Soviet Racism

~ Clarissa

I want to kiss (in an entirely friendly, non-creepy way) the blogger who wrote the following:

People like Francine Hirsch have argued that we should seek to understand what the Soviet government “thought” it was doing within its own officially stated ideological conceptions and terms and not what the objective results of its actions were as measured against later scholarly and legal understandings of the concept of racial discrimination (Hirsch, pp. 40-41). Of course nobody makes such excuses for Nazi Germany or South Africa under apartheid. It is only the USSR that is still blessed with such stalwart defenders in the western academy against the charges of racism.

And also this:

Even today a lot of people don’t think Stalin’s murder of 15 million people was nearly as bad as Hitler’s killing of 5 million Jews. Minimizers of Stalin’s crimes still hold quite a bit of influence in US academia. Nobody would wear a shirt with a Swastika on it around London. But, I see lots of sickle and hammer shirts. This ability to maintain a positive PR spin decades after his death is an accomplishment of evil by Stalin that Hitler could never have dreamed of accomplishing.

This is the greatest tragedy of the Soviet people: they suffered and died for nothing. An over-fed Canadian academic recently published a long article telling the world that Stalinism was not that bad and we have all been duped into thinking it was by Solzhenitsyn’s lies. (I’m not linking to this loser because I don’t want to give him traffic.) And he is only one of many.

 

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Published by Clarissa

9 thoughts on “Soviet Racism”

  2. The USSR was racist in that it retained the concept of “nationality”, and recorded people’s “nationality” in official documents, and treated people of different “nationalities” differently. That was very similar to apartheid in South Africa.

    But I think that there is a difference between the symbolism of the swastika and that of the hammer and sickle. The swastika was uniquely a symbol of Hitler and his Nazi ideology. The hammer and sickle was never uniquely a symbol of Stalin and Stalinism; it stood for a view of “workers of the world unite”, an ideal that many would say that Stalin and Stalinism betrayed. .

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    1. The hammer and sickle only dates back to 1917, when it became popular with the Red Army . It’s reasonable to assume it was Bolshevist in it’s origin, but if it wasn’t, it existed for an incredibly short time before being adopted by Lenin, and most likely always represented ideals very similar to Leninism. Now, Stalin and Lenin had their differences, but the thing people most commonly cite as Stalin’s “evil” (his use of terror, forced labour and death as a means to a political end) was also a favourite of Lenin, and a mainstay of Bolshevism from the start. So if you’re making the claim that the hammer and sickle once represented something other than terror, that doesn’t really stand up to the evidence. I think it’s unlikely it ever represented the interests of poor and working people, only the political goals of the middle-class bureaucrats-turned-ideologues who claimed to represent them.

      I think that even barely matters in the face of the fact this symbol was used by regime that tortured, killed, and oppressed millions of people. If you showed a victim of Stalin’s purges the hammer and sickle, they’d respond to it the same way a Holocaust victim would to a swastika. For the most part, that’s all you need to know about it.

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      1. Actually originally the Soviets used the symbol of the hammer and plow as their official symbol particularly for the Red Army. The hammer and sickle only officially replaced it in 1922. The USSR was formed in Dec. 1922 from a union of the RSFSR (Rossiia), the ZSFSR (Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), Ukraine, and Belorus,

        The swastika is an ancient symbol that frequently occurs in Buddhist iconography to represent Buddha’s heart. In the 1920s the USSR used the swastika on awards to Buddhist nationalities like the Kalmyks and Buriats. The swastika is everywhere in East and South East Asia. For instance instead of a Red Cross or Red Crescent society some Asian countries have or did have (Mainland China) Red Swastika Societies.It also appears in Navajo iconography. Which is why it was the emblem of the US 45th Infantry Division up until the 1930s.

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    3. The first paragraph is my argument. But, it is militantly rejected by all but about six people with both PhDs and US passports. Russian, German, French and other scholars are considerably less wedded to the idea that there was absolutely no racial component what so ever in the deportation of whole peoples by Stalin during World War II.

      The second paragraph is strange because as pointed out below the swastika is thousands of years old and was used almost universally before the 1930s. After WWII it disappears from the US and most of Europe. But, it is still very common in Asia. Just as the cross was once a symbol of Roman torture and became later rehabilitated it is likely that in a couple of centuries that the swastika will also be rehabilitated as symbol in Europe and North America. As for the latter I don’t think it ever ceased completely being used by the Navajo.

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      1. “But, it is militantly rejected by all but about six people with both PhDs and US passports. ”

        – I have no idea how anybody can call themselves an historian and deny that these deportations were racially motivated. This wasn’t the only reason for them, of course, but it is a very important one.

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        1. Very good article. The point about the need to use oral sources in researching the history of the USSR is very well-taken. I agree completely that it is ridiculous to use this extremely limited vision of race when analyzing the Soviet Union.

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