The Red Orchestra

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Sotiris Petroulas:

murdered by police, July 1965 The hatred of the masses developed during the seven years of the dictatorship. The movement started with the students, but this reflected only the deep crisis of capitalism and the problems of the working class. This was very clear when after two days' struggle thousands of workers and professional people gave full support to the students with money, food and medical supplies.

The movement went over the heads of the opportunists who were out of Greece. The movement had very deep revolutionary feeling. It wanted to take over not just the polytechnic and the university, but the whole of Athens and then weht to take over the main ministries.

SOCIALIST PATH

The capitalist class could only look on. The Trotskyists inside and outside the Polytechnic demanded openly that the movement must take a socialist path. The Stalinists wanted only the overthrow of the dictatorship and its replacement with a national unity government. The Healyites. had the slogan of CP government, never making it clear which CP they were referring to. After our criticism they withdrew the slogan, but they never explained their previous position. The Pabloites did not see the significance of the movement and therefore did not put forward the demand for a general strike.

We put forward a socialist programme through the building of workers' councils as embryo future soviets. We advanced the slogan for a workers' and peasants' government - the dictatorship of the proletariat -and through this struggle fought to level. build a mass Trotskyist movement.

Pouliopoulos (leading Greek Trotskyist theoretician who was 172. shot by the Nazis) over 30 years ago called for the overthrow of the capitalist dictatorship of Metaxas and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat through Trotsky's Transitional Programme. The Healyistes betrayed both Poulio poulos and Trotsky's programme by their policy. The main resolution of the IC of the FI ignored these demands as they ignored the Transitional Programme in the 1968 events in France.

How do you see Karan We said, and still say that the government of LaI lan is a s emicame out of the deepening crisis of world capitalism, the division between Europe and the USA and the strength and forward movement of the working class. The November events were the biggest factor in the collapse but the prospect of war between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus brought the dictatorship to a dilemma. They intended a general mobilisation over the Cyprus confrontation, but they could not put guns into the hands of the working class.

They collapsed because of the near certainty that war with Turkey would have led to a working class rebellion. This resultea in tne Junta came un tur right wing Karamanlis who was in Paris, to form a national unity government of the right and centre. They did this in order to maintain as much as possible the power of the bourgeoisie.

VICTORY

The collapse of the dictatorship was a victory for the working class, but the taking of power by Karamanlis was a defeat, because it headed off the movement towards workers' power. This was possible because it had the support of the Stalinists and the reformists who ase opposed to social revolution.

The Healyites at first said the Karamanlis government was an open Junta, and then without explaining their previous position they called Karamanlis the same as Kerensky. Both are criminal mistakes. We say Kerenskyism is the last stage of bourgeois democracy with only a talking shop left for reforms, but it is well known that Karamanlis represents big capital and is a puppet of US imperialism. At the same time a distinction must be drawn between Karamanlis and the Military Junta which collapsed in front of the strength of the working class.

How did the collapse of the Junta affect the work of Workers Vanguard in Greece?

The semi-legal situation has given us the opportunity to use every possibility of mass work. We have been able to participate in the struggles of the working class and to fight to raise the consciousness of the working class to the highest We fight, as a principle, against the so-called socialists of PASSOK who say the situation is not yet ready for socialism. We fight at all levels against the notion that the state has been democratised by explaining that the present state apparatus was fully in support of the Junta.

We fought against the Karamanlis bourgeois constitution, rehashed from the previous Papadopoulos one. We support every democratic right of the masses and we set out to fight for these rights at the highest level through the Transitional Programme. We fight against the attacks by the Karamanlis government on the trade unions and the control of the students union by the state.

Above all we direct our work towards the crucial life and death question of the building of the 0 11 - T Espionage is the boom 'industry of the post-war period. There is a story that shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that brought the United States into the Second World War, American intelligence officials succeeded in intercepting and deciphering Japanese messages giving exact details of the attack. But when they passed were told 'Gentlemen don't read each other's mail. Whether or not the anecdote is true, there is no doubt that during and since the war spying and intelligence gathering has revolutionised itself, becoming a major, acknowledged, professionalised arm of state power.

A large portion of this activity stems from the continuous threat posed by capitalism to the property relations of the workers' states And central to this is intelligence on the military capacities and plans of the rival powers.

The subject of the recent threepart television series The Red Orchestra', • prepared in 1 West Germany and transmitted by BBC2) has a double interest for the Trotskyist movement. In documentary form it describes the main network Western Europe during the Second World War. And it centres on the work of a veteran Communist -Leopold Trepper - who has recently testified to the principled and correct struggle carried out by the Trotskyist movement against the Stalinists.

DEFENCE

Within a year of its formation, in 1939, the Fourth International faced a major political battle within its own ranks. What was at stake was the unconditional defence of the USSR against imperialism. In his last major political struggle before he was assassinated (on Stalin's orders) Trotsky led the majority in the American party against a minority (the Burnham-Schachtman tendency) which sought to adapt to capitalist public opinion and relinquish the defence of the first workers' state.

By June 1941 this basic principle was put to the test in the whole of the international labour movement, as Hitler's divisions drove eastwards into the heartlands of Russia. The attack came as a disaster for Stalin's whole foreign policy. Only a week beforehand he had denounced the British Ambassador in Moscow for provocation in spreading rumours of 'an impending Russo-German war. And for months he had been similarly denouncing the reports of an imminent German attack on Russia from his own intelligence networks, particularly Trepper's groups in occupied France and Belgium, Czech agents reporting massive German troop movements in central Europe, and Richard Sorge reporting from the German embassy in Tokyo.

But despite Stalin's hamstringing of the defence of the Soviet Union, the men and women of Trepper's organisation (nicknamed the 'Red Orchestra' by Nazi counter-espionage) can claim the credit for an enormous contribution to the military struggle against Hitler. Many of them paid with their lives at the hands of the Gestano and their executioners. Poland from the 1920's. Driven out by the Pilsudski dictatorship in 1926, he went to Palestine and in 1930 arrived in France, where he acted as a minor agent for Soviet intelligence soon distinguishing himself by unravelling a complicated case of treachery which led to the arrest of most of the members of his 'circuit'. But the Stalinist purges were soon to put much greater responsibilities on his shoulders. In 1937 and 1938 the GPU executioners 'liauidated' majority of the senior officers in the Red Army, including many veterans of the revolution and the wars of intervention, such as Marshall Tukhachevsky. The bloodletting followed hard on the heels of the Moscow purge trials whose aim was above all to consolidate Stalin's grip by slandering and destroying the Trotskyist movement.

The purges also decimated the Soviet intelligence services in WestLeopold Trepper ern Europe. Hundreds of secret service men were ordered back to Moscow, most of them to be shot. A number tried to escape to the West; some (such as Ignace Reiss) drew the political conclusions from Stalinist policy and made contact with the Trotskyist organisations in Europe. These the GPU hunted down with double determination.

In this situation with the Soviet networks in Europe needing rebuilding almost frescat , Trem 1939 to take over all command in Germany, France and the Low Countries. By the time of the German attack on Russia, just over two years later, he had effective espionage coverage in Berlin, Belgium and France, with sources of information reaching right into the top levels of the German state and military apparatus. After the occupation of Belgium and France in 1940 the whole system had to operate under the noses of the Gestapo, and all communication with Moscow was by enciphered messages. (The slang for a clandestine radio operator was a 'pianist' - hence the nickname 'Red Orchéstra'.)

ANTI-FASCISM What distinguished Trepper's networks from the traditional spyrings of capitalist powers was that they were almost entirely composed of men and women acting from conviction. Not all were Communists, some would have described themselves just as 'anti-fascists'. But, in one form or another, their willingness to work and risk their lives testified to the inspiration of the October Revolution and the knowledge that - despite the crimes and blunders of Stalinism - the struggle against fascism was inseparable from the defence of the Soviet Union. In Berlin itself a large group headed by Harro Schulze-Boysen collected and relayed inofrmation from officials in several ministries and many sections of the military command. In Paris Trepper ran a commercial firm specialising in the supply of blackmarket materials to the German militarv anthorities which also serfirm in Brussels had similar function.

The West German TV serie concentrates on the way that Ger man counter-espionage managedito break the 'Red Orchestra'. The weak link was communications, the few radio sets were overloaded with traffic and transmitted for hours on end from the same place. This made them vulnerable to radio direction-finding equipment. In December 1941 one of the Belgian groups, with its transmitter, was taken, and from there the trail led to the Berlin group, most of whom were arrested in the Summer of 1942.

BROKEN UP

The French organisation was largely broken up in the autumn Nonetheless, in that crucial first period of the war, the 'Red Orch estra transmitted a huge amount of information on German militar and economic supplies, new type of equipment, and some of their intended military strategy.

In the last few years the 'Red Orchestra ' has become a target io the extreme right-wing and the anti-communism of the police ser vices in France and Germany. The main source for the TV series, a book by the bourgeois journalist Heinz Hohne, tries to argue that thi Berlin group - 46 of whom were executed - were guilty of treason And the French counter-espionag service (the DST) has accused Trepper of collaborating (after hi capture in November 1942) up to the hilt in order to save his neck In fact Trepper pretended to co operate but only in order to wan his superiors and regain some ol the ground lost. In Septemba 1943 he escaped and stayed free in France until the end of the war. But when he returned to the Sovie Union he disappeared into prison for years. Only in 1973 as an old man, did the Stalinists allow him to leave Poland for medical treat ment and to revisit his family.

PERSECUTION

Trepper recently gave an inter view to the French Trotskyis weekly paper Informations Our rieres. In it he reassesses, from the point of view of a communist the persecution of the Trotskyists in the 1930's:

I was never a Trotskyist, but the Trotskyists who were accused in the trials were of an exceptiona courage ... Why was this? It i possible to understand: because of all the factions within the party, only the Trotskyist faction (one may or may not agree) understood much more deeply what had haj pened to the October revolution, its degeneration, what the Stalinist regime was." (....)

And he accepts the Trotskyist analysis of the class character of the Soviet Union. "At the time when Trotsky analyse what was happening in the USSR, many militants did not believe in it. But later, it is not necessary to be a Trotskyist to understand that it is so, that it has developed as he forsaw. It is enough to live for a couple of years in a socialist country, not as a delegate from a fraternal party (in that case, one can know nothing) but to live one, itwo or three years in any one of these countries. And ... there i such a (bureaucratic) caste. On can call it caste, class as you wish ... It is not a class, that is my opinion" (Informations Ouvrieres, 9th July, 1975)

Trepper's comments spring from fifty years as a communist, and almost a quarter of a century as a scapegoat of Stalinism. The television producers and journalists who now glamourise his career do not, of course, refer to them. But they testify to the fact that only on the basis of a principled defence of the record of the Trotshris ooposition can the best element

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