Roza Shanina- The Soviet Army's sniper who became the nightmare of the Nazis

Roza Shanina, In Memoriam.

Ро́за Гео́ргиевна Ша́нина

1924 - 1945.

It was January 28, 1945 when the heroic senior sergeant of the Soviet Red Army, Roza Shanina, died after being seriously wounded in combat. She was 20 years old and already a legendary fighter of the Soviet Army against the Nazis. 

Roza Georgiyevna Shanina was born in the village of Yedma, Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia to logger Georgiy Mikhailovich Shanin and milkmaid Anna Alexeyevna Shanina. After completing elementary school in Yedma, she studied at a middle school at the nearby village of Bereznik. 

In 1938, she walked 200 kilometers (120 miles) to the city of Arkhangelsk, Russia to continue her education. In the same year, she joined All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (Komsomol). In 1941, after the Soviet Union introduced tuition fees for college courses, she took on a job at a kindergarten in Arkhangelsk to help her own finances. 

When Donald Trump Falsifies History

A response to U.S. President Trump's blatant falsification of historical events.

By Nikos Mottas.

Donald Trump seems to have his own version of history. A version that falsifies completely the real historical events. The tycoon- turned President of the USA- decided to demonstrate his ignorance (or, perhaps, ability to distort history) during a Republican Party's rally in Pensacola, Florida on December 8th. 

What did Trump say? Among others, the U.S. President said the following: “We are the nation that dug out the Panama Canal, won two world wars, put a man on the moon and brought communism to its knees".

European Communist Parties honored the Great Antifascist Peoples Victory in Berlin - Speech by the KKE Politburo Member Giorgos Marinos

An important internationalist event was organized by the European Communist Initiative in Berlin on Sunday 7/5, with as its theme: «May 9, 72 years after the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples: we are inspired and continue the struggle against the distortion of history by the EU-capital. For the overthrow of the rotten capitalist system that creates crises, wars, fascism.”

The event was supported by the Party Organization of the KKE in Germany and Party Organization of the CP of Turkey in Germany. The programme of the event included interventions from the representatives of the CPs that participate in the “Initiative” and a concert with songs of the Red Army and other revolutionary songs.

Joseph V. Stalin- Address to the people on May 9th 1945 (Victory Speech)

Speech by the Marshal of the Soviet Union 

Joseph V. Stalin.

May 9, 1945.

Comrades! Fellow countrymen and countrywomen! 

The great day of victory over Germany has arrived. Fascist Germany, forced to her knees by the Red Army and the troops of our Allies, has admitted defeat and has announced her unconditional surrender. 

Internationalist event on May 7 in Berlin: 72 years after the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples

An important internationalist event is being organized by the European Communist Initiative in Berlin on Sunday 7/5, with as its theme:

«May 9, 72 years after the Great Antifascist Victory of the Peoples: We are inspired and continue the struggle against the distortion of history by the EU-capital. For the overthrow of the system that creates crises, wars, fascism.”

The event is supported by the Party Organization of the KKE in Germany and Party Organization of the CP of Turkey in Germany. The programme of the event will include interventions from the representatives of the CPs that participate in the “Initiative” and a concert with songs of the Red Army and other revolutionary songs.

Greece: Communist mayor slams SYRIZA government, boycotts Tsipras' fiesta

KKE-backed mayor of Kesariani,
Ilias Stamelos.

ATHENS- In a symbolic gesture which carries a great message, the communist (KKE-backed) mayor of Kesariani, Ilias Stamelos, officially denied to participate in a governmental fiesta for the 75th anniversary of the country's most significant WW2 resistance movement, EAM (National Liberation Front). The government, along with the state television, ERT, are organising an event at the Kesariani Shooting Range (Skopeftirio)* on Sunday 2 October. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is scheduled to attend the event. 

In a letter addressed to the SYRIZA-ANEL government, mayor Stamelos points out the the city council's decision to deny any participation in October 2nd governmental event. Ilias Stamelos mentions that the heroic legacy of Kesariani's Shooting Range is in contrast with the governmental policy which attacks the rights of the working people. In his letter, among other things, the communist mayor writes:

"The policy exercised by the government is in total dissociation with the struggles and the claims of Kesariani's people and is directed against the Greek people in general. The SYRIZA-ANEL government has unleashed an attack against the rights and achievements of the people. It votes and applies memorandums of austerity, thus implementing a policy which crashes the people with taxes and reductions in wages and pensions, while on the same time it offers exemptions to the big capital". [...]

Hiroshima - Nagasaki 1945: The real reasons behind the 20th century's most horrific war crime

"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us [...] We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force--to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes".

The above words are the words of an imperialist war criminal. It was August 9, 1945 when U.S. President Harry Truman was delivering a radio address to the American people. Three days ago, the bomber Enola Gay had dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb in Hiroshima and another bomb was spreading death and destruction in Nagasaki. Truman actually lied to the American people. The reason behind the use of the atomic bomb wasn't to end WW2 or save lives. It was a warning against the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of the "Cold War". 

The Truth about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Imperialist Propaganda

By Nikos Mottas.

"If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible...”

- Harry Truman, 1941.

Since the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois historiography has tried to distort various incidents in order to vilify Socialism and the USSR. One of these incidents- which has been a "banner" of imperialism's apologists and other anticommunists- is the so-called “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”* which was signed in 1939. In it's unscientific, unhistorical effort to equate Communism with Nazism, the bourgeois propaganda presents the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a medium of expansive policy by the USSR and Hitler's Germany. The distortion of historical events, the amalgamation of lies and the half-truths by the Imperialists and their collaborators aim in defaming the huge role of the Soviet Union in the anti-fascist struggle of WW2.

However, the reality is different than the one presented by the bourgeois historiography. Here, we will examine the circumstances and the events which led to the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, in an effort to debunk the anti-communist propaganda on this matter.

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part II). Continue from Part I.

Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

Objectivity And Persuasion.

Political prejudice still predominates in the study of Soviet history. Conclusions that contradict the dominant paradigm are routinely dismissed as the result of bias or incompetence. Conclusions that cast doubt upon accusations against Stalin or whose implications tend to make him look either “good” or even less “evil” than the predominant paradigm holds him to have been, are called “Stalinist.” Any objective study of the evidence now available is bound to be called “Stalinist” simply because it reaches conclusions that are politically unacceptable to those who have a strong political bias, be it anticommunist generally or Trotskyist specifically. The aim of the present study is to examine the allegations made in the USSR during the 1930s that Leon Trotsky collaborated with Germany and Japan against the USSR in the light of the evidence now available. 

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan (Part I)

Grover Furr- Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan.

Source: Cultural Logic, 2009.

“If an objective research project on the events of those years were to be done, free of ideological dogmas, then a great deal could change in our attitude towards those years and towards the personalities of that epoch. And so it would be a “bomb” that would cause some problems. . . .”

Col. Viktor Alksnis, 2000.

“. . . it is essential for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of these fictions is verifiable fact. Whether the Nazi gas ovens existed or not can be established by evidence. Because it has been so established, those who deny their existence are not writing history, whatever their narrative techniques.” – Eric Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 57.

“. . . we can demolish a myth only insofar as it rests on propositions which can be shown to be mistaken.” – ibid., p. 60.

Honoring Greek guerrilla leader and communist revolutionary Aris Velouchiotis

Today is the 71st anniversary of the death of the First Captain of the People's Army (ELAS) Aris Velouchiotis (1905-1945). Velouchiotis was a partisan, member of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and guerrilla leader during the Axis occupation in WW2. 

Aris, who was born in Lamia, central Greece in 1905, was a cadre of the Communist Party of Greece and at the decision of the party he undertook the formation of the People’s Army (ELAS) during the fascist occupation, the armed wing of the National Liberation Front (EAM).

Aris opposed the Varkiza Agreement, which disarmed ELAS, and returned to the mountains. In June 1945, his small armed group was surrounded in Mesounda (Arta) and killed by the bourgeois army, which desecrated their corpses, cutting off the heads of Aris and his comrades, which were hung in the central square in the town of Trikala. The then leadership of the party disowned him. 

However, after 1957, the KKE in essence gradually rehabilitated him, something that was confirmed by the decision to politically rehabilitate him during the discussion on the 2nd Volume of the History of the Party, 1949-1968, at the Nationwide Conference in 2011. On 9 October 2011, an event was held by the CC of the KKE for the presentation of the Decision of the Nationwide Conference concerning the official political rehabilitation of the first captain of ELAS, Aris Velouchiotis. A large delegation of the CC of the KKE headed by the then GS of the CC, Aleka Papariga, was present. Speaking at the rally, Telemachus Dimoulas, member of the PB of the CC of the KKE, made extensive reference to the essay on the history of the KKE approved by the National Conference of the KKE and the special decision concerning Aris Velouchiotis. "In the consciousness of the people, Aris Velouchiotis is identified with the heroic history of the KKE, the struggle for the overthrow of imperialist barbarity”. 

'Captain-Yiotis' remembered: Charilaos Florakis, 1914-2005

Nikos Mottas writes about the legendary Greek Communist leader, partisan-fighter in WW2 and Greece's Civil War, long-time (1972-1991) General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece, CHARILAOS FLORAKIS.

By Nikos Mottas.

It was the 22^nd of May 2005 when the tireless communist, the militant guerrilla captain, the popular leader, comrade Charilaos Florakis passed away. At 91 years of age, he was completing a life full of struggles; a life given to the ideals of a better world, for the perspective of Socialism and Communism. His life was given to KKE, to the Party he loved and gave everything.

The life and activity of Charilaos Florakis has been core part of KKE's history, of the most glorious- but also difficult- peoples struggles in Greece during WW2 occupation, during the Civil War as well as the country's modern history. Comrade Florakis, with his firm faith in the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, was never absent from Greek working class struggles.

Charilaos Florakis' political activity began in the pre-war decade of 1930s, as a member of the Communist Party's youth wing (OKNE) and later as a student and vigorous worker at the so-called “TTT” (Posts, Telegraphs, Telephone Offices). At an early age, as a teenager, he understood the signs of the ongoing class-struggle in the Greek countryside of '30s:

European Communist Initiative: Announcement on the 9th of May - The day of the antifascist victory of the peoples

Source: Initiative of Communist & Workers' Parties.

Long live the antifascist victory of the peoples!

The Great Patriotic war of the Soviet people against the Nazi Germany, which was promoted as being invincible at the time, and its allies in Europe ended with the crushing and unconditional surrender of fascism. The 9th of May is the day that signals the end of the 2nd World War in Europe. The Red Army, by raising the red flag with the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag, completed a great people’s victory against fascism.

Fascism was created and supported by the capitalist system itself as a naked and reactionary form of bourgeois management for the protection of capitalist exploitation. The main factor of the fighting capacity and endurance of the Soviet Union was its socialist character, the planned economy, the fact that the people held power in their own hands.

Armed national liberation movements emerged at the side of the USSR in many European countries, movements which acted under the leadership of the communist and workers parties. The communist and workers parties themselves paid a high price in blood in order to crush fascism.

9th of May: Honoring People's Antifascist Victory!

Спасибо! (Thank you) - Veterans of the Red Army.

By Nikos Mottas.

9^th May 1945: The day when the Red flag with sickle and hammer was raised thriumphantly over the Reichstag in Berlin. The day when Nazi Germany surrended unconditionally to the Red Army, marking a great victory of humanity over fascism. The 9^th May is, without doubt, one of the brightest dates in human history, a glorious day for the first Socialist state, for the Soviet Union and it's people.

On this day, we pay tribute to all those heroes, men and women, who gave their own lives on the battlefields. We remember all those heroes who fought against the monster of Fascism. From the bottom of our heart we express our gratitude to the fighters of the Soviet Army, to the communist and anti-fascist partisans in Europe who led the liberation struggles against the Nazis. We remember and honor all those men and women, of every age, who maintained a heroic stance against the firing squads of the fascists.