THE NEWSPAPER of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, Sovetskaya Rossiya, devoted an entire page in its 13 March issue to a letter from a reader, a certain Nina Andreyeva. It was entitled 'I cannot compromise my principles'. It was an open defence of Stalin and Stalinism and an attack against 'the disciples of Trotsky and Jagoda' (a scandalous amalgamation as Jagoda was the GPU chief who had all the Soviet Trotskyists arrested).
The time seemed to have been well chosen. Gorbachev and his principal ideological collaborator (some say his guru), Yakolev, were out of Moscow. The way seemed open. So, by a peculiar coincidence, many Soviet publications reprinted Andreyeva's letter without criticism or comment of any sort.
It soon came to light that these periodicals had received instructions to reprint the article. Only one refused, Znamya Yunosti, a Byelorussian youth publication. All the others yielded, starkly showing that despite three years of glasnost, the habit of unquestioning obedience to orders from above continued to prevail. Three weeks later, however, on 18 and 19 April, Pravda itself published two contributions, one from a number of intellectuals' organisations, the other from 38 writers. Several of the writers had a reputation of being 'moderates' with respect to glasnost, if not 'conservative liberals'
', notably the president of the writers' union, Markov. Both sharply attacked Andreyeva's letter.
They denounced the conservatives who wanted to get the country back 'to the years when the law was trampled on'. They equated defence of the Stalin era with opposition to the reform course that the Gorbachev team was following, with the support of the CPSU leadership. They challenged their adversaries to clarify their opposition to perestroika and democratisation.
After this, a veritable anti-Stalinist storm swept the Soviet media. Not a day passed without some daily or weekly paper or some magazine, revealing a particularly revolting aspect or episode of the Stalin era. It is impossible to cite them all here. I will limit myself to listing a few of the main revelations that were printed in millions, if not tens of millions, of copies and often picked up by television.
• Forced collectivisation was a crime against the Soviet people and economy. It cost the lives of 10 million peasants. Stalin was the main person responsible for it (Argumenty i Fakty, 4 April 1988)
• Stalin facilitated the rise to power of the fascists and of Hitler in Germany. (Nouvelles de Moscou, 10 April 1988.)
• The bloody purges in the party after 1934 cost the lives of a million innocent communists. Stalin personally ordered and organised the purges.
• The purge victims who confessed crimes they never committed did so as a result of atrocious torture ordered and given 'legal' sanction by Stalin. (Sources too numerous to be cited.) • Stalin ordered the 1937 purge of the Red Army because he was opposed to the projects of Tuchachevsky and his officers for rapid mechanisation of the army, for providing it with armoured divisions and getting rid of its outdated cavalry, and for perparing it for mobile defence operations in the event of imperialist aggression. (Nouvelles de Moscou, 3 April 1988.) By decapitating the Red Army, by imprisoning the main innovators in Soviet aviation, Stalin delayed the modernisation of the army for several years. He bears a crushing responsibility for the defeats suffered by the USSR in 1941 and 1942 at the hands of the Nazi imperialist aggressors. (Izvestia, 3 May 1988.) • These defeats were aggravated by the blind faith he demonstrated in the Nazis' so-called interest in respecting the Hitler-Stalin pact in order to avoid a war on two fronts. Thus, the Hitler-Stalin pact was a crime against the USSR. (Moskovskaya Pravda, 18 May 1988.)
Stalin openly violated the federal constitution of the USSR when he decided to eliminate Soviet republics and autonomous territories and deport entire nationalities at the end of the war.
• Up until his death, Stalin kept the Soviet population, not just in the countryside but also in the cities, on the poverty line, with a standard of living that in eight years had scarcely improved over the wartime period.
• The penal system established in Stalin's time was inhuman. It was increasingly directed not against any political opponents but against the poorest ordinary people, including young
people, the disabled and so on. Penal legislation among the severest in the world, much more severe than that of the imperialist countries. The USSR's prison population is one of the highest in the world, numbering millions today (despite the millions released under Krushchev.) The Soviet press has not hesitated to use the term 'gulag'. The case has been cited of a 12-year-old boy sentenced to five years hard labour in 1943 for robbing a canteen to get food for his young brother and his little sisters (their father was at the front and their mother had abandoned them). He was released in 1945, and then arrested again in 1947 for stealing a fish. He got ten years hard labour! (Nouvelles de Moscou, 1 May 1988.)
• Stalin's victims should not only be rehabilitated, a monument should be erected to them that would not be a merestone building. In this respect, Aleksandr Waisberg, a laboratory worker, said in Nouvelles de Moscou on 1 May 1988:
'Collecting signatures for a request to the Supreme Soviet to create a monument for the victims of the Stalin repression is one of the activities of the Memorial Group. In our opinion, such a memorial should include not just an architectural and sculptural monument but also a museum, a library, archives and a scientific research centre - everything that could help to immunise social consciousness against Stalinism'. (It seems that 10,000 signatures were collected in the space of a few days.)
• After 1928-1929, Stalin's activity had a pronounced 'antisocialist character'. (Nouvelles de Moscou, 24 April 1988.) • 'Power belonged to the Soviet state, but - in accordance with the distorting practice - in reality it was exercised by the administrative apparatus! (Nouvelles de Moscou, 15 May 1988.) The 'administrative apparatus' is clearly a euphemism for the bureaucracy. In fact, from a Marxist standpoint, the two formulas are synonymous.
All this culminated in two brief but devastating statements: The Stalin and Brezhnev versions of socialism suited the reactionary forces in the West...Socialism was compromised.' 'Socialism and Stalinism are two incompatible ideas. Where there is Stalinism, there is no socialism! (Nouvelles de Moscou, 24 April 1988.)
This goes much further than the de-Stalinisation of Krushchev's time, of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses of the CPSU. The revelations are much more numerous, more precise, broader; the
shadowy areas have been greatly reduced. The publicity they received and the passionate response that they have aroused in large sections of the masses is out of all proportion to what happened in the period 19561962. Clearly this is a much more advanced stage of de Stalinisation. What is more, you get the definite impression that Gorbachev and his team have consciously unleashed this campaign against Stalin and Stalinism as a weapon in the factional battle that they are waging to prepare the 19th Conference of the CPSU, which is to meet on 28 June. In fact, the mysterious orchestrator who ordered the publication and massive reprinting of Nina Andreyeva's letter - regardless of whether it was Ligachev in person, or another, or others - wanted to block more advanced democratisation measures projected by the group around Gorbachev for this conference.
These measures attack the sacrosanct 'stability of cadres'. Challenging this is what brought Krushchev down. They call for subjecting these 'cadres' to the test of election and periodic re election. Finally, two 'investitures' for five years each are proposed for officials, which is far from an 'anti-bureaucratic revolution'. It is also proposed that there be several candidates for each leading post.
This is already enough to arouse fear, opposition, and even indignation among the people in such positions. They are no longer resisting merely through obstruction, routinism and passivity, as a good part of them have done with respect to perestroika. In the area of democratisation, the resistance is more open. Thus, after a month of hesitation, the tumult around the de-Stalinisation has taken the form of a real debate. Izvestia of 29 April reported a speech by the chief of the propaganda service of the party committee for the Kuntsevski borough of Moscow, N. Kozhevniko, who said that Nina Andreyeva's letter contained a number of true statements. It commented:
We are on the eve of the national party conference. What is more, the conference is in fact already underway. Just recently the publication of two articles [Andreyeva's letter and the Pravda editors' comment on it] has drawn a line between those who are working for radical restructuring and those who would like to stick to refurbishing the facade.
The adversaries of democratisation did not back off. Nouvelles de Moscou of 10 April cites an eight-page letter that they got from the Ignatov group', which amounts to an actual anti-glasnost platform. It characterises perestroika and glasnost as a 'revolutionary socialist programme that is leading the country and the people to an economic catastrophe, social upsets and finally to subjection of the country by the imperialist states. The Ignatov group says that it was centralism (that is,
Stalinist centralism) that 'in the first five-year plans enabled our country to achieve incredibly rapid rates of economic development. In its 4 April issue, Molodaya Gvardia, one of the bastions of conservatism, published an article by a veteran CPSU member, M. Malakhov. This defended Nina Andreyeva's and the Ignatov group's theses and carried them further: We are going to end up with ideological laxity and anarchy, he wrote. He expressed indignation against 'the tendency to condemn the people of my generation for all the failings in the economy and in life in recent decades. It was especially in the 1930s that we implemented Lenin's ideas [sic]'
Malakhov openly defended the military intervention in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. He said that in 'somesocialist countries, there were negative forces, and counter-revolutionary forces raised their heads' This led Nikolai Shmelov to write in the magazine Novy Mir (April 1988): You come reluctantly to the idea that a conspiracy of silence is developing, or has already developed, in the country against perestroika, in which there is an increasing convergence between the interests of a section of local leaders and a whole series of central bodies! There's the rub, obviously. The 19th Conference of the CPSU has to be made up of delegates elected in the party's local and regional branches. But these structures have by no means been renewed. They are totally controlled by the bureaucracy. Gorbachev has excoriated them, shaken them up, threatened them. Finally, he has had to seek a compromise with them.
The leading Gorbachevites - and undoubtedly the general secretary himself - fear that the pendulum will swing back unless the economic situation improves (and everything indicates that instead it is deteriorating).- They want to gain additional guarantees against backsliding of the sort that followed the fall of Krushchev. They are calling for democratisation measures attecting the party apparatus, or even democratisation measures enabling the masses to go around the party apparatus.
For example, Aleksandr Gebran wrote in Sotsialisticheskaya Industria: "Today, the preparation of the conference should not be left entirely !!l to the party apparatus! He poses the question of revising the rules for election of delegates to the conference. He was supported in the same journal by Gavril Popov. Yuri Andreyev, a member of the leadership of the USSR writers' union wrote along the same lines in the magazine Sovyetskaya Kultura. In the paper of the Central Committee of the Georgian CP, Zarya Vostoka, an appeal was made to all workers in the republic to keep party meetings open to everyone, and to discuss the
questions on the agenda of the conference at these meetings in the most meticulous way.
To raise the ante, the most advanced representatives of glasnost, such as A. Butenko, Otto L. Lacis and Gavril Popov have written that there are two conceptions of socialism and of how to build it - a Leninist one and a Stalinist one. They are products of historical development and persist in the public mind as well as in sociai practice. It is necessary t choose between them, because they are mutually exclusive Thus, the team around Gorbachev has deliberately chosen de Stalinisation as a 'litmus test' for opposition to glasnost and democratisation. It has done this because it is convinced that vertical structures and authoritarianism- which it considers not without reason to be one of the long-term hangovers of Stalinism- condemn perestroika to certain failure. It has done this because of its fear of a 'backward march', for which it would pay the price, including in personal terms. It has done so drawing a balance sheet of Krushchev's failure, which it attributes to a lack of involvement of the broad masses and to the narrow limits of the de-Stalinisation and democratisation of the time. It has done so knowing full well what it is doing, knowing that no small amount of confusion remains on the question of Stalinism and Leninism, that nostalgia for a'strong man' persists not only in a large part of the apparatus, but also among some sections of the people.
However, the very way in which the debate on de Stalinisation has been launched and carried forward reflects quite concretely the limits and contradictions of glasnost.
Everything is still coming from the top. Top authorities authorised the publication of Nina Andreyeva's letter and recommended its reprinting. The immense majority of the press obeyed. The top decided to counter-attack through the commentary published in Fravaa. Unce again, nearly everyone followed suit. The top level proclaimed, 'there has to be discussion', and so there was discussion. The top said, 'theelections have to be democratised'
', and so they are being democratised (in a very partial way). The top added, 'but you are not going to elect any open opponent to perestroika'
(Pravda, 13 May.) And so no opponent of perestroika is being elected.
This is not the road of a democratisation broad enough and deep enough to block the bureaucracy. This does not represent a renaissance of a real independent politicisation of the masses. It may lead to that. It may facilitate it. It may even stimulate it (although even the leading Gorbachevites seem at least to hesitate in this respect). This is obviously preferable to 'one-voice dialogue', to the sterile, paralysing, depoliticising and reactionary monolithism of the Brezhnev era, to say nothing of
the bloody and terror-ridden monolithism of the Stalin era. But this is not enough.
Behind these limitations of glasnost loom the contradictions that it bears within it: the contradiction between the principle of the sovereignty of the soviets and the one party system, in which the leading role of the party is confirmed in the constitution (this role was hardly mentioned in the first constitution drawn up by Lenin). The contradicties, tendency rights cannot be accepted, since any tendency would tend to become 'a potential second party). The contradiction between proclaiming unrestricted democratic freedom (freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom to demonstrate peacefully) and the restrictions that a more and more bureaucratically led one party regime inevitably imposes on the exercise of such freedoms.
But in the last analysis these contradictions are only the reflection of the social contradictions rending Soviet society. Two examples confirm this in a striking way.
The press - even the most liberal journals, such as Ogonyok and Nouvelles de Moscou - continue to oppose strikes. The spectacular strike in Yerevan - which lasted for many days and led to the election of bodieg representative of the strikers and toppled the local CP leadership, bodies that negotiated as equals with the CPSU Central Committee - was severly condemned in the press. The same is true of the Polish workers' strikes. In this respect, Nouvelles de Moscou identified itself entirely with Jaruzelski's views in its 22 May issue. It maintained a guilty Silence about the measures of economic repression (sackings) and police repression (beatings and arrests) against strikers. By the same token, the press has published little or no information about these strikes. The question of real power for the Council of Workers' Collectives recently set up in the workplaces is still more revealing. There is a real threat that self-management will be transformed into 'democracy for the plant managers', Evgenii Torkanovski wrote in Nouvelles de Moscou of 22 May. 'In the chair, a wilful leader can make a council into something other than a tool for the workers' collective, something subordinate to the plant manager, pliant to the will of the chief! And to make the point more forcefully, he wrote, 'A cliche has entered deeply into people's minds that "cooks" are no good as managers'.
• Is there anyone who does not understand that the problem is not just mental resistance (although that is no doubt real) but also and above all opposing social interests? The masses of workers are not taking part in this process. This is primarily because their interests and immediate concerns have not been
satisfied. Moreover, they fear a backward march. As Grigori Kanovich wrote graphically in Nouvelles de Moscou of 17 April 1988: Fear engenders flattery and obedience, imitatio and servility. Indeed. But the masses will not be freed from this fear by exhortations trom above. I hey will be treed from it only by regaining contidence in their own strength through independent action and organisation. The future of the democratisation in the USSR depends on how extensive this is. Having said that, this advanced phase of de-Stalinisation represents a major new historical victory for our movement, as was already true of the clearing of the criminal charges against the defendants in the third Moscow trial, comrades Bukharin, Rykov and our comrade Christian Rakovsky and all their associates.
The terrible truth about the Stalin era and the price that the Soviet proletariat and people paid for it, as well as the world proletariat and all of humanity, is something that only our current declared from 1927-1928 onwards and analysed step by step in each of its principal stages. It is the only one that can unashamedly look the Soviet workers in the face today.
What can those who denied, covered up and justified so many crimes, who licked the boots of the murderers and slanderers - and this includes most of the social democratic leaders and left intellectuals of the Popular Front period - say today?
Our current is the only communist current whose banner is unstained by blood, filth or lies. The founders of our movement, comrades Trotsky and Sedov, the members of the Soviet Left Opposition, the heroes who remained unbowed until the last and were felled like oaks by firing squads because they understood the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism®, acted as they did out of loyalty to communist principles, out of commitment to the cause of the working class. In so doing, they saved the honour of communism, they assured its continuity. No one can say that for a certain period all the communists accepted or tolerated Stalin's crimes. Thanks to them, no one can say that communism inevitably leads to Stalinism, because Stalin's fiercest and most irreconcilable adversary, the one whom he considered his number one enemy, was the communist Trotsky.
We do not claim any glory because of this. But from this moral capital, we will gain increasing political dividends. This exceptional capital will revive communism. Certainly, it will be a communism more seltcritical, more sensitive to bureaucratic deviations and manipulation, more focussed on self-organisation of the masses. But it will revive communism in a stronger form in the USSR and on a world scale.
We must therefore continue the fight for clearing all the criminal charges against victims of the Moscow Trials, and first of all Leon Trotsky. This battle is not essentially about the past, truth, honour and justice - although the number of Soviet citizens acutely interested in these questions is constantly increasing. This fight is over the crucial principles for straightening out the present situation in the USSR and in the world workers' movement, the principles indispensible for the emancipation of the workers.
We have to continue the fight to assure that Soviet intellectuals, youth and workers can have access to all the documents of the period after 1923. The whole truth has to be revealed about the debates that rent the party and the International from that time. Everyone must be able to judge on the basis of the elements necessary for such judgement. The entire truth will be resoundingly re-established.
The theses adopted by the Central Committee of the CPSU for the 19th Party Conference state that at the time of Stalin's death, free political discussion had been strangled in the party. (Pravda, 27 May 1988.) But this is what the Left Opposition said back in 1923! History will prove us right about Trotsky's role and ideas, as it has just done about the role and ideas of Stalin.
In Le Monde on 18 May 1988, Michel Tatu correctly stressed that most of the CPSU regional leaders - he calls them 'prefects' - were appointed before Gorbachev's ascension to power or were well advanced in their bureaucratic careers before being appointed by Gorbachev. 'How can you make a "revolution" [this word is being increasingly used today in Moscow instead of perestroika] with human material that is so unrevolutionary?' he rightly asks. Gorbachev's latest piece of 'bad luck' is a sudden shortage of sugar, an easily predictableresult of increased buying by moonshiners after the cut in 'official' vodka production.
On 10 April 1988, Nouvelles de Moscou published a letter from Ivan Nestavchev in Kaliningrad, who excoriated all leaders of the USSR in recent decades: 'Why didn't you develop a real people's power?'
A letter from a reader received by Nouvelles de Moscou said, 'I share the opinion of those who think that the slogan of anti-Stalinism', which seems democratic, is the slogan behind which are lining up, along with the professional anti-communists, the descendents living among us of the classes overthrown by the October revolution, as well as the descendents of those who got rich from the NEP, of the counter-revolutionary bandits and the kulaks.' This is what led to the sacking of the secretary of the Armenian CP. See the homage paid to the Soviet Trotskyists by Leopold Trepper, the leader of the Red Orchestra espionage network, in his autobiography, The Great Game (Michael) oseph, 1977).
This article first appeared in International Viewpoint 143, 13 June 1988.