Moscow Trials campaign
THE CAMPAIGN to clear the names of all the accused in the Moscow
Trials, launched over a year ago, has been collecting signatures from all over the world (for the full text of the appeal, see IV 137). You can contact the campaign c/o Michael
Löwy, 34 rue des Lyonnais, 75005
Paris, France.
Latest signatories:
Poland: Gregorz Ilka, secretary of the central executive committee of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), and editor of Robotnik; Jerzy Kolarzowski, PPS spokesperson; Piotr Niemczyk, member of the Freedom and Peace Movement (WiP); Malgorzata Ponulak, PPS central exec. cttee; Tadeusz Rachowski, president PPS central exec. cttee; Henryk Szlajfer, adviser to the National Self-Management Federation in 198026 81; Tomasz Truskawa, founder member of PPS. *
Soviet minister says Trotsky will be rehabilitated
[Abridged article from the September 1988 Issue of Bulletin in Defense of
Marxism, USA.] IGOR YAKOVLEV, Senior Counsellor on Legal Affairs to the USSR's Permanent Mission to the UN Commission on Human Rights, along with two other SoViet diplomats, in a meeting on June 29 with a delegation from the [US] Moscow Trials Campaign Committee, claimed that Leon Trotsky would soon be rehabili tated by the Soviet government and that his works would eventually be published in the USSR.
However, opinion was divided among the diplomats as to whether Trotsky would be posthumously re-admitted to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). While Yakovlev, who claimed to have read Trotsky, favored admission, one of his colleagues, who never read a word of this great Russian revolutionary, opposed the move. Their differences reflect the depth of discus sions within the USSR today.
In a two-and-a-half hour meeting in New York, requested by the US branch of the international campaign to rehabilitate the victims of the Moscow Trials, Yakovlev also discussed the political and economic reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev....
Yakovlev said the exoneration and rehabilitation of Trotsky would be a natural outcome of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost and perestroika and was surprised that an American group would even bother to make such a fuss over the issue, as he hardly saw it as the most pressing matter facing Soviet soclety today. The US delegates remained cautiously optimistic about Yakovlev's pronouncement....
Yakovlev vehemently defended Gorbachev's plans to allow market forces greater influence in the economy. He dismissed the revolutionary Marxist alternative for the Soviet Union - represented by Trotsky's thinking and the Fourth International today — as he dismissed the Left Opposition's positions in the ec onomic debates of the late 1920s as Irrelevant today. Yet it has been Stalinist policies of the bureaucracy that have plunged the country into stagnation and repression for decades, and the decentralizing market-oriented reforms envis. aged by Gorbachev and his followers are bureaucratic alternatives to a demo cratically planned economy advocated by Trotsky and his followers.
Because Trotsky severely criticized the bureaucratization of the Russian revolution and provided a Marxist analysis and a program to combat it, it is obvious that today's bureaucrats are yet wary of his works. Glasnost seems to have its limits
Bukharin, the leader of the Right Opposition to Stalin, who was legally vindi cated in February, was politically rehabilitated on July 9. This Is significant for it is his thinking that appears to provide a blueprint and the legitimacy for Gorba chev S reforms. it was Bukharin as Stalin's ally against Trotsky who called upon the peasants to "enrich themselves" through the New Economic Policy in 1925. Likewise, Gorbachev wants Individual enterprises to accumulate capital and drive other firms out of business if need be. Trotsky's Ideas could provide a program tor soviet workers to fight those bureaucrats and managers who see perestrolka as a chance to get rich, as well as the forces of capitalist restoration that could be unleashed. Nevertheless, Yakovley called "Trotskyism" a "bourgeols" Idea.
International Viewpoint #147 • September 19, 1988
4