not after, not in prison) wrote confessions, describing in detail both the conspiracy, and then, where they were going to arrest this Stalinist five.
Why did they split so quickly?
And this already happened, in general, after the failure of the conspiracy. They were kicked out of Moscow, they realized that they had failed and could not do anything. When I consulted with the guys from the FSO, I asked them: could Yenukidze and Peterson have inspired this to write? They grabbed their heads and said: “Never in my life! This is the greatest state secret - where it is more convenient to arrest someone in the Kremlin. They could have composed anything but this. Moreover, indeed, if you take Stalin's speech about our arrested marshals, then count how many military there are, and how many civilians. You will find that there are half of them. It was indeed a conspiracy of those who did not accept the Stalinist revolution from above. Who wanted to preserve the form and content of our country and the party of 1917, not noticing that 20 years have passed, and the world has changed, and the country has changed.
Ideals and the Civil War
Many later blamed Stalin for deviating from the ideals of the RSDLP and social democracy, making a turn to traditional values, although the Bolsheviks initially had very progressive views in the social and cultural sphere, in architecture …
The views of the first years of the revolution are pure utopia, fantasy. Hotheads wanted to instantly jump over the centuries and find themselves in a communist society and in our semi-feudal society to assert the norms of the distant future. Of course, this was nonsense and could not work out in any case. It was clear to many that one cannot leave the country without a past. There is no past, there will be no future. And Stalin, unlike Trotsky, understood this.
He said: how is it, we grew up on this very Russian literature, how can we do without it? And when Tairov staged the comic opera "Heroes" to the music of Borodin and the words of Demyan Bedny at the Chamber Theater, Molotov went to the premiere, and the next day a decree was published everywhere to remove this opera from the repertoire. And it explained why: they blacken the images of Russian history, of Russian heroes.
And how were they shown there?
Like clinical idiots. They throw mud at the adoption of Christianity, which has played a positive role in the history of the country.
But under Stalin, churches were felled, God forbid
Read, this decree was published in all newspapers.
And it speaks of denigrating Christianity?
Yes! Orthodoxy, directly. There was a conspiracy against this. These guys did not think how to live without the romance of the Civil War with which their names are associated. And they had nothing else for their souls. What battles did Tukhachevsky win in a real war? He fought once, with the Poles. Splash broken during the Soviet-Polish war. What battles did Uborevich and other Feldmans win? And they are presented to us as geniuses of military thought. Not a damn thing like that! They won nothing.
However, do not forget that the Civil War is not real. How did they fight there? The bridges were not blown up, the telegraph wires did not cut either white or red. In fact, every battle boiled down to an attack: whoever falters first will lose. Then they changed his cap badge to an asterisk or a star to a cockade, and that was all. There were no others, only Russian soldiers from both sides.
So it didn't matter to them who to fight for?
When a soldier is driven to the front, he has no choice, especially when he doesn't really understand what he is fighting for. But when he lived as a peasant in the Ukraine, where Denikin came and where the landowners returned, he understood this very well. And then he went to the Red Army. Therefore, the White Army was melting, and the Red Army was growing.
Moreover, the Red Army was commanded not by Trotsky and his deputy Sklyansky, but by the generals and colonels of the tsarist army, who won the war. And apart from Yegorov, in my opinion, not one of the tsarist colonels and generals was then repressed. Only these upstarts, the future Napoleons, were repressed.
Pests and repression
If we talk about repressions - how big was the percentage of errors, unfair accusations based on false denunciations?
I can only say one thing - what I saw in the archives. There were at least five different denunciations per person arrested.
But what denunciations they were - anti-Soviet activity. He told an anecdote - and in the camps
No! Here's an example. The geological party is directed to the site, and not always the geologist can find a deposit. And big prizes are awarded for the find. And when the exploration ended and nothing was found, one or two workers immediately wrote: this engineer, geologist deliberately did not discover gold or oil in order to destroy the economy of the USSR. Here's how they wrote. It's not just that.
It is difficult to argue that later these people were exiled to camps, where they were held in terrible conditions, on such denunciations
What do you want honest, normal citizens to support murderers, rapists, thieves, embezzlers at their own expense? Is that what you want? For example, I believe that the worse the conditions of the criminal, the better for us. And the longer the terms for them, as it was during the Soviet era, the better for us. And let them write about terrible conditions - but I do not need such jurisprudence when a criminal convicted of double murder leaves after two years under an amnesty.
So you think it's normal that they were then driven to dig the White Sea Canal, where they died in batches?
Well, how else? Well, should we feed them, water them? The only way. And this courageous role of Stalin, his speeches, what he did before the war, justified itself a hundredfold. Were it not for this, we would have been defeated by August 1941.
War and Sorge
By the way, many historians note the poor quality of Soviet military equipment, which often broke down on the way to the front
In vain they do not tell that lunatics or Martians flew in and spoiled it. This will finally make us believe their delirium.
So what was the quality of military equipment according to your information?
Our military equipment was, of course, not of very high quality. It was assumed that the tank would burn up after the third hit. The plane will make ten sorties and be shot down. These are not long-term civilian vehicles. They are designed for combat. Therefore, we released so many of them, not because of the good life.
Nevertheless, the planes, tanks, and guns were powerful enough to win in battle. And we won, we, not the Germans, for whom France, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Poland worked.
There is a certain consensus that the USSR took not by skill, but by number, filling the Germans with corpses
This is said by guys who do not know arithmetic. I would advise them to take and add up how many soldiers from Finland, Germany, Norway, Denmark, France, Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Romania fought.
Let them add up this number and calculate how many losses were on the other side, and how many were from ours. It turns out that it was the Nazis who filled up our country with their corpses. And at Voronezh there are two armies of Hungarian soldiers, and at Stalingrad there are two Italian and two Romanian, and not ours in Romania and Italy.
Let's go back to Stalin. Khrushchev recalled that in the first weeks of the war he locked himself in, did not talk to anyone and fell into depression
Khrushchev did not know that we would publish daily records of visitors to Stalin's office. Stalin had no one for only about two days, the very first. Imagine, you are a schoolboy, at home you said that you were studying, and you yourself played football in the yard. Control. You get a deuce. How do you go home? Barely, would come later. Stalin was also worried that the Germans outplayed him at that moment.
It is known that Stalin was warned more than once about the date of the start of the war. Again, the telegram from Richard Sorge …
No need, Sorge did not warn anyone, it was later invented, but all the time there was information about when the Germans would start. But our dear leaders of the special services must, according to the rules, double-check each message, analyze several and present their findings to the top. They didn’t do it, they just put the decoded telegrams on the table.
But he could have requested some kind of analysis from them.
Well, I didn't ask what to do now! Shoot them dead?
And Sorge was a double agent, worked for Germany and for us. And the telegram in which he calls June 22 the day of the start of the operation was invented by our propaganda.
When?
At the time of Khrushchev. In the 1960s, I worked for the Novosti press agency - it was a propaganda organization working abroad. Once they brought us a German film "So who are you, Dr. Sorge?" and those who worked with Sorge in Japan and China came to meet with us. Further, I think, it is not necessary to continue. I saw them alive, talked to them, like the whole audience. Therefore, I do not need to tell stories.
Housing and death
Stalin is often blamed for the fact that instead of building a large volume of simple housing, he preferred the construction of pompous buildings when barracks and communal apartments were not settled
Again, a lie. On the instructions of Malenkov, when he was the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Mordvinov, the president of the Academy of Architecture, prepared an extensive information on how expensive it is to build residential buildings with hinged decor and which ones need to be built in order to reduce the cost of construction and make it massive. For two years Nikita kept this project under the shelter.
But this was after Stalin's death. Is it possible to solve the problem with mass housing construction then?
If we take the Stalinist era, then the barracks were just beginning as temporary huts. Well, the war began, well, they did not have time to demolish it. And then the restoration of the national economy went on for five years, even more.
Naturally, after the 50th year this should have been done away with. And when did it end? There are still messages on TV: there is a barrack, there is a barrack, the old house collapsed …
If you remember those years - after all, you lived until the age of 15 under Stalin - did you then feel the enthusiasm that was mentioned above?
All the time. Before Khrushchev, there was enthusiasm. After Stalin's death, he began to subside. Then it was necessary to start life, and Nikita came up with an adventure with virgin soil. How will you take it? Enthusiasm. BAM - again enthusiasm. It was necessary first to complete what was being done before the war, but Nikita did not finish it.
What are these directions?
First of all, housing construction, and then light industry. In 1953 Malenkov issued a conversion order. Factory directors were asked how long it will take you to switch from making guns to making consumer products, and they replied that in six months they can start producing refrigerators, motorcycles, televisions, cars.
Photo: International Project Galaxy.
At this time, Nikita becomes first secretary and declares: no, we need heavy industry, defense industry. End of good beginnings.
Is Khrushchev's associates to blame for Stalin's death?
In no case. Nikolai Novik and I - then he headed what is now the FSO, the security department - walked around the nearby dacha, and he told me where it was that evening, the next day. The day before, they came to Stalin and sat there. In the last years of his life, Stalin did only one thing: he was sent grapes from a certain village from a certain slope, and he made homemade wine according to the old tradition. After leaving, there were four bottles of homemade wine, all half opened. Drank heavily?
Photo: Anatoly Garanin / RIA Novosti.
They left, and Stalin had a stroke. At first, the guards were afraid to take action, decided - well, fell asleep, asleep, you never know, wake up, and missed the deadline. And this stroke was Stalin's fourth. Ask any cardiologist today if it was possible in 1953 to save a person who had a fourth stroke? That's all.
Interviewed by Mikhail Karpov
