Intellectual Honesty the First Casualty of CPUSA Anti-Stalin Offensive

The CPUSA's leading social democratic clique has recently attempted to put a more "scholarly" face on their ongoing anti-Stalin campaign with Erwin Marquit's "Consequences of the Premature Socialization of Agriculture in the USSR" Marquit's piece contains citations of other works, which is something of an innovation for polemics circulated by the Webb-era CPUSA. However, as with nearly all anti-Stalin literature, "Consequences" falls woefully short of any reasonable standard of objectivity.

Marquit opens with a lengthy condemnation of Stalin's agricultural policies in the 1927-34 period. Central to his argument is the fact that Soviet agricultural output dropped precipitously during this period; "gross agricultural output [fell] from 16.6 billion rubles in 1927–28 to 13.1 billion in 1933....Livestock production dropped to 65 percent of the 1913 level." Astute observers might wonder what happened after 1934, when Stalin's policies realized their "net result". It is difficult to imagine a Soviet Union hobbled by such a disastrous agricultural policy successfully fighting off the Nazi onslaught in 1941-45, or even fielding a credible military force at all. As to the drop in production, it has been documented by Oxford scholar Lynne Viola in Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance that certain elements of the Soviet peasantry engaged in a protracted, violent struggle against collectivization, committing acts of sabotage and murdering Party workers, in what amounted to an armed rebellion against the Soviet state. Of course, in typical anti-communist fashion, Viola celebrates the peasant rebels as "homespun heroes"; communists ought not be so aggressively naive. A civil war requires two sides. Marquit, however, seems utterly unconcerned with such details, smoothly transitioning from discussing agricultural policy to a long discourse on political repression. It is here that Marquit commits his gravest crimes against intellectual honesty. Firstly, Marquit cites Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the accompanying "research" as support for his many accusations against Stalin. He does not address the most current research, which conclusively shows that Khrushchev Lied. While it is true that Marquit's article was published in late 2005, before Grover Furr's book was published, this is still a glaring omission; Furr's book was in print several months before this article was republished on the Political Affairs website. There was ample time to update it and address the relevant points. That this was not done suggests a disturbing lack of respect for accepted standards of discourse. It should also be noted that Roi Medvedev's Let History Judge, which Marquit also makes extensive use of, is based on Khrushchev's speech and its associated materials. The most glaring error, if indeed it is an error, is Marquit's misuse of J. Arch Getty's article "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence." Marquit claims that "681,692 executions (largely political) were carried out during the years 1937–38" and cites Getty's article as support. However, "Victims" contains only a total number of executions (799,455) for the 1923-53 period. There is no breakdown of this figure. None. Further, Getty's ultimate conclusion in "Victims" is that the vast majority of those in the Soviet penal system were not political prisoners.

Of course, none of the above will matter to the hardened anti-Stalin leftists and devout social democrats that the CPUSA is courting. However, the real tragedy of articles like Marquit's is that those who come to the CPUSA seeking a communist perspective on Stalin and the Soviet Union will take the distortions and falsehoods therein at face value, perpetuating the shibboleths of anti-communism and rendering Socialism, USA ever more distant.