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From Labor Action, Vol. 10 No. 39, 30 September 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Under Stalin’s signature, a new series of purges have begun in Russia. This time the purges are directed against officials appointed by the Kremlin and the peasant population of the collective farms. The charges against them are similar to those in all previous purges: false interpretation and application of policies laid down by the state, mismanagement, personal enrichment of officials, withholding of grain by peasants, the development of private property ideology among them and failure to meet plan quotas. The present purge follows the purges just carried out in industry, in the. field of literature, art and culture, and against the “nationalist elements” in the Ukraine.
It is obvious from a reading of the press dispatches which occasionally break through the thick wall surrounding Stalin’s prison called Russia, that the present wave of purges is not an ordinary event. The world has come to look upon Stalin’s purges as something normal to Russia. In a measure this is true, for periodic purges are one of the normal attributes of Stalin’s dictatorship. But the extent of this purge reveals that the situation is a little more than normal.
Purges are a natural and normal part of totalitarian regimes because they are the only way in which a police regime maintains the solidity and power of its rule and enforces its plans and decrees. The regime punishes dissatisfaction, differences, normal and natural failures, and failures, produced by the policies of the regime itself in a brutal, police manner. Those who are swept up by the purges are punished in several ways: they are shot, imprisoned, deprived of jobs and privileges which are controlled by the regime, or they are sent into forced labor camps to swell the ranks of the many millions of slave laborers.
Purges are an indictment of a regime because they record its failures – the failures in economic and political policy. Sometimes the purges come after the event, sometimes they occur as a preventative measure against mass dissatisfaction. In Russia, purges have presaged a change of line on the part of the regime, usually after discarding a policy that was wrong, or they have been started to force the population to some inhuman effort to meet new goals set by the rulers:
Each successive period of Russian development – especially the contradictory policies adopted by the totalitarian regime, super-industrialization and complete collectivization which produced chaotic conditions in industry and a famine on the land, the victory of Hitler contributed to by Stalin’s policies, collective security as the antithesis of the long established revolutionary foreign policy of Lenin and Trotsky, the pact with Hitler, the alliance with the “democratic imperialists” – each of these were accompanied by nationwide purges and frame-up trials and the murderous extermination of all friends of the regime as well as opponents and critics.
The new purges have their origin and explanation in the present conditions which pervade Stalin’s Russia:
Thus, to prepare for a new postponement of an improvement in the life of the masses, to prepare in advance the excuses for future failures of the bureaucracy, to condone the corrupt practices of the regime and justify its exploitation of the country and its enrichment, to fortify its rule, the purges have been instituted. Blame for difficulties is put on the shoulders of second-rate and lower-grade functionaries or on the many-times liquidated kulaks and on the resurgence of “capitalist ideology” in a land where socialism was represented as having been completely realized.
It does not take great profundity to realize that the system of purges is incompatible with socialism and the mere existence of this system is proof that Russian society has nothing in common with the great ideal of masses. Russian society is a class society, an exploiting system. The bureaucracy which rules over the masses pursues policies which meet its needs as a new ruling class.
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