LET HISTORY JUDGE STALINISM

Line ungins and Consequences ol Stamms (acu Man 23030 is the first independent attempt in the Soviet Union to understand the Stalin era which has come out of that country. It is a damning indictment of Stalin and Stalinism which confirms everything which Trotsky wrote about the bureaucratic degeneration of the first workers' state. From the great tension under which it is written, its passion drawn from the sufferings of millions of people, is also a testimony to the fact that the conquests of the October 1917 Revolution have not been destroyed. Medyedev writes as a communist intellectual, an oppositionist who is harassed and persecuted for his struggle to tell the truth as he sees it. His book has great merits and deserves a careful study both for what it provides in the way of corroboration for the Trotskyist analysis and what it leaves out. On some crucial questions the book is fundamentally wrong. This series of articles submit Medveder's book to detailed scrutiny with the aim of pursuing the struggle against Stalinism to the end. It will deal in particular with his errors and omissions and point the way for a more rounded analysis which must begin with the works of Trotsky which are cited in the footnotes. of Ctaliniem? (Manmillan {5 75) Stalin have found it difficult to admit that the trials were frame-ups from start to finish. Medvedev quotes from British Stalinist R. ralme Dutt who said 'the final verdict on the trials, whose validity is disputed by many living, will rest with future historians'. Dutt, one of the leading for Stalinism and all its crimes, 1s created the contempt he deserves:

"The truth is', says Medvedev, 'that all these trials were completely fraudulent, They were a theatrical presentation that had to be rehearsed many times before it could be shown to spectators.' Trotsky and his and rend argued along these lines from The beginning." The anel contradictions of every trial were exposed when not only the Stalinist press in every country but a multitude of bourgeois organs accepted the veracity of the testimony of the accused, which today everyone knows was extracted the most brutal physical and mental tortures.

Nevertheless, the trials and the purges, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousande of communists, are still treated with an embarrassed silence in the press of the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement. It is true that all the defendants in the trials have been rehabilitated as citizens and some restored to Party membership POSIhumously, of course-but the verdicts have not been formally annulled. Nor have the slanders against Leon self- the principal accused'— been retracted.

Medvedev also reports: Not one of the books on Party history that appeared after the 20th Party Congress mentioned the trials the 1930s. Neither do the 1960 and 1961 textbooks on Party history. The 1962 textbook has two lines on the subject: "The repression of the 1930s was begun against former ideological opponents, who were represented as agents of imperialism and foreign intelligence services"?

The 1964 'History of the USSR' prepared by the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences was a little more explicit, but not much. Basically, the bureaucracy is afraid of an honest reckoning with the past which would reveal its own origins and the complicity of its acknowledged leaders with the crimes of the Stalin era.

It cannot permit the story of the Opposition's struggle to be honestly reported. It cannot allow all the documents to be read. It cannot make accessible to historians all the secret files, if any survive.

It prefers to hold the keys to the archives for féar that the secret of its own social nature will be revealed. The same cringing fear of a reckoning with the past prevails in the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain and in the other communist parties.

It was obvious,' concludes Medvedev, 'that Stalin's extermination of former oppositionists was not accidental; it was a premeditated, planned political act.' Revenge, he believes, was the primary motive. By creating a constant state of emergency through terror Stalin was able to concentrate more power in his hands. The logic of the situation led him to carry that terror into the ranks of his own, ostensibly, loyal supporters.

In its final paroxysm in 1937-1939 the terror cut deeply into the highest Party and state circles as well as into the high command of the armed forces. The list of Stalin's victims is a cross-section of the bureaucracy as whole. Dozens of prisons and camps had to be opened, many in the most desolate spots in the Soviet Union. The execution squads of the NKVD were never idle. This was the greatest repression in history.

In 1936-1939, on the most cautious estimates, 4 to 5 million people were subjected to repression for political reasons. At least 400,000 to 500,000 of them — above all the high officials—were summarily shot; the rest were given long terms of confinement. In 1937-1938 there were days when up to a thousand people were shot in Moscow alone. These were not streams, these were rivers of blood, the blood of honest Soviet people. The simple truth must be stated: not one of the tyrants and despots of the past persecuted and destroyed so many of his compatriots' This is Medvedev echoing what the Trotskyists said about the Moscow Trials and the purges which followed them— at the time. All these events were known to many people in the communist parties outside the Soviet Union who not only kept silent, but made themselves the apologists for Stalin and his crimes. Most of them have remained silent to this day. What do they have to say in the light of Medvedev's book?

Soviet state brought to the of disaster As the whirlwind of repression swept through Soviet society, causing innumerable human tragedies and creating a national trauma which has not yet been healed, it also brought the Soviet state to the brink of disaster. No shred of credence now clings to the theory that the purges were necessary in order to sweep out dangerous opponents, incompetents or fainthearts.

Stalin's own claim that the class struggle intensified in the process of building socialism, like all his theories, was intended to cover up his own arbitrary rule and give some semblance of justification for what was otherwise inexcusable. That some honest people in the communist parties accepted this theory makes it all the more tragic and discreditable, makes it all the more necessary that the truth should be told and admitted.

There are now many works by those of Stalin's victims who by some chance were able to escape, or who lived through the horrors of the prisons and camps. They add their testimony to the damning picture of his tyranny. What remains puzzling to most of them, and to those historians who have examined the development of Stalin's regime as a whole, is why these things happened.

After Khrushchev's 'secret' speech to the 20th Congress in 1956, this question had to be faced in the Soviet Union under conditions where the bureaucracy, which owed its position to Stalin, now had to disavow the departed boss without undermining their own position. It tried first to get out of this dilemma by blaming Stalin entirely for the repressions of the 1930s while maintaining that he had been right in his struggle against the Opposition in the 1920s.

While a certain amount of leeway existed for criticism of the purges and the rehabilitation of Stalin's victims, it was never allowed to go • beyond certain limits and it had to be carried on within the fiction of the 'cult of personality'. That is to say, all the crimes and repressions were blamed onto Stalin and the search for reasons why Stalinism had been permitted to arise on the soil of a workers' state was prohibited.

In 1956 and the following years, when a certain amount of discussion of the • Stalin period had to be accepted, the bureaucracy, fell back on a banal and idealist explanation. The crimes and 'excesses' were all the fault of Stalin and of the 'personality cult.

The bureaucracy adopted a historical method in dealing with its own past which was completely opposed to the materialist conception of history. To search for the material basis of Stalin's power, as they well knew, would involve an investigation of their own past. This they could not permit because it would undermine their authority, call into question their power and privileges.

The events in Hungary in 1956, which raised the spectre of the political overthrow of the bureaucracy, were a terrible warning. The "de-Stalinization' campaign was kept within very strict limits. Stalin was simply written out of the official histories. All the great questions of the Stalin era remained unanswered One wing in the bureaucracy was opposed to Khrushchev's 'revelations' and favoured rehabilitation of Stalin. In the main, by the 1960s, an uneasy equilibrium reigned. But the history of the Stalin era was