[We have translated the following article from the December 31 issue of Rood, a Flemish revolutionary socialist biweekly.]
With its marks of police provocation, the Leningrad case takes us back to the Stalin period and its sinister trials. Secret proceedings, violations of judicial norms, the seemingly coincidental arrest of "accomplices" in several Soviet cities immediately after the unsuccessful attempt to seize the airplane, the foiled "blow," the spectacular press campaign-everything points
• to a painstakingly set up police provocation.
The most notable thing about the affair is the severe penalties imposed, which are completely out of proportion to the alleged offenses. There must have been powerful reasons for the Kremlin to defy world opinion in this way, particularly the opinion of the Western Communist parties. Moscow does not deliberately court unpopularity.
Only one explanation is possible for such a move — the Russian bureaucracy is afraid. It is frightened by the memory of the Czechoslovak "spring"; frightened by the revolt growing within the Soviet Union itself. The sentence in Leningrad was prompted by panic. The foundations of the Stalinist edifice are shaking.
The basis of this case is simple. Despite the fact that Jews in the USSR are recognized as a nationality and the fact that this nationality is even recorded on their identity cards, they are deprived of their rights as a national minority, deprived of a paper in Yiddish (the mother tongue of hundreds of thousands of them), and deprived of any cultural life of their own. They encounter a vague but still virulent anti-Semitism (which is in fact promoted by the state leadership, since anti-Semitic writings are passed by the official censors). As a result of all this, the lews in the USSR have become nationalistic out of desperation. January 25, 1971
Humiliations, frustration, and oppression naturally arouse a strong national consciousness. The impossibility of giving expression to this legally in the USSR promotes Zionism among the Jewish masses, since a revolutionary rallying point is absent. (The large number of Jews in the new left opposition in the USSR is, of course, no coincidence.) In these conditions, a culture medium for Zionism can be distilled from the Stalinist society in the USSR.
Added to this is the ambiguity of the USSR's foreign policy - unconditionally pro-Israel in 1948, hysterically anti-Israel afterwards. And all this is topped off with an abundant anti- Semitic sauce disguised as anti-Zionism. This had to give rise to the development of Jewish nationalism, just as Great Russian domination has once again aroused the nationalism of many smaller nations in the USSR.
In Lenin and Trotsky's time the Jewish masses were encouraged to develop their national life in the Soviet framework. As a result, an extraordinarily rich Jewish working-class culture arose, which enabled the Jewish youth in the Soviet Union to identify fully with the workers struggle. Stalinism on the other hand meant (as for all other national minorities) the most brutal kind of national oppression, and exploitation of the most shameful prejudices. During the extermination of the Left Opposition and conflicts within the bureaucracy, Jews were very often singled out as victims. Fortunately, they have not yet suffered the fate of the Tatars, the Volga Germans, the Chechens, and other peopies who were subjected to actual genocide.
There is, therefore, no separate Jewish problem in the Soviet Union. There is simply the problem - the problem of a workers state distorted and poisoned by a bureaucratic caste, by a social group that will use any means to cling to power. Gomulka and Moczar went through the
Moscow also "school." Great Russian chauvinism (against which Lenin fought so hard at the end of his life) is nothing more than an ideological consequence of "socialism in one country," which was meant to take the place of internationalism. With this mentality, the second world war (the Great Patriotic War) was waged not against Nazism and the German imperialist bourgeoisie but against the German people as a whole, including the working class.
The "anti-Zionism" of the USSR (propagated by such reprehensible figures as the ill-famed Trofim Kichko, a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences!) has a strong odor of anti-Semitism. The tone, the arguments, the reasoning used against the "Zionists" is similar to that of the sinister Prague trials in 1950, which also employed the pretext of anti-Zionism. Leningrad is now experiencing a new edition of the so-called "Doctors' Plot" in 1953, the case aimed at a group of Soviet Jewish doctors. This attitude of the Soviet bureaucracy is a crimea crime against the Jewish community, against the cause of socialism, and against the Palestinians (who, in fact, are also being sacrificed by the Soviet leadership on the altar of "peaceful coexistence").
Thus, objectively, the Soviet policy is Zionism's best ally. National oppression of the Jews always triggers the Zionist reflex. Anti-Zionism transformed into anti-Semitism therefore promotes Zionist colonization in actuality, the colonization carried out by the ruling class of the Israeli state (Tel-Aviv is waiting impatiently for colons to settle the occupied areas).
The Leningrad trial is giving Zionism an unhoped for opportunity to brighten up their escutcheon with the colors of a "national liberation struggle" in the USSR. The way the Israelis are exploiting this sinister masquerade in the Soviet Union is sufficient testimony to this. The Leningrad trial is giving the leaders of the Jewish state a chance to wipe out the revolutionary vanguard's long and patient work of explaining the Palestinian question.
For us revolutionists, Trotskyist militants in the workers movement, continuers of the revolutionary traditions of the Russian revolution and the Left Opposition slaughtered by Stalin, the "air piracy" question is only incidental to the Leningrad trial. The real question on the agenda is the class nature of the Soviet state and the deeper causes of a degeneration, of which anti-Semitism (as well as the problem of the Tatars and the persecution of the intellectuals) is only one of the more striking manifestations. The Leningrad trial symbolizes
the debasement of a regime heading into crisis and therefore trying to find scapegoats and to hold up intimidating examples in order to protect its underpinnings. The collapse of Stalinism is quickening; the Russian workers will finish it off.
It was in the USSR that the first section of the Fourth International arose, and this country remains the key to the victory of the world socialist revolution. As a result, our revolutionary organization bears a still heavier responsibility.