SOVIET SPACE ACHIEVEMENT

Stalin beside Kirov's graveside.

out either his knowledge or consent.

When more extensive translations of this new Party History become available it will be possible to make a more detailed analysis of the treatment it gives the great struggle between Stalin and the Left Opposition, led by Trotsky.

But even with the few excerpts so far at hand, the main trend is clear.

The road to power travelled by the present rulers of the Soviet Union, the Suslovs, the Kosygins, the Brezhnevs and the Podgornys, is littered with the corpses of murdered Bolsheviks, Red Army leaders and workers, and of the countless thousands led to their deaths all over the world by the counter-revolutionary policies of the Communist International after the death of Lenin and during its domination by Stalin.

THE LATE Isaac Deutscher was a leading advocate of the theory that the Kremlin bureaucracy would reform itself, by easy stages, out of existence.

This revision of the Trotskyist theory of the political revolution, of the violent overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy, was taken up within the Fourth International by a group which has since moved much closer to Stalinism after the split of 1953 between the forces of the International Committee and the United Secretariat' of the Pabloite revisionists.

The British adherents of this position are the 'International Marxist Group' of Messrs Jordan, Tariq Ali and Purdie.

Deutscher posed the question thus:

"The view that de-Stalinization is only a "temporary expedient" or a slick manoeuvre ... had perhaps a semblance of plausibility in the year 1953 or 1954...

They are cold comfort to the writers, intellectuals and workers hounded by the 'political police' whose backbone, according to Deutscher, was broken at least 13 years ago.

There is no doubt that the bureaucracy was forced to retreat under pressure from the working class and the youth. But it was only a tactical turn, it did not represent any change in the nature of the bureaucracy.

And that is where we parted company with all the revisionists in the international movecapitalist country. And in the Soviet Union, the forces of counter-revolution now marshall themselves behind the only banner they knowWhen Khrushchev revealed part of the truth about Stalin, we demanded that those leaders of the British Communist Party who justified these crimes should make a clear and public declaration on where they now stood on the Moscow Trials, the military and Party purges and all the Stalin in Kirov's assassination.

other crimes of cracy. done their homework, begun in 1961, and come up with the answer that Kirov was killed by a genuine oppositionist, and that the murder served the Party as warning that vigilance had to be greatly heightened.

As this version upholds the old legend of the Kirov assassination, it must also uphold the Moscow Trials, all of Whose victims were charged and convicted of the murder of Kirov.

Khrushchev's doubts have proved groundless.

Although greatly spurred on by the great struggles breaking out all over western Europe, the crisis within the Soviet Union has its own internal logic and laws of development.

The bureauera, from has tried every method, open terror to demagogy (together with every possible combination of the two), in its struggle to hold back the working class desperate card of 'de-Stalinization' and unleashed th very forces which he was attempting to head off.

The bureaucracy removed Khrushchev, and by degrees began to swing back towards the old line that pre-dated the 1956 secret speech.

Internationally, the Kremlin drew closer still to imperialism, collaborating with it against the Chinese Revolution and seeking by underhand pressure to force the Vietnamese people to compromise with US imperialism.

Both at home and abroad, this strategy met with resistance from the working class.

There are two vital factors which distinguish our era from that of Stalin and the Moscow Trials.

The first is the combativity of the international working class, unprecedented in the history of capitalism.

The second, closely allied with the first, is the rapid development of Trotskyism into real material force able to defeat Stalinism in open combat within the workers' moveThe coming together of these two forces will prove decisive not only here in Britain, but in the Soviet Union, where the opposition will be forced to fight for its very life now that the bureaucracy has made this open turn towards Stalin.

We have the duty to alert the working class dangers as well as the opportunities of this new development in the Soviet Union.

It is not a question that concerns Soviet oppositionists alone.

Stalinism remains an international counter-revolutionary force and it will fight to the very end, rallying all its national sections however weak and demoralized they may appear to be.

Their main enemy is Trotskyist movement.

Britain, that means

The publication of conflict between ourselves the Stalinists.

This new version of Soviet Party History must serve not only as proof of the deepening Stalinist crisis, but of Stalinism's determination to fight to the end. We must now equip ourselves for that fight. NURRIES U.S. IMPERIALISM THE LATEST Soyuz launchings register another space first for the Soviet Union. The sending into orbit of seven cosmonauts in three separate spacecraft is undoubtedly a further step towards the construction of a permanently-orbiting space station.

The three ships involved SOYUZ 6, with Air Force lieutenant-Colonel Georgy Shonin and civilian engineer Dr Valery Kubasov on board. SOYUZ 7, crewed by lieutenant-colonels Anatoly Filipchenko and Viktor Gorbatko and civilian engineer Dr. Vladislav Volkov.

SOYUZ 8, carrying Colonel Vladimir Shatalov, Commander-in-Chief for the whole mission, and Dr Alexei Yeliseyev, another civilian scientist.

Both the occupants of Soyuz 8 have had previous experience of space flight.

Both flew in the Soyuz 4 and 5 mission last January when two cosmonauts landed in a different vehicle from the one that sent them into space after completing docking manoeuvres. Yeliseyev has walked in space—a necessary part of any operation in space construction.

Diagrams published recently in the Soviet magazine 'Week', although not specifically referring to last week's mission, showed orbiting spacecraft joined by big tubes to allow movement from one to the other and to form the nucleus of a laboratory.

WELDING

TESTS During this latest flight welding techniques which will be used in the future for connecting sections of such a laboratory were tested out.

Kubasov and Shonin carried out the welding experiment by remote control, using equipment called 'Vulcan' which was situated in a compartment sealed off from their own re-entry capsule and living quarters.

Kubasov brought the samples of welded metal back to the re-entry capsule before the return flight and it is reported that arc welding, electron beam welding and electrode welding were all tested in the experiment.

The Americans are now extremely worried about the Soviet programme. Many American scientists believe that orbiting laboratories should have been given higher priority in the US space programme than the sending of men to the moon.

They believe that the recovery of lunar material by the Apollo 11 crew was out of all proportion in terms of cost and a number of leading scientists have already resigned over this issue since July.

FOUR-YEAR LEAD It is estimated that the USSR now has a four-year lead over the United States in techniques for assembling space equipment in orbit using recoverable space shuttles and that they will be assembling ..observatories and craft for planetary • exploration on the moon by 1975.

This is the price that the US is paying for throwing everything into the Apollo project.

President Kennedy's demand for a US 'space spectacular' by the end of the 1960s to overshadow the USSR's early successes has now rebounded with a vengeance.

The single-shot trips to the moon which have been characteristic of the American programme work out at about a billion dollars a piece and are completely uneconomical for any future programme of planned exploration involving large numbers of men and tons of equipment.

While the USSR will now proceed to the almost immediate construction of a space station capable of housing large numbers of scientists (each Soyuz craft can house six in comfort) the US programme will now have to go through major FLIGHTS UP At the moment a US threeman station is scheduled in 1972 but the Apollo programme still dominates. The Apollo flights will continue at three a year up to Apollo 20 in 1972.

While the Apollo 11 astronauts continue their whistlestop world tour, the Soyuz flight, coupled with the crisis of the American programme, threaten to cloud over the immense technological feat accomplished in the moon flight.

The tour has coincided with the launching in Britain of the film 'Footprints on the Moon —Apollo 1l' This emerges as an open propaganda film for the United States. It adds little in material to that which was presented on TV at the time of the flight.

In the background Dr Wernher von Braun drones on, occasionally interrupted by someone with an incredible French accent impersonating Jules Verne.

And that's about it. No scientific detail of interest and no documentary material even on the US programme.

Everything was reduced to some frantic flag-waving and 'the greatest show on earth'.

Indeed, capitalism in decay reduces even the most inspiring of man's achievements to the level of the gutter.