(UNO) TO MARK 75TH HOLODOMOR ANNIVERSARY

ForUm, Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, May 14, 2007

12. IF NOT NOW THEN NEVER
It is seventy years since the unfurling of a campaign of arrests,
farcical trials and executions which historians call the Great Terror.
LETTER-TO-THE EDITOR AND COMMENTARY:
By Halya Coynash, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group
Published by the Action Ukraine Report (AUR) #843, Article 12
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, May 16, 2007

13. SURVIVING STALIN, FAMINE AND FORCED LABOUR,
UKRAINIAN/CANADIAN PETRO SYDORENKO TAUGHT ART
STUDENTS TO 'SEE THE WORLD AFRESH'
By John Goddard, Staff Reporter, The Toronto Star
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Monday, May 14, 2007

14. REMEMBERING THE MOSCOW TRIALS [1936-1938]
The Moscow Trials were and remain important. They coincided with
the final climax of Stalin's Great Purges, and were a public symbol

of these. Between 1936 and 1938, millions were arrested and
more than a million executed.
By James Woudhuysen, Spiked-Online
London, United Kingdom, Monday 16 April 2007

15. NEW BOOK: COMRADES: COMMUNISM, A WORLD HISTORY
Book investigates the rise of communism and why it ultimately
failed, bar its curious Chinese hybrid, says Tim Gardam
BOOK REVIEW: By Tim Gardam, The Observer,

London, United Kingdom, Sunday May 13, 2007

16. BORIS YELTSIN: THE HERO OF HIS TIME
By not permitting Russia to disintegrate into anarchy or leading it back to

authoritarianism, Yeltsin kept the way open for such a leader to one day

emerge. Unfortunately, that man is not his handpicked successor, Vladimir

Putin, who has only perpetuated the vicious cycles of Russian history.
COMMENTARY: By Nina L. Khrushcheva
The Journal of Turkish Weekly (JTW)
Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, May 3, 2007

17. RUSSIAN STATEMENT ON SOVIET MONUMENTS SURPRISING

SAYS UKRAINE'S FOREIGN MINISTRY
RIA Novosti, Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, March 15, 2006

18. AWKWARD EMBRACE
Widening rift in EU over how to handle an increasingly authoritarian Russia.
By Bertrand Benoit in Berlin and Richard Milne in Frankfurt
Financial Times, London, UK, Wednesday, May 16 2007 03:00

19. "EUROPE WITHOUT PUTIN'S FRIENDS"
Latvian writer says Russia's friends in Europe disappearing
COMMENTARY: By Uldis Smits
Latvijas Avize, Riga, Latvia, in Latvian 15 May 07 p 3
BBC Monitoring Service, United Kingdom, May 15, 2007

20. MOSCOW-ASIA TRANSIT
During 16 years of independence, Ukraine has not started to
solve the problem of overcoming its energy dependence.
ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY: Mykhailo Honchar ("NOMOS" center)
Mirror-Weekly #18 (647), Kyiv, Ukraine, 12-18 May, 2007

a group of leading U.S. and European officials have joined forces to prepare
Ukraine for eventual membership in both NATO and the EU, despite the
continuing political turmoil in the country and enlargement fatigue inside
the 27-member bloc.

The initiative, led by a former U.S. national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, and a former German defense minister, Volker Rühe, reflects a
growing concern that unless Ukraine is given the prospect of EU and NATO
membership, the chances for long-term stability and economic, political and
social reforms could remain elusive.

Meeting in Berlin, the U.S.-EU Partnership Committee, as it is called, said
that it believed that if the EU reached out to Ukraine, it would achieve two
beneficial things: stability for Europe and assurances to Russia.

"The committee urged U.S. and European leaders to remember that an
independent, democratic and market-orientated Ukraine will contribute to a
more stable and secure Europe," said Brzezinski, counselor at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Such a policy could also
show to Russia that European policy toward Ukraine was not intended to
alienate Russia.

"We want to advance the cause of a larger Europe and a more cooperative
Europe," added Brzezinski, who was speaking at the German Council on

Foreign Relations, which hosted the conference.

"In that context, a closer and better relationship between Ukraine and
Europe that is open would not exclude Russia becoming involved in an open
and cooperative enterprise with Europe."

The U.S.-EU Partnership Committee proposed that one concrete area for
cooperation between the EU and Ukraine could be the security and reliability
of energy supplies. Ukraine is the major transit country for Russian gas
exports to Europe.

Russia's state-owned energy giant, Gazprom, cut its deliveries to Ukraine
last year, officially because of a dispute over the price of gas. But
analysts said it was the Kremlin's response to Ukraine's pro-democratic
Orange Revolution.

The committee proposed a reform of Ukraine's energy policies, with support
from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to reduce
corruption, introduce transparency and modernize the energy infrastructure.

The EU, which has become frustrated with the bitter infighting between the
pro-Western Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, and the pro-Russian
prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, is reluctant to hold out any prospect of
Ukraine's joining the bloc. Several countries, including Germany, also fear
that NATO membership would affect Berlin's close ties to Moscow.

Instead, the EU said it had offered Ukraine and other countries in the
region a "neighborhood policy." Under the plan, countries that enact reforms
would have greater access to trade with the EU and economic, social and
political ties with the bloc would be strengthened. Regardless of the
reforms, it would not lead to membership of the EU.

Rühe is unusual in Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union
party because he supports Ukraine's and Turkey's joining the EU, while
Merkel favors a privileged partnership for Turkey, similar to the
"neighborhood policy."

"The European neighborhood policy should be enhanced and should not be

a substitute for potential EU membership for Ukraine," Rühe said.

Bronislaw Geremek, a former Polish foreign minister and now a member of

the European Parliament who is on the U.S.-EU Partnership Committee for

Ukraine, warned about "enlargement fatigue" inside the EU. Despite that, he

said Ukraine should start preparing for when it will be in a position to
negotiate membership, that is, it should introduce the rule of law and
implement the EU's standards, regulations and legislation. -30-

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LINK: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/14/europe/ukraine.php

ForUm, Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, May 14, 2007

KYIV- The new permanent representative of Ukraine at UNO Yury

Sergeyev called on the United Nations Organizations as the united voice of

the international community to make its contribution to arrangements

concerning the 75th-anniversary of Great Famine 1932-1933 (Holodomor).

"We do not intend to put responsibility for events and acts committed at

the territory of Ukraine in 1932-1933 to any country. We underline that
responsibility for artificially-organized famine is on totalitarian regime
of that time," Sergeyev told at the UNO General Assembly session.

"It is important to understand the past in order to moralize and avoid such
mistakes in future. It is of great importance to admit crime against
humanity and to pay homage to its victims," Sergeyev told considering that
it will contribute to strengthening of trust and understanding between the
peoples and to cooperation of new generations within harmony and dialogue.

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LINK: http://en.for-ua.com/news/2007/05/14/105142.html

FOOTNOTE: Subheadings have been inserted editorially by the

Action Ukraine Report (AUR).

couple standing at a pillar reading a concert poster.

The man wore a military uniform, with a revolver on his belt. The woman
wore a coat, boots and a fashionable beret.

They were chatting and laughing, apparently oblivious to a toddler nearby,
crying over a dead woman.

"At the foot of the pillar lay a woman," Sydorenko wrote. "With his bony,
wasted hands her 2-year-old son tugged at her headscarf and clothes,
clinging to his mother's body, tears streaming down his ghostly face."

In 1963, Sydorenko submitted the painting for an exhibition of the Ukrainian
Association of Visual Artists of Canada, of which he was a founder. Although
other members objected to its theme, Sydorenko took it to the opening and
hung it anyway.

"In the 1960s, even here, people were reticent to talk about (the famine),"
his daughter says. The painting has since established a place for itself,
having been displayed on numerous occasions and printed in catalogues.

Petro Sydorenko died on May 6, just short of his 81st birthday. He leaves
his wife, Kateryna, and two children, Halyna and Wasyl.

Donations in his memory can be sent to the Ukrainian Canadian Research
and Documentation Centre to help fund a book about the great famine.
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LINK: http://www.thestar.com/News/article/213521
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[return to index] [Action Ukraine Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]
========================================================
14. REMEMBERING THE MOSCOW TRIALS [1936-1938]
The Moscow Trials were and remain important. They coincided with
the final climax of Stalin's Great Purges, and were a public symbol

of these. Between 1936 and 1938, millions were arrested and
more than a million executed.

By James Woudhuysen, Spiked-Online
London, United Kingdom, Monday 16 April 2007

Amid today's craze for anniversaries, there's one episode in history that
nobody - especially on the left - wants to talk about.

In August 1936, radios all over the world broadcast the sound of fallen
Bolshevik Party leaders confessing, at a packed, dingy Moscow court, to
crimes against the Soviet Union that they had never committed.

By 1937 the Moscow Trials gained further momentum, as 17 more leading
Bolsheviks were given a second public humiliation, while hundreds of leaders
of the Red Army were tried and executed in secret.

In March 1938, a third and final show trial concluded with a further 21
confessions, and nearly as many executions. Around the world, the court
proceedings initiated by Communist Party leader Joseph Stalin against those
who had led the October 1917 Revolution caused heated debate. Yet today
they are almost forgotten.
NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE MOSCOW TRIALS
Despite the fact that we are currently living through an anniversary
frenzy - where any event from the past judged to have 'meaning' for the
present is pored over - nobody seems to want to talk about the Moscow
Trials. Indeed, there has been silence on these events, especially among the
Western left, for decades.

The Trials tend to be revisited by historians only as a confirmation of
Stalin's rotten nature and personality, or as easy 'proof' that any attempt
to create a progressive alternative society is doomed; rarely are they
properly interrogated or fully explained.

That is a pity. The Moscow Trials were and remain important. They coincided
with the final climax of Stalin's Great Purges, and were a public symbol of
these. Between 1936 and 1938, millions of Russians were arrested and more
than a million executed.

Up to 1950, Soviet forced labour camps never held fewer than eight million
prisoners, and ran death rates of perhaps 10 per cent (1).

Bourgeois critics of the Trials insist that blind loyalty to the old
Bolshevik Party of Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) led veteran revolutionaries to
believe that their confessions, however far-fetched, were politically
justified (2). But what really happened in those dark days in the Soviet
Union?
'TERRORIST ACTS'
The origins of the first trial lay in the December 1934 assassination of
Sergei Kirov, governor of Leningrad (now St Petersburg), and a moderate and
popular member of the Stalinist Politburo.

Stalin arranged for Kirov to be shot in the back of the head on the way to
work and, on the same day, issued a decree hastening the trial and execution
of those accused of 'terrorist acts'.

Tens of thousands of people alleged by Stalin to be supporters of Leon
Trotsky, the former commander of the Red Army and exiled leader of the Left
Opposition within Stalin's Communist Party, were blamed for Kirov's murder
and deported to Siberia. Gregory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, also key
Bolshevik leaders in the revolution of October 1917, were arrested.

The works of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and the brilliant left-wing
economist Yevgeni Preobrazhensky were removed from libraries. The
prestigious Society of Old Bolsheviks was disbanded, the Communist youth
organisation purged, and the death penalty lowered to include 12-year-olds.

In August 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev and 14 others were brought to dock.
They were charged with helping Trotsky murder Kirov, attempts on the lives
of Stalin's henchmen on the Politburo, and plotting to shoot Stalin.

No evidence apart from the false confessions was produced, nor were those
implicated in the fictitious conspiracy brought to the witness stand. After
five days in court, all the defendants were sentenced to death. Executions
followed swiftly.
CREATIVE CONFESSIONS
From then on, the Purges began in earnest. While Stalin sought an alliance
with Hitler's Germany, Soviet Jews were shot for being in league with the
Nazis. Some officials received the Order of Lenin on the day they were
arrested. Others, dismissed from their posts, had to wait weeks before the
police picked them up.

Prisons were more diseased, overcrowded and full of informers than in
Tsarist times. Confessions were left to the creative powers of those
accused. It was essential to denounce relatives and friends, while wives of
convicted 'terrorists' were automatically shot, too.

Trials took place in minutes, and many top-level political meetings took
place at which only those listening knew that those speaking were already
destined for execution.

In January 1937, Georgy Pyatakov, the driving force behind Soviet
industrialisation in the 1930s, was publicly tried along with former Left
Oppositionist Karl Radek and a collection of top industrial bureaucrats.

The charges: plotting with Trotsky to sabotage trains, chemical plants and
mines; repudiating industrialisation and the collectivisation of
agriculture; conspiring to surrender the Ukraine to the Nazis at a meeting
between Trotsky and Rudolf Hess; spying for the Axis powers under an
agreement reached between Trotsky, Hitler and Japan's Emperor Hirohito; and
trying to kill Stalin and his senior aides.

Within a week, one of Trotsky's former colleagues, Christian Rakovsky, was
implicated in the plot, together with Marshall Tukhachevsky, the formidable
head of the Soviet army.

Twenty years later, Nikita Khrushchev, in his famous secret speech to a
closed session of the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956, was the
Soviet leader who first condemned the excesses of Stalin's era; in 1937, he
was the new secretary of the Moscow party.

He mobilised a demonstration of 200,000 in Red Square, in temperatures
of -27°C, demanding that Rakovsky and Tukhachevsky's sentences be carried
out immediately.

They were. Following the execution of Tukhachevsky, eight admirals and
thousands of officers were also shot.

In September 1936, Nikolai Yezhov had been appointed head of the secret
police.

Stalin had chosen that moment to call on every party official to name two
replacements in case of emergencies. Now in the notorious 'Yezhov years'
(1937-8), four or five such substitutes became necessary.

Failure to have denounced those who had been arrested became, itself,
grounds for arrest. Police interrogators unable to extract enough
confessions were shot. National minorities, foreign communists in exile,
Leningraders, historians, linguists and writers were singled out for arrest,
torture and execution.

In the mines and forests of the Soviet far north, GULAG - the organisation
that administered the camps - presided over regimes in which rape, murder
and death by disease, starvation or hypothermia were commonplace. Soviet
citizens were led to believe that Yezhov was to blame; by contrast, Stalin
appeared innocent.

Now nobody was safe. Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, who had supported
Stalin in his struggles against the Left Opposition, were arrested in the
middle of a central committee meeting and put on trial with 19 others in
March 1938 (3).
CHARGES: RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE FAMINE
To the familiar list of charges were added: responsibility for the famine
which followed collectivisation; faulty design of power stations; poisoning
pigs and horses; sabotaging butter with nails and glass; causing production
delays, poor harvests and shortages of paper, eggs and sugar; raising prices
and weakening the ruble; trying to kill Lenin in 1918; receiving money from
the Nazis - and working for the Mensheviks, the Tsarists, the Polish secret
service and British intelligence.

Even after the trial reached its inevitable conclusion, the purges
continued. Soviet diplomats, scientists, engineers, police and military men,
in their thousands, were forced to build their own labour camps.

Most of the Stalinist leaders appointed in the 1930s were removed by
the 1940s. Scarcely a section of Soviet society escaped the purges.
HOW CAN WE EXPLAIN THE STALINIST TERROR?
How can we explain the Stalinist terror? Its origins lay not in Stalin's
evil character, as many claim today, but in the vacuum created by the defeat
of the revolution and the crisis in the system (4).

After October 1917, war and famine ravaged the Soviet Union and prevented
the Bolshevik revolution from realising its aims. Limited freedom was given
to capitalists in the early 1920s in an attempt to revive the economy, a
policy that was extended by Stalin when he took over.

The free rein that Stalin gave to private commerce at the height of the New
Economic Policy in the late 1920s led to a crisis, in which all-out
collectivisation of agriculture and headlong industrial growth was enforced
by the state as the alternative to a full revival of capitalism.

Through forced collectivisation and industrialisation, the Soviet economy of
the 1930s succeeded in destroying all the mechanisms of the capitalist
market, but at a terrible cost.
ECONOMIC CHAOS RULED FROM 1929 to 1989-1991
Economic chaos ruled - in fact, from about 1929 to the collapse of the USSR
in 1989-91. The only way a wholly degenerate Communist Party could try to
overcome economic chaos was by imposing violence everywhere.

Stalin's terror was the outcome of neither ingenious planning nor personal
whim. Rather, it was the result of a completely rudderless economy.

Indeed, terror itself was conducted in the same chaotic way as was life and
politics in the rest of the Soviet Union.

Nor was terror alone enough to stabilise the Soviet system. While enforcing
relentless discipline in farms and factories, the Stalinist bureaucracy also
launched a programme of education and training to try to incorporate a new
generation of hacks into the state machine.

Through the classroom, the Kremlin tried to foster a section of society that
owed its privileges and its future prospects to the regime. The link between
Stalinist terror and this social engineering was apparent as early as 1928
in the Shakhty case - the forerunner of the Moscow Trials.
PURGING FOR INDUSTRY
On the eve of the launch of Stalin's first Five Year Plan (1928-32), the
Soviet Communist Party had just 138 engineer members to oversee
industrialisation. Hence the bureaucracy was heavily dependent on surviving
experts from the Tsarist era, most of whom had little sympathy with the new
order.

The trial of technicians, on charges of sabotaging coal mines in the key
Shakhty region of the Donbass heavy industrial zone, revealed the dangers of
relying on experts with no loyalty to the regime.

The Shakhty Trial was held in public, as a warning to bourgeois experts and
party officials alike. It was also significant in that the presiding judge
was Andrei Vyshinsky.

A former Menshevik and, eight years later, the notorious prosecutor at all
three Moscow Trials, Vyshinsky's career has pretty much vanished from the
world's history today. But after his success at the Shakhty Trial, he was
subsequently put in charge of all Soviet technical education.

In the early 1930s, hundreds of thousands of manual workers were rushed
through technical courses and trained for white-collar jobs. The role of the
secret police expanded - it now not only had to conduct repression, but also
to play a part in organising the economy.

However, the hectic industrialisation drive produced crises everywhere, and
the crash education programme moved painfully slowly. By 1934 and the 17th
Communist Party congress, little had been achieved. Only about 200 of the
2,000 delegates had ever got beyond secondary school.

By 1939, most of those delegates attending in 1934 had perished in the
purges, yet still only a quarter of the new Stalinist cadres had higher
education.

Given the dislocation of the Soviet economy, Stalin sought to maintain the
momentum of his industrialisation drive by purging layer after layer of
senior administrators. In 1935, he complained that industrialisation was
proceeding too slowly.

He sponsored the Stakhanovite movement, a corps of 'shockworkers' dedicated
to exceeding production norms and terrifying factory chiefs deemed
'over-cautious'.

With the population atomised, each individual converted into a real or
imagined informer, and both market mechanisms and workers' power long gone,
Stalin could only try to exhort or bash the Soviet economy into any kind of
coherence.
STALIN MADE THE LIE BIG ENOUGH TO STICK
For Stalin, the trials were also a means of shifting the blame for the
unpopularity of his regime on to scapegoats who might otherwise have
supplanted him.

By accusing his opponents not just of dissent, but also of terror, espionage
and all the ills of his economic policy, Stalin made the lie big enough to
stick.

It is also true that the trials showed the West that Stalin was in control,
and so eased capitalist fears about the Russian Revolution spreading to the
rest of the world. These fears had been real enough in the decade after
1917.

But the Trials and Purges cannot be put down, in the modern manner, to the
diseased mind of a malevolent madman (5). They were the work of the whole
of the Soviet bureaucracy.
OUT OF CONTROL
Tensions within the Soviet bureaucracy ensured that Stalinist terror was as
makeshift as Stalinist industrialisation.

The rewriting of history books, the retouching of photographs, the arbitrary
selection of victims and the iffy ways in which they were made to rehearse
their court confessions beforehand - all these devices were so hurried and
so crude in their implementation that the collapse of the whole edifice of
judicial terror was always a possibility.
TERROR, LIKE THE ECONOMY, WAS OUT OF CONTROL
Terror, like the economy, was out of control. Only a few months before
Zinoviev's public crucifixion, the left-wing writer and critic of Stalinism,
Victor Serge, was allowed to leave Russia. 'I am conscious', he wrote later,
'of being the living proof of the unplanned character of the first trial'.
(6)

At all three trials, defendants qualified their confessions and Vyshinsky
made potentially disastrous mistakes. The poverty of evidence and witnesses
was an error of Stalin's; so, too, was the fact that many people with both
the position and the desire to unmask Stalin - Lenin's widow Nadezhda
Krupskaya, foreign commissioner Maxim Litvinoff, writer Boris Pasternak,
physicist Pyotr Kapitsa - were never brought to book.
TERROR SYSTEM WAS IRRATIONAL
Finally, the terror system was just as irrational as the rest of the
Stalinist economy. By turning millions of Russians into unproductive
interrogators, guards, prisoners and corpses, it was just one more factor
exposing the Soviet economy to Hitler's Panzer tanks in 1941, and delaying
its full consolidation until the 1950s.

The degrading confessions of the Moscow Trials had nothing to do with
revolutionary politics, and everything to do with its disappearance in the
late 1920s. To the extent that people confessed because they thought it
correct to do so, this was the result of 12 years of Stalinism.
A DEVIOUS SOCIETY PRODUCED A DEVIANT LEADER
A brutish economy produced a brute; a devious society produced a deviant
leader. What is striking about Stalin's still-debated personality traits -
his suspiciousness, his inscrutability, his petty viciousness - is how much
they corresponded to the backward, disorganised nature of the Soviet system.

No wonder that, when asked back in 1925 what Stalin represented, Trotsky had
first thought for a minute, then replied with a one-liner that was not only
famous for years, but which retains its precision today. 'Stalin', Trotsky
observed, 'is the outstanding mediocrity in the party'. (7)

Previous anniversaries of the Moscow Trials have proved gifts for right-wing
ideologues. But in the twenty-first century, things seem rather different.

Obsessive portraits of Joe the totalitarian are still published, and Western
commentators regularly bemoan the growth of nostalgia for Stalin in Russia
today.
TRIALS WERE AWFUL WARNING
However, the worldwide collapse of genuine historical thinking ensures that
few now point to the Trials as the awful warning they once were.

Yet there is something else. In their youth, people like the British Labour
Party's John Reid, Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson joined the post-war
organisations of the Communist Party of Great Britain. They should have
known all about the Trials. Did they?

In 2007, we have as much reason to remember the Moscow Trials as some have
to forget them. Seventy years ago, many of those hauled in to appear before
Stalin's judges refused to confess, and never made it to the courtroom.

Rakovsky withstood interrogation for eight months, while Preobrazhensky died
rather than confess. History should avenge these men, give its own harsh
verdict on their tormentors, and on all those who would pass over these
tragic events. -30-
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: James Woudhuysen is professor of forecasting and innovation at

De Montfort University, Leicester. Visit his website here. This is an edited
version of the author's article 'Stalin's Trials' in the next step, 22
August 1986.
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(1) The figures here followed Robert Conquest, The great terror: Stalin's
purge of the thirties [1968], Penguin, 1971. Conquest was a right-wing
historian vilified for many years by the Stalinophile left. For a more
recent, more balanced set of estimates, by another right-winger, see
'Appendix: how many?', in Anne Applebaum, GULAG: a history of the
Soviet camps [2003], Penguin, 2004.
(2) The classic anti-communist work here is Arthur Koestler's novel,
Darkness at Noon, Jonathan Cape, 1940.
(3) A popular intellectual who had joined the Bolsheviks after the
revolution of 1905, Bukharin rose to become the chief organiser of the
Soviet Union's New Economic Policy after Lenin's death. Bukharin favoured
the growth of private enterprise, and especially encouraged capitalist
farmers to enrich themselves, believing that prosperity on the land would
lead to a boom in the towns. When, in 1928-9, Stalin turned from the New
Economic Policy to a bloody collectivisation of agriculture and an all-out
programme of industrialisation based on terror, Bukharin opposed him, only
to meet his fate in the Trials.
(4) The analysis that follows is based on Frank Furedi's pioneering work,
The Soviet Union Demystified, Junius, 1986.
(5) A recent example of this school is Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin: the
court of the Red Tsar, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003. (6) Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford University Press, 1963, p330.
(7) See Leon Trotsky, My Life, 1930
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LINK: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3092/
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FOOTNOTE: Subheadings have been inserted editorially by the

Action Ukraine Report (AUR).

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[return to index] [Action Ukraine Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]
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15. COMRADES: COMMUNISM, A WORLD HISTORY
New book investigates the rise of communism and why it

ultimately failed, bar its curious Chinese hybrid, says Tim Gardam

BOOK REVIEW: By Tim Gardam, The Observer,

London, United Kingdom, Sunday May 13, 2007

Comrades: Communism, a World History
By Robert Service, Macmillan £25, pp624

When Nicolas Sarkozy claimed that his victory had finally liquidated the
legacy of 1968, he sought to dispel the shadow of an ideology that once
seemed a credible threat to the West.

1968 was perhaps the last time in Europe when Marxism could claim
intellectual ascendancy, even though the revolt was led by student
radicals - the French Communist party stood aloof - with Lenin and Trotsky,
and not the regime in Moscow, their inspiration.

True, in the mid-Seventies, Moscow could kid itself that communism was
spreading, as Vietnam, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique and Afghanistan painted
red across the map, but in reality, the sclerotic logic of Soviet central
planning was already destroying an enfeebled system.

Within a decade, Mikhail Gorbachev had presided over the most dramatic and
unexpected collapse of imperial power in modern history.

Robert Service's Comrades is a timely and ambitious book. Embroiled as we
are with Islamic terrorism, the 20th-century struggle between world
communism and western capitalism seems as remote now as the 1914 rivalries
of kings and emperors must have seemed in 1945. But this was an equally
desperate battle for ideas and power.
STRIPS AWAY ILLUSIONS ABOUT COMMUNISM
Service strips away the illusions about communism that beguiled generations
of admirers. From the moment in 1917 when Lenin forced the disparate
revolutionary parties in Russia under his sway, communism became a system
based on state terror and the dictatorship of elites in the name of the
proletariat.

Service demonstrates that the Bolsheviks came to power without a detailed
template for the new world order. This was invented almost as an
afterthought and never lost a sense of insecurity.

Service dissects the paradoxes - Marx foresaw the withering of the state,
but Lenin created a system of state coercion that infested public and
personal life; Marxism believed that communism would emerge out of the
contradictions of capitalism; yet apart from the military conquests of the
Red Army in 1945, it only took root in underdeveloped peasant societies.

The first years of Soviet communism awaited with confidence revolution
across Europe. Later, Moscow pumped funds into western communist parties,
but, by the end, communism's internationalism expressed itself only in its
fractures: Yugoslavia, then China and finally the Euro communists.
FACE SEEMED SO POWERFUL THOUGH ITS HEART WAS SO WEAK
We can forget how permanent it seemed for so long. Service's account reminds
us why its face seemed so powerful though its heart was so weak.

Any history of communism is overwhelmed by Stalin and Mao. Most chilling is
Service's account of how the clinical targets of state industrial planning
during Stalin's five-year plans were replicated in the extermination of
political opponents.

Decree 00447 in 1937 stipulated that 259,450 'anti-Soviet elements' should
be taken into custody; a precise 28 per cent of them were to be executed.
STALIN'S FAMINE IN UKRAINE IN THE THIRTIES
Stalin's famine in Ukraine in the Thirties is eclipsed by the 30 million
estimated killed in Mao's Great Leap Forward.

The most horrible quotation in the book is Mao's: 'How many people would

die if [nuclear] war breaks out? There are 2.7 billion people in the world... if
we take the most extreme situation, half die and half live; but imperialism
would be razed to the ground and the whole world become socialist.'

Service's history is vast in its scope. He writes best when he offers an
unabashed personal and moral perspective on the human cost of the
totalitarian society. He seeks to explain how so many could acquiesce in a
regime that wantonly destroyed their lives.

'Millions had moved from the countryside to the cities. Neighbours were
strangers to each other. Families had been broken up. It was tempting for
individuals to look after themselves by showing unkindness to others.'

The enormity of the totalitarian 21st century can obscure our understanding
of why Marxist Leninism was so attractive. Its manifesto guaranteed full
employment, universal education, housing and welfare, and a commitment to
eliminating racism.
COMMUNISM FAILED BECAUSE
Communism failed, Service argues, because in the end totalitarianism could
not eradicate individual aspiration. It was the system's failure to deliver
the promised prosperity that discredited it in the eyes of the working
people it championed.

Yet there remains today one communist state courted as the world's next
superpower. Deng Xiaoping's China succeeded where Gorbachev failed.

It was Deng who coined the phrase: 'Seek truth from facts.' He set in train
the market reforms that led to China becoming 'the only communist state
which developed a viable economy by giving it over to capitalism'.

Yet at the same time he ruthlessly retained, as at Tiananmen Square, the
full apparatus of centralised control and the rigidity of the one-party
state; and the labour camps.

As Service concludes: 'The communist order has been retained only as a

means of rigorous political and ideological control; its economic and social
components were blown to the four winds.' It remains the most unsettling
question for liberal democracy today: on what terms do we really want China
to succeed?

A state that lets loose unbridled capitalism but secures the full despotic
apparatus of Leninism may yet demonstrate that the victories of pluralism in
1989 were not the end of communism. -30-
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LINK: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2078191,00.html
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[return to index] [Action Ukraine Report (AUR) Monitoring Service]
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16. BORIS YELTSIN: THE HERO OF HIS TIME
By not permitting Russia to disintegrate into anarchy or leading it back to

authoritarianism, Yeltsin kept the way open for such a leader to one day

emerge. Unfortunately, that man is not his handpicked successor, Vladimir

Putin, who has only perpetuated the vicious cycles of Russian history.

COMMENTARY: By Nina L. Khrushcheva
The Journal of Turkish Weekly (JTW)
Ankara, Turkey, Thursday, May 3, 2007

Boris Yeltsin was utterly unique. Russia's first democratically elected
leader, he was also the first Russian leader to give up power voluntarily,
and constitutionally, to a successor. But he was also profoundly
characteristic of Russian leaders.

Using various mixtures of charisma, statecraft, and terror, Peter the Great,
Catherine the Great, Alexander II, Peter Stolypin (the last tsar's prime
minister), Lenin, and Stalin all sought to make Russia not only a great
military power, but also an economic and cultural equal of the West.

Yeltsin aimed for the same goal. But he stands out from them in this
respect: he understood that empire was incompatible with democracy, and

so was willing to abandon the Soviet Union in order to try to build a
democratic order at home.

At the height of Yeltsin's career, many Russians identified with his
bluntness, impulsiveness, sensitivity to personal slight, even with his
weakness for alcohol. And yet in the final years of his rule, his reputation
plunged.

Only in the last few months of his second presidential term, after he
launched the second war in Chechnya in September 1999, did he and his
lieutenants regain some legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian public, while
causing revulsion among any remaining Western admirers.

Despite his caprices, however, Yeltsin kept Russia on a course of broad
strategic co-operation with America and its allies. Although he opposed
America's use of force against Iraq and Serbia in the 1990's, his government
never formally abandoned the sanctions regime against either country.

Moreover, no nuclear weapons were unleashed, deliberately or accidentally,
and no full-scale war of the kind that ravaged post-communist Yugoslavia
broke out between Russia and any of its neighbors, although several of them
were locked in internal or regional conflict in which Russia's hand was
visible.

The tasks that faced Yeltsin when he attained power in 1991 were monumental.
At several crucial moments, he established himself as the only person who
could rise to the challenges of transforming Russia from a dictatorship into
a democracy, from a planned economy into a free market, and from an empire
into a medium-ranked power.

In 1992, as the emerging Russian Federation teetered on the brink of
economic and monetary collapse, he opted for radical reform, prompting a
backlash from vested interest groups. In the years that followed, he would
tilt toward liberal economics whenever he felt powerful enough to do so.

Yeltsin was quintessentially a product of the Soviet system, which makes his
turn to democracy and the free market, though imperfect, even more
miraculous.

The son of a poor building worker, he had a meteoric rise through communist
ranks to become party boss in the industrial city of Sverdlovsk (now
Yekaterinburg) in the Urals.

Unlike most other party leaders, he was good at talking to ordinary people,
a skill that helped him win support and then power later, but he also showed
no sign of questioning the Marxist-Leninist gobbledygook that he was
required to recite at public events.

It was only after Mikhail Gorbachev summoned Yeltsin to Moscow in 1985

that he began to differentiate himself from dozens of other senior party
apparatchiks.

Sensing the bitter frustration of Moscow's middle class-in-waiting, Yeltsin
quickly gained a reputation as a harsh, if not always coherent, critic of
the party's old guard.

Campaigners for democracy admired Yeltsin's struggle against the
conservatives in the politburo - especially after he was forced out of the
party's inner circle in November 1987.

Determined to outbid Gorbachev as a reformer, he persuaded liberals to
overcome their distrust of his provincial manners. They gave him lessons in
democratic theory, while he gave them tactical advice.

As the Soviet Union steadily disintegrated, with virtually all of its 15
republics straining at the leash, Yeltsin gained the leadership of the
largest - the Russian Federation - which placed him in a tactical alliance
with independence campaigners in Ukraine, the Baltic states, and Georgia.

By June 1991, after quashing a series of challenges to his leadership, he
became the first elected president of Russia; two months later, real power
fell into his hands, after the failed putsch against Gorbachev of August
1991 by conservatives seeking to prevent the Soviet Union's disintegration.

For most Westerners and many Russians, his finest hour came on August 19th
that year, when he stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament and defied
the hardliners who had seized power.

But Yeltsin himself never succeeded in fully throwing off the intellectual
shackles of the past. As president, he talked of economic performance as if
it could be improved by decree. Like most Russians, he wanted the material
advantages of capitalism, but had little respect or understanding for the
rule of law and dispersion of power, which makes capitalist institutions
work.

Nevertheless, for most of his presidency, Yeltsin kept alive - albeit with
many tactical retreats - the goal of economic reform.

At some level, he sensed that Russia's potential could be unleashed only if
the government either faced down, or bought off, the special interests -
military, industrial, and agricultural - that stood in the way. The economic
orthodoxy pursued after the collapse of 1998 laid the groundwork for today's
sustained Russian boom.

Yeltsin's tragedy, and Russia's, was that, when the country needed a leader
with vision and determination, it found an agile political operator instead.

By not permitting Russia to disintegrate into anarchy or leading it back to
authoritarianism, Yeltsin kept the way open for such a leader to one day
emerge.

Unfortunately, that man is not his handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin, who
has only perpetuated the vicious cycles of Russian history. -30-
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LINK: http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=44813
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Affairs (NDI) is a non-profit institution working to strengthen democratic
institutions worldwide by providing practical training to leaders of
democratic political parties, civic groups and legislators.

NDI seeks a senior political professional to serve as Director of NDI's
office in Ukraine. This position is based in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The Resident Director would advise leaders of political parties and manage

a large NDI's office in the former Soviet Union.

Responsibilities would include representing NDI to the U.S. Embassy and
other American and international organization, supervising a Ukrainian
office staff of 13 and consulting with senior Ukrainian political leaders.

Primary Responsibilities -----
· Oversee the design and implementation of training programs for political
parties on all aspects of political party building.
· Provide day-to-day management and oversight of local and expatriate
program staff in the field office.
· Maintain relationships with key partners in the legislature, civil
society, government and the donor community.
· Oversee the development, review and timely submission of program-related
materials, including regular reports that measure and evaluate program
results, and reports on political developments in Ukraine that may affect
program outcomes.
· Ensure adherence to NDI-DC and Ukraine policies and procedures, as

well as adherence to funder/donor regulations, ensuring the integrity of all
financial transactions.

Qualifications -----
· Bachelors Degree, preferably in International Relations or related
subject.
· Minimum of twelve (12) years of experience in working with parliaments

or political parties.
· Supervisory and managerial experience.
· Demonstrated ability to work effectively with high-level government
officials.
· Effective written and oral communication skills. Proven ability to
communicate skills and experience to others.
· Work experience abroad and familiarity with international political
systems and foreign languages desirable.

Application Instructions -----
Interested applicants can apply now using our on-line resume tool. Please
see the employment section of NDI's web site, www.ndi.org

IMPORTANT: Please include cover letter with specific job title cited. No
phone calls please.

NDI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis
of race, ethnicity, national origin, political affiliation, religion,
gender, disability, and/or sexual orientation. -30-

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