Victor Kravchenko Quotes

[H]atred of Nazism had been drummed into our minds year after year. We had seen our leading Army Generals, including Tukhachevsky, shot for supposed plotting with Hitler’s Reichswehr. The bit treason trials, in which Lenin’s most intimate associates perished, had rested on the premise that Nazi Germany and its Axis friends, Italy and Japan, were preparing to attack us. Those nations, indeed, were only the spearheads of a world coalition of capitalists sworn to destroy our socialist fatherland. The brutalities of the super-purge had been justified largely on the basis of that imminent Nazi-led assault against us.

The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon–like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.

Hitlerism, we were instructed to believe, was thus merely the iron fist of the whole plutocratic, imperialistic world. A war between Nazi Germany and its capitalistic patrons was unthinkable, illogical. Now that just such a war had come, it seemed to us no less insane than the compact of friendship between the U.S.S.R. and Germany…

In substance we were told that the triumph of Fascism in Germany was really a disguised victory for the world revolution. It represented the last stand of capitalism, its death agony. The grimacing of the parliamentary harlequins of fake democracy was over. Even with the help of fascist and liberal lackeys, the capitalists could no longer control the discontented masses and had to resort to unadulterated terror through fascism. ‘German Fascism is the spearhead of world capitalism,’ a speaker at the Institute explained. ‘Capitalism finally has thrown off its mask. The workers of the world now face a clear choice between Fascism and Communism. Can we doubt which they will choose? The Soviet Union stands alone as the bulwark against Fascism, and the proletariat of all countries is with us. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, comrades, are the precursors of our revolution. By revealing the true face of modern capitalism—fascism, they push the masses to an understanding of the truth. There is force in our slogan: The worse the better!

Equality of income, which had been a Soviet ideal, was suddenly turned into a crime. Uravnilovka, equalization, was denounced as unworthy of a socialist society. The ‘Party maximum,’ under which Party members had been kept to an income not far above the average, was now removed, releasing torrents of greed and self-seeking in officialdom. Piecework was introduced throughout Soviet economy, even in types of work where such a system of payment was palpably silly if not impossible. With that strange Soviet genius for extremes, the evil of too many bosses was now replaced by the evil of the single and arbitrary boss, in which the last pretense of ‘workers’ control" from below was thrown overboard.

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations, in the defense of freedom and justice, we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.