Name: 不為人知的歷史斯大林、蘇聯和二戰： (Untold History: Stalin, the Soviet Union and WWII)
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Duration: 16 min 7 s
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Welcome back to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And we're continuing

our series of interviews with Peter Kuznick. He's the co-author of the book and the film

The Untold History of the United States. Thanks for joining us again.

So we'll just pick up the discussion. One of the things the series does which is pretty

courageous, really, is deal with the role of the Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War,

and then particularly in World War II, and really unpack and defy the basic Cold War

narrative. And so talk a little bit about that history, and also a little about your

discussions about how to deal with it, 'cause, I mean, in some ways politically it's the

most sensitive stuff in the series. You know, to talk about Wallace is--people are okay

with that. But your version of the Soviet Union is--.

PETER KUZNICK: They're not so okay with the Wallace. They think that we're--because in

1948, when Wallace runs for president again, the Communist Party is very much involved

in that campaign. So we do get a lot of negative reaction from the right-wingers on the Wallace

story. They're very sensitive to that one.

But you're right to say that the main attacks we're getting from the right are about our

treatment of the Soviet Union, because they want to portray the Soviet Union as the equivalent

of the Nazis, and Hitler and Stalin are equally bad.

JAY: Yeah, I was--I said in my opening introduction, in every school in North America--I mean,

I grew up in Canada, and it was no different--the chapter in the history book is communism,

fascism, two forms of totalitarianism, and the whole history is that they are simply

KUZNICK: Yeah. And there's some--not truth to that, but there is obviously a lot of truth

to the critique of Stalinism and the ways in which Stalin hijacks and subverts the Russian

Revolution, and from a left perspective, undermines the Russian Revolution. We on the left in

the United States in the 20th century had that albatross around our necks for much of

the 20th century, and people felt for some understandable reason that they had to defend

certain features of the Soviet Union. And under Stalin there's not very much that is

defensible of what's going on inside the Soviet Union--the massacres that took place, the

millions and millions of victims of Stalinism. And the repression is real. And the left in

the United States didn't know that in the 1930s. We didn't learn that till much later.

So we're actually quite critical of Stalin, but we also understand the important role

that the Soviet Union represents, the idea of the Soviet Union representing something

as a socialist society in which there is socialized medicine and education and tremendous advances

in the sciences in the 1930s. I mean, there are certain things that are positive about

Soviet Society that you can recognize without saying that Stalin was a good guy.

JAY: And, one way or the other, had pretty massive popular support, Stalin. You don't

rally a country to make the kind of sacrifices the Soviet people made.

KUZNICK: But there's still a lot of nostalgia for Stalin inside of Russia.

JAY: Still, even now, yeah. I mean, dictators can be popular too, so--.

KUZNICK: Yeah. Yeah. And he was as brutal a dictator as is imaginable in certain ways

during this time. That doesn't mean that everything that the Soviet Union did was bad. The Soviet

Union was often on the right side of history on these things. The Soviet Union in the Spanish

Civil War was the main support for the republican causes.

JAY: But the main problem in terms of the American historical narrative is he wasn't

JAY: Like, it's not like historically the United States has problems with brutal dictators.

KUZNICK: Yes, and he was never ours. And he represented something that was very threatening

to the people who liked our brutal dictators. He was--he believed that the world could be

organized on principles very different than capitalist principles. And even though his

works, like, philosophical material, whatever his big book in '36 was on Marxism, it's really

pretty lousy Marxism. He was very crude and mechanistic, and his understanding was, I

say, very shallow. But he still represented something that American capitalists hated.

And these same capitalists who didn't hate fascism, because fascism was a form of capitalism,

hated the Soviet communism because that was a threat to American capitalism and it said

the world could be organized in a different way and that way could work.

And it did work in a lot of ways in the 1930s. And you have the tremendous economic boom.

And there was a lot of literature in the United States in the early '30s when the American

was hitting the nadir of its depression, in late 1932, that the only country that was

immune to depression was the Soviet Union. And that was not just in liberal papers and

publications like The Nation and The New Republic; that was in The Christian Science Monitor,

it was in Businessweek, it was in Barron's. It was in very conservative places [crosstalk]

JAY: And also something interesting--and it's too complicated to unpack all this right now,

'cause it's not the history of the Soviet Union, but one of the facts that comes out

in your series, which--I didn't know the scale of it--was the extent of the millions of people

JAY: --east to get out of the way of the German army, and the complete rebuilding--

JAY: --of Soviet economy. Yeah. Tell a bit about that story.

KUZNICK: Well, it's, again, a remarkable mobilization of Soviet resources. The Soviets were fighting

Germany. In fact, that's part of the story about World War II that Americans don't know

but need to know, that we always think that it was the United States who won the war in

Europe and that the bomb ended the war in the Pacific, two very, very big misconceptions

Throughout most of World War II, the United States and the British were fighting ten German

divisions combined. The Soviets were fighting 200. The United States lost about 300,000

people in combat, 400,000 overall in World War II, which was terrible, but the Russians

lost 27 million people in World War II. There's good reason why Churchill says it was the

Russians who tore the guts out of the German army. And Roosevelt recognized that, and Americans

at the time recognized it, which is partly why the Soviets were considered--viewed so

positively by the United States and by American people during World War II. It's part of the

reason why there was a possibility for post-war friendship and collaboration as Wallace and

Roosevelt envisioned after the war and as Stalin desperately hoped for.

The whole Russian vision after the war was based upon this idea that the United States

and the Soviets would remain allies. That was essential for Stalin's political dreams,

as well as for his economic vision of how you rebuild the Soviet economy, which was

devastated. It was Kennedy who recognized that in his famous AU commencement address,

when he says that the destruction of the Soviet Union was the equivalent of the entire United

States east of Chicago being wiped out and destroyed. I mean, what they suffered was,

you know, beyond imagination, really, what the Soviets suffered, which was why there

was such an abhorrence of war afterwards inside the Soviet Union, but also why they were so

defensive and why they wanted Eastern Europe. This wasn't part of some grand imperial design

that Stalin had; this was his defensiveness as a Russian nationalist who understood that

the Soviet Union [incompr.] attacked by Germany through Eastern Europe twice within the past

25 years, and he was going to do anything he could, from the Russian nationalist standpoint,

JAY: I did a series of interviews with Ray McGovern, who was a CIA analyst for many years,