History

The TV channel “Russia,” on the initiative of N. S. Mikhalkov, is showing a project called “the main elections.” I don’t quite understand these elections. They show on the screen 12 people who, according to the project leaders, have glorified Russia the most with their deeds, and whose name will be identical to the name of Russia. It’s unclear how a person’s name can be identical to the name of a state. But perhaps there is some wise intent here that we mere mortals do not understand. But that’s not the point. I was struck by the fact that among the 12 truly worthy sons of Russia, there is Stalin, and he is in the honorable third place. After the XXth Congress of the CPSU, after the 1990s, when a huge number of documents were published about the mass repressions carried out by Stalin against our people, he occupies the third place out of 12 selected to determine the best of the best.

If we consider that the generation of Russians under 40 years old does not know who Stalin is and is unlikely to have voted for Stalin, it turns out that only the older generation over 60 and 70 years old could vote for Stalin. This is what I cannot understand, why? Why does a certain part of the older generation still feel nostalgic about the years of Stalin’s rule? And I know what those years were like not from stories or books. As an ordinary Soviet citizen, I experienced all the “delights of a happy childhood” given to us children of the Stalin era.

It should be said that, unfortunately, often the mass media does not provide objective information about the years of Soviet power, especially about the time when Stalin ruled the country. Here either the repressions, the year 1937, or Stalin’s five-year plans, the victory in the Great Patriotic War are mentioned. But very little is said about how workers and peasants lived and worked in a country where supposedly power belonged to the workers and peasants. I grew up in a working-class district of Tbilisi, so I saw with my own eyes how the “heroic” working class lived. And this class lived in absolute poverty and in constant fear of arrest. Workers were tied to the factory like serfs in their time. A worker did not have the right to resign from the factory or move to another job at will.

In case of being late for work by just 5 minutes, the first time there would be an administrative penalty, and upon repeated lateness, one would be subject to criminal liability. If the factory did not meet the production plan within the specified time, the director and chief engineer were subject to criminal liability. And in those years, such prosecution for such a category often ended in execution.

Workers mainly lived on the outskirts of the city. Back then, there were many small houses in Tbilisi where workers huddled with their families. All conveniences were outside. Our working class could not even dream of such things as an entrance hall, kitchen, bathroom, toilet. A radio point in our shack appeared only around 1948.

Every summer we went to the village to visit my father’s relatives. He himself was arrested in 1930 and exiled for 7 years to Central Asia. And we went to the village to get a little nourishment. For the summer period.

I spent practically every summer in the village until I was drafted into the Soviet army. I worked in the collective farm, earning workdays. Therefore, I know firsthand what a collective farm is and what village life was like in Soviet times. Collective farmers worked in the collective farm six days a week. Everything that the collective farmers created with their backbreaking labor for pennies was handed over to the state. In addition, each collective farmer had to hand over to the state meat, butter, wool, and other agricultural products. Almost every chicken was taxed on the number of eggs to be handed over to the state. The collective farm in our village was organized in 1937. I remember well that before 1937, the village was full of all kinds of livestock, cows and horses, and in the mountains, you can’t do without horses, sheep, pigs. No one even counted chickens and turkeys.

No one even counted chickens and turkeys. With the formation of the collective farm, the situation in the village worsened every year, and eventually, by 1972, the village disappeared. The youth left, and the elderly went where it’s known. In Stalin’s times, work in the collective farm was not considered state labor, and no pension was given. You couldn’t leave the village; they wouldn’t give you a passport. Isn’t this just like serfdom?

One could talk at length about our “happy” life under Stalin, but let’s stop here. The question is, why does the generation that experienced all the “delights” of Stalin’s “socialism” vote for Stalin again and feel nostalgic for those hardest times? I think the reason should be sought in the political environment that existed in the 1930s and 1940s in the Soviet Union. The 1930s were very interesting years for our country. They were years of incredible labor feats of the Soviet people. They were years of terrible repressions and years of deification of Stalin. Years of creating giants of the national economy and universal fear of the NKVD. It was during these years that the slogan “dictatorship of the proletariat” actually turned into the dictatorship of one man, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of people, the fate of the state, depended on his desire or lack thereof. We, the children of the 1930s, grew up convinced that Stalin cared about us, about the children. We were convinced that Stalin was a genius, the greatest scientist. Stalin was smarter than everyone. Books, mass media, poets, writers, scientists, composers of world fame, enthusiastically praised the wisest, the most outstanding leader of the first worker-peasant state in the world. And how could we, children, not yet firm in our worldview, not believe this massive ideological press?

“About wise Stalin, Dear and beloved, A beautiful song Is composed by the people.” Composer Vano Muradeli, cantata about Stalin. I’m not even talking about the films: “Lenin in October,” “Lenin in 1918,” “The Unforgettable 1919,” and the most disgusting in terms of this apologia for Stalin, the film “The Fall of Berlin.” All this together could not but affect our brains, our worldview. And the fact that today the generation of my age votes for Stalin is the result of ideological influence on the generation of the 30s and 40s. But history teaches us nothing. We again create idols for ourselves in the form of Putin or the party “United Russia.” They are the benefactors of the country, and only they do everything good for the country. There used to be the Communist Party, and now there is United Russia, nothing new, a repetition of the past. One should not exert ideological pressure on the younger generation. They must figure out for themselves who is who and what is what.

Yes, Stalin was the leader of the country during the war. Under his leadership, we won the victory. Honor and glory to him for that. But it was his political miscalculation, the wrong assessment of the military-political situation in Europe, that put our army, our country, in a catastrophic position. And for this miscalculation, we paid with millions of lives of Soviet people and the loss of a huge part of our lands. Yes, we won the victory, but has anyone analyzed how many millions of our soldiers died in this war completely in vain due to the inept leadership of the troops, especially in the first years of the war? We say that in this war we won thanks to the mass heroism of Soviet people. I agree, but why did our soldiers need to show mass heroism? Simply, the soldiers with their mass heroism corrected the stupid and illiterate decisions of the commanders and personally Comrade Stalin. Those who vote for Stalin today do not remember this. Perhaps what I am about to say will be a bit harsh, but I will say that we drowned the German army in the blood of our soldiers, our people, and that’s how we won.

Therefore, when I hear the triumphant speeches on May 9th about our victory, including from the war participants, I feel uneasy and have no desire to glorify Stalin. I always think of the millions who died in vain in that war, who might have lived if our government and Stalin himself had respected and cared for the preservation of Soviet people. Yes, Stalin did a lot for the strengthening and development of the Soviet state. Stalin’s contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany is significant, but he is also to blame for the needless deaths of tens of millions of Soviet people. Therefore, it is unlikely that the name Stalin is equivalent to the name RUSSIA.

Retired Colonel, Historian Sh. A. Chigoev