Speech at Celebration Meeting of the Moscow Soviet of Working People's Deputies and Moscow Party and Public Organizations. November 6, 1941

Section 5 of the speech titled "Who are the “National Socialists”?"

Exerpt:

In our country the German invaders, i.e., the Hitlerites, are usually called fascists. The Hitlerites, it appears, consider this wrong and obstinately continue to call themselves “National Socialists.” Hence the Germans want to assure us that the Hitlerite party, the party of the German invaders, which is plundering Europe and has organized the villainous attack on our socialist State, is a socialist party. Is this possible? What can there be in common between socialism and the bestial Hitlerite invaders who are plundering and oppressing the nations of Europe?

Can the Hitlerites be regarded as nationalists? No, they cannot. Actually, the Hitlerites are now not nationalists but imperialists. As long as the Hitlerites were engaged in assembling the German lands and reuniting the Rhine district, Austria, etc., it was possible with a certain amount of foundation to call them nationalists. But after they seized foreign territories and enslaved European nations-the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Belgians, French, Serbs, Greeks, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, the inhabitants of the Baltic countries, etc. – and began to reach out for world domination, the Hitlerite party ceased to be a nationalist party, because from that moment it became an imperialist party, a party of annexation and oppression.

The Hitlerite party is a party of imperialists, and the most rapacious and predatory imperialists among all the imperialists of the world.

Can the Hitlerites be regarded as socialists? No, they cannot. Actually, the Hitlerites are the sworn enemies of socialism, arrant reactionaries and Black-Hundreds who have robbed the working class and the peoples of Europe of the most elementary democratic liberties. In order to cover up their reactionary, Black-Hundred essence, the Hitlerites denounce the internal regimes of Britain and America as plutocratic regimes. But in Britain and the United States there are elementary democratic liberties, there exist trade unions of workers and employees, there exist workers’ parties, there exist parliaments; whereas in Germany, under the Hitler regime, all these institutions have been destroyed. One only needs to compare these two sets of facts to perceive the reactionary nature of the Hitler regime and the utter hypocrisy of the German-fascist pratings about a plutocratic regime in Britain and in America. In point of fact the Hitler regime is a copy of that reactionary regime which existed in Russia under tsardom. It is well known that the Hitlerites suppress the rights of the workers, the rights of the intellectuals and the rights of nations as readily as the tsarist regime suppressed them, and that they organize mediæval Jewish pogroms as readily as the tsarist regime organized them.