Red Youth visit Stalin’s dacha on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution

 

After a busy week meeting with communist youth from around the world, Red Youth took a short trip to visit Stalin’s dacha on the coast of the Black Sea on Friday.

The site is well maintained with renovations to several rooms ongoing, and it attracted a continuous stream of visitors from across the former territories of the once glorious Soviet Union, and from father afield.

Seeing so many working people coming to learn about comrade Stalin, and to pay their respects to him, threw in to glaring light for our delegation the relentless effect of our media and education system in Britain, which continue to demonise such towering figures of liberation and socialism, who are greatly respected in the rest of the world, either for their work as revolutionaries or as defeaters of fascism and imperialism (or both, in Stalin’s case).

2.2.
Stalin and Lenin at Lenin’s dacha

Of course we cannot pretend that opinion is uniform across the former Soviet Union, but not one person we spoke with over the week failed to take into the account the harsh situations faced by the Soviet Union, from the invasion of imperialist nations at the very birth of the USSR to bearing the brunt of the vicious nazi war machine when considering the legacy of Stalin and the Soviet Union, as well as the positive changes it brought to people’s lives. We were able to have many calm and informed conversations over the week, which was a refreshing change!

We consider Comrade Stalin’s legacy, and that of the USSR, to belong to the working class across the world, and that defending this legacy is necessary to defend socialism. Both Khrushchevite revisionism and the imperialist intelligentsia attack Stalin as a method of attacking the construction of socialism. Join us then, in celebrating the centenary of the Great October Socialist Revolution in a proper, inspirational, and revolutionary fashion on 4 November, in Southall!

When we put aside all the thousand and one nonsensical prejudices with which we have been carefully indoctrinated and evaluate sensibly the role played by Comrade Stalin’s leadership, and by the Bolshevik party during Stalin’s time at the helm, it becomes clear that his role was pivotal to the Soviet Union’s successes.

And when we understand all this, it becomes clear just why it is that workers all over the capitalist world are taught to revile the name of Josef Stalin; why so many historians, journalists and academics are paid such good wages for making up obscene and ridiculous lies about him and about the Soviet Union he led.

While Stalin lived, and while the Soviet Union was guided by such a leader, and by a party founded on Marxist-Leninist science, there was nothing the workers of the USSR could not achieve and no force on earth that could defeat them. Workers everywhere had a motherland and the world revolution had a base from which it could take confidence and support.

No wonder the bourgeoisie hated Stalin then, and no wonder they hate him still. No wonder his legacy leaves them incandescent with rage. No wonder they are so desperate to inculcate revulsion at the very sound of his name amongst workers. J V Stalin represents everything our rulers fear most: the death of their power and privilege; the end of their dominion over the people and resources of this earth. He represents the bright future of humanity – and the certainty that there is no place for rich exploiters in that future.

Josef Stalin, more than any other individual, was and remains the capitalist class’s harbinger of doom.

October 1917: the defining event of our epoch, Proletarian issue 80 (October 2017)