Contemporary Stalinist “historians”:

Bill Bland (3)

Bill Bland

As noted in the previous instalment, the organisation headed by Bill Bland sought to shift responsibility for the Popular Front policy -which politically subordinated the working class to the bourgeoisie- from Stalin to Dimitrov. The attempt to distance Stalin from these policies by portraying them as the work of revisionists was an atypical ideological manoeuvre, seldom encountered within the Stalinist movement.

The purpose of this historically indefensible ideological operation, performed without anaesthetic, was to absolve Stalin of responsibility for a counter-revolutionary policy that politically subordinated the working class to the bourgeoisie. To this end, responsibility for the disastrous political line was shifted onto one of his subordinates, Dimitrov, whom Stalin himself had appointed to head the Comintern. As part of this effort, Dimitrov was alleged to be an agent of imperialism and even of Nazism.

Following this operation, which distorted historical facts, Stalin continued, in Bland’s narrative, to stand for what was right and to represent revolutionary policies, while the Popular Front policies -which reduced the working class to the role of defending private ownership of the means of production and the capitalist state- were attributed to those around him. To carry out an atypical Stalinist ideological operation, Bland resorted to a typical Stalinist manoeuvre.

To recognise that this claim -an attempt to invert the power relationship between the Comintern and Stalin- was incompatible with historical facts, indeed downright absurd, one did not need to wait for the partial opening of the archives following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Even when the claim was first advanced, before various documents on the matter had come to light, there was nothing credible about Bland’s “theses”.

However, the subsequent opening of the archives made it possible to examine in far greater detail how the relationship between Stalin and Dimitrov functioned. An important selection of these documents was brought together in the volume Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives, published in 2000 -around a year before Bland’s death- in Yale University Press’s Annals of Communism series.[1]

The volume, edited by Alexander Dallin and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, consists chiefly of more than fifty secret letters sent by Dimitrov to Stalin, alongside documents concerning the activities of the Comintern. Stalin’s annotations on some of the documents, entries reproduced from Dimitrov’s diary and the editors’ explanations provide further political context for the correspondence.

These documents show that the narrative Bland defended is incompatible with the facts. Dimitrov was not a leader who had managed to remain outside Stalin’s sphere of authority and influence and determine the Comintern’s political line together with other “secret revisionists”; he was a Comintern official who referred important matters to Stalin and his inner circle and awaited their views and instructions. The decisive authority in determining the Comintern’s basic strategic direction, including the shift to the Popular Front policy, lay with Stalin and the Kremlin bureaucracy he headed.

This does not, of course, mean that Dimitrov was wholly passive, formulated no proposals or played no role in shaping policy. Indeed, the book includes his July 1934 proposal for a change in policy, together with Stalin’s annotations. Yet developing such proposals is not the same as having ultimate political authority. Dimitrov’s “contributions” remained secondary and took shape within a power relationship in which he was subordinate to Stalin; they cannot therefore be used to absolve Stalin of responsibility for the policy.

We do not know whether Bland was aware of this book, published around a year before his death, or whether he had the opportunity to read it. Nor do we have enough information about his health in the final months of his life to judge to what extent he was able to read and assess the book.

Yet for Bland’s present-day followers-those who regard him as an important Marxist theorist and historian-the same uncertainties cannot serve as an excuse. After all, the book was published more than a quarter of a century ago and has been available to readers ever since.

As I noted above, we did not need this book to see the absurdity of the far-fetched claims made by Bland and his organisation about Dimitrov. Yet continuing to defend these claims in the face of “new” and indisputable documents and facts amounts to committing an even graver offence against historical reality. Those who promote Bland as an important Marxist historian must confront these claims of his.

Moreover, Stalinists who still hold Bland in high esteem today must also confront another important source published after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes: Dimitrov’s diary. First published in Bulgarian in 1997, the diary appeared in an abridged English edition edited by Ivo Banac in 2003. It was translated into Turkish by Rüstem Aziz and published by TÜSTAV in three volumes in 2004-2005.[2]

The diary is an important source that complements the correspondence: it allows us to trace, through Dimitrov’s own records, his meetings with Stalin, the instructions he received from him and how the Comintern’s political line was shaped.

In the next instalment, I shall conclude this mini-series by examining how Bland, with astonishing brazenness, denied yet another historical fact established by documentary evidence.

[1] Alexander Dallin and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (eds), Dimitrov and Stalin, 1934-1943: Letters from the Soviet Archives, Russian documents translated into English by Vadim A. Staklo, Annals of Communism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000.

[2] Georgi Dimitrov, The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933-1949, edited and introduced by Ivo Banac; German sections translated by Jane T. Hedges, Russian sections by Timothy D. Sergay and Bulgarian sections by Irina Faion, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003. Turkish edition: Georgi Dimitrov, Günlük, trans. Rüstem Aziz, TÜSTAV, Istanbul; vol. 1: 9 March 1933-31 August 1939, 2004; vol. 2: 1 September 1939-5 May 1945, 2004; vol. 3: 6 May 1945-6 February 1949, 2005.

To be continued

Contemporary Stalinist “historians”: Bill Bland (1)

Contemporary Stalinist “historians”: Bill Bland (2)