TO RUSSIA

Deep consternation down in the editorial offices of the Tory 'Daily Telegraph'. When it was rumoured that members of the Royal family may pay their first-ever visit to the Soviet Union, the "lelegraph' was the paper which denounced the rumours in the most crushing terms.

In a leading editorial the paper declared: 'Let it be said straight away that the Queen should be advised by the government in the strongest Prince Philip. terms on no account to consider such a tasteless proposal. The present rulers of Russia are the direct spiritual heirs of the men who murdered the Queen's relatives in 1918.' There's been a compromise. The Queen isn't going, but Prince Philip and Princess Anne are.

INDIGNITY 'Those who say that entry into the Common Market is going to put us on a starvation diet are not painting a wholly truthful picture.' So writes Miss Monica Greenwood, who has just had a remarkable little cookbook published by the 'Merlin Press'.

Miss Greenwood has all kinds of handy hints for housewives threatened by food prices rocketing to Common Market levels.

Basically her motto is to avoidstarvation by eating foods mainly • from the era of the great depression in the 1930s.

She advises the working class to go out hunting for their supper: 'Mussels, winkles, and in some places cockles, can be found around the coast; and, speaking of the seaside, SO can sea-spinach and samphire. Spanish chestnuts may be larger, but you can still find some sweet chestnuts in parkland and elsewhere, not to mention beenuts and acorns.' Miss Greenwood does not quite suggest that the working class should go out grazing in the parks-but she gets near to it.

On the flesh side of things, she suggests the British public ought to cast prejudice aside and start shooting and eating sparrows, blackbirds, etc., etc. Other favourites are cabbage soup, tripe casserole, sheep's head pudding, mixed herbs and plants washed down with dandelion coffee.

I doubt if Miss Greenwood will suffer the indignity of eating such foods-her book, called 'Common Market Cookbook', is undoubtedly designed to exploit the genuine fears over prices in the Common Market. It is a tawdry affair noticeable for its lack of copy - sprea1 over 56 bulky pages. Idistic etchings accompany the br efest of recipes. Leon (New £1.65 Spanish Revolution' B! Trotsky. Pathfinder Press York). Price £4.15 cloth paperback.

The Stalinists did not desire a revolution in Spain. The bureaucracy feared such a revolution at a time when its policy was based upon making a counter - revolutionary alliance with Britain.

The arms and material aid sent to the Republican government were intended to shore up the bourgeois social order and to crush the revolutionaries. As Soviet influences increased, SO the repressive apparatus of the GPU (secret police) established a branch on Spanish soil with its own prisons and murder gangs. That is why it was necessary to take up the question of the Moscow Trials and expose the role of Stalinism in the midst of the Civil War.

In order to cover up its role in Spain and to convince Communist Party members of the need to support the bourgeois Republic, the Comintern provided its oWin 'analysis' of the Spanish situation. The most sophisticated exponent of the Stalinist view was Ercoli, the name used at this time by Palmiro Togliatti, Who became one of Stalin's principal agents in Spain and secretary of the Italian CP.

The constrast between Togliatti's position and that Trotsky is striking. Togliatti took his stand on the fact that the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution had not been carried out in Spain to defend the alliance with the bourgeoisie. He invented new kind of revolution:

'It is a people's revolution', he wrote in International Press Correspondence', the organ of the Comintern. It is a national revolution. It is an anti-fascist revolution.' war between the people civil He claimed that the civil the 'reactionary castes', whose power Franco aimed restore, bringing some capitalist elements and the major part of the middle class into the struggle against fascism.

The Communist Party, in fact, had no real mass base in the working class even during the Civil War period. It grew rapidly as the most energetic supporter of the bourgeois republic, of the army and the police (equipped with the best Soviet weapons) against the revolutionary workers and peasants who, In July 1936, had taken over manv factories and public buildings and seized the big estates Recruits to the Communist Party, to a large extent, came from sections of the middle class, civil servants who had remained loyal to the Republic and army officers such as General Miaja who, at the end, was to capitulate to Franco. It was to these people, not to the revolutionary workers, that the Stalinists appealed. Togliatti claimed: 'As for the urban petty - bourgeoisie, the vast majority of them are on the side of democracy and the revolution against fascism.' munist Party banner in the background.

Togliatti distorts and exaggerates the role of the middle class in order to disguise the support which the Stalinists gave to the bourgeois Republic. In fact in this article Togliatti boasts the adherence of men whom he describes as industrialists and landowners to the Republic, such as José Giral, 'a fairly big landowner and a minister in the first Popular Front government.

Togliatti also holds up as an example the support for he ticians in Catalonia and the Republic nationalist the Basque country. It was the alliance of the workers' parties with the Catalonian bourgeoisie which sealed the fate of the revolution in that area in May 1937. It was no accident that Nin had entered the government in Catalonia. Togliatti also omits to mention that the Basque nationalists, although they opposed Franco, also carried out repression of the revolutionaries in their part of Spain.

Togliatti's article was the 'theoretical blueprint for be. trayal by the Stalinists. The Civil War was described as a national struggle for 'democracy' and against fascism. In reality the Stali the Stalinists confused and the working class, restored and strengthened the bourgeois state murdered revolutionaries and paved the way for the Franco victory by making it impossible to carry through the only policy which could have enabled the working class come to power.

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