Ists Used Vorkers

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Stalinist tanks crush Czech workers in 1968 external CP members.

In the uprising, workers' councils had taken over the factories and unions had developed militant demands for nationalisations. Workers' militias had been formed.

Yet the CP spent the whole of this period not developing these independent struggles, but transforming the workers' councils into mere advisory bodies "to put suggestions". They dissolved the workers' militias.

As the trade unions persisted with their calls for nationalisation, they found themselves opposed all the way by the CP.

Bloomfield's book extensively documents this position, which lasted until Spring 1947.

The CPs only consistent direction for the masses was towards a fierce nationalism. They supervised the deportation of 230,000 Germans, including Communists (shades of Kampuchea?). And they ceased publication of the CP's own dual language paper.

Industry was to be run on profit lines, and the favoured compensation for nationalised industry.

In other words, the Stalinists blocked revolution in the East as completely as they did in Western Europe.

Bloom field's depiction of the events of Czechoslovakia exposes the fraud of the Soviet bureaucracy claiming credit for carrying through socialist transformation in Eastern Europe.

If the Soviet Union had not obstructed the struggle, the Czech working class itself could have taken the power in 1945.

A revolutionary party fighting for a break from the bourgeois parties of the Popular Front could have offered workers a lead in the fight for a healthy workers state based on the power of workers councils and soviets.

What changed the attitude of the Czech CP was not the movement of •the working class: by 1947 the mass pressure had been largely contained. It was the movement of the imperialists, and the onset of the Cold War.

The bourgeois parties and social democrats had been very quiet in post-war Czechoslovakia-resting happily in the coalition But as the bourgeoisie moved into an anti-Soviet offensive on a world scale, this found its political reflection in the East European buffer states:

"With the announcements l of the Truman Doctrine on 12 March, followed by the Marshall Plan on 5 June, the Big Three coalition collapsed. The Truman Doctrine heralded an ideological crusade against the USSR and Communism" (p. 179).

The economic moves of the Marshall Plan were an attempt to pull the bourgeois coalitions of Eastern Europe back firmly within the capitalist orbit.

Right wing ministers in Czechoslovakia-as in other 'buffer' states, at first responded favourably to this initiative: but under severe pressure from Moscow they were persuaded to pull back.

Stalin however had seen the writing on the wall. The Kremlin began to work to break the Eastern European economies completely from the West, and in September 1947, at a conference of the ten European CPs in Poland, the Cominform was established to coordinate the strategy for the takeover and consolidation of Stalinist power in the 'buffer' states.

Meanwhile other factors were emerging in Czechoslovakia itself.

As the CP , following the new instructions trom the Kremlin, took up the call for nationalisation and a series of left' policies, the right wing took a majority within the Social. Democratic Party and began moves designed to split the Czech working class.

In February 1948 the right wing parties resigned from the government-using the excuse that the CP entrol over the police meant they were removing political opponents and replacing them with party members.

This was almost certainly the case, since the CP's overall perspective was towards the consolidation of state power through the elimination of the right wing from the National Front government.

In doing this they were even prepared to utilise the strength of the working class, and began to organise, through the Central Trades Union Council, an 8,000strong conference of works councils and union branches for February 22. Meetings and demonstrations were called-including one of 80,000 through Prague.

Yet within that the Stalinists were careful to keep control. The conference on February 22 was composed of selected delegates • only: "The URO (Trade Union Council) organisational department instructed workers as to who their delegates would be" (p.221).

Not surprisingly, the conference passed the CP's proposals. A one-hour token strike was called for February 24. 2½ million workers came out in On February. 25, President Benes accepted the CP's demands for governmental changes, and Gottwald announced victory to a crowd of 200,000. As Bloomfield and Busby, £3.95).

countries. points out:

"This united demonstration of working class support for KSC (CP) policy settied the crisis: the carefully controlled intervention by the working class proved decisive in sealing the fate of the right and ensuring political victory for the KSC."

From then on, as Tim Wohlforth points out in 'Communists' Against Revolution, the critical question was in whose hands the state was rather than the mopping-up operation on the remains of private capitalist holdings."

Of course the CP did go through the motions of popular mobilisation in consolidating its takeover. It all over the country, a . 23 Central Action and workers' ward of any danger of rignt - LI 1 wing resistance.

But, as Bloomfield points out: •'The militia's presence in Prague and . other major towns undoubtedly cowed the opposition, but their military value was primarily symbolic: the KSC's control of the police and army were the decisive factors in hampering the possibility of armed right-wing resistance." (p.227).

The militias were soon disbanded, as a monolithic Stalinist state was consolidated through a takeover rather than a revolutionary smashing of the old capitalist state machinery. Stalin's foreign policy had taken a further step forward-utilising the strength of the rzerh working class Be book 'Alison of the i to the 'Buffer' Committee. militias, to 4-.-. _ I .:_LL In this policy of peaceclass forces shifts in various parts of the world.

The capitalist crisis forces the imperialist powers to look towards prospects of attacking the nationalised property relations of the USSR and the deformed workers' states: the struggles of the workers and peasants internationally continuously threaten the hold of imperialist oppression; and within the Stalinist-ruled states there remains the threat of mass struggles for political revolution.

The social transformations in Eastern Europe were no triumph for Stalin's strategy: but a belated recognition hilal. poduciut rarinanitinn that 'peaceful coexistence' is not a long term possibility.

A study of the postwar period is important in demonstrating vividly the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism even in the carrying through of the historically progressive step of overturning capitalist property relations.

It is for this reason that Bloomfield's book is valuable for Marxists.

But the only revolutionary alternative to the class collaboration and bureaucratism depicted in the book is embodied in the programme and perspective of the Trotskyist movement in the fight for social revolution in the capitalist coun tries and the political overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracies.

Bloomfield's Eurocommunist conclusion is as bankrupt. and counter-revolutionary as the Czech CP whose treacherous manoeuvres he so ettectively exposes.

Stalin

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Soviet fighters and missiles at the ready Moscow TREVOR SELLARS reviews The Third World War, by General Sir John Hackett (Sphere Books)

out to real events.

For instance as accurately predicted in the book, this year measures have been taken to secure the services and maintain the training of British