To the left of the SV, the traditional pro-Moscow communist party (NKP) and the ex-Maoist AKP(M-L) were the main forces behind the electoral alliance "Environment and Solidarity". The alliance's
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NORWAY show deepening polarization
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SUMERS BAND SONN
Norways 1989 election results
Party Votes
DNA (Social Democrats) 895,164
Heyre (Conservative) 579,036
KrF (Christian Soclal) 221,828
SP (Center- farmers) 170.137
FrP (Ultra-right) 339.260
SV (Left Soc. Democrat) 261,374
V (Liberal) 83,091
FMS (Comm/Maolst) 21,223
Greens 9,861
SI (openly racist) 8,765
FAF (People's Action for Finnmark) 8,773 official goal was to give all the different protest movements and opposition tendencies an electoral expression. Its program was very unclear and not to the left of the SV (it was not even explicitly socialist!). In reality the goal of the AKP (M-L), the strongest party in the alliance was to get one of their members into Parliament in order to strengthen their nation-
This project was a failure. The results were only slightly better than the results of the two parties combined in 1985and less than their results in the local elections of 1987.
This is bound to lead to discussion inside the AKP (M-L), which is going through a very interesting development, from a revolutionary Marxist point of view, at the moment (see /V 166).
The polarization in the electoral arena has led to problems in creating an effective government. The bourgeois parties have a slight majority in the new Storting (84 seats to 81), but the three-party coalition will be caught between Hagen's 22 seats
% change
Since 85
34.3
63
- 6.5
222
37
- 8.2
6.5
14
+ 0.5
6.5
11
- 0.3
13.0
22
+ 9.3
10.0
17
+ 4.6
3.2
- 1.8
0.8
18
+ 0.1
0.4
0.3
0
0.3 representatives on the right and the
"socialists" on the left. Whichever way the eventual government is going to lean, the biggest partner, Høyre, will risk losing even more votes.
A DNA government would also be in a difficult position if the bourgeois project breaks down. A confident SV putting pressure from the left, and on the other side the need to secure support from at least one of the bourgeois parties to secure a majority in the Storting.
The halting of the FrP's growth at 12seems to suggest that the Hagen machine is running out of steam. If this is the case, the leftward swing represented by the SV's results is all the more positive. A trial election among school children between 16 and 18 years old gave a clear sign of an even bigger leftward swing among young people.
seems likely that ernment is eventually formed, it will confront broad mobilizations working class and popular movements in the four years ahead. * second most populous in the country, the People's Front of Ukraine (RUKH) for restructuring was constituted on September 8-10, along lines similar to those of the people's fronts in the Baltic republics. ZBIGNIEW KOWALEWSKI
T HE Stalinist counter-revolution of
the 1930s had a particularly terrible impact on the Ukrainian people. Millions of peasants died in the famine created by Stalin's policy. The national intelligentsia was totally exterminated, and the republic's Communist Party and state apparatus were destroyed by police terror on a vast scale. Stalin subjected the Ukrainian people to forced russification.
In 1939, on the basis of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the USSR annexed western Ukraine, which had previously belonged to the Polish state. This annexation was confirmed at the end of the Second World War. But it was very difficult to consummate, because the installation of the Stalinist system in this area encountered powerful popular resistance. The very widespread rural guerrilla movement led by the radical nationalists of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was finally crushed only in the early 1950s. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the survivors of the Ukrainian national struggle led strikes in the concentration camps from Vorkuta and Norilsk north of the Arctic Circle to Kinguir in Kazakhstan.
On this basis, in the following decades a continuity of historical memory was forged between successive generations of Ukrainian dissidents, who made up a very high percentage of the political prisoners in the "Gulag Archipelago." But in the Toric ane bari-hare red disin ence to a 21 Gorbachev period, the transition from his-
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