I’ve got a soft spot for “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (though I can’t claim I understand it all), but I remember liking the letter where he admonishes a comrade for calling themself a “Stalinist”. I wish I could remember which one that was!
I like his writing style, and the way he lays his points out. There’s still a lot in the archive for me to read!
Is that something you believe Stalin was personally responsible for? I don’t see any evidence to that effect.
“Millions of Poles were killed in German death camps throughout the war, and with considerably less sustained outcry from the [Polish government-in-exile in London]. Indeed, only that very month the Germans were annihilating some 50000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, and far less was heard from London on this matter. Katyn was an infinitely more sensitive issue because the men killed there, as Polish underground leader Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski described them, ‘had been the elite of the Polish nation . . .,’ that is to say, the friends and family of the exiles in London. Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step towards implementing a social revolution in Poland, and on the basis of class solidarity, the London Poles felt one officer was worth many Jews or peasants.”
(Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945. New York: Random House. 1968. p. 105.)
He was ruling the country back then, who else could be responsible for that? Well, USSR and later RF even admitted they did it.
This isn’t how the soviet system worked.
He was one of FIVE people on the upper most council, and hundreds and then thousands on the councils that reported to it. He had exactly the same powers that the other people on this council had. The USSR is not a presidential system, there was never one single leader of it.
But don’t take my word for that, here is a quote directly from the CIA’s declassified documents:
No he wasn’t. “Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”.