SUMULONG'S
A Philippine Constabulary "source" claimed at the beginning of March that Commander Sumulong had been stabbed to death in Pampanga by a trusted aide. The report, however, has not been confirmed.
-299-
women who protest against this trampling
under foot of the most basic human rights.
No one can be sure that when Valentin
Campa serves his [full] sentence some
bureaucrat will not order his term ex-
tended because after eleven years of im-
prisonment he did not change his mind,
falter, or renounce his ideas. Thought
control is the lowest depth to which a
dictatorial government can sink.
It is especially important at this
time to make these facts known to world
public opinion (fortunately Campa's case
has been roundly discussed in the press
by his political friends and by ordinary
people disturbed by the spreading repres-
sion in this country). For, as a result
of the international scandal touched off
by South Africa's readmission to the Olyn-
pic games which are to be held in Mexico
this year the Mexican government finds
itself in the center of a controversy on
the world stage over the right of peoples
not to suffer discrimination.
The Mexican Political Prisoners
Defense Committee addresses itself to all
groups, to democratic, progressive, and
revolutionary people and asks that they
redouble their efforts to inform and
educate about the state of "veiled repres-
sion" which is arousing alarm in this
country (still considered "revolutionary"
by all those who accept their government's
deceptive statements as true).
We demand of the Mexican govern-
ment what it requires of South Africa!
Respect for the human rights of
the Mexican revolutionary minority in the
Same way that it must demand respect for
the rights of the black majority_of South
Africa!
That the country in which the Olyn-
pics are to be held respect the constitu-
tion that governs it and grant Valentin
Campa parole!
Immediate release for the hundreds
of political prisoners (workers, peasants,
and students) that fill this country's
jails!
Long live international solidarity
with the victims of repression!
Mexico City
March 1968
DEATH UNCONFIRMED
It may have been "leaked" by the govern-
ment in hope of eliciting a response that
would help locate the guerrilla leader,
for whom a reward has been issued of
100,000 pesos [about $25,000].
IS REHABILITATION OF STALIN A POSSIBILITY?
(The following article by Lev Kopelev, entitled "Ist Eine Rehabilitierung Stalins Moglich?," has been translated by World Outlook from the January- February issue of Tagebuch, an Austrian magazine that is generally considered to be close to the Communist party of that country. The editor of Tagebuch identifies Lev Kopelev as a Soviet writer, a specialist in German literature, who is already well known to Tagebuch's readers. He was asked to comment on a subject of considerable concern to observers of the new developments in Soviet literature, according to the editor, and responded at some length.
[Kopelev's opinions are of special interest as a reflection of informed opinion among Soviet intellectuals. ]
* * *
You write, dear friend, with great apprehension about some recent Soviet publications, which, as you put it, made an "extremely disagreeable impression" on you. Specifically the publications are these: the article which you cited by Deborin and Telpukhovsky in the journal Voprosy Istorii KPSS [Problems of the History of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union)], No. 9, Voroshilov's menoirs appearing in Oktyabr, No. 10, the novels by V. Zakrutkin and V. Kochetov (serialized in Oktyabr, Nos. 6-10), V. Kochetov's journalistic sketch Gorod v Shineli [City in Uniform], which was published in book form, and a poem by 5S. Smirnov, which appeared in the journal Moskva, No. 10.
In all these publications, so diverse both in theme and type, you feel that you recognize one and the same hardline tendency, namely a desire to rehabilitate Stalin. It is quite natural that you were not only disappointed but also seriously apprehensive about the fact that after all that has become known in the last fourteen years, in contradiction to numerous documents and the experiences of millions of people, there are today journalists and writers who on their own would like to circumvent the resolutions of the twentieth, twenty-second and twenty-third party congresses and who consider themselves justified in maintaining that, although Stalin committed "a few errors," his role was on the whole progressive and beneficial for our country and for the international workers movement.
You want to know what I think about this. I will try to answer your question as clearly and simply as possible.
I think that you are right in condemning with the greatest sharpness these expressions of incorrigible “lackeys of the Stalin cult." However, I trust that your concern will be in vain and your fears prove exaggerated. Why do I believe this? On the basis of these considerations:
Stalin's defenders appeal to objective historical truth: Wasn't it Stalin who led the party and the state in the years of industrialization and the Fatherland war, in those years of unquestionable successes and victories? They appeal to historical objectivity and cite as well the very important subjective factor of the education of new generations in the spirit of socialist patriotism and respect for revolutionary tradition; they consider themselves obliged to maintain that Stalin was an outstanding statesman and that his work benefited socialism and our homeland.
If these restorationist attempts are viewed in the light of the facts which have become known and in accordance with the basic principles of Marxist historiography and if the real -- and not the imaginary effect on the intellectual and moral consciousness of the youth is considered, then it must be clearly realized that such efforts can only have results diametrically opposite to the intentions of even the most well-meaning of the restorationists.
The emergence and development of the notorious cult in the thirties and forties had many objective and subjective preconditions.
(a) Millions of people were convinced that our country was an isolated fortress besieged by deadly enemies; hence they considered maximum centraliza~ tion coupled with iron discipline necessary and justified.
(b) The successes in industrial and cultural development stood out with special prominence against the background of the world economic crisis and the growing strength of fascism. This served as an argument for those who maintained that all the wants and privations were only accidental insufficiencies or else the result of sabotage but that all the achievements were the product of the brilliant leadership of the "universal genius."
(c) The public confidence in the press, in the state apparatus -- and most importantly in the state security administration, in the judicial system and in the courts -- was so great that most people suppressed their own experience and doubts as, overnight, heroes and leaders were declared traitors, spies, enemies of
the people, as history was turned upside down, as heroic deeds were attributed to Stalin which he never performed and his adversaries were charged with crimes of which they were innocent.
(d) Blind faith was buttressed by mass trials. These aroused apprehension and fear in some. In others they strength-— ened the conviction that cunning foes were omnipresent and that, therefore, any wavering, any doubting of the rightness of Stalin's words and deeds, even an excess of moderation in settling accounts with waverers and doubters, meant direct aid to the enemy.
(e) During the war and after, all these objective and subjective preconditions received a -- let us say -- natural as well as an artificial reinforcement. Take me, for instance. I am one of those who learned to love Stalin during the war and, indeed, with a sincere love.
He was the head of our state and our army. All our hope for victory, our love for all that we were fighting for and for which we were ready to die was incorporated in him. We ascribed to him all the virtues that we saw in the best of us. We believed the myth of the great, the all-knowing leader because we wished for such a leader. We ourselves -- many consciously and many unconsciously -created this myth and we were convinced of its reality or virtual reality and still more of its absolute historical necessity, for we believed that victory was impossible without absolute authority and absolute faith.
It required many years and two party congresses, it required the perspective which our historical experience alone made possible, the new facts which came to light after 1953 and serious consideration of these new insights into the past and present before we finally understood what a repulsive "naked emperor" we had clothed with our blind faith and our fanaticism and how dearly this had cost our country and the international workers movement.
Twenty years ago, indeed, even ten years ago, out of an ignorance of the facts or by taking refuge in dialectical sophisms, one could quite sincerely declare himself both for Stalin and socialism -- cherish the welfare of the Soviet land and believe in the wisdom of Stalin's policy. Today, this is no longer possible.
After all that has become known in these past years, after the twentieth and twenty-second party congresses, after the publication of previously concealed documents of Lenin, after the publication of eyewitness accounts of hundreds of old Communists, the mythology of the Stalin cult is destroyed once and for all.
1. Today it is known to all and
clearly proved that Stalin's tyrannical
and incompetent interference in the man-
agement of the economy in the years from
1929 to 1933 as well as in the postwar
period led to widespread famine and to
the destruction of the economic bases not
only of the individual peasant enterprises
but also of the collective farms.
2. Today it is known to all and
proved that in the years from 1945 to
1940 with Stalin's knowledge and, indeed,
at his instigation, hundreds of thousands
of people, including the overwhelming
majority of the top officers and generals
of the Red Army and the majority of the
experienced and trained industrial admin-
istrators, were arrested, sent into penal
exile, murdered and tortured to death. In
those years more Communists were impris-—
oned in Stalin's jails and concentration
camps than in all the capitalist and fas-
cist countries put together. Among those
shot as enemies of the people were the
overwhelming majority of the delegates
to all previous party congresses, and
even the majority of the immediately pre-
ceding party congress of 1934 and the
Central Committee elected by it, as well
as the overwhelming majority of the men-
bers and functionaries of all the govern-
ments of the union republics and all the
regional and district party committees.
4. Today it is known to all and
proved that Stalin sought to transform
the nonaggression pact with Germany into
a treaty of friendship, that in his of-
ficial documents and speeches he desig-
nated Hitler's enemies as imperialist
aggressors and imposed a de facto ban on
antifascist propaganda.
4. Today it is known to all and
proved that Stalin, a pathologically
suspicious man who was suspicious even
of his most faithful and oldest friends
and his comrades in struggle (for ex-
ample, Yenukidze, Ordzhonikidze, Posty-
shev, Tukhachevsky and others), for some
unfathomable reason was filled with naive
trust in the friendship of a Hitler; he
trusted him to the extent that he disre-
garded numerous warnings reaching him via
various channels and ignored all intel-
ligence reports on this matter, thereby
condemning our army to very severe de-
feats and the entire country to terrible
losses and sacrifices.
5. Today it is known to all and
proved that after the war, with the knowl-
edge and at the instigation of Stalin,
once again millions of persons were sub-
jected to the harshest reprisals. Whole
peoples, the Volga Germans, the Kalmyks,
the Chechens, the Balkars, the Ingush,
the Karachai and the Crimean Tartars were
robbed of their homelands and sent into
exile .as entire nations, as whole ethnic
communities. The overwhelming majority of
former Soviet prisoners of war, even pris-— oners released from fascist concentration camps, were tried for "high treason." Their tragic fate is personified in the figure of Ivan Denisovich in Solzhenitsyn's novel.
6. Today it is known to all that it was Stalin who inspired the campaign of slander against Yugoslavia and tried to transplant the methods of the Beria terror, the lies and provocations, to Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Rumania and Czechoslovakia.
Today therefore an apology for Stalin is synonymous with defamation of socialism. The only ones who can defend Stalin today are unbelievably stupid simpletons among the bureaucrats grown old in service or retired, who have thoughts like the character in Dostoevsky's anecdote, "If there is no God, how can I be a captain?" or else completely conscienceless, cynical advocates of the Jesuitical principle that "The End Justifies Any Means," who are incapable of understanding that the Stalinist "means" already bear within them a negation of the end adduced to justify them.
Seeking to rehabilitate Stalin today as if there had been no twentieth, no twenty-second party congress, as if the incriminating documents were still unknown, to spread the fairy tales about his virtues and the lies about his loyal-~ ty to Lenin -- as Zakrutkin and Kochetov are doing -- means nothing else but furnishing the enemies of Communism with ideological weapons, ideologically playing into their hands; it means nothing else but cultivating cynicism, hypocrisy, and civic apathy in the youth, a contemptuous disbelief in precisely those ideas to which the restorers of the cult verbally swear allegiance.
It follows from this that such articles, memoirs, poems, all this literature, entirely independently of its authors' subjective intentions, objectively damages our country and our party and strengthens its enemies and disarms or repels its friends.
Nevertheless, the experience of history shows that an ideological censorship only impairs the healthy forces in cultural and literary development -- like any administrative persecution of literary or scholarly work. I am convinced therefore that it is impermissible to demand the banning or destruction of the above-named or similar works, to subject their authors to any punishment or restrictions. That would be using their own methods against the belated heirs of the Stalin cult -- the same Stalinism under a different name.
It is a different sort of thing that is needed. An objective critical study of such restorationist tendencies in literature, which must be undertaken here and in the press of our Communist brother parties, would substantially lessen the harm that these works do. In this way the spread of such intentions could be prevented. The defenders and restorers of the Stalin cult fear nothing more than free expression, a public airing of differences, concrete historical truth and competent Marxist criticisn.
We must not hinder either Deborin or Kochetov from writing and publishing anything they choose. But obstacles must not be put in the way either of those who want to criticize them. This is the only way to set limits on the mounting activity of the restorationists. Limits must be set, however. This tendency must be checked for the sake of our country, for all its friends, and for the cause of socialism throughout the world.
Moscow
November-—December 1967
LEV KOPELEV EXPELLED FROM CP
Lev Kopelev, the author of the above letter, has reportedly just been expelled from the Soviet Communist party for signing protests against the trial in January of four young Soviet writers -- Aleksandr Ginzburg, Vera Lashkova, Yuri Galanskov, and Aleksei Dobrovolsky. [See World Outlook, January 26, p. 69, for documents and background on this trial.]
Expelled along with Kopelev, who was identified in the March 26 report in the New York Times as the author of a book on the German playwright Bertolt Brecht and a former inmate of a Stalinist prison camp, was Boris A. Zolotukhin, the lawyer for Aleksandr Ginzburg.
The other four were given in the Times report as Boris G. Birger, a painter; Boris Shragin, a specialist in aesthetics; Yuri Koryakov, a literary figure; and Iyudmilla Alekseyevna, an editor in the Nauka publishing house.
Since Communist party membership is a prerequisite for most of the better professional positions in the Soviet Union, expulsion from the party means that the victims face harsh material reprisals for their critical attitude.
A CANADIAN STUDY OF EDUCATION IN THE SOVIET UKRAINE
By Ross Dowson
EDUCATION IN THE SOVIET UKRAINE, by John Kolasky. Peter Martin Associates, Toronto. 238 pp. $3.50. 1968.
Leon Trotsky, coleader with Lenin of the Russian revolution and founder of the Fourth International, in an article dated April 22, 1939, entitled "The Problem of the Ukraine," wrote:
"In order to guarantee ‘administrative needs,' i.e., the interests of the bureaucracy, the most legitimate claims of the oppressed nationalities were declared a manifestation of pettybourgeois nationalism. All these symptoms could be observed as early as 1922- 1924. Since that time they have developed monstrously and have led to outright strangulation of any kind of independent national development of the peoples of the USSR....Nowhere did restrictions, purges, repressions and in general all forms of bureaucratic hooliganism assume such murderous sweep as they did in the Ukraine in the struggle against the powerful deeply rooted longings of the Ukrainian masses for greater freedom and independence."*
Aside from the intrinsic importance of this whole question, what inpelled Trotsky to take it up when he did was a situation that was developing in Canada, and in a parallel way in Ukrainian emigré Communist circles around the world. Since 1933, Ukrainian workers and farmers had been moving away from the Communist movement and falling into either passivity or nationalism. This trend became very sharp in Canada. Trotsky's article was intended to explain the nature of Stalinism to these forces and try to save them for socialisn.
Education in the Soviet Ukraine appears thirty years later at another critical turn -- a rebirth of the struggle against the bureaucracy by socialist opposition currents within both the Ukraine and Russia, with the consequent
* Trotsky's article was published in an English translation in the Socialist Appeal of May 9, 1939. It aroused widespread discussion and some controversy. Trotsky answered the objections in an article "Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads" which was published in an English translation in two issues of the Socialist Appeal -- September 15 and 17, 1939. The two articles were reprinted in the November and December, 1949, issues of Fourth International. -- W.0O impact this is having on Ukrainian- Canadians around the Communist party, who are faced once again with the necessity of evaluating the "problem of the Ukraine."
It was in response to the growing reports of the suppression of the rights of Ukrainians, and the dissension these reports were causing in Ukrainian- Canadian circles, that a delegation headed by Tim Buck went to the Ukraine last spring. Their report, released in February in the January-—dated Viewpoint, while loaded with assurances that all will be well, nonetheless admitted that there have been gross violations of the national rights of the 40,000,000 Ukrainians. [See World Outlook, March 1, p. 174.]
John Kolasky's book is an integral part of the ferment in Ukrainian-Canadian left circles. It is the result of a twoyear stay in the Ukraine from 1963 to 1965. The Canadian schoolteacher went to study at the Shevchenko University in Kiev. His personal experiences led him to make a detailed study of the educational system in the Ukraine. The evidence that he presents of the imposition of the Russian language and the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture is overwhelming and unchallengeable.
Kolasky clearly shows that the policy of Russification, which really began under Stalin, violates every principle on the national question propounded by Lenin. In fact it was around this very question that Lenin intended to give battle to the bureaucracy at the time of his death. Kolasky also shows that contrary to the expectations of many people, Russification of the Ukraine took on an even wider and harsher character under Khrushchev.
Unfortunately, while he is strong on the results of Great Russian chauvinism, Kolasky fails to grasp the roots of this criminal policy. He calls the policy of the heads of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic toward the Ukraine, "imperialism." This is the scientific term for the most ruthless, exploitative, and last stage of monopoly capitalisn. However, the information submitted by Kolasky on the suppression of the rights of other nationalities besides the Ukrainians, including those within the RSFSR itself, confirms Trotsky's contention that it is a matter here, as on other questions, of the bureaucracy's frightened, arrogant, administrative and regulative approach to the problems of planning and centralization.
"It is a question not of the oppression of one nationality over another in the proper sense of the word," wrote Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed, "but of oppression by the centralized police apparatus over the cultural development of all nations, starting with the Great Russian."
Kolasky compounds his error by presenting the national problem in Belgium, which has been reaching fresh in-
VIETNAM WAR PROTEST
Opposition continues to deepen in Japan to any further escalation of involvement in Washington's aggression in Vietnam. The Christian Science Monitor reported March 28 that "an edgy mood of apprehension about the Vietnam war seems to be growing among the Japanese people at large....
"Ever since the Tet offensive, the unsettling feeling has prevailed that something is radically wrong, that the United States may resort to nuclear weap~ ons.
A number of clashes have taken place in recent months between the antiwar movement and the growing U.S. military presence in Japan. The major incidents have been the visit to Japan of the Vietnam-bound nuclear carrier Enterprise in January, the moving of B-52 bombers to Okinawa, the plans for building an airport at Narita that will handle American military flights, and the recent opening of a U.S. army hospital in Kita Ward of Tokyo to treat Vietnam casualties.
The Socialist, Komeito, and Communist parties announced March 8 that they would submit a "B-52 withdrawal resolution" to the Diet in Tokyo.
The same night students clashed with police in front of the U.S. "field hospital." The Japan Times reported March 10:
"Riot police, 2,000 strong, battled with 1,200 rock~hurling Zengakuren demonstrators around a newly built U.S. Army field hospital at Oji, Tokyo, and arrested 157 of them....at least 72 police officers and 24 students were injured in the clashes which continued for more than five hours."
The Japan Times said that unionists and onlookers cheered the students. "Unionist demonstrators, about 1,000 in all, meanwhile, staged a street rally near the hospital's main gate, shouting