Moves to
Shayanov were important intellectual figures in postrehabilitate the
October Russia. Both were non-communists and non-
Marxists, and the quite legal work that they did tes-
Moscow trials tified to the high level of intellectual freedom that prevailed in the USSR bedefendants fore the consolidation of the Stalinist dictatorship.
Kondratiev has on some occasions been wrongly portrayed as the inventor of the theory of long cyclical
ON JULY 16, 1987, the Supreme Court of the waves.' He did in fact for-
USSR legally rehabilitated the great Russian mulate the sophisticated economist Nikolai Kondratiev and his academic version of this theory. He founded one of co-defendants in the 1930 trial at which they the first institutes for systewere sentenced to long years in prison.
matic study of international cycles, which had a consid- With his macabre sense of humor, Stalin called cycles, which had a considthis the case of the "industry party." In reality, it erable prestige. His theory continues to enjoy an authority in academic circles, was mainly a trial of agronomists working in the although it was subjected to
Rural Economics Institute in Moscow, as well severe criticism by the
Soviet Marxists, beginning as of some people working at the International with Leon Trotsky.
Institute of Conjunctural Studies. The first
Aleksandr Shayanov was stution was headed by Aleksandr Shavanov.
Testament "the favorite of
701 the whole party." Is it possible to rehabilitate Kondratiev and not Bukharin?
What makes a rehabilita tion of Bukharin quite likely is that the wiping out of the charges against Kondratiev and his companions in misfortune was by no means an isolated incident.2 In 1985, one of the main defendants in the third Moscow Trial, former People's Commissar of Finance and former Soviet ambassador to Berlin, Nikolai Krestinsky, was also rehabilitated, along with five of his codefendants. 3 It is true that, unlike the rehabilitation of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the other leaders of the Red Army who were shot in 1937, Krestinsky's rehabilitation was carried out very much on the quiet. While the military chiefs rushed to include pictures of their comrades murdered by Stalin in the memoirs they were publishing and in history one of the main there Stal cians of the "non-market peasant agriculture" that was inspired in Russia by the populists. Much less well-known internationally than Kondratiev, he made his mark above all as the author of a famous article on "The theory of non-capitalist economic systems," published in German in 1924; and a curious "peasant utopia" (My brother Alexei's voyage to the land of peasant utopia). He was a prominent activist in the Soviet cooperative movement after the October revolution.
The Stalin faction's real grievance against the defendants in the 1930 trial was the support they gave to Bukharin and Rykov against the policy of forced collectivization of agriculture and breakneck industrialization on which Stalin embarked in 1928-29. It should be stressed that Kondratiev and Shayanov, who were definitely not members of the CPSU, kept their distance from the Right Opposition, limiting themselves to offering facts, statistics, analyses and forecasts that helped Bukharin to underpin his arguments.
Many observers saw the legal rehabilitation of Kondratiev as a confirmation that Bukharin himself will soon be officially rehabilitated. Bukharin's widow and his son, Yuri Larin, started the official procedure for rehabilitation back in the Khrushchev era. After a long and tortuous procedure, the party Control Commission rejected this appeal in the summer of 1977.
en was neadea by Aleksandr S the second by Kondratiev.
### ERNEST MANDEL
Today, positive references to Bukharin as a person, and even to his political orientation, are multiplying in the Soviet press, as well as, by the way, in some Chinese publications. In its issue of July 22 this year, Literaturnaya gazeta published the text of a one-act play that presented two characters, one defending forced collectivization, the other upholding Bukharin's gradualist theses. For the first time, Bukharin was not only portrayed as a kind and sympathetic person, although an opponent of Lenin, but as someone defending a correct line. The author of the play was Fyodor Burlatsky, one of Gorbachev's main intellectual and media representatives.
Judicial authorities in awkward position
In view of the rehabilitation of Kondratiev, Shayanov and their associates, a refusal to wipe out the penal charges against Bukharin would put the judicial authorities in the USSR in an awkward position. After all, Kondratiev was a minister in the Kerensky government. Bukharin was a leader of the October revolution, a member of the Bolshevik Politburo, called by Lenin in his Last layanov, textbooks, Krestinsky's name is still barely mentioned in the USSR.4
Nonetheless, given the feeling for consistency that characterizes the writers of the "official" history of the
CPSU, Bukharin's rehabilitation could very well loom at the end of the process that started with Krestinsky's, even if the timing remains unclear.
After Bukharin, Trotsky? Alexandre Adler announced that a bit precipitously in the Paris daily Libération of September 10, 1987. For the moment, the only definite signs are the less hostile 1. The real "inventors" of the theory of long waves in the capitalist economy were two pre-1914 Marxist theoreticians, the Russian Parvus-Helphand and the Dutchman Fedder/Van Gelderen. 2. At the same time, the Moscow Agrarian Academy was liquidated, and its main members (Shayanov's teachers) were arrested. Kondratiev and Shayanov were executed in 1937. 3. At the beginning of the third Moscow trial, Krestinsky distinguished himself as the only defendant to plead not guilty and reject en bloc all the slanderous accusations lodged against him by the prosecutor, Vyshinsky. He went so far as to say that the confession he had made during the pre-trial investigation had been extracted from him by force. (Prozessbericht, the German version of the stenographic record of the trial, pp.56-59.) At a later session of the trial, however, he repeated his confession as a result of horrible torture inflicted after his retraction, according to reliable reports. 4. See notably the memoirs of the chief of the Soviet army General Staff, Marshal A. Vasilevksi, La Cause de toute une Vie (Cause of a Lifetime), Moscow, Editions du progrès, 1984. The Russian-language edition was published in 1975. It includes, after p.80, a group photo entitled, "The first marshals of the Soviet Union," showing M. Tukhachevsky, S. Voroshilov, A. Yegorov, S. Budyenny and V. Blcher in 1935. Stalin had 1 1 three of these marshals shot in 1937.
October 26, 1987 • International Viewpoint
USSR public references that are beginning to show up in the press and in plays and literary accounts. Two of the closest political friends of the founder of the Red Army - the Old Bolshevik and civil war hero Muralov and Ivan Smilga, who were sentenced in the second Moscow Trial - have, moreover, also been rehabilitated by the Supreme Court.
It does not follow from this, however, that the wiping out of the criminal charges against Leon Trotsky can already be taken for granted. There is no lack of contrary signs. At the Moscow Book Fair that opened in the latter half of September 1987, Orwell's book, Animal Farm, a famous satirical allegory centered around the Stalin-Trotsky conflict, was seized and banned. The same thing happened to Isaac Deutscher's biography of Stalin, despite the protests of representatives its English publishers who were present. (The Times, September 12, 1983).
Trotsky acknowledged as
"excellent party activist"
Moreover, on September 10, Victor Shebrikov delivered a speech on the 110th anniversary of the birth of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, which contained a very hostile reference to Trotsky. (The Independent, September 12, 1987.) Afanasiev, the editor of Pravda, questioned the oppor tuneness of rehabilitating Trotsky. He argued that the revolutionary leader's "negative" features predominated over his "positive" ones, although he did not deny the latter.
The press is more and more taking up this controversial question. Ogonyok noted the generally positive assessment of Trotsky found in Lenin's Testament, and said that he was "an excellent activist of our party, forced [by Stalin] to set out on a path leading to isolation." The dailies Trud and Sovietskya Rossia at the end of September devoted whole pages to a critical examination of Trotsky's role, denying that the time had come for rehabilitating him or that such a rehabilitation was underway. The TASS agency disseminated extensive summaries of these articles.
The least that can be said is that the reason for all this is unclear. Are the CPSU leaders deliberately blowing hot and cold? Are they divided on this question? Whatever answer you give to this question, the usefulness of, and the need for, pressure from the international workers' movement for rehabilitating all the defendants in the purge trials stands out quite clearly.
In order to understand the implica12 ) tions of wiping out the criminal charges against the defendants in the purge International Viewpoint • October 26, 1987 trials — against all the defendants and not just the main Bolshevik leaders who were murdered after these judicial travesties — it is necessary to distinguish three aspects of the Stalinist repression against the Old Bolsheviks:
• Gross falsification of history. This involves completely covering up their role in the Russian revolution and even in the Russian workers' movement before the revolution, as well as in building and leading the Soviet state and the CPSU from 1917 to 1928, or else mentioning them only under slanderous designations, such as imperialist spies, Gestapo agents, traitors, counter-revolutionaries, murderers, terrorists, saboteurs and so on.
Subtle falsification of history
• More subtle falsification of history. This consists of distorting certain aspects of their work and the ideas they defended, covering up part of their real work and attributing to them conceptions that they never held. Such was the standard operating procedure of the Stalin faction in its fight against the various oppositions between 1923 and 1928. Over the years from 1929 to 1934, this gradually slid into the base slanders of the first type.
• Formal sentencing for crimes that they never committed and execution subsequent to these verdicts. (Radek, Rakovsky and some others were exceptions They were sentenced to long tions. They were sentenced to long prison terms, and died either as a result of their privations or at the hands of their jailers - the truth may never be known.) These sentences involved the deprivation of all civil rights and meant that the writings of all these communist leaders and cadres remain banned to this day in the USSR.
In order to to get off the hook at the least cost, the bureaucracy may only rectify a part of the consequences of these crimes of Stalin, for example on the seventieth anniversary of the October revolution. It may eliminate the grossest and most slanderous falsifications of history, as has already been done in the new edition of the Soviet Bolshaya Entsyklopediya, without restoring the full historical truth about the victims of the trials or permitting re-publication and free circulation of their writings. It might even wipe out all the gross falsifications and a lot of the more subtle ones, and tolerate republication of some writings of the Old Bolsheviks, but not all. Still other variants are possible.
Need for a vigorous campaign
Once you see this range of choice, you can understand the decisive importance of total, non-discriminatory and public rehabilitation of all the defendants in the Moscow trials, and therefore the need for a vigorous campaign for this. Such rehabilitation necessarily involves the state acknowledging before the Soviet masses that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov, Rakovsky, Pyatakov, Radek, Smirnov and other leaders of the party in Lenin's time and immediately after his death were not only not traitors, coun ter-revolutionaries, imperialist agents, fascists, assassins or terrorists. It would also mean recognizing that they were the main leaders of the state and party, members of the Politburo - in fact the only ones mentioned along with Stalin in Lenin's Testament -that they were revolutionists and dedi5. Trotsky was found guilty personally in the verdict of the first Moscow trial (August 19-24 1936). This verdict ended with the following words: "Trotsky, Lev Davidovich, and his son, Sedov, Lev Davidovich, who are now living abroad, have been found guilty [überführt in German] — on the basis of the statements of the defendants Smimov, N.; Goltzman, E.S.; Dreitser, V.; Olberg, Fritz David (I.I. Kruglyanski and Berman-Jurin), as well as by the evidence submitted to this trial — of directly preparing, as well as personally leading, the organization of terrorist acts in the USSR against leaders of the CPSU (B) and the Soviet state. If they are found on the territory of the USSR, they are to be immediately arrested and handed over to the Tribunal of the Military College of the Supreme Court." (Prozessbericht, Moscow, 1936, p.185 of the German version of the stenographic record, my translation.) 6. Trotsky pointed out a great many more subtle falsifications of history in his book The Stalin school of falsification.
USSR cated and bond itsele cated and honest communists, and that therefore their writings deserve to be reprinted.
If they are to be criticized, this has to be done in an objective way, based on what their writings actually contain and not on the basis of "intentions" attributed to them or "a double meaning" that is generally falsely imputed. These writings cannot remain under wraps. Even a partial and selective reprinting is inadmissible. No debate, no reference to what happened in the USSR from 1917 to the murder of the Old Bolsheviks or even up to today will be possible any longer without finally taking account of these writings.