Ex-Communists' Critiques and the Moral Cost of Denial

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Welcome to the third and final part of the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin: Terror.

It’s 1929 and the age of Stalin has begun. His mission to revolutionise the Soviet economy succeeds at the price of millions of lives: kulaks are murdered en masse while Ukrainians starve in the man-made famine known as the Holodomor. In 1936 he commences the purge known as the Great Terror, which radiates out from the highest levels of the Communist Party to ravage the entire country. Nobody is safe in Stalin’s nightmare state.

While communists abroad excuse or actively endorse Stalin’s atrocities, some socialists and ex-communists recognise that this is the antithesis of what socialism should be and sound the alarm. Stalin has no fiercer critic than Trotsky, but his former rival flounders in exile and meets a sticky end. The USSR’s international reputation is complicated by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War. Is Stalin Hitler’s worst enemy, his gullible enabler or his unlikely friend? Turns out it’s all three.

Stalin’s murderous paranoia fails him just once: he ignores warnings that Hitler will break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and launch an invasion in 1941. The war claims as many as 27 million Soviet lives. Victorious, Stalin sets about strangling hopes of post-war liberalisation and taking control of Eastern Europe — the Cold War begins. Trapped in his cult of personality and endless suspicions, he seems set to launch a new, antisemitic purge in 1953 until death mercifully intervenes. He leaves behind a powerful but traumatised country, a very long way from the hopes of 1917.

How much of what the USSR became can be pinned on Stalin’s disastrous personality? What was it like to live and die under his regime? What was the relationship between economics and mass murder? How did the Second World War transform Stalin? How similar were Stalinism and Nazism, the two faces of totalitarianism? And why did so many western communists become accomplices to terror?

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Reading list

• Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003)

• Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (2012)

• Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (2008, first published 1968)

• The Death of Stalin, co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci (2017)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007)

• Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977)

• Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays (2011)

• Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2008)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (1938)

• Mr Jones, written by Andrea Chalupa and directed by Agnieszka Holland (2019)

• George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

• George Orwell, ‘The Freedom of the Press’ (1945, first published 1972)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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