Aid Red Army with Lenin’s weapon¶
Core Argument¶
In the spring of 1943, as the Red Army’s winter offensive drew to a close, this article from Socialist Appeal offers a polemical balance sheet of the war from a Trotskyist perspective. Its core argument is that the Soviet Union’s military survival, while a testament to the heroism of its masses and the planned economy, is being squandered by Stalin’s nationalist and chauvinist propaganda, which is steering the workers’ state toward destruction at the hands of Anglo-American imperialism.
The chapter acknowledges the Red Army’s “unsurpassed resistance” and the material preponderance of Germany, which has been offset by the “enthusiasm and self-sacrifice” of the Soviet masses. It cites the Daily Telegraph’s account of peasants in the Donetz basin fighting with knives and pickaxes as evidence of popular support. Yet the central claim is that the war is being prolonged because Stalinist propaganda has “deliberately distorted” the just hatred of the imperialist invader into a racial hatred of all Germans. The article quotes extensively from Soviet War News to substantiate this: Alexei Tolstoy’s call to make Germans “whine like curs” and D. Manuilsky’s description of an “accursed generation” of Germans as “moral cripples” are presented as proof that Stalin’s regime has adopted the methods of Goebbels. This, the article argues, only reinforces Hitler’s own narrative of a struggle for national survival, ensuring the German army continues to resist.
The historical context drawn upon is the Napoleonic wars. The article quotes the Russian historian Eugene Tarle, via the Daily Worker, on how British imperialism under Lord Castlereagh in 1812 desired both a Russian victory over Napoleon and that it should not come “too soon.” This parallel is used to argue that Churchill and Roosevelt are repeating the same policy: weakening their “ally” the Soviet Union while using it to bleed Germany. The Stalinists, the article charges, refuse to draw the necessary conclusions from this history.
The polemic is directed against two targets. The first is Stalinism itself, accused of substituting revolutionary internationalism with “incredibly revolting nationalist and chauvinist” appeals. The second is Anglo-American imperialism, which is coldly calculating the exhaustion of the Soviet Union. The article warns that Stalin’s self-promotion to Marshal signals the ascendancy of a military caste that will lean toward the Allies, and that post-war “victory” under such conditions would open the door to the reintroduction of capitalism. The only safeguard, it concludes, is the method of Lenin and Trotsky: a socialist appeal to the workers of Germany and Europe to overthrow the Nazis and establish a united socialist states of Europe, making the fate of the Soviet Union inseparable from that of the international working class.