After great crimes 'against humanity', there is usually some kind of atonement, blame is apportioned, the guilty are charged and sentenced, and the lessons are hopefully learned. But not always. The Turkish genocide against the Armenians has still not received full historical recognition. The crimes of the Nazis against the Jews have been pored over again and again, but not how the Nazis rose to power with the help of the capitalists, both in Germany itself and in Europe, Britain, etc., nor that for Hitler, his main target was the organizations of the working class
In the ‘transition’ to capitalist democracy from the Franco regime in the 1970s, the pact of forgetting allowed the torturers and hangmen of the fascist regime to go unpunished. Only now are the bodies of those murdered by Franco being dug up with the hope that those who suffered, their families, will receive their due historical recognition and hopefully an indictment is brought against Franco, his dictatorship and those who supported him. A similar historical reckoning has been partially carried out in Argentina – driven on by the heroic 'Mothers of the Plaza' who fought to bring to book the right-wing military officers who not only murdered their sons and daughters, the 'disappeared', but also stole their grandchildren. A similar task remains to be carried out in Chile where those who supported the murderous regime of General Pinochet have yet to be brought before the bar of history. Other examples include South Africa and its 'truth commission'.
However, from the standpoint of the labor movement and Marxism, the greatest 'blank page' is the role of Stalinism, and particularly the crucial role played by the purge trials of 1938 which have left their mark on the former Soviet Union (USSR) even today. Solzhenitsyn, the alleged chronicler of the crimes of Stalin, was not objective in dealing with these events in his 'hailed' work 'Gulag Archipelago'. He never mentioned that the main defendants in the Moscow Trials were Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. He scandalously underestimated and downplayed the crucial and heroic role of the thousands of Trotskyists who resisted Stalin and Stalinism to the end – relegating them to a historical footnote. Although largely unknown outside Marxist circles, they provide an inspiration for the struggle against Stalinism and its 'legacy' in today's barbaric Russian capitalism.
Solzhenitsyn – who started off as a radical critic of Stalinism and ended as a Great Russian chauvinistic, nationalistic mystic – tried to show that Stalinism was an ‘outgrowth’ of Bolshevism and the ‘genuine’ expression of the Russian revolution. Many have sought to imitate him since then – for instance Oliver Figes in his book ‘Whisperers’ and Robert Service’s latest book on Trotsky. But now we have this magnificent book from the late Vadim Rogovin which shatters the thesis of the Solzhenitsyns et al. But it does a lot more. It illuminates for a new generation just how Stalin and Stalinism used the purge trials to consolidate his regime and how this put its lasting stamp on Russia. In fact, between Stalinism, the regime of a greedy privileged bureaucratic elite, and Bolshevism existed a “river of blood”. On virtually every page Rogovin shows this, refuting in the process the arguments of the Solzhenitsyns. He describes how the mechanism of Stalinism as a political system took root and grew, how it caught up in its machine and demoralized the heroic generation that had made the October revolution.