This revolutionary truth will arise by questioning sources, testimony and analyses. Rediscovering the revolutionary truth about this pioneer period is a collective task that must be borne by all Communists, around the world. With the burial of Stalinism, Leninism disappeared as well. No one can deny the evidence: when Gorbachev succeeded in eradicating all of Stalin's achievements, crowning thirty-five years of virulent denunciations of `Stalinism', Lenin himself became persona non grata in the Soviet Union. All Communist and revolutionary organizations across the globe must re-examine the opinions and judgments that they have formed since 1956 about Comrade Stalin's work. It is clear that, throughout the world, those who wish to defend the ideals of Socialism and Communism must at least do the same. Today, for a man such as Zinoviev, seeing the destructive folly that has taken hold of the ex-Soviet Union, with its trail of famine, unemployment, criminality, misery, corruption and inter-ethnic wars, has led to the reassessment of prejudices firmly held since adolescence.

And most people who firmly oppose the murderous anarchy of world capitalism have become intimidated. To defend the historic rфle of Stalin and the Bolshevik Party becomes unthinkable, even monstrous. Since then, angry, unanimous condemnations of Stalin have come from the Nazis and the Trotskyists, from Kissinger and Brzezinski, from Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and many others, each adding to the `proof'. Everything that sworn enemies of Communism had claimed for thirty-five years was supposedly confirmed by Khrushchev in 1956. Unfortunately many Communists do not feel at ease on this battlefield. It is very difficult to raise one's feeble voice against the torrents of anti-Stalin propaganda. Many who consider themselves Communist have not shown such courage. That a famous Soviet dissident, now living in `reunited' Germany, a man who in his youth was so fanatically anti-Stalin that he planned a terrorist attack against him, who filled entire books with vehement denunciation of Stalin's political line in every possible way, that such a man would, in his old age, pay homage to Stalin is remarkable.

Ludo martens another view of stalin