The chickens are coming home to roost. in une new conditions of the late 1960s and '70s which have witnessed a revival of Marxism on every level (a necessary product of the rise of world revolution in the late '60s), the Communist Parties are finding their Stalinist heritage some what irksome.
Apart from the fact that it reduces their credibility in the eyes of newly radicalised militants, they are discovering that an attitude of total subservience towards the Soviet Union reduces their ability to manoeuvre and impedes the development of alliances with social democratic and bourgeois parties. Recent developments in the French CP and the speech by Italian CP leader Enrico Berlinguer at the recent congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) are indications of a new trend towards establishing a clear distance from some of the practices of the Doviet leadersnio.
In Britain, where the political influence of the CP is very small, a similar trend is discernible. Confronted on one side by lett social democracy and on the other by predominantly Trotskyist tar lett, the British Communist Party is undergoing a crisis.
The excuse for the article is to com memorate the twentieth anniversary of ine zuin Party Congress of the Crsu, where Khruschev shocked the world Stalinist movement by his denunciation or stalin. John Gollan admits that his article is not 'an exhaustive analysis', of kepimportance. The problem is that he fails to resolve any of them satisfactorily. Faithful On the level of the history of the CPSU, Gollan defends the assessment of Stalin by the 20th Party Congress: "He was faithful to Marxism-Leninism, ano as a unconst and orcaniser or nian calibre he led the party's fight against the Trotskyists, right-wing opportunists and bourgeois nationalists, against the intrigues of capitalists from without.
Gollan himself comments: 'This was the basis of his great popularity and authority.' But if this great theoretician Was s0 immensely popular, why then did he not content himself with defeating his opponents politically as Lenin did? Why expel them from the party and later physically liquidate them?
Gollan is in 1976 opposed to the excesses of the collectivisation programme Ine puroes, etc. or ine issus. His incon sistency lieg in his refusal to understand or appreciate that it was the victory of Stalin in the 1920s which made the events of the '30s inevitable. The failure to implement the Left Opposition's programme in the 1920s, by combatting the kulaks and starting the process of industrialisation, meant the horrendous repression or ine entire peasantry in the 30s from which Soviet agriculture has still not recovered.
Gollan continues to defend the orientation of 'socialism in one country which is the cornerstone of Stalinist ideology and practice. He claims that the trotskyist oppositior denied the possibility of victory for socialism' in one country. He is correct, but why indict Trotsky alone? Why not Lenin, who said explicitly: Gollan in 1976 repeats this absurd slander.
role in the war. Virtually every Soviet mistorian or note especiany nov Med vedev) has described the complete debacle of Stain's war policies, but Gollan defines Stalin's war speeches as being cridist past, une corrication or Dat ing to Gollan justified.
Gollan again distorts Trotsky's positions on the trade union question, that has not read much of the literature produced by the Left Opposition. We ever, we will concentrate now on the central weakness of Gollan's article. It lies in the following sentence, where Gollan after criticising the purges and the show-trials baldly states: They did basis of Soviet society! 'socialism in one country' is not just empty anti-Leninist rhetoric. He ialist country and has a democratic basis. There are no fundamental flaws in Soviet society, just a few problems which can be resolved by the existing leadership with a little bit of help from its friends.
nalt a century all power social and political - has been monoposed by the leadership of one party, when there is no real distinction betState, and when the masses have no contro/ whatsoever over the running of the State, the government or the party, then the very least we can say is Red Weekly 11 March 1976 But Stalin was a few years later to denounce this as Trotskyism, and John Gollan also differentiates himself from Khruschev on the question of Stalin's let masses "brilliant in their approach and analysis.' The revival of the Church, the utilisation of chauvinist themes from Russia's impriotism and nationalism, were all accord- misplaced.
and on this and other questions reveals will take these and many other questions For the purposes of this article, how tremendous harm, but did not and could not change the socialist and democratic In 97 A special review article in otner words. collan s oosition of actually believes that the USSR is a socWe challenge this thesis. When for SocIety ween the apparatus of that party and the Enrico Berlinguer, head of the Italian Communist Party, addressing the r that this is not socialism or anything remotely connected with it. It is the crystallisation or a bureaucratic caste wilose very existence desenes on the continued depoliticisation of the SovThat is why Solzhenitsyn's hooks are not published, and why Sakharov is denounced and harassed. We agree completely with Gollan that the only enective way ot dealing wit reactionary critics of the ilk of Solzhenitsyn is to publish their works. Where we disagree is that his confidence in the bureaucracy to answer Gulag Archipelago is a trifle Dissidents Furthermore, there are other dissidents whom Gollan virtually ignores.
They are communist dissidents: men like Medvedev and Grigorenko: the Tatar socialist Mustafa Djemilev; the Ukranian socialist women prisoners.
How does the British CP think they should be dealt with?
Do these communist dissidents have the right to form tendencies or Tactions in ine crour collan replies in the negative. The reason: Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership banned factions but collan knows pertectly well that this was intended as a very temporary measure, and it is now obvious in any case that it was a wrong decision since by that time the spinal cord of the counter-revolution had already beer smashed. It is simply not serious to talk about "socialist democracy' and deny the rights of tendencies and factions to exist in the CPSU - or for that matter in the CPGB. But even that is not sufficient We are for the right of other working class parties to exist and to function under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This means genuine Soviets embodying the elective principle at every level of You cannot say, as Gollan does, "that the still greater involvement of the masses of the people, as I have said, in the process of decision-making, is the major issue, and at the same time not provide any effective institutions of socialist democracy to canalise this process. The 'regular' assembly of CPSU Communist Party 9 congresses is a bit of a joke, given the bureaucratic way in which delegates are selected and the basis on which members are recruited to the party.
The changes necessary to achieve socialist democracy will not be brought about by friendly pressure from without but by the mass mobilisations of the workers and soldiers in the USSR itself In 1953 in East Berlin, working class demands for democracy were crushed by Stalin's tanks. In 1956 the Hungarian insurrection led by communists was crusned by bowel tanks. In soo In Czech spring was brought to a hasty conclusion by Soviet tanks.
In the Soviet Union, too, the bur eaucrats will try to use the same tanks, but on home ground they will face more serious problems. It is the masses (including no doubt many thousands of members of the CPU itself who will overthrow the bureaucracy. Then and only then will we see the flowering of socialist democracy and a rebirth of proletarian internationalism (Gollan deals with une cissolution or tne corintern in twenty lines and is remarkably reticent on the question) * on a massive scale.
In a sense. the verv fact that the Communist Parties in Western Europe have begun to discuss and debate these questions is a sign of the direction on which the wind is blowing. But the prognostications of Berlinguer, Marchais, and Gollan - the weathermen of the new reformism - are hopelessly wrong.
They feel the winds, but try to pre empt the clouds which will follow and the rains they will bring by creating an artificial rain. This might help them temporarily, but in the long run it is the real rain of revolutionary Marxism which will clense the working class movement of Stalinism and its heritage.
* We would recommend to our readers a book by a veteran Spanish Communist expelled from the CP in 1965 - From Comintern to Cominform. by Fernando Claudin, Penguin Also worth study is Leninism Under Lenin by Marcel Liebman. Cape.