Stalin: The Enduring Legacy

Introduction

Joseph Stalin’s legacy continues to haunt geopolitical developments across the world. Stalin (‘Man of Steel’) ruled the USSR and later Soviet-Russian Empire with an iron fist from 1928 until his death in 1953. His individual resolve placed Russia on a course to national greatness by reversing the Bolshevik-Marxist psychosis that would have reduced Russia to chaos and destroyed the very soul of the Russian people.

In foreign policy Stalin assured Russia’s place as a world power and maintained the national and cultural freedom of Russia by rejecting the post-1945 international policy that the USA aimed at creating a one-world government.

In the arts Stalinism repudiated ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in favour of a Soviet culture based on a synthesis of Russian traditions.

This writer contends that had it not been for Stalin, we would have been living under a one-world state decades ago, and existing as economic automatons at the behest of global capitalism. The contention is also that the USA has long been the centre of ‘world revolution’, and continues to be so, while Stalin pursued a most un-Marxist policy of nationalism and imperialism.

Stalinism therefore constitutes a major force for tradition and conservatism in the world, against globalisation; while the USA maintains its mission as a centre of contagion that spreads throughout the world.

Such views on the USSR and Stalin are not new. In the early days of the Stalinist regime many on the German Right believed that the Soviet Union would transcend Marxism and become a nationalist state, which might form an alliance with Germany against the plutocratic powers. This was a primary position of the German National-Bolsheviks, a faction of the Right. Even the conservative historian Oswald Spengler saw the same possibility. From the Soviet side, Russian diplomats in Berlin were instructed to cultivate ties with pro-Soviet elements in the Right-wing intelligentsia. After World War II, when the USA had fallen out with its Russian wartime ally and sought German assistance against the USSR in the Cold War, German Rightist war veterans, who had fought against Russia, refused to do so again under American direction. Major-General Otto Remer and the allegedly ‘neo-Nazi’ Socialist Reich Party regarded the USA as more dangerous to the soul and freedom of Germany and Europe than the USSR. In the USA a faction of the Right also regarded the USSR as having transcended Marxism in favour of cultural and political health, recognising that their own country was the real centre of international subversion and revolution.

This book examines how the legacy of Stalin has had a lasting impact upon the world, and why the course Russia took under Stalin continues to be relevant to the present and the future. It is not intended as an apologia for Stalin’s crimes, for the Katyn massacre or the Ukrainian famine, etc. The bandying about of moralistic clichés about ‘crimes against humanity’ is often nothing but strategies to demonise one’s political adversaries by those who are hardly innocent themselves. It is intended rather to realistically assess Stalin’s impact on the present and coming struggles for world power, based on the belief that Russia must and will play a pivotal role in the shaping of a new geopolitical and cultural bloc that again says ‘nyet’ to the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.