Black myths have always been attached to the Russian leaders who looked after the interests of the country and did not fall under the spell of the outside influences. Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin is one such leader, whose memory was defamed and desecrated both by the internal political rivals, like Hrushov, and by the external enemies. I plan to publish several articles that take aim at debunking these black myths surrounding the historical figure of Stalin. As always, when looking at history, one must remain dispassionate and look at the events not through the prism of modern sensibilities, but as a contemporary to the events, with all the challenges that the leadership of the USSR faced at that time.

Today, on the 145th anniversary of Iosif Stalin’s birth, I want to start with a reblog of an excellent article by Olga of the Siberian Matrëshka Telegram channel, which I can warmly recommend.

Myths about Stalin. Where do legs grow from?

Olga🪆July 21, 2023

First of all, there was no Communism in the USSR. The USSR had a communist state ideology and a socialist system.

One of the most terrible and destructive myths about the Soviet Union is the lie about the “bloody regime” of Stalin, who allegedly destroyed tens of millions of innocent people. Few people know that this myth was created back in Nazi Germany, and only later it was used by the United States in the information war against Soviet civilization.

Despite a number of fundamental studies based on the factual material of the archives, which showed the inconsistency of Joseph Stalin’s accusations of mass repressions and terror, the false myth supported by slanderers like Solzhenitsyn, Radzinsky, Suvorov-Rezun continues to dominate the information field of Russia and the world community. The dirty work of denigrating Russian and Soviet history continues, within the framework of the global historical and informational confrontation between Russian civilization (Rus) and the West. Citizens of Russia (especially young people), not to mention Ukraine and other post-Soviet republics, continue to be stuffed with horror stories about death and murder in labour camps of the GULAG (Main Directorate of Camps and Places of Detention), stories about millions of people who died of starvation and were deliberately destroyed in the USSR, about the alleged premeditation of the Holodomor in Ukraine, about the inhuman cruelty of the Soviet punitive system, “the bloodiest in the world”. The repressions against the kulaks and the “fifth column” take on an absolutely fantastic character in these stories, and Stalin becomes a villain of a literally galactic scale. All this is superimposed on the image of the USSR-Russia in the world – as an “evil empire” and “Russian Mordor”, where there live “fierce” Muscovites, scoops-padded coats, ready at the first opportunity to drown in the blood of all dissidents in Russia itself, as well as to drive to their “concentration camp” and the surrounding peoples.

The myth of the “bloody Stalinist regime” was created back in Nazi Germany. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, they used information and psycho-technologies to properly indoctrinate the population. The Minister of Propaganda was Joseph Goebbels, who propagated dreams of a racially pure people living in Greater Germany, an empire with vast living space. This living space included the territory to the east of Germany, the Russian lands, including Little Russia-Ukraine. The conquest of living space meant a big war, a war with the USSR. Therefore, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, headed by Goebbels, launched an information campaign around the alleged genocide organized by the Communists in Ukraine, the terrible famine (Holodomor) organized personally by Stalin. The purpose of the Nazi propaganda was to prepare the world community for the “liberation” of Ukraine by German troops from the “bloody Bolshevik yoke”. Later, the Ukrainian Nazis (Bandera) used the same lie about an artificial famine to sit on the neck of the people of Little Russia-Ukraine.

In the United States, the same information campaign directed against socialism, the USSR and Stalin personally was led by the largest media mogul, the founder of the Hearst Corporation holding, the leading newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. He created the news industry and came up with the idea of making money on gossip and scandals (the so-called “yellow press”). Hearst became one of the richest people on the planet and one of the most influential personalities. So, in the 1940s, Hearst was the owner of 25 daily newspapers, 24 weekly newspapers, 12 radio stations, 2 world news agencies, one enterprise for the production of new themes for films, the Cosmopolitan film studio, etc. His newspapers were sold in millions of copies daily . He shaped the minds of tens of millions of Americans. In addition, millions of people around the world received information from the Hearst press through news agencies, films and newspapers, which were translated and printed in huge numbers around the world.

In 1934, Hirst travelled to Germany, where he was received by Hitler as a guest and a friend. After this visit, American newspapers were filled with stories of horrors taking place in the Soviet Union – murders, torture, genocide, slavery and starvation among the people. One of the first campaigns of the Hearst information industry against the Soviet Union was the continuously raised question of the millions who died of starvation in Ukraine. The American press announced that 6 million starved to death in the USSR.

In fact, a terrible tragedy occurred in the USSR in the early 1930s, connected with the peasant question in the Russian Empire, the events of the Revolution and the Civil War, the peasant war during the unrest of 1917-1920, and the class battle in Soviet Russia. This led to the instability of agricultural production (plus mistakes and, possibly, sabotage by some of the Trotskyist managers, hidden enemies of Stalin and his project), and a reduction in food production in a number of areas of the USSR, including Ukraine. The lack of food weakened the people, which in turn caused epidemics. It is worth remembering that mass diseases were then a ubiquitous phenomenon. So, in 1918 – 1920 the Spanish influenza epidemic, which was superimposed on the exhaustion of people during the World War, unsanitary conditions, overcrowding in military camps and refugee camps, led to the infection of more than half a billion people and the death of 50-100 million people (2.7-5.3% of the world’s population ).

As a result, at the suggestion of the Nazi regime in Germany, a huge myth was created in the world that the Bolsheviks deliberately destroyed millions of people, starved them to death, and even on a national basis – they supposedly starved mainly “Ukrainians”. In the wake of the campaign unleashed by the press against the “communist-organized famine,” no one was particularly interested in Moscow’s counterarguments and exposing lies.

Nothing has changed in this technique of information wars in the modern world. Take, for example, the case of the Skripals. It is obvious that the West is lying. The version of the British authorities fell apart almost immediately. However, the arguments from Moscow are of no interest to anyone. The masters of London and Washington control the world’s main media, and they can create an information picture for the majority of Westerners and the entire world community. And all Moscow’s excuses are in vain – the victim has already been appointed. Another pebble in the overall mosaic – “Russia – the evil empire”, “Russian Mordor”.

Thus, the United States provided not only material, financial, economic, technological support to the Nazi regime in Germany, but also informational. With the full support of Washington and London, the Hitler project gained momentum in Germany, subjugated most of Europe, in order to then go on a “crusade” against the USSR. In the West, a myth has been created about the “red plague”, allegedly preparing a blow to Europe and destroying the people in the subordinate territories by millions, tens of millions. Thus, the masters of the West tried to maintain dominance over most of the planet, and their own cannibalistic, predatory-parasitic essence. The Nazi regime at that time received tremendous information support, Hitler himself was the most popular person. And all in order to denigrate the Soviet development project to create a “solar civilization”, a society of the future and set the then “world community” on it.

It is worth remembering that despite the false world propaganda that blames everything on Germany and Japan, who lost the world war, the USA and England sponsored the Nazis in Germany, helped them come to power, financially helped create a powerful military-industrial complex, the Munich agreement made it clear to Hitler that Europe is at his full disposal, and that the road to the East is open. Hitler was allowed to create a strong coalition against communism and the USSR. It was the United States and England that allowed Hitler to start the world slaughter. And the real masters of France, knowing full well the alignment and tasks of the new world war, capitulated to Germany almost without a fight, after the so-called “Strange war”, providing the Third Reich with steel rear for aggression against Russia-USSR. England, on the other hand, secretly promised not to open a “second front” (the mission of R. Hess) while Hitler was fighting in the East.

Thus, we must always remember that it was England and the United States that unleashed the Second World War (as before that, the First World War, and dozens of other small and large wars, uprisings, coups and revolutions all over the planet), a deadly war for the complete destruction of the Russian civilization and Russian superethnos. That London and Washington were and still are our main enemies. Germany, like Japan, were only “rams” in their hands. Russia, Germany and Japan do not have fundamental contradictions, their strategic alliance could stop the aggression and predatory aspirations of the Anglo-American octopus. Therefore, London and Washington are trying with all their might to quarrel the Russians, Germans and Japanese, to pit them against each other, receiving from this a lot of benefits and the main prize – dominance on the planet.

The lie about the “Famine organized by the Bolsheviks” lasted until the 1980s, when it received a new breath. Several generations of people in the West have grown up with this lie, with a negative view of socialism and the Soviet Union. In the 1980s, the fate of the West and the United States was being decided. The Western project, the system of capitalism, based on the constant expansion of living space for robbery and the drain of resources, was on the verge of death. The West was dying because the socialist camp did not allow Westerners to suck resources and energy out of it. The USSR was at the peak of military space power, it was impossible to defeat it by military means. The population of the USSR was morally stable, the economy as a whole was self-sufficient. The only way to victory was in the decomposition, “recoding” of the Soviet elite, so that it itself would destroy the Soviet project and civilization. Therefore, the West launched a new large-scale information campaign against the Russian “Evil Empire”. This new “crusade” was led by the US President Ronald Reagan.

A new period of inciting Russophobia begins. One of the most popular American authors who described mass terror in the USSR was Robert Conquest. Reagan even commissioned him in 1984 to write material for his presidential campaign to “prepare the American people for a Soviet invasion”. The text was titled “What to do when the Russians come? Survival Guide”. A former spy and diplomat, Conquest was a professional propagandist. He worked in the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, created to combat Soviet propaganda, then became a “free” writer and historian, but continued to work in the same anti-Soviet direction. He gained fame after the publication in 1968 of the book “The Great Terror: Stalin’s purges of the 30s”. The work was based largely on information released during the “Khrushchev thaw” (when de-Stalinization began in the USSR under Khrushchev), but it also included information obtained from Soviet emigrants and exiles, including fugitive Ukrainian Nazis and war criminals. Conquest estimates that the Stalinist famine and purges resulted in the deaths of 15 to 20 million people. In 1986, Conquest published “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization” and the “Terror by Famine”, dealing with the famine in Ukraine and other parts of the USSR. The work said that millions of peasants died from starvation, deportations to labour camps and executions.

Conquest’s deception was later discovered. For example, Canadian journalist Douglas Tottle exposed the falsifications of a retired British intelligence officer and professional propagandist in his book “Fraud, Famine and Fascism. The Myth of Genocide in Ukraine from Hitler to Harvard”. This book was published in Toronto in 1987. In it, Tottle pointed out that the frightening photographs of hungry children were taken during the famine in the Civil War. Another example that exposes Conquest’s lies is the fact that Thomas Walker, a journalist who has long provided the American historian with photographs and reports from the hungry regions of Ukraine, had never been to Ukraine himself.

Thus, the lies about the many millions who died from the “specially organized by Stalin” famine were revealed in the West. But the deed was already done, the true story could not break through the sea of lies. In the West, they waged an information war against the USSR and used fakes invented back in the Third Reich.

Speaking about the repressions that took place in the Stalin years, anti-Soviet propaganda claims the following:

• The Nazis destroyed other peoples, and the communists – their own;
• 20 million killed in the war with the Germans, twenty – in the war with their own people;
• 10 million people were shot;
• 40, 50, 60 up to 120(!) millions who passed through the camps;
• Almost all those arrested were innocent – they were imprisoned on the grounds that the mother plucked 5 spikelets in the field for hungry children or took away a spool of thread from production and received 10 years for it;
• Almost all those arrested were driven to camps for the construction of canals and logging, where most of the prisoners died…

When asked why the people did not rise up when they were exterminated, the answer is usually: “The people did not know this”. At the same time, the fact that the people did not suspect the scale of the repressions is confirmed not only by almost all the people who lived at that time, but also by numerous written sources.

In this regard, it makes sense to note several important questions to which there are not only no intelligible answer, but generally no answers at all.

Where did such an incredible number of prisoners come from? After all, 40 million prisoners are the population of the then Ukraine and Belarus combined, or the entire population of France, or the entire urban population of the USSR of those years. The fact of the arrest and transportation of thousands of Ingush and Chechens was noted by contemporaries of the deportation as a shocking event, and this is understandable. Why was the arrest and transportation of many times more people not noted by eyewitnesses? During the famous ‘evacuation to the east’ in 41-42, 10 million people were transported to the deep rear. The evacuees lived in schools, makeshift houses, anywhere. This fact is remembered by the entire older generation. It was 10 million, what about 40 and even more so 50, 60 and so on? Almost all eyewitnesses of those years note the mass movement and work on the construction sites of captured Germans, they could not be overlooked. The people still remember that, for example, ‘this road was built by captured Germans’. There were about 3 million prisoners on the territory of the USSR, this is a lot, and it is impossible not to notice the fact of the activities of such a large number of people. What can be said about the number of “convicts” in about 10-20 times more? Only that the very fact of moving and working at construction sites of such an incredible number of prisoners should simply shock the population of the USSR. This fact would be passed from mouth to mouth even decades later. Was it? No.

Documentary evidence of mass repressions is about the same as trying to fly on an airliner on a tram ticket. It should be clear that the opponents are not classical liberals who interpret doubts in favour of the accused, they are cruel and dishonest charlatans. All ambiguities are interpreted in favour of the prosecution, and the absence of documents is considered evidence of guilt. This is not a ‘split of consciousness’, on the contrary, it is a very clear and systematic fraud. The case of the so-called mass repressions is sewn with rotten threads of such a bright colour that only the blind can fail to notice them. Charlatans have to go out of their way to ‘prove’ things that don’t exist. If it turns out that there were no mass crimes against the people, then the whole scheme of proving the “crime of the regime” will crumble like a house of cards. The communists will automatically turn out to be incomparable with the fascists, industrialization will be a labour feat unprecedented in the history of mankind, and dissidents, perestroika, democrats and the current government of Russia will not be heralds of truth and fighters against bloody murderers, but traitors and criminals. All ‘evidence of multimillion-dollar repressions’ is a crude and impudent forgery. And so they dissipate like a ghost or a mirage if you look at them closely. Everything is built on the speech of Khrushchev – trusting whom is even more imprudent than trusting Judas – on the fakes of Solzhenitsyn and other scoundrels.

From what has been said above, the answer to another common thesis automatically follows: “Almost all the best people in Russia were destroyed during the period of repression, the pogrom of the gene pool was completed by the war of 1941-45. Therefore, now Russia is doomed to death.’ Now it is clear that all this is complete nonsense and manipulation of unscrupulous anti-Russian ideologists who seek to instil a guilt complex in our people and deprive the Russian people of the presence of mind. Below and in other articles we will see what were the ‘best people’ who were ‘bad luck’ in the 30s and for whom they were a role model.

To put the final nail in the coffin of the “multi-million repression” myth, it should be noted that the USSR did not need “tens of millions of slaves” to build its economy. This lie was invented specifically to discredit the socialist idea and explain the incredible success of the USSR in industrialization and post-war economic recovery.