Mourning Stalin

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scratched his head, and thought very hard for a long time. Finally ust possible. But then, unfortunately, you would have to go and Hungarian Stalinist secret police gunned down, 1956 Not to be outdone, the the Stalinist press for weeks. leaders of the other main And yet, in these same pages, Stalinist parties delivered the name of the 'deathless Stalin, but Stalinism will live memory is a "Rabbi, is it possibl The Rabbi frowned replied: "Yes, my son. It is somewhere else.' Do 'you get a sense of unreality, don't you need a lifeline of sensibility to hang on to?' asked the fund-raising column of the "Morning Star' ('incorporating the 'Daily Worker") on Monday 6 March.

Reading the rest of that edition, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Joseph Stalin, you easily could have done.

A very short factual despatch from the paper's Moscow correspondent reported that the anniversary passed unnoticed here yesterday. No national paper mentioned it'.

For its part, the Morning Star is not usually one to pass over important anniversaries. But on the political significance of Stalin and his life it offered-very prudently-not one breath of comment of its own.

"Classified'

It was left to c individual advertiser to f for an insertion in the Memoriam column:

"Stalin J.V. In memory Uncle Joe, defender of Socialism...

With fine political judgement the Morning Star's editors squeezed his advert into the classified' section, between the bankruptcy notices and the 'Situations Vacant'.

The leaders of the British Communist Party seem to have forgotten their promises of the time.

On March 7, 1953, they headlined the vow of the CPSU Central Committee that:

•The immortal name of Stalin will live for ever in the hearts of the Soviet people and of all progressive mankind"

British Party leader Harry Pollit headed his tribute •Itsrael Planato Stalin!" to build socialism in one country ?" and a grief we have not the describe, at our command to party and its newspaper never to forget Stalin:

66 .. whose miracles in Communist construction are of a character that even Marx would never have dared to believe possible"

Daily Worker, March 7, 1953.

"Long live the immortal memory", proclaimed the solemn lead article of the same issue, "of the greatest working-class leader, genius and creative thinker that the world has ever known!" similar judgements.

For the French CP:

«We have lost Comrade and last eternally d Palmiro Togliatti. leader I1 t & v the Italian CP, announced the Rome Chamber Deputies:

"My soul is in anguish today at the death of my teacher, my companion and my friend. Our century will bear the name of Stalin"

For almost a whole week the illness and death of Stalin Hungarian cautiona banner headlines: "Moscow mourns deathless leader in spirit of deeper unity"_"A Great Servant of Mankind who belongs to the Ages" (this the effort of Andrew Rothstein, the Party's specialist in falsifying Soviet history) - "Such a man cannot die"_ "Stalin policy will go on-building of a happy life for the people"

'Deathless leader'

It would be possible, but tedious, to multiply such examples almost indefinitely.

Similar articles saturated leader' has now almost completely faded.

The moral is that a short professional necessity for political scoundrels.

Specialist

It is instructive today, to look back at a few of the claims made by Stalin's choirboys-and at the reality behind those claims.

Mr Monty Johnstone is nowadays one of the Com'critiques' of Trotskyism and a suave apologist for the more 'regrettable' aspects of the cult of personality'.

In the early 1950's, though (having earlier spent a brief period inside the Trotskyist movement), he was a leading propagandist for the Young Communist League.

His obituary of Stalin in their paper Challenge (March 14, 1953) claimed (among many • other exaggerations) that "People of every race and colour are today mourning the death of their greatest leader, teacher and comrade"

One group who may have found some solace in their sorrow were the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Jews indicted

In the last years of Stalin's life he carried out a series of murderous purges in Eastern Europe, in which Jews were explicitly singled out for victimisation.

At the end of 1952 the Jewish former General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Rudolf Slansky, was framed, 'tried' and hanged in Prague on charges which included 'Trotskyism', 'Titoism' 'fascism' "zionism' and conspiracy with western intelligence services.

Of the thirteen who were tried with Slansky (all were convicted and eleven were executed), ten were also Jews and were described as such in the official indictment!

The trial, based on 'confessions' extracted under torture, was a clear, racialist frame-up, and has been admitted to be fraudulent by the Czech authorities.

Yet Johnstone wrote that:

"These people unwillingly confessed their crimes in the face of the irrefutable testimony of facts, documents and other evidenc evidence of witnesses... Yet, in this trial-as in all the similar trials in Eastern Europe-the British press, " 30: they are not guilty"

[sic!], in Challenge of 10 January, 1953).

Challenge felt forced to run a front-page article headlined 'There is no Jew-baiting in Russia' Suppressed Is it possible that (as they claim) Johnstone and his fellow CP propagandists were innocently misled? Hardly.

When the former Bulgarian vice-premier Traicho Kostov was tried on similar charges in December 1949 he repudiated his written 'confession' in open court.

He was immediately silenced and the trial adjourned for him to 're-read' his confession in the privacy of his cell.

This fact' was wholly suppressed in the massive coverage in the Bulgarian press.

And the Daily Worker had more important things to do in pursuit of 'democracy' and 'socialism' than ask the obvious, if awkward, questions.

Personal courage

Briskly approving Kostov' execution, its correspondents pressed on, during December 1949, with reporting the Bulgarian general election ('97% for Fatherland Front!') the universal rejoicing that apparently erupted throughout Bulgaria on Stalin's seventieth birthday (21 December, 1949) and the 'Bulgaria Today' exhibition off Bond Street:

"Happy Bulgarians!. Socialism is now growing there so fast that you can almost see it unfurl-like one of those speeded-up films of a sprouting seed!"

Kostov was, in fact, a man of considerable personal courage.

He had led illegal Com3.A2 result of which he was His treatment Stalinist press, which unancoin the recantation' hé was alleged to have made just before his execution (and which was admitted, in 1956, to be a forger) made it certain beyond any doubt that all those Stalinist publicists, like Monty Johnstone, who obediently swung with every shift of the political wind from Moscow, could only be Stalin writing dishonestly.

As well as daily dishonesty the Stalinist publicists of western Europe also resorted to the most shameless chauvinism.

A famous libel case in France in 1950 centred on the issue of whether there was any illegal political imprisonment in the Soviet Union.

Labour camps

The Communist Party maintained there was none;

Jean-Paul Sartre estimated (accurately enough) that there were perhaps ten million people detained in

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Johnny Burne reviews "Only a Game?" by Eamon Dunphy, Published by Kestrel Books in a ¡labour camps, and added the comment that one citizen in twenty in a prison camp could scarcely be called socialism.

A key witness in the case was Alex Weissberg-an Austrian, Jewish physicist and Communist who had fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazis took power, and became head of th Kharkov 'Institute of Physics.

In the late 1930's, during the great purges, he was arrested and quite falsely accused of Trotskyism.

'Goodwill'

Then, in 1940, during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, he was one of those Imany German and Austrian Communists handed over to the Gestapo as a sign of *goodwill' to Germany!

Weissberg, by a miracle, survived the war, and was prepared to testify. His er:dence, naturally, promised to be extremely damaging to the Stalinists.

Thus, when he entered the siness box, one of the lading Stalinists in the case I erupted with a protest. His grounds? He objected to the fact that, in a French ccur, a German ('Boche') soul be allowed to give erience in German against LE USSR!

French Stalinists took the Tronal honour' of France б:: seriously, just as do all i= Eurocommunist' parties o: western Europe today.

The 'Eurocommunists' are ki: eager, now, to obliterate Ir: own stalinist history.

Nicording to the official E: Stalinism' was ended 1956, with Kruschev's *wet speech' at the 20th Cingress of the CPSU.

Kruschev's 'revelations' revealed only the tip. of an #energ of repression that the Trotskyist movement had krown and fought against for de:ades.

His 'secret speech', howere:. was accepted only reluctartly and formally by the leaders of British Stalinism, ho feared the repercussions o: his 'thaw'.

They gave unhesitating Firport to Kruscher in 1956, #wever, when he showed kimself most completely the disciple of Stalin: in his war Ic crush the Hungarian revolricon.

The fighting in Hungary began when the political price fired on a mass demonwwww..

Slansky stration -of Communists, workers and students--demanding the full rehabilitation of Rajk and other Communist leaders killed in Stalin's purges.

'Justification'

It ended in November after Kruschev's tanks launched an artillery battle against the workers of Budapest, killing twenty thousand of them before the Red Army regained control of the capital.

The official justification' -accepted then and now by the British Communist Party was that the Hungarian revolution was the work of ... fascists!

In December 1956 Challenge (to which Mr. Monty Johnstone was still a prominent contributor) carried a major feature explaining' the Hungarian events.

It was by James Klugmann seasoned campaigner in Stalin's day against "TitoTrotsky-Fascists" and the man now officially in charge of telling the truth about the Party in its own 'history'.

Verdict

Klugmann's article was headed It stopped Fascism and gave People chance of Free Choice'.

For their part, the Hungarian workers had already delivered their verdict on Klugmann's lying diagnosis.

In November the workers of Czepel, Budapest's main industrial suburb painted their defiant, sarcastic response to the Stalinist shells on the walls of their factories: The forty thousand aristocrats and fascists of Czepel strike on!' Their feelings, like so many others from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Motherland' were never reported in the Daily Worker.

In journalism, as in other matters, Stalin's spirit lives on in the CPGB. Reflecting the interests of a narrow, reactionary caste of bureaucrats, the politics of Stalinism form l an organised system of cringing, lying and hypocrisy.

It is this spirit that allows the Morning Star's journalist to reach the ludicrous conclusion that, because Pravda has not mentioned it, the anniversary of Stalin's death has 'passed unnoticed' in Moscow.

Johnst one Last week's article looked at the early days of witch-hunting inside the TGWU.

It was in the early 1950s however, under General Secretary Arthur Deakin that witchhunting by the union had its heyday.

To understand why communists should have been barred from office and expelled from the union at that time, it is necessary to look beyond the mere confines of the TGWU.

Communists are witchhunted because they represent a threat to the bureaucracy's attempts to coerce and hold down the working class.

Today communists (though no longer members of the Communist Party) and militants who have opposed the TGWU's complicity in government incomes policy and plans for speed up, pose a threat to the bureaucracy's collaboration with the ruling class.

It is for this reason that they now singled out for attack.

Opposed strikes

Equally in the late 1940s it was those who opposed wagefreezes and class collaboration who were attacked.

The Communist Party had not, prior to 1947, been singled out for attack precisely because it had not waged any fight likely to disturb the bureaucracy.

During the war period, the Communist Party had supported tha Inalition National Anuorn- trIC ment and had been mainly concerned to boost production.

The CP had been opposed to strikes throughout the war, and continued this position in the immediate post war period.

But as 1947 saw the imperialist powers consolidating an anti-Soviet alliance and laying the basis of the 'Cold War' Moscow began to swing the Communist Parties towards a 'left wing' policy.

The Cominform was established in October COordinate the activities the European CPs.

And in December 1947, in an important speech, the ever obedient Harrv Pollitt-the "Deep down in all of us there resides this spirit of rebellion, but if we all rebelled, if we all took up the cudgels in support of a complete revolution of the present order of things, there would be only one resultCHAOS"

This quotation could well have been taken from any Fleet Street hack's ritual attacks on the independent movement of the working class.

In fact it comes from the Millwall Football Club's programme one week after Eamon Dunphy's departure from that club.

Dunphy, now retired, was a gifted midfield player, a competitive, skillful craftsman who regularly played international football for Eire.

His skills and dedication should have ensured him a long career in the First Division but he was quickly recognised by the autocratic soccer establishment as a "militant" and a "troublemaker" • a man prepared to agitate uncompromisingly for a footballers' trade union in opposAl as Laa. -ll.. General Secretary of the British CP-announced that:

«We were late in appreciating the full scale of the drift to the rinht in the Ishaur Annarnmant and clung to traditional formulas and approaches after it had revealed itself as an instrument of the imperialist camp"

Still supporting the drive for productivity, he went on:

"In our anxiety for increased production we have sometimes done far too little in the fight for wages and conditions and on occasions have placed ourselves in a position where we seemed to be holding back the struggle.

He argued for the need to expose social democracy and finally in terms so appropriate tor the CP today, declared that:

"Our main danger today is an underestimation of the strength nf tha wnrking clace and ite hardback edition at £2.50 imposed Professional Footballers' Association (PFA).

Dunphy was clearly something of a political 'loner' , an isolated individual working from a basis of socialist convictions but without the support of a group to give coherent direction to his principled struggles.

The strengths and weaknesses of his book all stem from this.

Only a Game? is a straightforward diary of his last three months at Millwall, where he stayed for eight years.

Apart from a brief period with Manchester United early in his career he was always propping up struggling clubs like York, Charlton, Reading and Millwall.

This experience sharpened his awareness of the class nature of the battles within the sport-the role of the directors, the position of ex-players who become managers and coaches, and the exploitation of young 'apprentice' professionals.

Success with feet or with fists has long been one of the mythological escape routes offered by capitalism to working class youth.

It has become part of bourgeois ideology. The hungry fighter is the best business By Di Parkin Deakin readiness to fight back for the achievements of its demands and its solution of the crisis"

The Communist Party therefore turned to mass work in the factories and became for the first time since the 1930s an obstacle to the continued collaboration of trade union leaders and Labour government.

Witch-hunting

In direct response to this Morgan Phillips, Secretary of the Labour Party sent a witchhunting letter to all affiliated organisations:

"Now is the time to go allout in a great campaign against the Communist Party intrigue and infiltration inside the Labour movement".

This was a signal for Deakin and nthor hilrosirrate to hamin Dunphy attacks this attitude with subjective but penetrating class consciousness which sets this book far above the usual horrendous ghost-written pap that passes for football literature:

"You rarely get through to people in football if you start talking about this kind of thing.

People say, 'Yes, but they know what they are doing when they come into it'. But do they? At fifteen, I didn't know what I was doing when I went into it. You come from a working class home with no future except as factory fodder. No real education and no choices open to you"

The development of sport under capitalism has tended to follow a clearly defined historical pattern.

Put crudely, a proletarian form of relaxation is rapidly assimilated by the bourgeoisie and transformed into a commercial enterprise.

In some sports this process is so thorough that eventually the players themselves are largely recruited from the middle-classes (e.g. rugby and cricket).

Football has become the most lucrative sport of all in Britain to move militants.

Deakin declared that:

"The Communist Party stands indicted as the declared enemy of the British working class"

This, he claimed, was because it encouraged people 'to believe that they can only make progress by being in a constant state of conflict with the employers".

(A tar cry trom CP policy today!).

Deakin of course stood collaboration and wage freeze.

CP members

At this time nine of the 34 members of the Executive Council of the TGWU were members of the CPGB including the busmen Papworth and Jones who were again, despite their being purged in 1938, in a commanding position on the Central London Bus Committee.

The CP also held key positions in the London docks.

Deakin moved inside the TGWU against the background of cold war and anti-communism, which had already led to civil servants being dismissed in Britain for membership of the CP and to a blacklist against the CP in private firms such as John Lewis's store.

Imperialist agent

In 1948 and 1949 the TUC published two pamphlets on the Communist Party in the unions called Defend Democracy and The Tactic of Disruption in which they argued that:

"Communists acting as the abject and slavish agents of forces working incessantly to intensify social misery and to create conditions of chaos and instability", were disrupting the trade union.

Supporting this view, Deakin acted to break up the World Federation of Trade Unions which contained representatives from the workers' states.

Deakin was President of the Federation and, acting entirely as the "abject and slavish agent" of imperialism withdrew Britain from the World Federation by walking out of an International Conference in January 1949.

(Walking out of meetings now used by the right wing an excuse for witchhunts).

'Honoured'

For this and other attacks on communism, Deakin was made a Companion of Honour.

Once the atmosphere of anticommunist hysteria had been worked up Deakin was able to get the 1949 Biennial Delegate Conference of the TGWU to pass the motion that:

"no member of the Party shall be eligible to hold office within the Union" by 426 to 208 votes.

Deakin however, did not have things all his way and next week's article will detail the res stance to the witchhunting. to maintain its recruitment and audience drawn from the working class.

The financial rewards for the few who 'make it' are great for ten or twelve years, but this superficial gloss conceals the fundamental conflicts embodied in the system as a whole.

Dunphy's book provides some vital insights into those conflicts.

It is significant that Only a Game? should have Millwall's "Den" as its background.

Recent press hysteria about crowd trouble and violence at the ground ignored the fact that the Den was first closed in 1930 after persistent trouble and has been closed three times since.

Last year it emerged that the National Front were recruiting Millwall fans in some numbers.

Capital has traditionally provided forms of institutionalised and ritualised violence to soak up the undirected anger and frustration of those already brutalised by inadequate housing. education and unemployment.

That such violence is now centred round football is no accident for, as Eamon Dunphy's book shows, class conflict is inherent in the whole structure of eL

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ND STRAL elect committee Strikers at Boddingtons breweries in Manchester voting to continue their strike. PHOTO: John Smith, IFL NEWES A major step forward in the seven-week union recognition strike at Garners Steak Houses was taken on Sunday when a 7-man strike committee was elected.

This offers a real opportunity to fight the treachery of union officials.

Even in the midst of national press and TV coverage TGWU bureaucrats continued last week with their preparations to sell out the strike.

Behind-scenes talks

It is also rumoured that behind the scenes talks have started between top union officials and Garners boss Margolis towards an agreement along the lines proposed by TGWU official Abraham.

Determination

He had offered, in an interview with the Tory press, to call off the strike immediately if the employers would only recognise the outcome of an ACAS inquiry.

Abraham speaks for himself and not the strikers. They have declared their determination to fight if necessary for 1-2 years for their demands, and that they refuse to return to work without union recognition.

Their lead is prompting a wide response. Other catering workers are approaching Garners pickets asking for TGWU membership fr irms.

But union bureau crats are hostile to these moves towards unionisation by low-paid and oppressed sections of workers.

They know that behind the fight for union rights are a flood of demands on wages, job security and working conditions which can only inconvenience and embarass union officials.

Sell Last week's meeting between the TUC Catering Committee and selected MPs was clearly designed to discuss how to head off such struggles and derail any action that might threaten the Lib-Lab coalition government.

The objective of the officials is to prevent any