From En Marcha
Organ of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Ecuador
December, 1997

The peoples of the world and, subsequently of the former USSR, evaluate ever more highly Stalin's historical role. The work of the Party and the masses, under Stalin's leadership, is a beautiful and victorious example of the superiority of socialism.

This December 21 we are commemorating the 118th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Vissarianovich Stalin, the great leader of the Soviet and world proletariat.

His revolutionary activity began at an early age. At 15 years he was in contact with illegal Marxist groups and began to read Marxist literature.

His revolutionary activity began with the building of the Party in the areas of Baku, Tiflis, Batum, etc., always zealously guarding the secret character of the organization and the high discipline which every one of its members had to show. He had to confront the opportunist positions of those who did not want to go beyond bourgeois legality. Stalin was a partisan of the need for intensive agitation among the working class, for which one important instrument was required: an illegal newspaper. With this aim he set up the first illegal printing presses. In February of 1903, the first Congress of the Social-Democratic Organization of the Caucasus was held, at which he was elected to the Caucasian Union Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, RSDLP (the organizational predecessor of the Communist Party Bolshevik). Stalin was named a member of the above-mentioned committee in his absence, since he was in jail at the time. Throughout his life there were various times in which his tireless work of defending revolutionary principles, Marxist-Leninist principles, came to the fore. Thus, in 1911 he took up the struggle against the liquidators and anarchists. Later, in the period between the bourgeois-democratic and the socialist revolution, at the VI Congress, he fought against the treacherous positions of Kamenev, Rykov and Trotsky concerning the appearance of Lenin before the counter-revolutionary court, and the Trotskyite theses of the impossibility of the victory of the revolution in Russia.

In the meetings of the Central Committee, between October 10 and 16, 1917, Stalin defended Lenin's thesis on the armed insurrection, unmasking Kamenev and Zinoviev once again.

After the seizure of power, his fight against the anti-Leninist and counter-revolutionary positions did not lessen. He fought the Trotskyites and Bukharinites who were opposed to the plans for the socialist industrialization of the country, and for the collectivization of the rural economy. This ideological struggle against the revisionist conceptions led to the expulsion from the Party in 1927 of Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky, and later of Bukharin.

In the middle of the fight for the defense of Marxism-Leninism, Stalin developed the Leninist theory of imperialism and of the organization of the Party, as well as the Marxist conception of nationalities and of the revolution. Thus he became a beloved leader of the Party and an intimate collaborator of Lenin.

After Lenin's death, Stalin continued and developed the planned policy for the construction of Socialism, which could be summed up as follows:

1. To develop an independent economy, based on the internal market and on the union of industry with the peasant economy of the country, which unfolded to the maximum the development of industry to the degree of the resources that the country possessed.

2. To lead the economy in a planned manner, taking into account the necessities existing for it and constantly developing the reserves.

The fulfillment of these lines permitted the raising of the USSR to the level of an industrialized country. In 1938, socialist industry occupied first place in the world in its pace of development and in technique it surpassed the principal capitalist countries. This is one of the demonstrations of the superiority of socialism over capitalism, which in the decade of the 1930s was undergoing a tremendous economic crisis, which led millions of workers in the capitalist world to unemployment.

When, on June 22, 1941, the Hitlerite fascist beast launched a violent attack with 170 divisions against the Soviet Union, Stalin moved to the front line of defense of the Soviet State. The plan of the Hitlerites to do away with the Soviet Union in two months failed. The Soviet army harassed the enemy in order to later take the offensive.

The heroic battles of Moscow and Stalingrad, the operations of the winter of 1944, etc. led to a political and military triumph of the Soviet working class, people and army led by the Bolshevik Party headed by Stalin.

Stalin has always been the target of attack by the bourgeoisie, revisionism and opportunism of all kinds. Behind this attack is the fight against socialism, against Marxism-Leninism. Therefore, to defend the work of J. Stalin is to defend Marxism-Leninism and its fundamental principles.

"When one passes at night through the Red Square, through that vast scene which seems to be divided into two parts -- that of to-day, that is to say of the nation of a large number of the Earth's inhabitants, and that which dates from before 1917 (which is antediluvian) -- it seems as though the man who lies in the tomb, in the centre of that nocturnal, deserted square, is the only person in the world who is not asleep, and who watches over everything around him, in the towns and in the fields. He is the real leader -- the one of whom the workers used laughingly to say that he was master and comrade at the same time; he is the paternal brother who is really watching over everyone. Although you do not know him, he knows you and is thinking of you. Whoever you may be, you have need of this benefactor. Whoever you may be, the finest part of your destiny is in the hands of that other man, who also watches over you, and who works for you -- the man with a scholar's mind, a workman's face, and the dress of a private soldier."

(Henri Barbusse, "Stalin.")

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