Hello Mr. Bolton,
I thank you again for your participation. I would appreciate it if you answered questions. Thank you!
First of all, in doing some background research on you, Wikipedia claims that you were "briefly secretary for the New Zealand Fascist Union". If this is true, how would you respond to those who would express revulsion at this association?
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| Author Kerry Bolton |
If people are so easily ‘repulsed’ rather than thoughtful, I don’t give a damn. Why would I? Fascism is a complex doctrine of synthesis, and the NZ Fascist Union was not it; as one would expect in NZ. Hence the ‘brief’ association. I am a Spenglerian, a pro-Catholic Christian, anti-usury and a guild-socialist. Geopolitically, closest to Dugin’s Eurasianism.
This book, from my understanding, was originally published in 2012. What necessitated the 'new edition'?
I am not aware of a ‘new edition’. Ask the publisher.
With this book, you can almost guarantee that the reader will be exposed to a different narrative on Stalin than they are used to. What do existing works on Stalin miss that your book covers?
Other books on Stalin are written from the viewpoint of the orthodox Left or Right, the latter focusing on moral judgments. I am trying to look from a long historical perspective. The Left find Stalin horrendous because in Trotsky’s words he ‘betrayed the revolution’; which is what I find commendable.
The book jacket says that Stalin: The Enduring Legacy" "will outrage dogmatists of both Left & Right". What is so outrageous about this book?
To the Right and the Left he was the epitome of evil: for the Right a communist and intrinsically evil; to many of the Left a betrayer of Marxism, and conversely to others on the Left a hero. There’s plenty there to offend everyone because they are all looking at history from doctrinaire preconceptions.
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| The famous 'young, hot Stalin' portrait |
Actually, the premise is not that eccentric or heretical from the Rightist perspective. Oswald Spengler could see that Russia would rid itself of doctrinaire Marxism even before Stalin ascendency. So did others in the German conservative revolutionary movement during the Weimar era, and there were associations between the USSR and Rightist-Nationalists. They saw a common enemy in the plutocracies. Walther Rathenau’s Treaty of Rapallo was a reflection of this thinking. After World War II many German nationalists having just fought a war with the USSR did not want to do so again in the interests of the USA and advocated a ‘neutralist’ position which was really more pro-Soviet. This caused quite a worry to the USA and the authorities banned the Socialist Reich party which advocated rapprochement. For his part Stalin insisted that German nationalists and veterans be accommodated politically, and ordered that the GDR sponsor the formation of the National Democratic Party (not to be confused with the NPD founded in West Germany) which remained part of the GDR government until its demise. In the USA the Spenglerian philosopher Francis Parker Yockey, who was chased all around the world by US Intelligence, advocated alliance with the USSR against the USA, and this was also the attitude of other Amercian nationalists such as the widely circulated Catholic newspaper Common Sense which started as a McCarthyite publication; the partly satirical Yockeyan journal TRUD, and later the ‘ethnostatist’ Wilmot Robertson, author of The Dispossessed Majority, and editor of Instauration.
Conversely, many Trotskyites jumped aboard the anti-Soviet bandwagon, including Trot’s widow Sedova, who issued a public statement that the USSR, not the USA, is the main obstacle to world socialism, and backed US intervention in Korea, because the North Koreans were a bunch of Stalinists. From this milieu Mensheviks and Trotskyites of sundry types formed first the Congress for Cultural Freedom under CIA auspices, and then the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which remains one of the key instigators of world revolution, along with Soros, and a myriad of NGO’s, the so-called ‘civic society’ that were given their marching orders recently by Putin.
In the book, you propose that Stalinism should not be thought of as a Communist or as a Marxist ideology, but as something else entirely, something even opposed to these doctrines. How would you define Stalinism?
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| Cathedral Of Christ The Saviour After Demolition By USSR |
In the historical line of Russian Messianism; given a Communist face according to the requirements of the time. This was manifested in Stalin’s backing for the resurgence of the Orthodox Church, for which patriarchs remain grateful, even today. There is certain evidence, partly from anecdotes by his daughter Svetlana, that Stalin never was an atheist or anti-Christ. For example the oft-stated episodes of young Joseph being expelled from seminary because of revolutionary activities is unlikely. The Communist Party in Russia under Gennady Zyuganov is Stalinist, and strongly nationalist. Additionally, many parades of the Nationalist-Right in Russia include portraits of Stalin. The conjunction is at times called ‘national-bolshevism’, and reaches into all elements of Russian society.
The back cover of your book states "Despite so-called 'de-Stalinization' after his death, the Soviet Bloc continued to oppose globalism..." However, there are some facts that contradict this notion, both during and after Stalin's rule. From Stalin's ascension until the bloc's demise, The USSR or its affiliates in Eastern Europe intervened all around the world, including China (Xinjiang,especially), Mongolia, Spain, Finland, Romania (pre-Communist), The Phillipines, Iran, Indochina, Malaysia, Korea, Congo, Nicaragua. Cuba, Eritrea, Namibia, Angola, Mozambique, Egypt, Italy, Ethiopia, Somalia, & finally Afghanistan be fore it 'gave up the ghost'. How is this opposition to globalism? Were not the Soviets trying to create their own global order?
A matter of semantics. I’d call it geopolitics, of which there is a strong school in Russia. Marxism became a tool subordinated to geopolitics. The Communist parties were subordinated to Soviet foreign policy. Where there was not a territorial interest, such as in Greece, the parties were abandoned.
The USA had a major interest in revolutionist movements in China and many of the other states you mention; especially in Africa. The USA pursued an anti-colonialist policy of its own to fill the vacuum when the European powers scuttled their empires; bankrupted by World War II, bedevilled by guerrilla movements more often funded by the USA than USSR, and in debt to international finance which now saw empires (‘Reichs’ as Roosevelt called them all to Churchill) as a burden to the international free flow of labour, resources, money and technology. That is globalisation, and quite different from the Soviet Union’s geopolitical policies. In some areas the USSR outmanoeuvred the USA, in others ,vice versa.
In such matters as post-war ‘decolonisation’, the USA and USSR often had a convergence of aims, which is why many ‘conspiracy theorists’ on the Right assumed there was a secret alliance between the USSR and USA to rule the world at the behest of a ‘hidden hand’, and that the ‘Cold War’ was a hoax.
Dr. Alexander Jacob, in his back cover blurb, expresses that this book is "a major contribution" not only to the "proper understanding" of Russia, but also to American Politics and society. How is this book relevant to the USA of today?
US foreign policy has been driven by Russophobia since the days when Jacob Schiff of Kuhn
Loeb & Co. funded George Kennan to write books and articles for US consumption against Czarism and to propagandise Russian POWs with Leftist material with the aid of Japan. The March Revolution looked like Russia would become a lucrative piece of real estate for international capital. US business interests were jubilant. Then under bolshevism Trotsky was the ‘go-to’ man for the British, as indicated in the autobiography of R H Bruce Lockhart: ‘Memoirs of a British Secret Agent’. Trot was adamant that Russia stay in the war against Germany, to the point of resigning his post as foreign affairs commissar because of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. It might be surmised that his journey from New York to Russia was facilitated by British and US secret services for that purpose, while the Germans likewise facilitated Lenin’s journey.
When Stalin changed Russia’s direction the anti-Stalinist left became Russophobic, joined the U.S. foreign policy establishment and foreshadowed the neocons. Many of them became Ayn Rand-type libertarians.
The USA has its own messianic outlook, from its Puritan legacy, that clashes with Russia’s; something of which can be deduced from Dostoyevsky’s novels, and the works of the ‘Slavophils’ dating to the 19th century.
The common fight against the Axis was a brief interregnum. The ‘Cold War’ began when the USSR refused to become a junior partner in a post-war US world order. The USA had pinned its hopes on controlling the United Nations General Assembly through typical democratic wire-pulling, but the USSR insisted that the UN Security Council be vested with the ‘power’, subject to veto by any member; hence it rendered the UNO worthless as a ‘world government’. The conservatives in the USA epitomised by The John Birch Society campaigned against the UNO as a Soviet tool for world control. Quite the contrary, it was the USSR that scuttled any such idea. Likewise with the rejection by the USSR of the ‘Baruch Plan’ for the internationalisation of atomic energy, which the USSR regarded as a de facto method for US control.
Dr. Jacob also talks about authentic culture "rooted in the soil" how Stalin, he would contend represented that, as opposed to globalism. Explain more of this idea of traditional culture "rooted in the soil"
A culture starts from the land, from the village, and the communal bonds of the peasantry, and is in later epochs destroyed by urbanisation, and the rise of money-politics, of plutocracy over landed aristocracy; capitalism over feudalism. Refer to Spengler’s Decline of The West, and Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilisation and Decay. It is a cyclic process undergone by civilisations generally, unless cut short by war or ecological disasters. Russia retains the eternal ‘peasant’ outlook, distinct from both East and West, caught between this and the need to modernise and industrialise. Nonetheless a certain ‘eternal Russia’ remained. The Bolsheviks fought eternal Russia; Stalin went with it.
Refer to the article by F. Chernov, ‘Bourgeois Cosmopolitism and its reactionary role’, written in 1949, which is online. Regardless of the Marxian phrases, it is an excellent definition of folk culture which the USSR sought to retain and develop.
You also have have a volume out called "The Psychotic Left". The conventional narrative would be that Stalin, along with Pol Pot and perhaps Mao, would be the "The Psychotic Left". How would you respond?
The ruthless determination of a Stalin is of a different order than the narcissism and sociopathy of a Mao or Pol Pot or Trotsky and sundry others, although such distinctions do not mean much to the victims. It could be argued that there has been a lot of mystification about Stalin, while Trot and until very recently Mao have enjoyed a good press in the West. Certainly Mao and Trot had their share of sponsors in the West particularly the USA. Stalin was ‘Uncle Joe’ while he was fighting fascists; and suddenly a tyrant when he rejected US overtures after the war.
You write that Bolshevik-Marxism is "Psychotic", meaning disconnected from reality or unable to grasp reality. In what ways is B-M psychotic?
It tries to impose a dogma that is contrary to the realities of what humans are. Marx himself was deeply flawed psychologically and projected his own failings onto society from which he created an entire ideology. It is a rationalisation for destructive impulses.
On Page 3, you write that "...Stalin assured Russia's place as a world power and maintained the national and cultural freedom of Russia...". During Stalin's time 'cultural freedom' was greatly curtailed. Media and the press were controlled and functioned as organs of the party. People were being put into GULAG's even for private diary entries that they had written in opposition. How did Stalin promote 'cultural freedom'?
Russia’s national culture was preserved. I am not referring to individual cultural nihilism that treats the arts as ego-fulfilment or as a commodity as in the Late West. Under Stalin Russian traditional culture was revived, not only in the face of the USA’s cultural offensive via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but via elements in Russia, which Trotsky had backed, such as in his joint surrealist manifesto with Andre Breton.
Many Trotskyites jumped aboard the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom. It was led by ‘life-long Menshevik’ and Trot apologist Sidney Hook, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom from President Reagan. Very symbolic of the Russophobic nexus.
Liberalism gives the individual freedom to be banal. Picasso was quite a good artist at an early stage then turned to crap to become a public entertainer. That is why artists such as Celine, Hamsun, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and many others thought democracy to be a disaster for the arts; where culture would become just another commodity, which it has. Ralph Peters and other neocon strategists regard the junk culture of the West as a means of undermining the traditions of ‘rogue regimes’, and this goes back to the Cold War.
Can you please define 'rootless cosmopolitanism' and is it influential in the United States? From what sources does 'rootless cosmopolitanism' emanate from?
'Rootless cosmopolitanism' refers to the artist as a detached ego rather than as working within a tradition. One can proceed with innovation within a tradition, as those such as Beethoven, Dali, Pound and Mozart have shown, without the impulse to vomit rubbish and call it ‘artistic freedom’. A traditional predicate need not lead to stagnation; quote the contrary, as proven by the artists I have mentioned.
The artist as nihilist appears in the Late epoch of a civilisation, driven by money, Saatchi become the arts patron rather than Medici. The USA used 'Rootless cosmopolitanism' as an anti-Soviet strategy; ‘abstract expressionism’ became synonymous with ‘Amercian culture’ and Jackson Pollock was the epitome. Refer to Francis Stonor Saunders’ ‘Cultural Cold War’. Beneath the Marxist jargon the Stalinists defined the culture-war rather well in their articles and speeches which are easily found online. Again, refer to the Chernov article.
On page 5 you write, "Many on the Left regarded Stalin's Russia as a travesty of Ma rxism.
It is true. But there is also a significant amount of very sincere Stalinists online who believe that Stalin was the ultimate Communist and bolshevik. Why are they wrong?
Perhaps they aren’t. Anything can be justified by dialectical materialism; so nothing on such matters can be said with certainty. Perhaps the best that can be done is to look at the actual results and impact on history. I am merely giving another perspective, from the Right, and one that is not unique; albeit largely forgotten, as alluded to previously.
If Stalin was the greatest anti-Communist force within the Soviet Union, why did he never repudiate it openly? Why didn't he end the Soviet system, and perhaps most of all, why did he implement the collective farm system?
He had to work within the system in which he was a part. He did a pretty good job of reversing the Marxist doctrines, whether due to pragmatism or otherwise.
Collectivisation was the type (of) tragedy that generally goes with a period of transition, and was regarded as necessary for Russia’s development. Estimates for the victims of collectivisation range from zero to 10,000,000. One could point to the attempt to exterminate the peasants of the Vendee region by the Jacobins, the forefathers of both Liberal-capitalism and communism.
More particularly, around the same time as Stalin the USA was hit by agricultural devastation. The Dust Bowl was caused in part by unplanned farming, and hit at the same time as the Great Depression. The Amercian farmers were dispossessed en mass, often by bank foreclosures, and forced to the cities. In the USA it was foreclosure; in the USSR collectivisation. Collectivisation rightly or wrongly, was undertaken for what was regarded as being essential to Russia’s development. Foreclosure was regarded as essential for… what? – Banker’s profits…. It is also by no means certain that there was not also mass starvation that caused deaths in the USA at this time.
While there was abundant food, this was being destroyed by the state not only in the USA but around the world, while people starved. Crops and livestock burnt and buried. In other words, throughout the democracies, there was an abundance of food, there were malnourished people, but there was a lack of purchasing power and ability for efficient distribution. So how is that for a criminal system? The Irish famine was caused by something similar. The blight on potatoes did not cause wholesale starvation. Presumably Irish eat more than potatoes. Rather, the food that continued to be produced went as exports to pay Ireland’s creditors. While the orthodox economists say ‘export or die’ the reality was ‘export and die’.
If there was one fact or concept that you wanted readers to take from Stalin: The Enduring Legacy, what would it be?
Russia resumed its Messianic mission with Stalin, Bolshevism epitomised by Trotsky being a brief interregnum. Stalin did not overcome eternal Russia, as the Bolsheviks had sought. He became the custodian of eternal Russia, maybe even despite himself. That is history as an organic process. The Western Civilisation is passé. The next world civilisation belongs to Russia, or China; spirit or matter respectively. Stalin set Russia back on its culture-destiny after Lenin-Trotsky, and so has Putin after Yeltsin. The West might be revitalized in a symbiotic relationship with Russia, so long as by ‘the West’ we don’t mean the leadership of the USA, the centre of international excrescence. The Baltic-German philosopher-historian Walter Schubart, writing in the 1930s in his book ‘Russia and Western Man’, suggested that a Russo-Western synthesis could rejuvenate both by giving spirit to the soulless Westerner, and direction to the anarchic Russian, creating an entirely new civilisation.
The Russophobia that was continued by Obama and obsessed on by Hilary Clinton, arose from the revitalisation of Russia under Stalin. Russia was supposed to become a satrap of Western capital, which had invested heavily in Bolshevism, including a U.S. expeditionary force under General Graves sent to ensure a Red victory during the Civil War. The ghost of Trot contends with the ghost of Stalin, and it is the USA where Trot’s spectre has long resided.
There is a clash of contending messianisms. China hopes to stand back and inherit the world. Its alliance with Russia is pragmatic and inorganic, and has seen China get its own way at Russia’s expense. Recently at DAVOS China put in its bid to become the leader of globalisation; the bastion of international capital. China is the power-house for globalisation; not its nemesis. The presidential election showed how significant Russophobia remains. Trump indicated rapprochement. However, he is now surrounded by Russophobes. Goldman Sachs has invested in China heavily, not Russia, and Trump’s two primary economic advisers are from Goldman Sachs. The purging of General Flynn was a coup for the Russia-haters. Despite great expectations, draining the Washington swamp seems to be ever more remote, and the clash of world-views seems likely to continue, unless Russia again succumbs to the forces of disintegration.
Thank you very much!!
