Printrepe 2 The Second World War: The Stalin- Hitler Pact by Robert Black

visionists.

The fight for alternative ist record-and ours.

REID'S REFERENCE to 'that famous Trotskyist "unconditional defence" which incorporates in it the necessity for overthrowing the government' (p. 48) is a cheap attempt to slander the Fourth International as an anti-Soviet moveOn page 32 she alleges that by unconditional defence of the Soviet Union Trotsky meant 'the only way to defend it was by the overthrow of its government. On the same page she also refers to "Trotsky's so-called "unconditional defence" line'.

Trotsky never made his defence of the USSR conditional or dependent on the overthrow of Stalin.

In fact, as Reid has to admit, Trotsky's firmness on this question drove him to a split with the Schachtman tendency in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party of the USA.

Time and again the same question has come up: has the development of the bureaucracy and the killing of all the old Bolsheviks destroyed everything created by the revolution of 1917?

Trotsky answered firmly in the negative, as we do today. With Trotsky we defend the Marxist position that despite the terrible ravages of Stalinism, the bureaucracy has not been able to overthrow the property relations established by the Octwer Revolution.

Political power The working class lost all political power under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

The Soviets were turned into tame instruments of the bureaucracy, the statutes on workers' control of production were either revoked or trampled on by the managerial caste that owed its privileges and power to Stalin.

But despite all these tremendous setbacks for working class, capitalist property relations had and have not been restored.

Within the framework of nationalized property, state central planning and the monopoly of foreign trade, the bureaucracy won for itself social privileges approaching those of the ruling class of the capitalist states.

But the bureaucracy did not become a ruling class by so doing.

It distorted the property relations established by the Revolution, it stole vast sections of the surplus product of the working class for its own private consumption (not investment), but it was not able to abolish these same property A Soviet bureaucrat, however exalted, remained but a bureaucrat-and then only if Stalin permitted it.

Last analysis and workers' movement at that time.

Reid also presents Schachtman's position wrongly again betraying her profound ignorance of Trotskyism. He was not a supporter of the theory that Russia had reverted to state capitalism and that the bureaucracy were a capitalist class.

Schachtman held the bureaucracy to be a new type of ruling class, based on collective property relations, the theory of 'bureaucratic collectivism'.

But far worse than mistakes and omissions is her failure to quote from a single document of Trotsky's on the class nature of the Soviet Union and the stand taken by the Fourth International in its defence. To do so would immediately expose all her slancalled union Trotsky's 'sounconditional defence. Schachtman In his struggle against the Schachtman group after the outbreak of the Second World War, Trotsky underlined • his position many times over:

•.. let us suppose that Hitler turns his weapons against the East and invades the territories occupied by the Red Army. [Unlike the Stalinists, Trotsky always warned that the Pact with Hitler only postponed the Nazi onslaught against the Soviet Union.] Under these conditions, partisans of the Fourth International, without changing in any way their attitude toward the Kremlin oligarchy, will advance to the forefront, as the most urgent task of the hour, the military resistance against Hitler. The workers will say:

"We cannot cede to Hitler the overthrowing of Stalin; that is our own task"? ('In Defence of Marxism' p. 24-25).

Where is there any reference to the defence of the USSR being conditional on the overthrow of Stalin, Mrs Reid?

On the contrary, Trotsky Molotov, who thought fascism was | confer with Nazi leaders. He was gi states that the most urgent task is its defence against Hitler, despite the Stalin regime and its oppression of the working class.

On page 35, he returns to this same point:

We are completely and wholeheartedly for an independent (of Hitler as well as of Stalin) Soviet Ukraine. But what to do if, before having obtained this independence, Hitler attempts to seize the Ukraine which is under the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy? The Fourth International answers: Against Hitler we will defend this Ukraine enslaved by Stalin.

Unconditional 'What does "unconditional" defence of the USSR mean?

It means that we do not lay any conditions upon the bureaucracy. It means that independently of the motive and the causes of the war, we defend the social basis of the USSR, if it is menaced by danger on the part of imperialism' From this statement it is crystal-clear that Trotsky suba matter of taste', seen arriving in Be Iven a Nazi salute and guard of hono CINEMA such a film financed in this country, and this is all the more reason that 'Adalen 31' should be put on general release here and shown at local cinemas throughout the country.

This will surely be one of the great film classics and it is far too valuable to be shown only to the privileged few who can get to Academy One in London.

Jackson.

raises some important questions when she sa •ys that 'Adalen 3I' • sho uld be put on general release, ordinated everything, including , the self-determination of the Ukraine and the removal of the Stalinist bureaucracy, to the defence of the USSR.

In an interview on February 14, 1940, Trotsky returned to this theme:

6. • • you will see clearly where I stand in relation to this grouping of forces: on the side of the USSR entirely and unconditionally; before all against imperialism-of all labels; after that-against the Kremlin oligarchy which facilitates with its foreign policy the preparation of the march against the USSR and with its domestic policy debilitates the Red Army'.

Yes. Well over a year before the Nazi invasion, Trotsky warned the Soviet and international working class of German imperialism's designs on the USSR. Following Hitler's conquest of Poland, Trotsky gave this prophetic warning:

"To picture it as if the new western boundary of the USSR were a permanent barrier to Hitler's road eastward violates all proportion. Hitler solves his tasks by stages. On the order of the day now is ling poi because it is at that point that you come slap up against the big monopolies.

Last week I tried to sketch out some of the difficulties of film-making in this country, but left out the whole problem of film distribution.

There are two major cinema circuits in this country. That is to say the actual bricks and mortar of theatres are owned by two monopoly chains.

In effect two men decide what is to be shown at your local cinema.

Their considerations are, of course, financial; whether the He signed pacts and occupied territory (such as parts of Finland and Poland and the Baltic states) but he was unable and unwilling to summon Freestonary potential that greatest defence of all: and capacity of the international working class.

This meant unleashing that force the bureaucracy feared as much as any imperialist intervention. It was in this sense that Trotsky spoke of bureaucracy defending and even extending the revolution (as with the change in property relations Poland and the annexed parts of Finland) by counter-revolutionary methods, methods which only alienated working class from the Soviet Union and communism.

Following the defeat France by Germany, Trotsky again, and for almost the last time, raised his voice in defence of the Soviet Union and against the policy of Stalin, which placed it in pawn to the goodwill of Hitler:

'In spite of the Kremlin's territorial seizures, the international position of the USSR is worsened in the extreme. The Polismanite distrai disappear tomorrow. Mighty Germany, master of Europe, acquires a common frontier with the USSR.

•... Her victories in the West are only preparation for a gigantic move toward the East. In the attack on Finland the Red Army, decapitated and demoralized, again by Stalin, demonstrated its weakness before the whole world. In his coming march against the USSR, Hitler will find support in Japan' Persecuted This is how the meagre and persecuted forces of the Fourth International prepared for the defence of the Soviet Union against the Nazi offensive. How did Reid's Stalinists, both in Britain and the Kremlin, match up to this challenge?

For nearly two whole years, from August 1939 to June 22, 1941, they pretended to their own members and the working class all over the world that there was no such danger.

And we shall prove it.

But first let us expand a little on Trotsky's reference to Stalin's purge of the Red Army forces.

What was the extent of the military purge begun by Stalin in June 1937?

At the 22nd Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1961, Khrushchey only gave a hint of the depth of the purge:

'Delegates have spoken here with pain in their hearts of many innocent victims among prominent Party officials and statesmen. - Such prominent army leaders as Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Uborevich, Kork, Eidemann and others were victims of the repressions.

"They were military men who had great services to their credit, especially Tukhachevsky, Yakir and Uborevich, who were outstanding soldiers.' ('The Road to Communism', p. 346.)

Evidently Stalin felt he could do without their services. Not only they, but literally thousands of other Soviet military leaders, the cream of the Red General Staff, were murdered in the years between 1937 and 1939. rian Moore film will show a profit.

In this they are speculators, gamblers at the tote, with no more guarantees of the mythical jackpot than any other gambler.

And in this sense their choices are haphazard and uncertain and today there is a good deal of confusion about which film actually does make money.

In the old days of Hollywood studio productions with their contract stars, along with a generally high audience attendance at local cinema houses, there was a certain stability, a certain predictability.

But since the breakdown of the studio system and the adof One undo and eight om manders rhile onl naval Far cast of the staff were purged all taken Irom soviet sources in the Sunking thes Party, terrible DIows against the Parmed WORKING class. orces and the economi , Stalin ›ecame the spearhead o1 the impera 1s1 offensive against the Soviet Union.

Though not restoring capi talist property relation: Dur cauclacy served Imperial small that limit by smash bulwarks erected anly or une international work ng class and colonial people Stalinism destroyed both.

It was, and remain: coun Reid skates on very thin ice With the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and she knows it:

'For those have been nourished on the conventional explanations the Second World War which began with Soviet-German at even international communist o [Stalin's • thee streak 51939 Congress secure.

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