No rehabilitation for purge victims

IN HIS 1956 Secret Speech, Khrushchev makes no direct reference to the Moscow Trials and the murder of Lenin's Central Committee.

He explains why: 'Just before the 20th Party Congress I summoned the State Prosecutor, Comrade Rudenko, who had been involved in many of the cases during the purges of the 1930s.

'I asked him: "Comrade Rudenko, I'm interested in the open trials. Tell me, how much basis in actual fact was there for the accusations made against Bukharin Bukharin, Rykov, Syrtsov, Lominadze, Krestinsky and many, many other people well known to the Central Committee...?"

'Comrade Rudenko answered that, from the standpoint of judicial norms, there was no evidence whatsoever for condemning or even trying those "The case for prosecuting them had been based on personal confessions, beaten out of them under physical and psychological torture [these were the 'judicial norms' observed by Stalin during the great purges]..• revertneless, we deciaea not Khrushchev's insistence on a to say anything about the open partial rehabilitation of those trials in my speech to the 20th Bolshevik leaders killed under Party Congress... What was Khrushchev's reason official version of Party history Contents include:

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Trotskyist policy and the General Election: A reply to the 'Morning Star' The Charter of Basic Rights Replacing the Tories Available from Fill in the form below and send to NATIONAL SECRETARY, SOCIALIST LABOUR LEAGUE, 186A CLAPHAM HIGH ST, LONDON, SW4. Name a JOURNAL OF IRISM NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS 184 Clapham i Street sure 186A Clapham High Street, SW4. for maintaining a slander on honest communists, unprecedented in the entire history of the international workers' moveIt is here that Khrushchev touches on a very sensitive nerve for the leaders • of the British Communist Party. For he goes on:

•.. there had been representatives of the fraternal communist parties present when Rykov, Bukharin and the other leaders of the people were tried and sentenced.

"These representatives had then gone home and testified in their own countries to the justice of the sentences . . .

This was most certainly the case with the leaders of the British Party. After each massacre, they jubilantly trumpeted their praise for the butcher Stalin and heaped slander on his tortured, defenceless victims.

The pro-Stalinist D. N. Pritt, KC churned out a whole book on the Zinovie trial proving that Lenin's closest comrades had been in league with the counterrevolution nearly all their political lives.

A considerable proportion of the British Stalinist press was devoted to articles and resolutions upholding the trumped-up charges at the three Moscow trials as shining examples of Soviet justice.

To this very day, not one of these slanderous attacks on the pioneers of Bolshevism and the leaders of the Russian Revolution uds vetu willurawn. hac hoon with Argun Everything still stands as far as Gollan, Pritt and company are concerned.

As Khrushchev himself says:

'We didn't want to discredit the fraternal Party representatives who had attended the open trials, so we indefinitely postponed the rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov and the rest.

I can see now that our decision was a mistake. It would have been better to tell everything. Murder will always out...

And so will historical truth, as the Stalinist leaders of the British Communist Party, many of whom actively engaged in the antiTrotsky slander campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, are discovering.

Stalin jars harshly with • the Fourth International Just off the press NATIONAL TUNION OF PUBLIC EMPLOYE BaRMONDSEY GEN. BRANCH REG. NO 1386 ORGANISE AGITATE EDUCATIE Molotov, Khrushchev, and Stalin in (19347) being promoted in the Soviet Union by its present rulers.

This suggests that if the work is genuine, it is being used to back up those arguing for such a policy in the Soviet Union.

For example, this is what Khrushchev has to say about some of Stalin's main victims:

'Almost the whole Politbureau which had been in office at the time of Lenin's death was purged ...At Lenin's side, Zinoviev and Kameney gave worthy guidance to the Party.

When the government moved to Moscow, Zinoviev stayed in Leningrad... And Moscow had been entrusted to Kamenev.

'Yet now these men were in the dock as criminals and were soon to be eliminated as enemies of the people!

'Stalin's purge of the Party swept from the oppositionists in 1936 to the rightists in 1938, when Rykov, Bukharin and other leaders of the people and the Party [note —not enemies, but leaders, of the people!] were brought to trial.

It is fitting that these men should be called leaders. Take Rykoy, for example. He became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars [Soviet 'Prime Minister'] after Lenin's death. S AFRICA 50 YEARS AGO Workers fight racialism THE PRESENT controversy over Wasp helicopters for the S African Navy recalls a revealing incident of just over 50 years ago.

In the spring of 1919 the African workers of Johannesburg and the Reef, encouraged by the revolutionary workers' struggles in Russia and throughout Europe, were mounting a courageous fight against attempts to tighten the Pass Laws, which were being used systematically to break a wave of miners' Thousands of men threw away their passes and openly invited Chile: Peasants told 'Hand back land' CHILEAN peasants who recently seized farm land in the S Valdivia region have restored it to the old owners following a wage settlement.

Interior Ministry under-secretary Daniel Vergara said last week that some 2,000 peasants gave the land back after owners agreed to pay the higher wages demanded by the farm-workers' union.

'He was a man of merit in the eyes of the Party and a worthy representative of Soviet power. Yet he was shot.

'As for Bukharin, Lenin had called him "our Bukharchik", his "ABC of Communism" was a primer of Marxist-Leninist wisdom for the entire old generation. He, too, was brought to trial and eliminated...' Khrushchev aptly calls this period the era of the 'meat mincer".

Not so the latest official Rykov arrest in . an attempt to break the racialist law. They were subjected to brutal repression by police and white vigilantes more than 700 were arrested. S. M. Makgatho of the African National Congress wrote: "They were driven like cattle, trampled by mounted policemen under their horses' hoofs, shot at by white volunteers, and some men and women are in their graves as a result of their refusal to buy any more passes.' The S African government hastily prepared to repress this potentially revolutionary movement. Some of their preparations have come to light in newlyopened British Air Ministry archives.

On April 3, 1919, the Dominion premier F. S. Malan wrote a secret minute to the Governor General in Capetown asking for British aid 'in view of the labour difficulties at present existing in Johannesburg and the possibility of serious trouble' But peasants in areas bordering Valdivia are still refusing to surrender some 200 other farms seized after the government of 'Marxist ' President Salvador Allende took power last autumn on a programme of agrarian The Allende government is clearly embarrassed by the land seizures, which are now taking on a violent character as the rich landowners fight back.

In the Concepcion A review by Robert Black Soviet account of Stalin's rule, which can be found in 'A Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union', published in Moscow in 197°, and now on sale in an English language version in British Communist Party bookshops.

One would have thought that even the shortest of short histories could find room for an account of how Lenin's Party was destroyed.

Instead, we discover the following:

'Socialism created favourable conditions for the development of democracy in the country as a whole and within the Party.' (This passage is dealing specifically with the years of the great purge.)

'The introduction of the 1936 Constitution signified further democratization of the Soviet social and state system.

In December 1937, elections were held to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR... The elections demonstrated the strength and vitality of socialist democracy and the Soviet people's support for the Party? (p. 238.)

It is of this very year, so 'strong and vital' in its 'socialist democracy' that Khrushchev bitterly comments:

'In the late 1930s Hitler He wanted the temporary loan of a British aeroplane and pilot 'together with a sufficient supply of bombs, explosive and smoke, and flares' to be 'held in reserve mainly for demonstration purposes and consequent moral effect against the natives on the Reef, should they become out of hand. 'Ministers, he added, 'desire to make it clear that the machine will not be used against the white population of Johannesburg.' The Governor General, Lord Buxton, replied by return, agreeing to send a plane manned by a Lieutenant A. H. Gearing, a Royal Air Force flying officer seconded from the 17th Mounted Rifles.

It is understood, Buxton wrote, 'that Lt Gearing's services are to be utilized only in connection with any serious native disturbance, and that he is not to be requested or required to use his aeroplane in connection with any European disturbance.' Gearing could use his bombs and Lewis gun only if expressly of Valdivia, a 17-year-old peasant was killed when a hand grenade exploded in his pocket.

Reports say he was acting as a guard on a ranch seized by peasants.

Rather than openly side with the rural poor, the Chilean government has accused the Christian Democratic Party, which holds the balance of power in parliament between Allende's coalition and the right-wing preparing his attack and doing everything he could to undermine our military leadership.

'We helped him along considerably by destroying the cream of our executive personnel, our Party leadership and our scientific intelligentsia.

"The blood bath reached a redhot frenzy in 1937: (Emphasis added.)

cratic in the world'-was also the year of the second Moscow trial and military purges, which served as open invitation for Hitler to invade the Soviet Union once Poland had been put out of the way.

Unlike the leaders of British Stalinism, Khrushchev recognizes that the Stalin purges are not a purely Soviet affair, but that they had a profound impact on the whole course of the world class struggle in the 1930s.

It is high time therefore that we considered Stalin's role on the world political scene, and how much Khrushchev, despite his 'anti-Stalinism', was to follow in his footsteps as an exponent of class-collaboration, on a scale undreamed of by the opportunists of the Second International and the English Fabians.

CONTINUED ordered in writing by his comnanding officer, 'after the nilitary or police have found themselves compelled to open fire against the natives' Gearing himself was told to keep his mission secret as far as possible and to pretend he was in the Reef for an ordinary visit. The records unfortunately do not show whether Gearing's bombs and Lewis gun were ever used, but they leave nobody in any doubt that that was the intention.

It is worth pointing out for the benefit of those liberals who are morally indignant about present-day aid to Vorster that these events took place during the Liberal premiership of David Lloyd George.

Buxton, too, was a Liberal, and was in the 1911 administration which brought in Unemployment Insurance.

He had earlier served on the conciliation committee which awarded the 'Dockers' Tanner' at the end of the 1889 London dock strike. nationalists, of encouraging seizures.

In this way it hopes to reassure Chile's ruling class that the Allende regime is opposed to attacks on the private property of rich landowners.

This government will not build socialism in Chile. The more it vacillates before the resistance of capitalism, the greater the dangers of a right-wing military coup backed up by US imperialism. 6.45 7.05 7.30 8.00 9.00 9.20 10.10 10.40 11.15 11.37 BE 11.006.35 7.05 7.30 8.00 9.00 TELEVISION TOP OF THE FORM.

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