#bukharin

Kaganovich: "Iosif Vissarionovich was a very prudent man. Very. A man who saw very far. Today we should ask ourselves: could we really have fought fascism if we had remained a non-industrialized, non-collectivized country? Could it have, our archaic agricultural village, feed the army and the cities? Who would have the courage to answer yes to this question? We should ask ourselves: why did Tsarism die? Because it had nothing to feed the army with. It had no clothes to dress it. It was a naked, barefoot, and hungry army, that of the Tsar, and it had nothing to shoot. We, on the other hand, in the fight against Nazism, after the retreats we began to increase, increase, increase our military power, and we sent tens of thousands of artillery pieces to the front. When we attacked Berlin, it was an attack never seen before in intensity and power. Where did we get all those tanks and planes? Without Stalin's policy we would never have gotten anywhere, we would all have died. What would have become of the USSR, if we had not made in ten years the progress that normally takes fifty or sixty years? Fascism does not wait, it would not have waited. Our country would have been destroyed. And all these shitty patriots today don't want to understand it, just as many communists don't understand it anymore. We should have taken Bukharin's path, they say, Kondriatev's path... Well, what would have happened if we had followed their path? We would have been crushed, I am deeply convinced of that. We would have been crushed for five hundred years, it would have been much worse than the Tartar yoke. That's what Russia would have ended up like. We gained two years with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, two years, from '39 to '41, crucial for the development of industry, for the strengthening of transport. But now it's easier to blame Stalin and his era for everything."

Q: Have you never had second thoughts about the arrests of that era, about the violence and the victims of the campaign to collectivize the countryside?

Kaganovich: first point to remember is that collectivization was the continuation of a Leninist line. Were there excesses? Yes. But where and when aren't there? There always are. When you fight a war, it is difficult to know in advance how many bullets you will fire. The enemy occupies one of our cities, we must retake it. But inside the city there are our people, innocents who could be killed in the attack. The army will still shout: to the assault, because that is how it must be, in all types of war. Yes, the result is that even the innocent suffer. There were innocent victims in the collectivization of the land. But there were also rich, influential peasants, linked to the church, who disturbed, obstructed. What was to be done? And in industry there was sabotage. Today many historians deny it, but it was true. Sabotage existed, and, I will say more, it still exists today. Perhaps I have the mentality of an old, overly suspicious fighter: but what are the unshipped goods, the extortion, the development of this mafia that is so much talked about, and of the black market, what are they if not a colossal sabotage against socialism? We should intervene harshly, and explain to the people what is happening, why they are made to suffer in this way. We should open a great debate."

Lazar Kaganovich's response to criticism of Stalin's domestic industrial and agricultural policy in preparation for the Nazi invasion of the USSR

Excellent speech clarifying the problems the CPSU(B) avoided by opposing the Trotskyite "left" and Bukharinite right opposition + the start of the USSR's post-NEP pivot