LET HISTORY JUDGE STALINISM

Line : Urgins and consequences Of Stallisin Mall 1 aлo1J. the first independent attempt in the Soviet Union to under. nd the Stalin era which has come out of that country. It is : sta dai mning indictment of Stalin and Stalinism which confirm: erything which Trotsky wrote about the bureaucrati evt dej generation of the first workers' state. From the great tensior der which it is written, its passion drawn from the suffering: unı millions of people, is also a testimony to the fact that thi nquests of the October 1917 Revolution have not beer cOl de: stroyed. Medveder writes as a communist intellectual, ar positionist who is harassed and persecuted for his struggl opI tell the truth as he sees it. His book has great merits anc des serves a careful study both for what it provides in the way o rroboration for the Trotskyist analysis and what it leave: CO1 t. On some crucial questions the book is fundamentall! oul ong. This series of articles submit Medveder's book tr de1 tailed scrutiny with the aim of pursuing the struggli ainst Stalinism to the end. It will deal in particular witl ag: ; errors and omissions and point the way for a mor unded analysis which must begin with the works of Trotsk! TOI wh Munnannanne of (tolinicm' (Monmillon (5 75)

lich are cited in the footnotes.

CONTINUED IN ONE at least the correct step in the circumstances.' The right turn is not seen as coming from essentially the same method as the 'third period' excesses of ultraleftism, nor can it be recognized for what it was.

There is no need to decide who invented the new turn. It may have been Dimitrov, as Medvedev sugests, but there were others in the communist parties and in the leadership of the Comintern who were capable of inventing it.

Much more likely it arose empiracally in the practice of a number of countries after the victory of Hitler, when the danger of fascism became acute. There were, for example, signs of its emergence in France from the time of the fascist riots in February, 1934, and France was one of the first countries in which it found expression even before the 7th Congress of the Comintern of August 1935.

There is no doubt, however, that Stalin quickly made the policy his own and imposed it on the communist parties as firmly as he had done the policies of the 'third period'.

Medvedev skates over the Popular Front period in the most cursory way, yet it bears examination in relation to what he has written about Stalinism in the 1930s.

While the remnants of the Opposition were being smashed, the Moscow Trials were being staged and hundreds of thousands of loyal ommunists were being imprisoned and murdered, Stalin was winning support and applause from many 'democrats' and liberals for the moderation of policy and its Defence of the bourgeois status quo More than a shift in tactics was involved. The German events indicated, as Trotsky vas soon to point out, that Stalinism had swung definitively to the defence of the bourgeois status quo; it had become a counter-revolutionary force. Without understandLaval concluaing ine rrencn pact 1930This foreign corollary, the ing this, the nature of the Popular-Front tactic and the so-called struggle against war and fascism proclaimed at the 7th Congress cannot be understood.

There was, of course, a shift in diplomatic policy • on the part of the Soviet Union which came about after Hitler's consolidation of power in Germany.

Until then Soviet dipl omacy had looked to Germany " as a counter-balancing forc Britain and France from whom the main danger to