LET HISTORY JUDGE STALINISM

Ky Meavedey tansate as Let ristory Jusge: ane Dook Dy ine Urgins and Consequences or stalnism' (Macmilian tJ./5) 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 Medyeder'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. -e Cs_19..9. the city and the country.' Later he writes about millions of prisoners in labour camps and concludes:

'Industry would have developed faster if these millions of innocent people had worked as free men. Likewise, the use of force against the peasantry slowed of agriculture, with painful effects on the whole Soviet economy to the present dav. It is an incontrovertible, arithmetically demonstrable fact that Stalin did not choose the shortest path; he did not speed up, he slowed down the movement towards socialism and communism' Here Medvedev is perfectly right against all the apologists for the bureaucracy, as well as against those who argue that such methods are inevitable in a planned economy:

'By maintaining that Stalin's lawlessness derived Tine very essence of socialism, from Marxism-Leninism, from the proletarian revolution', he points out, Contronice the ideas socialism, Marxism-Leninism, and the proletarian revolution in the eyes of the masses. They try to transfer to the whole social system the disillusionment and anger that, rise in people when they learn of Stalinist crimes.' of course is not the least of those crimes-that for many people socialism is seen as inseparable from purges and repressions of the type which have taken place in the Soviet Union, or the type of Medvedey does not say so.

He rejects the view that Stalin's crimes were just mistakes, untoward incidents which fade into insignificance beside carrying O11T great historical tasks. As put forward by Stalin's accomplices and apologists in the Soviet Union, or by the Manists. an excuse is offered for the carrying out of similar crimes.

As Medveder insists: In 1936-1937 Stalin was not engaged with counter-revolutionaries. On the was Stalin whose contrary, actions in those years were objectively counter-revolutionary. The main tendency of the mass repression of 1936-1938 Was an assault on the Party, on old Bolshevik cadres. on proletarian revolutionaries, on the intelligentsia that were honourably serving the interests of the masses.

: I spent in camps I saw no counter-revolutionaries', wrote one of Stalin's victims of period in Open Letter to Mao Tse-tung. Top: Stalin lying in state in the Kremlin, 1953. Bottom: Stalin's pallbearers (left to right) Bulganin, Molotov, pa alenkov, and chief of