Haunted by Andrey Vyshinsky’s Ghost

Last week I sent out a message to tens of thousands of trade unionists alerting them to two bits of news.  The good news, I reported, was that some workers in Poland had won a big victory in court.  The bad news was that in Ukraine, President Zelensky had failed to veto anti-union legislation, as we had been demanding.  Most people reacted with thanks, or said nothing, but two of the emails I got within a minute of each other were, I think, interesting.

The first said: “You’re talking about a fucking union at a time of war. Where’s your head at you dirty lefty”.

The second said: “Of course, Zelensky signed the anti-labor legislation.  His government is fucking fascist and YOU SUPPORT HIS FASCIST GOVERNMENT.”  (Yes, that was all capital letters in the original.)

My first thought was that if I’m attacked for being both pro-Putin and anti-Putin at the same time, I must be doing something right.  But that’s not always the case, as we know.

My second thought was that it would be great to get these two guys into a room. But that was just me being silly.

Upon further reflection, it struck that while the messages were diametrically opposed the tone was identical.

One referred a “fucking union” and the other to a “fucking fascist”.  Both were addressed to me, referring to my “talking” and my “support”.  In both cases, I was clearly the enemy.

Politically, neither comment made any sense. 

Ukrainian unions have every right — in fact it is their duty — to defend workers’ rights even during a war.  One might say, especially during a war.  If the debate in Ukraine weakened the country or undermined its unity in wartime, blame Zelensky and the parliament, not the workers.

And calling Zelensky’s government “fascist” (twice in one sentence) is not just wrong, but unimaginably stupid and ill-informed.

And yet, the comments read as if written by the same person.

The tone is extremely nasty and I, like many of you, have gotten used to this.

On a number of occasions I’ve been called a “so-called trade unionist” or worse.  My favourite is from more than two decades ago, but still accessible online, referring to me as “one of the most experienced and influential agents of the bourgeoisie in the world labor movement”. 

This kind of language is not entirely new, even on the Left.  Marx in his time could be quite nasty when challenging people he didn’t like very much.  But I think in the last century, this incredibly aggressive tone, and the constant assertion that the person under attack is not really who they claim to be, has its origins in the Stalinist period.

Most famously, it was the chief prosecutor in the Moscow show trials, Andrey Vyshinsky, who ramped up the language of abuse when addressing the historic leaders of the Bolshevik Party, Lenin’s close comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev, who would soon be sentenced to death.  Summing up his case — which Vyshinsky knew was entirely made-up, based on nothing — he shouted:

“Shoot these rabid dogs. Death to this gang who hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people!  … Down with these abject animals! Let’s put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses!”

At the heart of the Stalinist political culture was the idea that no one was who they appeared to be.  The top generals of the Red Army in the late 1930s turned out to be German agents and needed to be shot.  All the surviving members of Lenin’s Central Committee were also long-time agents of the international bourgeoisie.  And this filtered down from the top so that in every region and every village in the Soviet Union, innocent people were “exposed” as traitors to the cause.

In a healthy political culture on the Left, we would never talk this way.  We can disagree with our opponents and perhaps even try to persuade them.  But it’s very unhelpful to start those conversations by accusing those we disagree with of being “fascists” or “pro-Putin” when that is obviously not the case.

So long as we continue to speak in that old language of abuse, we can see that the toxic legacy of Stalinism lingers on, decades after the dictator’s death.


This article appeared in this week’s issue of Solidarity.