UNDERGROUND REVOLUTIONARY PUBLICATION IN THE USSR
Brief references have appeared in the European bourgeois press about a trial in the Soviet Union involving a group in Leningrad who were charged with printing a clandestine magazine politically hostile. to the Kosygin-Brezhnev regime. os
We have just received more detailed information, indicating that those active in the group were evidently left oppositionists following a Marxist | orientation.
The title of the magazine echoed an old revolutionary ‘Russian tradition: Kolokol [the Bell]. Three issues appeared. The number of copies of each issue was considerable -- almost 1,000. The declared aim of the magazine was. to work for a revolutionary revival in the country. .
~The group associated with the underground publication was composed of two or three hundred persons, most of them chemists or students of chemistry. It should be noted particularly that. the group was. headed by Komsomol leaders and that their work of political criticism began on the basis of a much smaller study group which called itself. the "Circle of Communards" and which studied Lenin' Ss. State and_ Revolution. ~
The organization appeared in Leningrad, spreading to other cities, including Ivanovo-Voznesensk and other important centers such as Omsk and Novosibirsk.
. This is the first time. in decades that an oppositionist organization has appeared in the USSR, extending to different cities. It demonstrates that the ‘long process out of which a new Soviet revolutionary leadership will appear has: already begun.
As the newspapers have indicated, the trial involved dozens of defendants. They displayed various attitudes in court. Some. of them openly stated that they considered the ideas they were fighting for to be correct, while admitting that they were probably wrong in resorting to the ‘methods of underground struggle.
A young girl, questioned by the judges on the aims of the organization, replied: "The first thing is to s send ail of you to work." ot vl Leet
ALL the accused were ‘given: “sentenced ranging ‘from two ‘to seven years in so-called re-education camps. .
Not less significant is an item concerning representatives of the older generation. On March 4 in Moscow's Red Square, some Old Bolsheviks, most of them survivors of the Stalinist concentration camps, staged a protest demonstration. Close to two hundred persons, people of ripe age, demonstrated in front of Lenin's mausoleum against a return to the methods of the "personality cult," a return which a sector of the bureaucracy seem to have in mind.
Inasmuch as news of the demonstration was known in advance, the GUM department store was packed and people watched the demon-.— strators through the windows with astonishment and sympathy while. the Square was packed with thousands of uniformed police and plainclothesmen, who did not seem to have received clear orders as to what to do.
Rome
- The March 9 1'Unita, daily newspaper of the Italian Communist party, carried an interesting article by Augusto Pancaldi, its Moscow -correspondent, on the preparatory discussion for the twenty-third congress of. the? Communist party of the Soviet Union.
A big: political and ideological discussion is going on at .all levels, Pancaldi reports, involving "a sharp confrontation of positions on one of the most crucial phases of the country's life, one that has so far been skirted --~ the role and importance of Stalin in the construction of socialism in the USSR."
"The: Soviet press, Pravda included," says Pancaldi, "is reverting more and more to the problem of the ‘personality cult.' The aspects under consideration, sometimes contrasting to each other, bear witness almost daily to a process now going on, the length and outcome of which no one can predict since it is not known to what . extent and in. what way it will ‘be, brought up at the twenty-third -congress.
Aside from the long-standing objective reasons impelling discussion on this problem, two new ones have arisen, the Moscow correspondent of L'Unita points out. First, the twenty-third congress is taking place éxactly ten years after the twentieth, and this calls for a balance sheet. Secondly, the coming celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution will raise’ the problem of explaining the complex reality of the past thirty-five years -which is not easily done if Stalin and Khrushchev after him are elininated from consideration.
"The terms of the debate," Pancaldi declares, "start essentially from objective acknowledgment that a vacuum exists in historical research; that is, one cannot consider the period dominated by Stalin's figure without mentioning his name, as has been done until recently. From this at least three different positions emerge, each having different means of expression:
"The first position calls for historical and political study of the period of the personality cult and of the causes that generated it. The position.is reflected in the work underway on various :. literary and historical projects, or in the fight against vestiges of the cult being carried on by magazines like Novy Mir and: Junost, or on the stages of some Moscow theaters.
"The second tendency believes that all that needs to be said about that period has already been said and to go on speaking about. it does nobody any good, and that the solution is to let bygones. ‘be bygones and to go forward.
"The third one, which ‘has more say than the others, after declaring that the consequences of the 'cult' must be viewed as totally overcome thanks to the twentieth and twenty-second