T IS HARD to imagine anything more illustrative of the regression of the Stalinist bureaucracy on the question of national rights than the official press service of the Soviet Union turning to one of the most rabid war dogs of British imperialism to try to intimidate peoples robbed of their national rights by
Moscow.
The Russian revolution became a beacon for oppressed nations, and this was no small factor in its victory. Now, those who claim the mantle of Lenin to justify a reactionary paper as the voice of reason about the limits of national independence for the Baltic
The Daily Telegraph has specialized in setting the limits of Irish national claims and howling for the blood of Irish fighters for national rights who "go too far." The response of Irish patriots to such warnings since the days of Parnell has been that no one can set a limit to the march of a nation.
It seems clear that the response of the fighters for national rights in the Baltic is the same. TASS does them a service in reminding them that the Western big powers have no interest in their aspirations, and that the fundamental attitude of the
Gorbachev regime is still great-power chauvinism.
The latest heirs of "socialism in one country" still think in terms of established state boundaries. For example, in the September 2 Pravda, Yuri Zhukov accuses
Die Welt, a West German daily owned by
28 the anti-Communist Springer chain, of favoring the "breakup of the USSR." Zhukov went on to say, "someone dreamed of this a long time ago. Could the editors of Die Welt have forgotten how that ended?" This is an obvious reference to the Second World War, meaning: Hitler tried to break up the USSR and was defeated, and that
Sinister forces in the West
This article, entitled "Instigators," was devoted to sinister forces in the West that were said to be encouraging "separatism." But it opened with a paragraph praising "many [Western] papers - even some that normally take an unfriendly attitude to the socialist countries [like the Daily Telegraph, presumably] — which, especially after the statement of the CC of the CPSU on the situation in the Soviet Baltic, have changed their tone. started to talk about the abyss into which the nationalists were pushing the peoples and to call for a reduction of tension."
Exactly what "abyss" were these papers about? Presumably, it was a crackdown from Moscow. This puts the Soviet publicist in the peculiar position of using the bogeyman of neo-Stalinist repression raised by capitalist papers "that normally take an unfriendly attitude to the socialist countries" in an attempt to intimidate those in the USSR itself who might be tempted to go "too far" in demanding their national rights.
Zhukov's article also illustrates a problem facing Soviet propagandists today. They need to continue to link the moveen by the Western special services in the postwar years."
At the same time, because they themselves lack credibility with the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union and because of Gorbachev's opening to the West, the Soviet propagandists make more more systematic use of statements by Western publications and politicians that assert a common great power interest in keeping international politics free from
"complication" mination of peoples. Capitalist powers blowing hot and cold
There is a certain basis for the Soviet press talking about both voices of "responsibility" in the West and instigators." The capitalist big powers, especially the US, are quite capable of blowing hot and cold about the rights of small nations. And a minority wing of the national movements in the USSR seems to have been taken in by right-wing big mouths, such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, who have an interest in encouraging hard antiCommunist rhetoric for domestic consumption.' But there is no capitalist govemment or political force anywhere that supports a democratic solution guaranteeing self-determination of the peoples either in the East or the West.
The Baltic peoples have already had some experience of this. In the revolutionary period, even the bourgeois nationalist movements found that the big capitalist powers allied themselves with forces that sought to restore capitalism in the Russian empire as a whole at the expense of claims to national independence. At least one widely used Latvian exile history text (quite anti-Communist) makes a special
A new generation of fighters for national rights are getting an education in the hypocrisy of the capitalist powers as regards their aspirations. This is being helped along as well by the contradictions of Moscow's propagandists. 1. See the report on a meeting of representatives of "national and democratic movements, mostly involving independence parties, in Paris in May, at which L'Est-Européen (September 1989) noted that Kirkpatrick spoke and was well received. 2. Germanis, Uldis, Latviesu Tautas Piedzivovumi, Greenwood Printers, Canada, 1987 (first edition 1959).
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allies against national movements