OSTPERESTROIKAGLAS
NOSTPERESTROIKAGLA Condemnation of Prague Spring intervention AN OFFICIAL spokesperson for the Gorbachev team has followed the Polish and Hungarian Communist Parties and condemned the military Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.
Evgenii Ambartsumov, Gorbachev's adviser on relations with the socialist coun tries and departmental head at the Institute of the World Socialist System at Moscow, gave an interview to the Italian daily La Repubblica of August 13-14 in which he states categorically: "It was a practical error and a violation of Czechoslovakia's national sovereignty." In the same interview, Ambartsumov reveals that a member of the Soviet Communist Party Politburo, Voronov, voted against the military intervention. He was dismissed from his posi-
Ambartsumov had previously sharply denounced the military suppression of the workers' councils and the removal of the Imre Nagy government in Hungary in 1956. In an article in Les Nouvelles de Moscou (June 23, 1989), he describes that intervention as a "cruel and despotic policy" originating in an "original Stalinism" that Khrushchev was never able to overcome. He compares the counter-revolution in Hungary to the repression of the Chinese democratic movement, and draws the following conclusion: "Zhao Ziyang, until recently the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and who was sympathetic to the students, will probably escape the grim fate that befell Imre Nagy, but the sinister shadow of Autumn 1956 hangs over China today." * Important works by Trotsky published in USSR THE Communist Party youth organiza(Young Communist) published several letters from Leon Trotsky in its August 1989 issue. The letters, sent by Trotsky to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, initiated and supported the first Left Opposition, the so-called 47, which became public in October 1923.
These letters denounced the grip of the bureaucracy on the party and the opposi-
POLAND • USSR tion between a few thousand people "in positions of command" on the one side and the mass of party members on the other. Trotsky's letters thus appear as forerunners — 65 years ago — of the anti-bureaucratic denunciations current in the Soviet Union over the past two years. * Katyn massacre THE Soviet authorities have always claimed that the German army carried out the massacre in the Katyn forest. Here, on the Polish-Soviet frontier, several Polish military units had to surrender to the Red Army. What had happened to these soldiers became clear from 1941 when the bodies of thousands of Polish officers began to be discovered. The number counted reached 11,000.
Two Soviet historians from the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences, Alexandr Akulichev and Alexandr Pamyatnykh, have now stated that those responsible for the massacre were from the Soviet NKVD. They have thus admitted something that every Pole has known for a long time. (Les Nouvelles de Moscou, August 11, 1989) * Inter-regional group at the Congress of People's Deputies ON JULY 29 and 30 this year the founding meeting of the Inter-regional Group met at the House of the Cinema in Moscow. It brings together 269 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, mostly from Moscow and Leningrad.
Among its instigators are important figures such as the Moscow leader Boris Yeltsin, the historian Yuri Afanassiev and the Nobel prize winner Andrei Sakharov. The Inter-regional Group publishes its own journal Narodny Deputat (The People's Deputy). It fights for party pluralism and for the political expression of the "radical left minority" that came out of the last elections as proposed by Yeltsin. (Les Nouvelles de Moscou, August 3, 1989.) A debate is continuing among the members of the Group as to what organizational structure they will adopt. Accordine to a poll 11 41.7% of the members wish the Group to
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International Viewpoint #169 • September 18, 1989
USSR continue in the form of "discussion clubs", while the majority (55.4%) wish the Group to have a clearer political profile, with the elaboration of a platform. Towards the formation of the People's Front of the Ukraine ON AUGUST 15, the provisional leaders of the People's Front of the Ukraine announced that their founding congress would take place on September 8 in Kiev. The Ukrainian editor-in-chief of the weekly Ogonyok, Vitali A. Korotich, revealed that some 50 Ukrainian members of the Congress of People's Deputies have launched a campaign against the new Ukrainian electoral law which gives 25% of the seats in local soviets to the Communist Party and other "social organizations."
According to Korotich, the recent strikes of miners in the Donbas have terrified the party bureaucrats who are trying to hang on to their positions. * The secret protocols of the "Hitler-Stalin pact" FIFTY years ago, on August 23, 1939, V. Molotov and J. von Ribbentrop, the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, signed the notorious pact which was to open the way to the Second World War. The existence of a secret protocol to the pact, that sanctioned the partition of Poland between the two great powers and the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) has now been admitted in the Soviet press.
In Les Nouvelles de Moscou of August 21, 1989, the historian N. Eidelman underlines the unconstitutional character of the accords, which, unlike the nonaggression pact, were not ratified by the Supreme Soviet. He saw in these secret agreements, that were the culmination of the logic of collaboration between the Third Reich and the USSR, the end product of "the terrorist and totalitarian Stalinist policies of the 1930s."
All the documents concerning the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact have been known in the West since the end of the Second
War and the Soviet press revealed nothing new. But the admission of the existence of the pact's secret protocols, and the vigorous criticism, clearly represent a new step forward for glasnost.
The recognition of the anti-constitutional character of the accords will have an enormous impact on the Baltic countries, where it will be taken as a vindication of the national demands of the Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians.
The process of revising the Soviet position on the 1939 pact began last year. For example, in the October 1988 issue of Sputnik, the historian Vassily Kulich analyses the disastrous effects of the accord on the international communist movement:
ordered the communist parties throughout the world to at once cease their anti-fascist propaganda and approve the agreement with Hitler. Stalin did not stop at dividing social democrats and communists. He began to discredit and disarm the communists in the West themselves. One or two years more and the western communist parties would have been wound up!"
Now is the time for the Soviet press to recognize another result of the agreement between Hitler and Stalin. The citizens of the USSR should know that after the pact was signed, the NKVD [Soviet secret police] handed over to the Nazis several hundred German communists who had fled to the Soviet Union after 1933. Many of them had already fallen foul of the Stalinist terror and had been interned in concentration camps. Glasnost must not step back in the face of this repulsive crime, which was sanctioned by the "spirit of friendly concorde" that underlay the agreement between the two dictators. * "United Front of the Workers of Russia" BENJAMIN YARIN, a metalworker from the Sverdlovsk region and a deputy in the Supreme Soviet, and a member of the strike committee of the Miners of Kemerov in Siberia has called a founding congress of a "United Front of the Workers of Russia."
According to the Moscow correspondent of the Spanish daily El Pais of August 15, 1989, Yarin stated that: "neither the unions, nor the workers' councils, nor the party apparatus defend the workers. We have therefore created this Front to defend ourselves. It is not possible to make the working class pick up the bill for all the political and economic disasters of the past seven decades." * Attack on the independent press The August 26 Pravda carried a major article by Yuri Zhukov denouncing "antiSovietism" and Western influence in independent publications. The writer, who purported to be a veteran of the independent press in Lenin's day, took some time to get to his point. He began by recalling the flowering of independent journalism in the revolutionary period and the crushing of press freedom by Stalin. He noted that now
Planificación, mercado y democracia
La experiencia de los llamados países socialistas
(Planning, market and democracy - the experience of the so-called socialist countries)
by Catherine Samary the law on anti-Soviet propaganda was no longer used.
"However," he went on to say, independent publications were saying quite unacceptable things. Among others he mentioned a publication, "bought for a rouble and a half at Moscow University", Slobodnoe Slovo, which called on its readers to demand "a constituent assembly on a multi-party basis" and "the breakup of the empire.
He said such publications often had circulations of over 10,000 and were in fact financed by the West. This made them "foreign publications" circulated "without state permission" on Soviet territory. Furthermore, the state authorities had the duty to
Second Spanish-language edition of the Notebooks for
Study & Research
12 find out where they got their resources and especially their paper. "It's no secret that they simply steal some of it."
He concluded on the other hand that it was necessary to combat these "political opponents" with the "methods of glasnost", that is, to debate with them. But to do that, the Communist Party press had to apply the Leninist principle of "party loyalty."*