Stalin
(originally posted at 100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems)
Stalin was a big boy
a bully
& more & more successful
all his life
richer & more powerful
than any of our richest
most powerful, now—
I suppose
more than half the population
must have been seething
with resentment against
the Romanov czars
by 1917
they had put down
rebellion after rebellion
secret police were everywhere—
young Stalin
held no ideological views—
he was against anyone
with authority over him—
what we’d call
an anarchist or entrepreneur—
he joined the communists
the way you might go to work
for Google, the Sinaloa drug cartel, or Goldman Sachs—
he stuck up banks & got the money to Lenin—
so that he became Lenin’s favorite
while Trotsky led the Red Army against
anyone who resisted the government of Lenin
& the so-called cadre of so-called communists
the so-called vanguard of the working class & human race
& anyone who might possibly resist—
Stalin let the other apparatchiks think he was stupid—
later he’d undermine them
have them arrested & tortured
til they “confessed”
then have them executed—
he accepted all the clerical tasks no-one else wanted
til he was General Secretary
& General Secretary became the most powerful position
after Lenin was shot in a botched assassination attempt
& enfeebled, then died—
Stalin was a ruthless dictator
he twisted every bit of information
he suppressed any possible resistance
by the time he was done
tens of millions had been ruined
& millions murdered or worked to death in slave camps
& the idea of everyone sharing ownership of the means of production
forever tainted in the minds of anyone not paying close attention
especially since the oligarchy of those who owned the means of production
took good care to conflate communism & what Stalin called communism—
an even greater tyranny than Russia under the Romanov czars
& the descendants of those who had conquered
& divided up the land & the labor force—
Stalin was Hitler’s main inspiration—
he betrayed the socialists
who bravely thought beyond their predicament
Karl Marx especially—
as so many priests & preachers & other hypocrites
have betrayed what Jesus said & did—
& what so many others have dared to say & do
but they’ve been forgotten in the disgust
at what so-called leaders like Stalin
do in the name of what they proposed—
Stalin gave those who use their ownership
of the means of production
against the rest of humanity
a weapon greater than all their soldiers & bullets.
Eric Chaet, The Turnaround Artist, born Chicago, USA, 1945, raised on rough South Side, pre-computer factory, office, & warehouse jobs. Some teaching, some independent self-taught technical consulting. 1974, Old Buzzard of No-Man’s Land, poems, Toronto, Canada. 1977, Solid and Sound, vinyl LP of songs, Lee’s Summit, Missouri, USA. Mid-80s to mid-90s, silkscreened, hitchhiked, & stapled 1500 cloth posters to utility poles along American highways. 1990, How To Change the World Forever For Better, brief prose philosophy, Greenleaf, Wisconsin, USA; 2nd edition, 1994. 2001, People I Met Hitchhiking On USA Highways, mostly narrative prose, De Pere, Wisconsin, USA. Lives in Wisconsin, industrialized dairy farms & cows, remnant cheese & paper factories & factory hands & outlaw mammals & birds, post-construction boom, reactionary politics & obsolete machinery, a smattering of professionals & millionaires. Poems published, over 50 years in many USA states, plus Brazil, Cuba, Ireland, Scotland, England, Spain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Nepal, India, China, Singapore, Korea, & Taiwan, often in translation.
You can contact him at the Leave a Reply box on each page of his website, 100 Peculiarly Useful So-Called Poems, <http://www.ericchaet.
wordpress.com>.
Find Chaet’s book, People I Met Hitchhiking USA Highways, and read a review written here. See also, There’s still a little breath in the old American Revolution and On Job Creation
