Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, communists had always believed that the only way a socialist state could be destroyed was by hostile forces from the outside. Now we know that this was tragically wrong. The Soviet Union was destroyed by betrayal from within.
By the time that Gorbachev came to power as First Secretary of the CPSU in 1985 he had already decided to put an end to socialism in the Soviet Union. Few people know this. So I begin by quoting an essay from the year 2000 by Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s closest collaborator. In 1985, immediately upon becoming First Secretary, Gorbachev chose Yakovlev to head the Propaganda Section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thereafter Yakovlev became a Secretary of the Central Committee, then member of the Politburo, then senior advisor to the President.
Yakovlev wrote a preface to the Russian-language edition of the Black Book of Communism. I assume everyone here knows that this book, originally published in France in 1999, is a large collection of lies and slander against the international communist movement. It has been translated into many languages.
This is how Yakovlev described the conspiracy to do away with the USSR and Soviet socialism:
After the 20th Congress, in an ultra-narrow circle of our closest friends and like-minded people, we often discussed the problems of democratization of the country and society. We chose a method as simple as a sledgehammer to propagate the “ideas” of the late Lenin. It was necessary to clearly, succinctly, and distinctly, isolate the phenomenon of Bolshevism, separating it from the Marxism of the last century. That is why we tirelessly talked about the “genius” of late Lenin, about the need to return to Lenin's “plan for building socialism” through cooperation, through state capitalism, and so on.
A group of real, not imaginary, reformers developed (orally, of course) the following plan: to strike at Stalin, at Stalinism, with Lenin's authority. And then, in case of success, to beat Lenin with Plekhanov and Social Democracy, and with liberalism and “moral socialism” to beat the idea of revolution in general.
A new round of exposure of the “cult of personality of Stalin” began. But not with an emotional cry, as Khrushchev did, but with a clear implication: the criminal is not only Stalin, but the system itself is criminal.
Yakovlev continued:
The Soviet totalitarian regime could only be destroyed through glasnost and the totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism.
Yakovlev went on to outline his opinion about communism as follows. Remember, he was the head of propaganda for the Communist Party and was Gorbachev’s right-hand man.
In its final version my definition of Bolshevism looks like this:
“From a historical point of view, Bolshevism is a system of social insanity, when the peasants, the nobility, the merchants, the entire layer of entrepreneurs, the clergy, intellectuals and intelligentsia were physically destroyed. This is the “mole of history” that dug mass graves from Lvov to Magadan, from Norilsk to Kushka. It is the exploitation of man and ecological vandalism based on all types of oppression. These are anti-human precepts, hammered in with the ruthlessness of ideological fanaticism that hides pettiness. It is a landmine of monstrous power that almost blew up the whole world.
From a philosophical point of view, it is a subjective inhibition of objective processes, a misunderstanding of the essence of social contradictions. This is thinking in terms of social narcissism and a reflexive rejection of any opponent. It is a megaton load of dogmatism, an intermediate and final result of a consumer-prudent attitude to truth.
From an economic point of view, it is the minimum end result at maximum costs due to the voluntaristic denial of the law of value; the anarchy of productive forces and a bureaucratic absolutism of productive relations; the preservation of scientific and technical backwardness; an increase in stagnation. It is leveling as a universal way, perhaps the sole way, to make people into “cogs.”
Internationally, it is a phenomenon of the same order with German Nazism, Italian fascism, Spanish Francoism, and Pol-Potism. In modern dictatorial regimes, each has its own characteristics, but the essence remains the same.”
We must ask ourselves: How could a person like this, someone who hates socialism – to say nothing of communism – so much that he equates it with Nazism and fascism, become the second most powerful person in the Soviet Union, the head of propaganda for the CPSU?
Here is how Yakovlev descries the method that he and his co-conspirators used to undermine the Soviet Union.
The Soviet totalitarian regime could only be destroyed through glasnost and the totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism ... Looking back, I can proudly say that the clever but very simple tactic -- use the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism -- worked. We had no other way of political struggle. Bolshevism completely rejected any democratic reforms, any dissent.
For example, my works and speeches in 1987-1988, and partly in 1989, were thickly crammed with quotations from Marx and especially from Lenin. Fortunately, in Lenin one can find as many mutually exclusive statements as you want on almost any fundamental issue.
I recommend that we all study this essay. I have translated it into English. It has also been translated into Chinese by Professor Ma Weixian of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
How could a fanatical anticommunist like Yakovlev be appointed to the most important post in the CPSU after Gorbachev? He says that it all began with Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous “Secret Speech” (literally, in Russian, “Closed Speech”) to the XX Party Congress on February 25, 1956. Remember that Yakovlev wrote:
After the 20th Congress, in an ultra-narrow circle of our closest friends and like-minded people, we often discussed the problems of democratization of the country and society ... A group of real, not imaginary, reformers developed (orally, of course) the following plan: to strike at Stalin, at Stalinism, with Lenin's authority. And then, in case of success, to beat Lenin with Plekhanov and Social Democracy, and with liberalism and “moral socialism” to beat the idea of revolution in general.
Yakovlev says that the conspiracy, in which he was one of the leaders, began with Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.” Khrushchev’s speech was an extended attack on Joseph Stalin.
Today we know that Khrushchev was lying. In 2008 I published a book in Russian, in Moscow, in which I demonstrated that every charge of crime or misdeed by Stalin or by Lavrentii Beria in Khrushchev’s speech is provably, demonstrably, false. I began by identifying 61 accusations against Stalin and Beria by Khrushchev in this speech. With the use of documents from former Soviet archives that were available by 2008, I showed that at least 40 of these 61 accusations by Khrushchev are deliberate lies.
In 2011 my book was published in English under the title Khrushchev Lied. It has since been published in more than a dozen languages including Chinese1, French, German, Italian, and Czech.
The implications of the fact that Khrushchev did nothing but lie about Stalin and his supposed “crimes” are profound. They are also largely unexplored. For one thing, it strongly suggests that Stalin committed no crimes at all! For if Stalin really had committed even a single genuine crime, why wouldn’t Khrushchev have included it in his speech along with all of his lies?
Since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 an enormous number of documents from former Soviet archives has been available to researchers. They include many documents containing evidence about the defendants in the three public Moscow Trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, as well as about many other persons who were arrested, convicted, and sentenced either to death or to prison during the Stalin period.
What these documents show is this: Khrushchev and his men, and later Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and their men, lied and falsified everything concerning Stalin himself and the Stalin period generally.
Let’s start with Khrushchev. After his “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956, many Party members, mainly leaders, who had been tried, convicted, and executed during the Stalin period were “rehabilitated.”
What does “rehabilitation” mean? It is a dishonest term that is intended to deceive. We are encouraged – misled -- to assume that if a person has been “rehabilitated”, that person was not guilty of the crime of which they were convicted. However, this is not true at all.
As early as the 1980s anticommunist scholars concluded that “rehabilitation” was a purely political act that had nothing to do with juridical guilt or innocence. In his German-language book Bucharins Rehabilitierung Marc Junge writes:
... rehabilitation in the Soviet Union was an arbitrary political-administrative act, which was determined primarily by the political expediency of the measures , and not by correctness according to criminal law. (266)
This has been fully confirmed by the voluminous evidence we now have. The fact that someone – a defendant in one of the Moscow Trials, for example – has been “rehabilitated” does not mean that this person was in fact innocent of whatever crime he was convicted of.
In Khrushchev Lied I discussed all the "rehabilitation” documents that were available in 2005. Not a single one of them contains evidence that the person “rehabilitated” was innocent. Since then my Moscow colleague Vladimir L. Bobrov and I have examined many other “rehabilitation” reports. None of them contain any evidence that the person “rehabilitated” was in fact innocent of the crime of which he or she was convicted.
“Rehabilitation” simply means that the Soviet leadership – Khrushchev, then Gorbachev – decided for political reasons to declare that person innocent. The “political reasons” were to attack Joseph Stalin and discredit the advances towards communism that were made by the socialist Soviet Union during Stalin’s time.
At the XXII Party Congress held in October 1961 Khrushchev’s men launched more violent attacks against Stalin. Once again, the allegations against Stalin made during this Congress are false. They had the documentary evidence that the persons they claimed were innocently repressed were really guilty and they deliberately lied about it.
For example: Aleksandr Shelepin, Khrushchev’s Chairman of the KGB (Committee for State Security) read a letter to Stalin from Komandarm (major general) Yona Yakir, one of the defendants in the “Tukhachevsky Affair.” Shelepin read out only a passage in which Yakir swears his loyalty. He omitted the section in which Yakir confesses at length to his treason and betrayal. My colleagues and I have translated the whole text of Yakir’s letter and reproduced a facsimile of it in Chapter Five of our book Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy.
At a 1962 conference for historians of the CPSU Petr Pospelov, one of Khrushchev’s men who had in fact drafted Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” told the Party historians that they were not permitted to have access to the Party archives. Today we know why – the evidence in those archives proves that Khrushchev and his men were lying about Stalin.
After the XXII Congress Khrushchev directed a special commission, the “Shvernik Commission,” to search the archives for evidence that Stalin was guilty of the crimes that Khrushchev and his men had alleged against him. But the Shvernik Commission was unable to find any such evidence. In fact, they found some evidence to the contrary – for example, evidence that Marshal Tukhachevsky had been conspiring with the Japanese general staff! The reports of this commission were not published until 1994-95, after the end of the USSR.
Here is an interesting fact. Twenty years ago Yale University Press announced that it would be publishing a translation of the “Shvernik Commission” reports in its “Annals of Communism” series. But this book was never published. Why?
I wrote to Yale University Press and asked them. They never answered me. But I can guess why. Yale did not publish this book because the Shvernik Commission failed to find any evidence – not slanderous claims and unsupported assertions, but evidence – against Stalin.
Yet Khrushchev and his researchers had access to all the documents, all the records of all the prosecutions and trials. And they could not find actual evidence of a single crime of Stalin. So why would Yale publish such a book?
During 1962-1964, Khrushchev’s last years in power, a great many books and articles were published charging Stalin with yet more crimes, and many more persons were “rehabilitated.” Rehabilitations and attacks on Stalin generally almost ceased during the period after Khrushchev was ousted from his position at the Central Committee meeting of October 1964.
A few books that were intended for publication as part of Khrushchev’s attacks against Stalin were completed too late and were not published. One such book is Let History Judge by Roi Medvedev. It was smuggled to the West and published in many languages by major publishers. It too is full of lies and contains no primary-source evidence for the charges against Stalin that are made in it. In short, it’s worthless for those interested in the truth. But it has proven very valuable to anticommunists, to dishonest and/or incompetent pseudo-scholars, and to Trotskyites, all of whom continue to cite it even today, 60 years later.
In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as First Secretary of the CPSU. Gorbachev and Yakovlev immediately resumed attacks against Stalin on a level that surpassed even Khrushchev’s campaign of lies and slander.
Today we have access to an enormous amount of evidentiary material from former Soviet archives. A careful study of these materials reveals that the Khrushchev-era and Gorbachev / Yakovlev-era charges of “crimes” against Stalin are all false -- every one of them! And this means that virtually all of the mainstream, academic history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period, as well as all the books and articles by Trotskyites, Social-Democrats, anarchists, and other anticommunists, are based on falsehoods – in plain language, on lies.
Here are a few examples of charges against Stalin that my colleagues and I have proven false:
* Stalin did not have Soviet Jewish theater director Solomon Mikhoels murdered in January 1948. This is a lie, supported by crude forgeries. My co-author Vladimir L. Bobrov of Moscow and I demonstrate this in our book Stalin Exonerated. Fact-Checking the Death of Solomon Mikhoels.
* Marshal Tukhachevsky and the high-ranking military commanders tried, convicted, and executed in June 1937, were all guilty. There is a huge amount of evidence against them. In addition, the complete transcript of their trial was published online in 2018. Our book, Trotsky and the Military Conspiracy, discusses the evidence and contains the only complete translation of this trial transcript in any language.
* The military conspirators were in league with the Right and Trotskyite oppositionists, including Aleksei Rykov, Nikolai Bukharin, and others less well known. They were directly conspiring with Leon Trotsky too.
* Lenin did not write the articles dated December 1922 to March 1923 -- falsely called “the Testament of Lenin” -- that criticize Stalin and praise Trotsky. These articles have been used to discredit Stalin by Trotsky, then by Khrushchev in the “Secret Speech.” This was discovered by Russian historian Valentin Sakharov, who in the 1990s gained partial access to the original documents in the Lenin archive. His 700-page book in Russian, Lenin’s ‘Political Testament’, is the basis for my book The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin’.
* A study of the primary sources shows that the Soviet Union did not shoot the Polish prisoners in the events called the “Katyn massacre.” For the evidence, see my book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre. The Evidence, the Solution. The documents produced by Gorbachev that supposedly establish Soviet guilt are forgeries, some of them originating from Khrushchev’s time.
* The so-called “Great Terror” of 1937-1938 – more accurately known in Russia as the “Yezhovshchina”, or “bad time of Yezhov” – involved the murder of a great many innocent persons by Nikolai Yezhov, the head (“commissar”) of the NKVD. This is what the evidence shows, as I point out in my book Yezhov vs Stalin. The Truth About Mass Repressions and the So-Called ‘Great Terror’ in the USSR. The term “Great Terror” was invented by anticommunist propagandist and British intelligence agent Robert Conquest, whose massive book contains no evidence at all to support his contention that it was Stalin who ordered these killings.
Yezhov deceived Stalin and the Politburo, who assumed that the NKVD was battling real rebellions. When Stalin and the others discovered that Yezhov had been murdering innocent people, Yezhov was arrested, along with many of his henchmen. Most of them, including Yezhov himself, were tried, convicted, and executed in January and February, 1940.
* The famine of 1932-33 was not created by the collectivization of agriculture. Much less was it deliberately created by Stalin to “punish Ukraine,” as Ukrainian nationalists and many others continue to claim. The whole notion of a “Holodomor”, or “man-made famine,” is a fraud. There has never been any evidence of it.
The famine had natural causes: flooding in some areas, drought in others, plant diseases such as rust and smut, and infestations of insects and mice. Once the Soviet leadership discovered the extent of the famine, the Soviet government gave extensive aid to the parts of the country affected. This enabled a weakened peasantry, whose numbers were shrunken by deaths and illness from starvation, to bring in a good harvest in 1933 and put an end to the famine.
The famine was not confined to the Ukrainian SSR, as Ukrainian nationalists falsely claim. It affected areas of Russia and especially Kazakhstan. The best research on this and on Soviet agriculture generally is by Mark Tauger of West Virginia University. I have summarized Tauger’s research in two chapters of my book Blood Lies and in the first chapter of my book Stalin Waiting for ... the Truth.
* Leon Trotsky really did have a serious conspiracy within the Comintern. This conspiracy included Osip Pyatnitsky, the former leader of the Comintern, Hungarian communist leader Bela Kun, the prominent German communist Hans Neumann, and many others. We have studied and translated the evidence in our book Trotsky’s Comintern Conspiracy.
* All the charges leveled against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials are supported by strong evidence. Trotsky did indeed collaborate with the German Gestapo, the German military, and the Japanese militarists, against the Soviet Union. The evidence cannot have been faked. There is too much of it, from too many different sources.
My latest book is on Khristian Rakovsky, one of Trotsky’s closest friends and political allies. Rakovsky was indeed Trotsky’s agent to Japan and a Japanese spy.
* Trotsky lied to the “Dewey Commission” in April, 1937. The commission held hearings and declared that Trotsky had been framed by the first two Moscow Trials, though it had no evidence to support this conclusion. What’s more, Trotsky lied shamelessly to the Dewey Commission. We can prove this from documents in the Harvard Trotsky Archive, opened to researchers in January 1980. See my short book The Fraud of the Dewey Commission.
I have now published six books about Trotsky and his lies and falsifications. Trotsky lied to an extent scarcely believable – until we remember that Trotsky was involved in a network of conspiracies against Stalin and the Soviet Union, and that lying is an essential tactic in any conspiracy. Today’s Trotskyites, like Trotskyites in the past, ignore the evidence we now possess, and cling to the falsehoods about Stalin, because these falsehoods sustain the Trotsky cult.
Khrushchev had to know that the charges he and his men leveled against Stalin were false. Likewise, many of the Party leaders who heard Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” must have known that at least some of what Khrushchev said was false. They remained silent. But a younger generation believed him. Yakovlev clearly believed the Khrushchev-era lies. So did Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev wrote:
“ ... the idea was, in fact, to break the back of that totalitarian monster ... that party-state structure that sought to subjugate and absorb the whole of society, every person.”
Gorbachev and his henchmen knew that their so-called “reforms” would cause great hardship to the Soviet people. They didn’t care. In 1990 Gorbachev wrote in Pravda:
“... I am inspired that the current generations, learning from the past and correctly assessing the realities of the present, have found the strength to take responsibility for a fundamentally new socio-historical solution, despite the incredible political, economic, and psychological difficulties that await us along this path. Everything is still ahead, including the main difficulties.”
Vitaly Ivanovich Vorotnikov was a high Party official, eventually Chairman of the Council of Ministers, then Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. Concerning Gorbachev’s actions Vorotnikov wrote as follows:
“The main hero of perestroika, M.S. Gorbachev, in his interviews since mid-1992, brazenly and shamelessly declared that he had planned the entire “democratic revolution” [so-called – GF] from the very beginning, but had concealed it ... Otherwise, he declares, “if I had then proclaimed the final goal, I would inevitably have been overthrown.” To what monstrous cynicism in relation to one's country and one's people must one reach in order to make such statements?”
Filip Denisovich Bobkov was a Soviet general and high KGB official. Bobkov wrote:
“Was Gorbachev so naive that he did not understand what kind of upheaval was taking place in the life of the country? No ... From the very beginning of perestroika, everything was done thoughtfully and unhurriedly. Our leaders understood well: if they had immediately declared their ultimate goal -- to replace the socialist system and dissolve the Communist Party -- it is not difficult to imagine what kind of public indignation this would have caused.”
Anatolii Sergeevich Chernyaev, a historian and one of Gorbachev’s top aides, supported Gorbachev’s policies. Yet he recognized how devastating they would be. In his published diary, under the date of November 15, 1990, Chernyaev wrote the following:
“... You can't force people to look for excuses for it, because even after the terrible catastrophe -- Stalin's collectivization -- after 5-6 years (and this is exactly the time equal to perestroika) “life became better, life became more joyous” (Stalin). I remember this myself. I saw it with my own eyes. And people ask: why hasn't this happened now, with 100 times more resources ... It is correct to say that it is impossible to destroy the previous system without chaos. But people do not want to pay for 70 years of criminal policy. And they will never understand why, in order to become a civilized country at the end of the 21st century, we have to go through hunger, collapse, debauchery, crime and other such delights.”
Chernyaev was wrong about collectivization. He says that collectivization was “a catastrophe.” Yet in the next sentence he admits that it had somehow led to a higher standard of living. So where’s the “catastrophe”? Professor Tauger has demonstrated that collectivization was essential. In fact, collectivization put an end to the series of famines that had devastated Russia for centuries.
Please notice too that Chernyaev predicted that “hunger, collapse, debauchery, crime,” etc., would last a hundred years! Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and their henchmen consciously condemned their children, their grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren to “hunger, collapse, debauchery, and crime!”
Gorbachev and Yakovlev knew that their so-called “reforms” meant turning the Soviet Union to capitalism and privatizing the collectively-created wealth of the USSR, virtually giving it to influential persons. They knew this would cause terrible hardship for the Soviet working class. Yet they did it!
But why did they do it? They believed Khrushchev’s lies about the Stalin period. We know they believed them because they said they believed them and they acted upon that belief. The lies about Stalin were deployed to justify returning to exploitative capitalism and rejecting the international communist movement, in Yakovlev’s words, as “a phenomenon of the same order with German Nazism, Italian fascism, Spanish Francoism, or Pol-Potism.”
How did people who thought that the international communist movement was “a criminal enterprise” no better than fascism become the leadership of the party of Lenin and Stalin? Part of the answer to this question is that they believed Khrushchev. Khrushchev was the Party leader. He had been in the Politburo since 1938. Probably – and this we don’t know for sure because no one has ever researched it – Khrushchev had taken the trouble to build alliances with the Party First Secretaries, who really ran the Soviet Union from their own areas and who were the single most powerful bloc in the Party.
But then, why did these people believe Khrushchev’s lies? Personal careerism must have played a role. In addition they were accustomed to believing the Party leadership and following the policies that the leadership set. They had done so under Stalin and continued to do so under Khrushchev.
They must also have sympathized with Khrushchev’s political line nationally and internationally, policies that turned sharply away from the policies supported by Stalin. Probably the best known were: the abandonment of violent revolution against capitalism as the only road to socialist revolution; the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with capitalist countries, leading to what came to be called “Eurocommunism” – the rejection of the working class as the essential agent of revolutionary change and the embrace of electoral politics. This led in turn to the need to ally with other classes rather than winning these other classes to unite with the working class.
These and other differences, as they were understood at the time by the leadership of the Communist Party of China, are outlined in the documents of the “Sino-Soviet Dispute.” All of them are available online in English at the “Marx to Mao” web site.
The leaders of the Communist Party of China began to recognize how Khrushchev was betraying the international communist movement. But they did not know that Khrushchev was lying about Stalin. They did not have the evidence from Soviet archives that we have today. If the CCP leadership had known that Khrushchev was lying about Stalin, the history of socialist China might have developed differently.
* * * * *
The Soviet Union came to an end not because of economic problems, not because it could not withstand military competition with the United States, and certainly not because the population of the Soviet Union wanted it to end. It was destroyed from within. The Gorbachev leadership was convinced that the goal of Lenin and Stalin, of socialism developing with time into communism, were morally wrong. They believed that on the basis of lies about Joseph Stalin and the “Stalin period.”
The late Russian historian Aleksandr Ostrovsky put it this way:
In his memoirs, A.N. Yakovlev takes offense at the statements of George Bush and some other American politicians that the USA won the Cold War against the USSR. What caused the former Soviet leader's disagreement? It turns out that it was not the Americans who defeated [the Soviet Union] but it was the Soviet leaders who themselves surrendered their country. They surrendered it, and hoped that doing that would get them the credit [with American leaders].
They were just like the capitalists of the world, who also believe that getting rid of exploitation is “wrong.” And it is wrong – for them.
Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and what Yakovlev called “an ultra-narrow circle of our closest friends and like-minded people” and “a group of real, not imaginary, reformers” developed a plan to attack Stalin. They carried out this plan by publishing thousands of articles and books filled with falsehoods about Stalin and the Stalin era of Soviet history. And the Stalin era is the heroic period of Soviet history and of the history of the world communist movement, the era of its greatest, world-shaking achievements.
They did this in order to justify converting Soviet socialism into overt, predatory capitalism by turning the wealth collectively produced by the labor of the Soviet people into private property, creating dozens of billionaires and millionaires and leading to decades of impoverishment, unemployment, and declining life expectancy for Soviet workers.
This has been called the greatest expropriation in the history of the world. The term, “the greatest theft in history”, has been used to describe the “privatization” of the collectively-created and, formerly, collectively-owned, state property of the USSR.
Not the USA or NATO but the leadership of the Communist Party destroyed the Soviet Union and socialism.
* * * * *
What do we need to learn from this history of betrayal?
* We should reject all allegations of crimes against Joseph Stalin, no matter how authoritative the source appears to be, unless they are supported by primary-source evidence.
Khrushchev and his men, then Gorbachev, Yakovlev, and their men, were able to convince millions of people of non-existent “crimes of Stalin” simply by repetition. They had no evidence of any such crimes.
I have been studying the documents from former Soviet archives for decades. I have not yet found evidence of a single crime by Joseph Stalin. I think this is amazing! It is a tribute to the moral and ethical superiority of the communist movement.
I can assure you that I am not a “Stalinist” – whatever that is. I am continuing to examine all the allegations of crimes against Stalin that I can find. If and when I find evidence that Stalin did in fact commit some crime, I promise you that I will publish it.
There is a lot we don’t know.
* How did Khrushchev change from being in his youth – let us assume – an honest Bolshevik of the Lenin-Stalin type to someone who would lie and falsify on such an enormous scale about Stalin and Soviet history? What was the process inside the Soviet Union that changed him?
* How did vicious anticommunists such as Gorbachev and Yakovlev rise to the leadership of the CPSU?
* How can communist parties prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future?
These are serious, vital questions. I leave you to ponder them. Thank you for your time and attention.
You can watch the video of the discussion here: https://youtu.be/RrvgOH0pGfc
