Political Revolution 1956

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TROTSKYISM TODAY

No 9, 3rd November, 1976. 5p.

THEORETICAL SUPPLEMENT TO SOCIALIST PRESS

POLITICAL REVOLUTION 1956

Almost exactly 20 years ago today, at dawn on the 4th November 1956, Soviet tanks started their savage bombardment of Budapest. During the second Russian 'intervention' in Hungary over twenty thousand died. The man who ordered it was Nikita Kruschev, symbol of the 'liberal' turn of Moscow Stalinism. In February 1956 his 'secret speech' selectively denounced Stalin's crimes. In October, he agreed to a 'new style' leadership, under Gomulka, in Poland. But in Hungary he confirmed to the hilt the Trotskyist analysis that, behind the changing facades, Stalinism remained a regime of brutal counter-revolution.

We publish here an article by ADAM WESTOBY which draws heavily on material dealing with the post-war history of Stalinism, to be published in book form next year by the Workers Socialist League.

1956 forms a turning point in post-war history and particularly in the development of Stalinism. In the events which exploded in Hungary and Poland – though in quite different forms – during the autumn of that year one can see the main antagonistic social forces which produce the crisis of post-war Stalinist rule in Eastern Europe.

A major part of the background to them was the changes in Moscow. Malenkov headed the 'collective' leadership which stepped uncertainly into Stalin's shoes in 1953, but which could in no sense succeed him.

Malenkov never held a secure grip. Before Kruschev definitively ousted him in early 1955 it is clear that the Stalinist leaders of Eastern European states were often interceding not with a unified leadership in Moscow, but with leaders of opposing currents.

The Korean armistice (on July 1953) was not a sufficient easing of the Cold War to secure Malenkov's position; it was Kruschev who was to lead the steps in 'detente' of the late 1950's.

But Kruschev removed Malenkov with the aid of Stalin's Foreign Minister, Molotov, the 'hard' representative of Stalinism.

What Kruschev's rise to power in 1954-5 showed was the way in which the internal mechanics of Stalinism reflected its overall position as a regime of balance.

Kruschev used Molotov's support to rid himself of Malenkov, then Molotov himself was removed in the drive to provide a new face.

Kruschev's Kremlin had to perform its balancing act in the post-war period, not on a single platform, but on a set of adjacent national platforms in Europe, platforms which had to be held in step, but needed at the same time some freedom to diverge in answering their own immediate pressures and crises.

INSULATION

Each state moved, though primarily in relation to Moscow; for several years after Stalin's death contact between the Stalinist heads of different Eastern European states was at a minimum, and the insulation also took such forms, for instance, as banning certain public statements of 'fraternal' parties in the press of their next door neighbours.(1)

The contrast between Hungary and Poland in 1956 sharply illustrates the pragmatic fashion in which Kruschev tried to secure his rule within the immediate local situation.

Nagy in Budapest was deposed (and later executed) when he found himself the figurehead of a revolutionary movement he could not control; Gomulka was tolerated in Warsaw because he promised, while allowing reforms, to ensure that anti-Moscow movements were held in check and that Poland remained within the overall military and economic framework – most important of all Gomulka undertook to isolate the struggles of Polish workers from the Hungarian revolution.

The tangled machinations which led to the Hungarian 'October' of October-November 1956 really began in the summer of 1953 when Moscow installed Imre Nagy as replacement to the hard-line Stalinist Rakosi as number one in Budapest, but left Rakosi with an intact opposition, based on his leadership of the Party and the support of the Party apparatchiks.

Nagy's qualifications as the Prime Minister to announce the 'New Course', intended to defuse the growing tension in Hungary, were those of political ambiguity. He had opposed the forced march to collectivisation in 1949, and been demoted for it.

MOSCOW-TRAINED

But he was a long-standing Stalinist, trained in Moscow, and it was he who delivered the obituary eulogy in the Hungarian Parliament the day after Stalin's death.

He had, also, the relatively rare 'advantage' among top Hungarian Stalinists of not being Jewish.

But Nagy's first period in office lasted only up to the fall of Malenkov at the end of 1954. By Spring 1955 Rakosi had ousted him not only as Prime Minister but even from the position he had retained as Professor of Agriculture!

During the whole of Nagy's period in office Rakosi had conducted an energetic, if veiled, campaign to obstruct and sabotage his policies. In effect the 'collective' leadership in Moscow, covertly warring among themselves, played one string against another in Budapest.

But although Rakosi was back in office, he was not firmly there. He was unable simply to strangle the forces released during the Nagy interlude. Not the least of these were the tens of thousands of political prisoners released from internment camps, many of them Communists, purged before Stalin's death, whom Nagy had restored to responsible state and Party jobs.

EXPELLED

Nagy himself was expelled from the Party (November 1955) but he went on immediately to organise a loose opposition, including many Party members, around the positions on 'national communism' he was preparing. (His

[Caption: (Top) Stalin (above) Kruschev]

[Caption: Hungary 1956 - armed workers in the streets.]

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'On Communism', addressed to the Hungarian Party leadership and Kruschev, was completed around June 1956).

Rakosi was not in a position to arrest Nagy, nor could he suppress the seething oppositional discussions in the (originally literary and academic) 'Petofi Circles' of the Communist youth organisations in Budapest, which at this stage drew in mainly writers, intellectuals and dissident Communists.

The situation was driven forward as details filtered through of Kruschev's revelations of Stalin's crimes and frame-ups, in his 'secret speech' to the 20th Congress of the CPSU.

At the end of March Rakosi reluctantly announced the rehabilitation of those murdered (under his supervision, as everyone well knew) in the Rajk trials of 1949.

Trying to retrieve a slipping situation, he accompanied further economic concesssions, and the release of other political prisoners, by violent press attacks on the literary circles who were opposing him. But there were further blows.

STRIKE

In the last days of June a mass strike of workers in Poznan signalled the beginning of the political revolution in Poland. And in June, too, a further joint declaration between Tito and Kruschev approving different 'roads to socialism' spelled out the process of raprochement between Moscow and Belgrade which had been under way since 1954.

If Yugoslavia could have 'fraternal ties' with the USSR which did not involve KGB dictatorship, why not Hungary? It was the living character being taken by this question which drove Rakosi to prepare the arrest of Nagy and hundreds of his supporters in early July.

But other – equally Stalinist – elements in the Central Committee drew back from this step, and appealed to the Soviet leadership.

To the accompaniment of Tito's public approval (2) Mikoyan flew to Budapest on July 17th, removed Rakosi and replaced him with Erno Gero (known, among other things, as one of the GPU agents principally responsible for the murder of anti-Stalinists during the Spanish Revolution!)

RESIGNED

Rakosi (suffering reportedly from hypertension) resigned 'for reasons of health'.

Yet the new head rested on the same shaky feet – the secret police (the Hungarian AVH organised under the direct supervision of the KGB) and the threat of Soviet armed backing. Increasingly the mass of the working class gathered behind the inchoate, largely democratic and nationalist demands of the pro-Nagy opposition.

By the time Gero readmitted Nagy to the Party (October 14th) the time for reshuffling the pack was past. When the government, having vaccillated, decided to prohibit the mass demonstration of October 22nd (called – among other things – to support the Polish 'reform' movement) it was impotent to act.

100,000 marched, behind photographs of Nagy – and Lenin! As news came through of a broadcast by Gero attacking those who 'slander the Soviet Union' sections of the demonstrators moved to the Radio Station, where they were met by bullets from the AVH.

As fighting spread through the city, Soviet tanks moved in. By the morning of the 23rd Budapest was paralysed by a general strike.

FIGHTING

Widespread fighting, involving Red Army units, and strikes had spread to the provinces. And...Nagy was back in the government, as Prime Minister!

A short article cannot give a factual account of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (3) but some key elements must be drawn out.

The treacherous role of the government figureheaded by Nagy, from October 23rd to the second Soviet intervention on November 4th, underlines more clearly than any other single event in post-war history, the correctness of the Trotskyist position that only new, communist parties will be able to lead the political revolution in the deformed workers' states.

While Nagy prevaricated on the key issue – the withdrawal of Soviet forces – the mass enthusiasm for him subsided into a cautious tolerance for his cabinet which included many figures from the 'old regime'.

Workers' councils sprang up, first in the provincial towns. They began to organise local economic life, yet still looked to the government for a national political solution. Temporarily the government retreated.

NEW GOVERNMENT

By October 31st Soviet troops had disappeared from the streets. On that day Nagy formed a new government with a majority of non-Communist members and announced Hungary's 'neutrality' (ie as between the Warsaw Pact and NATO).

But behind his back was being prepared an international line-up which was to give Kruschev a free hand to suppress the political revolution.

Earlier in October Eisenhower had sent private assurances to Moscow (through Tito) that NATO would not intervene against Soviet forces in Hungary. Tito himself had agreed to stand aside.

By October 22nd Kruschev had accepted Gomulka as the chosen leader of the 'moderate' majority at the top of the Polish hierarchy, on the understanding that he would preserve the military and political alliance with the Kremlin, and restrain support for the Hungarian revolution.

On October 30th Britain and France announced the Suez invasion by a joint ultimatum to Egypt. In all probability the final Soviet decision to intervene was made on November 1st.

'BANDITRY'

That morning, Kadar – ruler of Hungary to this day – made a most demagogic speech against the 'political banditry' of the Rakosi clique. That night he disappeared from Budapest. He was to return, escorted by tanks.

Soviet army movements continued throughout the country, and at dawn on November 4th a massive artillery bombardment was launched against key points in Budapest, followed immediately by assaults in the provincial centres. Little infantry was used.

Shaken by the fraternisation that had begun to develop between Hungarians and Red Army infantrymen during the October intervention, Kruschev and Co. set about the Hungarian revolution at arm's length.

Nagy and his supporters in government fled to the Yugoslav embassy, whence they were before long handed over to the KGB and eventual execution. Kadar returned to lead a 'Revolutionary Workers' and Peasants' Government'.

But it took two weeks, and an estimated twenty thousand dead, before fighting ended in Hungary. And Kadar's puppet regime found itself obliged to negotiate for months with the Workers' Councils, and with the strike movements that continued well into January.

Even when the government, backed by 200,000 Russian troops, felt strong enough to arrest the delegates of the Budapest Central Workers' Council on December 11th the capital was all but paralysed by a general strike the following day.

PARALLEL EVENTS IN POLAND

It would be impossible to understand the breaking of the political revolution and counter-revolution in Hungary without at least sketching the 1955-6 reform movement in Poland, which closely paralleled developments in Hungary.

The fact that they came to a head at virtually the same moment (late October 1956) was far from an accident; it expressed the 'permanent' combined character of the revolution in Eastern Europe.

The hesitant growth of a (largely democratic and nationalist) opposition in 1955 was pushed forward by Gomulka's release from jail late in that year.

The Poznan strike (June 1956) was put down by army action, supported, among others, by Tito and Togliatti, ('liberal' leader of the Italian Communist Party), but strikes spread in other towns, bringing large sections of the working class behind the radical students and intellectuals.

The repercusssions of Poznan split the Polish CP leadership. The old-style Stalinist (Natolin) faction favoured political repression, wage concesssions, 'detente' with the Catholic Church and fewer Jews in top posts.

A looser grouping (round Ochals) proposed continuing political concessions, but not – at this stage – the restoration of Gomulka as being too sensitive in relations with the USSR.

WORKERS' COUNCILS

In October, Workers' Councils began to be set up in numerous workplaces. These, most of all, brought the crisis at the top of the Party to a climax.

Ochals switched support to Gomulka, and the Politbureau was rearranged under his leadership on October 17th.

An attempted coup by the Natolin faction was followed by initial mobilisation of Red Army forces within Poland. But Gomulka and Ochals threatened, in effect, to resist with the Polish national armed forces, and Kruschev then retreated.

On October 21st a Central Committee meeting confirmed Gomulka's new Politbureau.

Trading on his reputation as a victim of Stalinism Gomulka set about restoring the situation to 'normal'.

His first task was to restrain those who wanted a second 'front' against the Soviet intervention in Hungary; his speeches condemned all forms of 'anti-Soviet agitation' and 'rabble-rousing'. Then, gradually, he moved to strip the Workers' Councils, by a mixture of economic concessions and manoeuvres, of their power.

SUBORDINATED

Even so, it was not until early 1958 that they wrere formally subordinated to the party and the official trade unions.

In Hungary Kruschev used tanks, and

[Caption: Stalinist cartoon of Tito prior to 1955.]

[Caption: Tito with Kruschev 1955.]

[Caption: Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968.]

[Caption: Stalin with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta 1945, dividing up Europe]

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Kadar, in Poland, Gomulka. (4) But the purpose was the same. And among those who recognised it wwere Cardinal Wyszynski and the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe, both of whom urged support for Gomulka in the elections of January 1957.

History lasts a long time, but it is made in weeks or hours. The 1956 events form a crucible in which can be seen crystallising many of the basic political elements of post-war Stalinism.

Every post-war eruption of the political revolution has demonstrated that to break the Stalinist dictatorship, their police and their monopoly of all the essential organs of state power, nothing short of a revolutionary party will serve.

Yet in every serious struggle – Germany in 1953, Poland and Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1968, Poland again in 1970-71 and in 1976 – the working class has found itself tied, by the absence of its own independent party, to the bureaucracy's offers of reforms, or to one section of a divided bureaucracy which promised reforms and 'democratisation'.

'SPLITS'

And as far as the growing 'splits' within the world Stalinist movement are concerned, there is not a single 'opposition' leader who has fought for mass, independent, working class support, or to draw clearly the political divide between the workers' movement and the bureaucracy.

This is true of Tito, of Nagy and of Gomulka. And, more recently and in very different situations, it is equally true of Castro, of Dubcek and of Ceausescu.

The common factor in the political roads they have travelled is their attempts to acheive a new, particular, national balance of forces more favourable or feasible to the bureaucracy and the social strata which support it within their own nation state.

Nowhere is the principle of 'non-interference' in the internal affairs of other states more rigorously observed than by the native bureaucracies of Eastern Europe when the essentials of the state power of Soviet Stalinism are involved.

Neither Tito, Gomulka, Nagy or Dubcek ever came near to appealing to the workers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for support against the Kremlin – on the contrary one of their first concerns was to reassure Moscow that a compromise would be feasible since they would do no such thing.

TITO'S BACKING

Tito's mild disapproval of the first Soviet invasion of Hungary gave way to unambiguous backing for the Soviet Army's artillery on November 4th. (5)

The first great division in the Stalinist 'monolith' was healed with the blood of Budapest's proletariat.

The Chinese leadership seems to have pursued – though even less publicly – a line similar to Tito's.

Gomulka reportedly appealed to Mao during Kruschev's visit to Warsaw on October 19th-20th, and Mao replied that China would not agree to a Soviet military intervention in Poland.

A Chinese broadcast of November 1st contained a veiled warning against 'chauvinism by a big country' (6). But the Chinese Communist Party leadership gave full backing to the shelling of Budapest on November 4th. (7)

Nonetheless, the ascension of Kruschev (in which the 'settlement' of Hungary and Poland formed a decisive step just as much as the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the ousting of his rivals) marks a qualitative state in the development of post-war Stalinism, and it is important to define its character.

'Kruschevism' signified the recognition by Soviet Stalinism that state power in the post-war workers' states could not be exercised direct from Moscow and that – depending on national circumstances – they would have to act in alliance with the new national bureaucracies, rather than simply treating them as their puppets.

Soviet military and political power was to set the limits and the general lines rather than the detail of national policies. But underpinning the growing 'independence' of the national bureaucracies was the Soviet Army, protecting them from imperialism and, more directly, their own working class.

This 'devolution' of Soviet state power resulted partly from the pressure to find a general working relationship which kept the 'Soviet bloc' intact but also embraced the two most independent bureaucracies – the Yugoslav and the Chinese.

LIMITS

And on a more fundamental level it reflected – like the autarchic pattern of 'socialist' economic development after 1947-8 – the reactionary political limits within which the European workers states had been formed – on the mould of the capitalist states which preceeded them, and with the aim of serving the interests of a narrow bureaucratic caste, utterly opposed to those of the masses of Eastern Europe.

The Hungarian revolution was the breaking point of this antagonism. For twenty years it has been slandered by the paid liars of international Stalinism as a conspiracy organised by the CIA, the Vatican and Horthyites.

The workers of Hungary replied to these slanders almost before they were uttered. As Kruschev poured shells on Budapest, posters appeared on the walls of its main industrial suburb: "The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of the Czepel works strike on."

The spectre of their hatred and contempt haunts every bureaucrat in Eastern Europe to this day.

FOOTNOTES

1) See Nagy, Imre On Communism, page 240 for examples.

2) To be exact Tito approved Rakosi's removal, but witheld his open approval of Gero until October, on the very eve of the first fighting in Budapest. Given the inflamable state of Eastern Europe during the summer of 1956 Tito was in a position to drive a hard bargain over 'reconciliation' with the Kremlin.

3) Among many accounts perhaps the best are Hungarian Tragedy by Peter Fryer (Daily Worker correspondent in Budapest at the time, who broke with the CP and joined the Trotskyist movement), Pologne-Hongrie 1956 by (eds.) Jean-Jacques Marie and Balczs Nagy (1966) both then supporters of the OCI. Among liberal accounts: F. Fejto Budapest 1956 (1966), T Meray Thirteen Days That Shook the Kremlin, (1959) and P. Zinner Revolution in Hungary 1962. Chris Harman's Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe (1974) written from the standpoint of state capitalism, contains many interesting quotations.

4) A subordinate reason which may well have reduced support in the top echelons of the Polish Communist Party for Soviet military action is the exceptionally deadl[y] character of Stalin's purges in that party. I[n] 1938 the Polish CP was dissolved on th[e] pretext of being ridden with police agents an[d] 'Trotskyites'. Almost all its leading member[s] were called to Moscow and killed; virtuall[y] the only ones to escape were those who wer[e] in the jails of the Polish dictatorship.

5) Tito provided the first demonstratio[n] that those Stalinists who have organised th[e] revolutionary destruction of capitalism i[n] their own right find no difficulty in crossin[g] class lines in the interests of intra-Stalinis[t] 'diplomacy'. [See Tito's speech at Pula o[n] November 11th, (quoted in Zinner op cit. p[.] 527) where he condemned Nagy and backe[d] Kadar as 'that which is most honest i[n] Hungary']. Twelve years later Ho Chi-Min[h] and Castro gave belated – but definite – support to the 1968 invasion of Czecho[-]slovakia.

6) Radio Peking, November 1st., 1956.

7) People's Daily, 4th November, 1956. I[n] December the Chinese leadership linked – accurately – justification of the Hungaria[n] intervention to a cautious defence of Stalin'[s] record (see More on the Historical Expressio[n] of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (29t[h] December 1956).

[Caption: Mass meeting in Budapest 1956.]

[Caption: Mao with Rumania's Ceaucescu]

[Caption: Budapest after the Stalinist bombardment]

[Caption: Tanks in Poznan 1956]

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AN OLD BOLSHEVIK RESIGNS

We reprint below an Open Letter of resignation from the Soviet Communist Party from veteran member Arnosht Kolman (58 years' membership) to Party leader Leonid Brezhnev. While we do not necessarily endorse everything in the letter, and it stops a long way short of attempting a full political analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union (remaining conspicuously silent on the period of the 1930s), the letter is particularly interesting in that it attacks the bureaucracy not as a 'new ruling class' - as the state capitalists in the International Socialists would have us believe - but, in line with Trotsky's analysis, as "the privileged castes of the Party".

Kolman has broken from the bureaucracy but not from socialism, and at no point attacks the gains of the October Revolution. For these reasons his principled statement ( which must reflect also the unspoken feelings of considerable numbers of dissidents still in the Soviet Union ) is worthy of serious study by Trotskyists.

To:

L.I. Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, Kremlin, Moscow.

I wish to inform you that I am leaving the Soviet Communist Party. I am 84 and have been a party member for 58 years.

I joined its ranks in order to fight for social justice, for a happy future for mankind. Now, after long and painful reflection, I have come to this difficult decision.

I was born in Prague and came to Russia as a prisoner of war during the First World War. During Kerensky's rule I was held in solitary confinement for six months for anti-war propaganda, and I was freed by the October Revolution.

As a Red Army soldier, I fought on four fronts for the establishment of Soviet power.

In the 1920's I worked illegally in Germany, was a member of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party. I was sentenced to five years' hard labour, but after half a year's solitary I was freed in exchange [with the Soviet Union].

COMINTERN

Afterwards I held responsible ideological posts in the Comintern, in the Central Committee, in the Moscow party committee and in the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

I was also elected member of the Moscow party control commission and the Moscow party district commission. I knew Lenin personally, worked with Krupskaya, Kruschev and many others.

During the Second World War I worked in the Political Command of the Soviet Army in charge of units fomenting disaffection in the ranks of enemy troops.

It was at this very time that my sister was burnt in a gas oven in one of Hitler's concentration camps, while my brother, one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Communist Youth League, was murdered by Stalin.

In 1945, I was appointed head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party's propaganda department in Prague, but after three years I was arrested and shipped back to Moscow, where I spent three and a half years without trial – three of them in solitary confinement – in the Lubianka jail.

EXILED

During this stretch, my wife and small daughter were exiled to Ulyanovsk, where they lived in appalling conditions.

After my rehabilitation, I was appointed director of the Institute of Philosophy in Prague. Since my retirement in 1963 I have been living in Moscow as a pensioner.

After Kruschev's revelations about the bloody crimes of Stalin, euphemistically described as the 'personality cult', I began to understand how deeply distorted the Soviet Communist Party and Soviet power had become, and that I, as a party member must bear my share of responsibility for this.

TURNING POINT

However, 1968 was the real turning point for me, when I had occasion to observe the 'Prague Spring' and see with my own eyes with what enthusiasm the united people of Czechoslovakia backed the strivings of the party to rekindle socialist ideals and the fight for socialism with a human face.

When your tanks and armies occupied Czechoslovakia subjecting it to your political Diktat and merciless economic exploitation – in short turning it into your colony – I lost any illusions I may have had about the nature of your regime.

I understood that the Soviet Communist Party had long since ceased to be a political party, that it had been transformed into a mutual society for the early fulfilment of the Five Year Plan.

Its members, the congresses, even the Central Committee, have virtually no influence over the shaping of the party's policies, which are determined from your high ruling perch.

And in any case, about what sort of socialism can one talk in the Soviet Union when the place of the former capitalist and landowner exploiting classes has been taken by the privileged castes of the party?

WEALTH

They are drowning in wealth, live isolated from the people, above them and contemptuous of ordinary folk, not wishing to and incapable of understanding their needs and sufferings.

Of what sort of socialism can one talk when you are continuing Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship within the country and a great power policy abroad?

The Soviet Union lacks the most elementary democratic rights: instead of free elections there is voting for candidates imposed from above: there is no public political life; strikes are forbidden and the trade unions are subservient to state interests; political discussions are forbidden and everything is covered by universal censorship; information is subject to the interests of lying propaganda.

Basic human rights are crudely trampled on in the Soviet Union: dissidents are harshly persecuted, tens of thousands of them are languishing in jails, concentration camps and psychiatric jail hospitals, many being punished for their religious beliefs only.

In the sixtieth year of Soviet power there are no elementary intellectual freedoms and there is no freedom for the creative artists...

As far as the nationalities policy is concerned, the history of the Soviet Union is nothing but an uninterrupted chain of territorial annexations, forced 'unification' of foreign lands, subjection and discrimination against many nationalities in the country, among them the Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans, Jews, the Baltic nations, the people of the Caucasus and Central Asia, etc. This makes the Soviet Union no less 'a prison of the nations' than Tsarist Russia was.

While preaching about 'international detente' and 'peaceful coexistence' the Soviet Union is in fact amassing at an increasingly fast rate nuclear weapons and rockets, is preparing new generations of mass destruction weapons and is preparing for aggressive wars.

It keeps vast armies outside its frontiers, builds more and more military bases in Europe, Asia and Africa, and is preparing for the occupation of Romania and Yugoslavia.

Under the guise of 'selfless aid' to the national liberation movements and developing countries, the Soviet Union is carrying out ceaseless attempts to infiltrate their ranks and establish its military and political overlordship in various corners of the earth; it is also supplying arms and providing military support for most reactionary regimes and international terrorists.

The political and social structures of the country are in a state of acute stagnation. The Soviet Union has one of the most conservative regimes in the world, with an aging leadership...

It is perfectly logical that under such circumstances and as a result of the colossal expenditure on arms, the sustenance of the vast KGB network and of the party and state apparatus, the country's economic situation grows worse and worse.

Inflation and rising prices, officially denied, are accelerating.

Productivity in industry is extremely low, industrial production is of poor quality and, judged by its technical parameters, it falls way behind similar production in the West.

And is it not a tragedy that 60 years after the Revolution the agriculture of Europe's former granary is unable to produce enough bread, meat, fish and even potatoes to satisfy the needs of its own population?

Can one simply ignore all these facts without drawing conclusion from them?

I am not going to deny the successes achieved by the Soviet Union in ending illiteracy, in the fields of education, science, technology and in securing a better living standard for a considerable section of the population. But man does not live by bread alone.

A human being must be able to say aloud what he thinks, write down what he thinks, read what takes his fancy, choose his place of abode freely, and go wherever he wants.

AFRAID

But we are once again afraid; just as under Stalin, we hide our manuscripts, stop trusting one another, write meaningless letters for fear of the censors and sever links with friends...

Isn't it inhuman to take away children from parents, block the reunion of families, deny exit visas to visit relations abroad and to deny the families of political prisoners the right to see their loved ones for years and even to write to eachother? Can one live amid such conditions?

And how long can one live like this? I can no longer go on living like this.

My decision to leave the Communist Party does in no way mean that I will be abandoning the ideals of socialism with which I became acquainted in 1910 and which have since constituted the main substance of my long life.

On the contrary I have come to the firm conclusion that my staying in the ranks of the Soviet Communist Party would amount to a betrayal of the ideals of social justice, humanism and the building of a new and more human society, for the attainment of which I have strived despite my mistakes and the errors of my ways, and shall go on striving to the end of my days.

Academician Arnhost (Ernest) Kolman.

[Caption: The Russian Revolution - betrayed by Stalinism.]