CANADIAN CP
REPORTS ON ITS INVESTIGATIONS IN THE UKRAINE
By Ross Dowson
The accumulating facts, now conmpletely irrepressible, on the ruling bureaucracy's violation of the national rights of the Ukrainian people within the USSR has thrust the whole question up and into the open in the Canadian Conmunist party.
The Central Executive Committee of the CPC has just released in its bulletin, Viewpoint, a report that is certain to have considerable impact not only on the CP rank and file but in particular on its block of Ukrainian-Canadian supporters. The latter have long served as the base of the most abject Moscow-liners, such as national leader Tim Buck, in their fight against dissidents, whose continued defection has left that party a hulk of its former self. It should have an impact on Communist parties around the globe.
The report was prepared by a mission that visited the Ukraine over a period of twenty-two days last spring. It was presented to a Central Committee meeting early last fall. The mission urged that its report "be made public through meetings, press, articles, interviews," and not "be treated as an innerparty question." It added the admonition that "we have to fight tendencies in our ranks which express themselves in such remarks as 'Jnless this question of the Ukrainian language is resolved in the Soviet Union, there is no future for our organizations in Canada.'"
The report was finally released in the January-dated Viewpoint, which appeared on the stands late in February. The fact that Tim Buck himself was among the delegation of six only increases its significance.
The mission went to the Ukraine in response to the increasing evidence of the violation by the Soviet bureaucracy of the Leninist concepts of the rights of national minorities written into the constitution which it claims to uphold. Reports of great Russian chauvinism expressed in the downgrading of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture, and rumours of widespread arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals -- much of this information brought back by Canadians who are known supporters of the USSR as a workers state -- have caused considerable disturbance and a continued decline of the Ukrainian sectors of the CP.
As to be expected, the report contains the usual statements that "Never before has official governmental policy fostered the development of the national culture so all-sidedly." And such traditional assurances as “the problems are recognized and are being dealt with"... "the trend is in the right direction"... "There are many indications that in the recent period there has been some change in the direction of official policy in the Ukraine -- a correction of previous distortions both of national nihilism as well as expressions of great nation chauvinisn."
But what is truly significant is the frank admission by the delegation of the most outrageous violations of the elementary democratic right of the forty million Ukrainians to speak, read and write their own language, and similar violations of the elementary civil rights of writers and students charged with harboring bourgeois nationalist concepts.
The practice “until recently," the report states, was "of signs in Ukrainian railway stations being only in Russian; of menus in Ukrainian railway restaurants being in Russian, French, English, German, etc., but not in Ukrainian."
The mission reports that one of its members asked:"'When will you at last start to produce records in the Ukrainian language. People in Canada have been waiting for them until they have gray beards.’ ‘Very soon now,' the director replied, ‘construction of our plant for making records is almost completed. We expect to start production very soon.'"
The mission records its dissatisfaction with official replies that there are no schools in the Ukrainian language in Moscow because there is no demand for them.
"Our delegation is not satisfied with such replies. In what way are Ukrainian workers in other republics different from Russian, Polish and others who desire to continue with their native languages in Ukraine? Are national feelings among Ukrainians weaker than among other Soviet nationalities? Or is it possible that Ukrainians living in Moscow or elsewhere outside of Ukraine, hesitate to request schools in the Ukrainian language lest they be branded as 'nationalists'? 'Is this a case,' they ask, 'where the remnants of Russian chauvinism, mistakes made during the Stalin era. still linger?' The answer that there is no demand for the Ukrainian language outside of Ukraine is similar to the answer given years ago that there was no demand among Soviet Jews for the study of and publication in the Yiddish language."
The mission enquired about the ar-
rest and imprisonment of Ukrainian writers. "We were told that they were not recognized writers, that they were not imprisoned for their writings, that they were convicted as enemies of the state. But the specific charges against them," the report notes, "were not revealed."
Furthermore "although we do not claim to know what considerations of state security led to the trials of these writers being conducted in secret, we must make the point that such in camera trials never serve to dispel doubts and questioning."
They also point out "we were told of cases of bourgeois nationalism among writers but in no instance could we get the specifics of the charges. Bourgeois nationalism was not defined."
"There has been a tendency in some quarters," they caution, "to brand as bourgeois nationalism or some kind of deviation, demands for the greater use of the Ukrainian language in public institutions. Such carry-overs from the Stalin era do not help in correctly resolving the language problem."
The mission was unfavorably inpressed in discussions with the minister of education and the secretary for ideology in the Central Committee. Their attitude, "the attitude that language was secondary and unimportant, that it is technique, the building of Communism alone which counts, was one that we found to be widespread. Our delegation can only assume that this reflected a distorted concept of the language question in relation to the nation."
In their conclusions, the mission notes "Any concept that in a Socialist Canada it would be immaterial to us what language is spoken in Quebec; that once we have Socialism then the national question doesn't matter or concern us any more, is not only false, but would hamper the struggle to win support for our party in Quebec."
The mission makes no effort to analyse why on this, the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution, great Russian chauvinism continues to
exist, that rights of the Ukrainian
nation, supposedly a free associate
member of the Union of Socialist Soviet
Republics, are everywhere violated. To
be sure, this situation prevailed in the
Stalin era -~ the report calls them ren-
nants of that period. But the CP never
went any deeper than to attribute the
horrendous crimes against socialist
democracy under Stalin to the paranoia
of an individual, the personality cult.
Why, fifteen years after the death of
Stalin, such violations of socialist
democracy and national and civil rights
should continue to take place under
Kosygin and Brezhnev, they do not ex-
plain.
Indeed the mission goes out of
its way to clear the bureaucracy, which
usurped power and which seeks to main-
tain its privileged position at all
costs, by reporting that M.A.Suslov,
member of the Politbureau and secretary
of the CPSU in Moscow spoke to them, in
contrast to leading officials in the
Ukraine, of the close relationship be-
tween language and culture.
The Canadian CP leadership has
been compelled to admit some of the facts
of the violations of Ukrainian national
rights in the USSR. But it is doubtful
their assurances that everything is now
working towards rectification ~- they
have given similar assurances on behalf
of the Soviet bureaucracy at every turn
since they were compelled to face Khrush-
chev's revelation on Stalin -- will prove
acceptable to their dwindling supporters.
All the less so now that such courageous
Soviet intellectuals as Pavel Litvinov
and Larisa Daniel are openly appealing
for support in their opposition to the
frame-up and sentencing of writers Yuri
Galanskov and Aleksandr Ginzburg.
The CP's weekly Canadian Tribune
will have to explain its continued si-
lence on these gross violations of Soviet
legality. Quebec supporters of the CP
will also want to know why the bilingual
Viewpoint carries the French and English
of one article in the January issue but
not the French of the report of the
delegation investigating violations in
the USSR of the rights of a national
minority.
THIRD WORLD