First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 29, July 24, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The frame-up trials of three dissidents in the Soviet Union last week have added fresh evidence to the indictment of the Soviet system as a fascist dictatorship that has nothing In common with genuine socialism.
Throughout the world, a cry of protest went up as the dissidents were routinely found guilty and given harsh sentences Anatoly Shcharansky, Jewish dissident, sentenced to three years in prison and 10 more at hard labor; Aleksander Ginsburg sentenced to eight years at hard labor; Viktoras Pcrkus, Lithuanian dissident, sentenced to 15 years at hard labor.
The charges against all three men of “treason,” “anti-Sovietism,” and “betrayal of the homeland,” were never substantiated by the courts. The defendants were not allowed to call witnesses in their defense, and their relatives were not even allowed in the courtroom.
While the new czars who rule today’s Soviet Union hope that the trials will help to suppress the growing resistance among the Soviet people, the clumsily concocted frame-ups only serve to shine the light of world opinion on the fascist nature of the USSR.
In fact, there is absolutely nothing socialist about the Soviet Union. It is an imperialist country just like the U.S. All who oppose and resist the status quo, whether they are bourgeois democrats like Shcharanksy or rank-and-file working men and women, find themselves subjected to the most brutal repression.
The only reason the cases of Shcharansky, Ginzburg and Perkus even attracted international attention is that these dissidents come from the upper classes and the intelligentsia. Their movement, centered as it is on religious freedom, has many supporters internationally. But the vast majority of repression cases in the fascist Soviet state are carried out against workers and peasants who are not even given the formality of a “trial.”
Over a million people in the USSR, for example, have been subjected to “treatment” in mental hospitals. Their activities in strikes, demonstrations and other agitation against the Brezhnev regime have shown them to be “mentally ill” in the eyes of the authorities.
Perhaps as many as three million more, mostly workers, are in prisons and labor camps of the type that have very few survivors.
Some 120 million national minorities in the USSR have been denied the right to their languages, persecuted for practicing their customs and religious beliefs, and in many cases, forcibly “assimilated” into the Russian melting pot by literally moving them from their homeland to other places.
In the factories and the collective farms, where 85% of the Soviet population labors to produce vast profits for a small circle at the top, there are some two million KGB agents, secret police, and other deputies of the fascist state. Their chief duties are to report instances of protest or “subversion” on the part of the workers and peasants.
The situation in the Soviet Union was aptly summed up by Mao Tsetung in 1962 when he pointed out: “The Soviet Union is today a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, a dictatorship of the German fascist type, a dictatorship of the Hitler type.”
Indeed, Hitler fascism of yesterday in Germany has become Brezhnev fascism of today in the Soviet Union. And the purpose of the fascist system is the same in the USSR today as it was in Hitler’s Germany: to keep power in the hands of a very few rulers, while enforcing the daily exploitation of the masses of people and gearing up for a war for conquest of the world.
The country which was the birthplace of socialism with the great October revolution of 1917 has become the opposite of everything socialism stands for. There is nothing “socialist” about imprisoning workers in mental hospitals, about trials where the verdict is decided in advance, or about the absence of any rights for the people to criticize and speak out against wrongs and injustices. All these phenomena are the products of a capitalist society–as we have seen time and again in the U.S.–where a tiny minority must enforce its rule over the majority.
Socialism did exist for a time in the Soviet Union, in fact it thrived from the 1917 revolution to the death of Stalin in the early 1950s. In those years, the working people were not the exploited; they were the masters of society.
In those years too there was broad freedom for the masses to air their views, to practice criticism and self-criticism, to constantly improve the socialist system. Political repression existed, but only against the relatively small number of old czarist agents, Nazi collaborators and Trotskyites who wanted to sabotage the revolution.
All this changed as Khrushchev seized and then consolidated power in the 1950s. He, and later Brezhnev, purged the great Bolshevik Party of all those who would not support their efforts to rig up capitalism and the profit system once again.
Continuing to use the rhetoric of “socialism” in order to fool the masses about their real intentions, Khrushchev and Brezhnev step-by-step turned the Soviet state into a highly centralized bureaucratic apparatus to govern a superpower with imperialist interests, not only at home, but in every corner of the world.
Along with the restoration of capitalism came all the other hallmarks of capitalist society. A rich elite has grown up, living a life of luxury, complete with Black Sea resort homes, fancy cars, expensive foreign goods, and prostitutes al their beck and call. Widespread corruption, alcoholism, crime, gambling, black market dealings and speculation have become as typical of the Soviet Union as they are of the United States.
In fact, the Soviet Union resembles the United States in many ways.
This was the very truth which Jimmy Carter and all the other spokesmen for capitalism American-style tried so desperately to hide last week with their endless platitudes championing the cause of “freedom” and “human rights” in the USSR.
Can Jimmy Carter and Co. really dare to talk about the lack of “human rights” in other countries?
What exactly is the difference between the frame-up trials of the Soviet dissidents last week and the infamous trial and execution of the Rosenbergs 25 years ago? How is it any different from the racist railroading received by Gary Tyler and countless other frame-up victims in this country? Has the KGB really infringed on the rights of Soviet citizens in any ways that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI-Cointelpro scheme didn’t do?
While thousands of Native Americans are marching on Washington demanding an end to the U.S. government’s robbery of their lands and genocide against their people, Jimmy Carter’s concern for the rights of Jews, Lithuanians or other minorities in the USSR rings awfully hollow.
When Jimmy Carter himself was responsible for issuing the Taft-Hartley back-to-work order against striking miners earlier this year, his comments criticizing Soviet “dictatorship” must be seen as nothing but demagogy of the highest order.
When Nazis and Klansmen are marching in the streets of America’s big cities with the open approval of the highest court in the land, remarks from politicians here about “fascism” in the USSR must be taken with a grain of salt.
True, there are some differences between the American system and the Russian one. But there are only differences of form and degree. At bottom they are the same.
For 200 years, American capitalism with its “democratic” facade has meant nothing but the exploitation of the working class, the sending of workers’ children off to fight imperialist wars, and the use of the police club whenever necessary to maintain the power of America’s dictators–the Rockefellers, Morgans, Duponts, etc.
There is another fundamental similarity between Soviet and American capitalism–the struggle of the people against the oppression and exploitation they face.
More than a dozen strikes involving tens of thousands of workers are known to have taken place in the USSR since 1969, despite the fact that all such activity is strictly illegal and information about it is almost impossible to get.
Illegal trade unions have been organized, although their leaders like Vladimir Klebanov have been shipped off to mental hospitals recently. This took place without a word of protest from the Carter administration which apparently considers repression against workers’ organizations shaky ground on which to speak.
In the minority areas and oppressed nations of the Soviet Union, big mass protests have taken place. Just last year more than 50,000 people at a soccer game in the Lithuanian town of Vilnius spontaneously mobilized themselves into a massive protest against Russian domination. In Georgia, the native place of Joseph Stalin, as well as in other minority areas, it is not uncommon to see the graffiti, “Stalin lives” scrawled on the walls, showing the minority peoples’ love for the revolutionary days when the USSR was genuinely a socialist country.
Even communist groups, dedicated to the real communism of Karl Marx and not the phony brand peddled by Khrushchev and Brezhnev, have been known to surface and publish documents. To be caught involved in this type of movement, however, is to face immediate execution. To Brezhnev and Co. the greatest crime against the Soviet Union is to call for a return to principles on which it was founded.
The struggle of the working class, the oppressed nationalities and other progressive forces in the USSR is not so much different than our own, although it is a more difficult one because it is waged under the conditions of Soviet fascism. But the struggle is surging forward. It cannot be silenced through the type of intimidation tactics that were used at the recent dissidents’ trials.
The struggle against capitalist oppression cannot be electro-shocked or solitary-confined out of the Russian people any more than it can out of the American people. The struggle will go on and grow stronger in both countries until revolutions are successful in destroying the barbarous, criminal rule of capitalism wherever it may be found.