World View: Learning the real lesson of Auschwitz (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fifty years ago saw the liberation of those who remained the victims of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Its remembrance is important, but torturing ourselves with memories without learning from them can be next to useless.

The whining tones of the clerics of various unreasoning faiths urge us to remember the inhumanity that is within all of us. Every baby, say those who want to deliver us from "sin", is an embryonic Nazi. We reject such anti-human nonsense. Of course, humans are born with a capacity to behave co-operatively or callously and, depending upon environmental factors, can exhibit both characteristics. But humans are uniquely social animals, dependent upon one another for survival. To say that inhumane barbarity of the kind practised in the concentration camps is "within us all" is to say no more than that all humans can be driven to defy their social nature.

Stalinist Gulags

The gas chambers of Auschwitz, like the Stalinist gulags and countless other monuments to inhumanity, are not reflections of what humans naturally are, but of what we can become under certain historical circumstances. The lesson we must learn is not to repeat those circumstances.

There were no prisons, gas chambers. torture machines or genocidal experiments within the earliest tens of thousands of years of human history. We call these people primitives, but they were not Nazis or Stalinists. Faced with any army ready for the murderous task of battle they would have looked on with human incomprehension.

For most of human history there were no property relationships. There were no nations or states. Modern mass murder, be it organised warfare or organised ethnic killings, is a product of property society and the resulting ideologies of nationalism, racism and religious tribalism.

German workers supported the Nazis in specific historical conditions which were exclusively connected with the property system of capitalism. Fascistic feelings were not “within them", but were responses to a world which they felt they could not control. Without capitalism there could be no Nazism, just as state capitalism lay the ground for Stalinist thuggery and butchery.

Today we see the same system causing the same effects. From Bosnia to Rwanda to East Timor literally hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered because workers have yet to learn the real lesson of Auschwitz.

If there is to be any hope out of the tragedy of the holocaust it will come when enough of us say not merely "Never Again", but organise consciously to ensure that the soil within which future death camps can be planned is removed from the landscape of our history.

Steve Coleman

"Nor Prison Bars a Cage?" (1950)

From the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since Russia became the main rival to Western Capitalism, the capitalists of the West have seen fit to acknowledge, indeed to publicise, the vicious acts of their counterparts in that country. Their purpose, as we shall see, is not in the noble cause of truth, for they could have told that at least fifteen years ago, but the far more practical reason of getting the workers “at it.” And. many of the workers who four and five years back were wearing hammer and sickle badges in their lapels and cheering the mention of Stalin, are now prepared or even eager to fight their ex-allies. Not so the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Just as we took the line in both 1914 and 1939, that the workers of this country had nothing to gain by slaying fellow workers in Germany, so do we point out that a future war with Russia will benefit neither British nor Russian workers, but will be no more than a further dispute between the capitalists of these countries. But in the meantime it is our bounden duty to lay these distortions of the truth and show up this propaganda for what it is really worth.

A few months ago the Daily Express carried the headline, “Britain publishes Russia’s forced labour laws," the Evening Standard, "Soviet slave laws revealed," and the Daily Herald, so different from the days of not so very long ago had the biggest headline of the lot saying, “Soviet slave camp code shown to world." Many workers, who previously sympathised with the system of administration in capitalist Russia, rapidly changed their ideas. Those who looked just a little farther than the news put right on their plates by their masters, were not surprised. As long ago as 1935, a translation of the “Corrective Code ” was obtainable in Britain. It has taken the capitalist class a long while to find it!

Anyway up to this time, far from deploring this penal code, various spokesmen and apologists of Capitalism, both British and Russian, were quite vehement in applauding it. Sir Montague Burton said, “A better opportunity for prisoners to become useful members of society" (Yorkshire Evening News, 25710/35). Canon F. J. Shirley, in a sermon in Canterbury Cathedral, preached "Russia is reclaiming the criminals; the system is redemptive and men are restored to good moral life, assets once more to the community” (Kentish Gazette and Canterbury Press, 7/9/35). In March, 1937, the A.E.U. delegation published a report applauding the system, as did the Quakers in 1933. So we see that there has been a great deal of change in their ideas; there has been none in the Russian penal system.

But in slating the propagandists of Western Capitalism, we must not allow those of the East to escape scot free. Equal trickery comes from such Moscow henchmen as the Communist Party and its subsidiary Anglo-Soviet Society. While one group attacks the Russian system, the other attempts to defend it.

In its pamphlet "The Forced Labour Swindle” the British Soviet Society try to smooth over these revelations and get into such deep water that if their words were true the Russian worker would be better off in prison than out of it.

They begin by trying to establish a wealth of difference between the words "corrective” as used in the Russian text and “forced" in the newspapers. Surely this treatment is not voluntary?

Prisoners have much more freedom, we are told. When they are not performing their tasks, they are free to indulge in “political” education. In a country which recognises the need for only one political party, we can well imagine what form that education takes. Incidentally political prisoners are treated exactly the same as criminals.

Apart from these points it seems, in theory at least, that the conditions in Russian prisons are similar to those in the rest of the capitalist world so far as material conditions are concerned. In accordance with modern ideas they may attempt to rehabilitate the recalcitrant worker as an honest and servile wage-slave, but as a recent report by several psychologists pointed out, such systems are doomed to failure, for no matter how ideal the conditions in one of these centres may be, the subject must eventually return to the environment which was the cause of his misdemeanours.

The right of exile is excused by the author of this pamphlet and made to sound as if it doesn’t really matter. The exile is allowed to take his family with him and pays "only” five to fifteen per cent, of his income as cost. They are allowed twelve free days per year. They fail to emphasise the vast climatic and geographic difference between, say, Moscow or Kiev and the frozen wilds of Siberia.

It is, by the way, possible to imprison without a trial in Russia, and the writer compares this law with Defence Regulation 18B. Countering the argument that this Regulation is only enforced during a war, he says that Russia has been in peril for the whole thirty years of the Communist Party’s regime. But if the conditions in that country are as rosy as he would have us believe, who on earth would want to sabotage them?

As a conclusion the pamphlet points out that forced labour exists in many parts of the world, and cites the forced porterage in Tanganyika, Papua, Indonesia and Malaya. Attack, they say, is the best form of defence. But we know all this, and expose it wherever it exists, whether in Russia or Timbuctoo. And furthermore we know that wherever slaves exist there must be a class of masters, in other words, Socialism does not exist.

In 1917, the Russian revolution and what followed, transformed a semi-feudal society into an effective capitalist state. The fact that the particular organisation of Russia is worded with a hotch-potch of "left- wing” jargon counts for nothing. In Russia wage-labour exists as the counterpart of capital: there are armies, navies, airforces, police and prisons. All are hall-marks of Capitalism. That being so, the task which faces the Russian worker is similar to that which faces the workers throughout the modern world—the casting off of the yoke of exploitation and the establishment of Socialism.

Ronald.

World View: Sent to Siberia (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been called the Frozen Hell. There are no trees. Nothing but rock and tundra. In the winter, which lasts from mid-September until the beginning of May, when the snow begins to melt, the temperature goes as low as –75oC, with blizzards drifting the snow eight-storeys high. The spring and summer last a brief three months; and for two months, in mid-winter, the sun never rises above the horizon. Sixty five miles to the west, the estuary of the Yenisey-Angara river (3,445 miles long) flows, during the short spring and summer months, into the Kara Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. For nine months of the year, it can only be reached by air or by a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk, docking at the estuary port of Dudinka.

Such is the location of Norilsk, the world’s most northern industrial city, with a population of 200,000 inhabitants.

In 1930, there was nothing there, except a few reindeers and reindeer-hunters. Nevertheless, in that year, Stalin proposed the Angara-Yenisey Combine for central Siberia, similar to the Kuznetz Combine planned for western Siberia. Shortly after, nickel and other metal deposits were discovered. And in 1935¸ construction of what was to be the city of Norilsk and the Norilsk Metallurgical Combine began. The problem, however, was, as elsewhere in Siberia: where would the Soviet state find the hundreds of thousands of workers it needed in such an inhospitable place? Few would volunteer to go there.

The solution was the collectivisation of agriculture and the dispossession of the kulaks, and other peasants, in Ukraine and south-western Russia. Together with “Trotskyists” and other “enemies of the people”, they were rounded-up and shipped off to eastern Russia and Siberia the Soviet Union’s era of what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital” had begun.

Responsibility for the administration of the Norilsk Combine was the Glavnoye Upravlniye Lagerei, or Gulag, the Chief Directorate of Labour Camps, a department of the Narodny Kommissariat Gosudarvetvernoy Bezopasnosti, or NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of State Security. After the Second World War, when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states, eastern Poland, hundreds of thousands of Balts, and thousands of Banderisti¸ Ukrainian Nationalists, were arrested and sent to such places as Vorkuta and Norilsk. Just how many prisoners passed through the Norilsk Combine is not known, as even the present Russian authorities in Krasnoyarsk, where the records are still kept, refuse to permit anyone to see them. Between 1935 and 1955, it has been unofficially estimated that 500,000 prisoners passed through Norilsk. Most died there, buried in unmarked graves or in holes in the ice.

Stalin died on 2 March 1953. Following his death, there was general unrest in many of the Soviet labour camps, including those in the Norilsk Combine. The strike began in zone 5 on 25 May. It soon spread throughout the camps and mines. Thousands of prisoners refused to work. The strike, which lasted about two months, was finally suppressed with many killed by the NKVD guards. After the strike, conditions for the prisoners were, for some time, considerably worse. But 1956 saw the beginning of the end of the vast Gulag system. The rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union required a more sophisticated workforce of “free” wage-slaves. Not that that made a lot of difference to the surviving ex-prisoners in Norilsk! Nevertheless, some returned to western Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

But for many, after ten or fifteen years imprisonment, and five years “administrative exile”, there was nowhere to go. Some of the women married former guards and NKVD (later KGB) officials. All became state employees, or were pensioned off. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever-increasing inflation ate up their modest savings. Today, the Combine is no longer a state-run enterprise. No longer are the workers exploited by the state. It has been privatised; and according to James Meek (Observer Magazine, 4 July), “it was bought for fraction of its commercial value in 1995 by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, a man made very wealthy now by the old slavery and the new freedoms, and a business partner of George Soros”. Private capitalism had replaced state capitalism.

Yenseisk lies on the banks of the Yenisey river, 800 miles to the south of Norilsk. Trees grow here, and it is less cold. Indeed, global warming has been noticeable in Yenseisk. It has become milder, with the minimum winter temperature rising from –52oC to –40oC. Even vegetables can be grown under glass. Nevertheless, the ice only melts on the Yenisey in May, when boats from Dudinka arrive, or pass south to Krasnoyarsk. And over the last couple of years, a few thousand workers have managed to escape the frozen hell, and the smog and pollution, of Norilsk, downstream to Krasnoyarsk.

There is a road between Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, but no railway; and, furthermore, the local airline, which links such towns and cities as Norilsk, Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, is in deep trouble as it has lost most of its pilots. In fact, according to a local priest, Father Grigory, interviewed by the Guardian (3 December 1997), Yenseisk is “a dying town that lived in the past, by subsidies. There’s no industry. Now, it’s thrown back on its resources. The teachers and doctors haven’t been paid for months”.

Krasnoyarsk, a city of 900,000 inhabitants 200 miles south of Yenseisk, is the administrative centre of the area, and is situated on the Yenisey where it is crossed by the Trans-Siberian Railway. It has factories manufacturing equipment for Siberia’s mining industries, a timber combine and a food processing industry. But like Norilsk and Yenseisk, it too is depressed and probably in terminal decay.

One hundred miles to the west of Krasnoyarsk, also on the Trans-Siberian Railway, is the huge Achinsk Company, recently privatised, which produces alumna, most of which it sends to the Krasnoyarsk Aluminium (KrAZ) Company. It does not make a profit, yet it is the source of massive profits. It pays no taxes to the state. For it does not sell its produce direct to Krasnoyarsk aluminium, but through a series of intermediate companies, owned by the managers of Achinsk Company and KrAZ, all of which make “a killing”, and pay very little tax. Much of this money ultimately finds its way, in dollars, to the Bank of New York. Like Potanin, the owner of the Norilsk Combine, Georgi Lokk, the Chief Executive of the loss-making Achinsk ore combine, is a very rich man; from wealth created by the exploited, poverty-stricken workers of Siberia.

Peter E. Newell

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The age of austerity is over, as the well-heeled splash out on Porsches and Dom Pérignon champagne, according to retailers of luxury goods....Porsche, the luxury carmaker, said this week that orders for its new Cayenne sports utility vehicle, due to arrive in European showrooms next month with a €55,400 ($75,000) price tag, were stronger than expected . . . LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury goods group by sales, said sales of its Dom Pérignon champagne and premium Hennessy XO cognac in the first three months of the year had been “much better” than last year:

(Dead Link)

“This man has been sacrificed to propitiate the gods,” said local official Kalyan Mukherjee. “This is a shame for Bengal where the ruling Left coalition claim they have eradicated social evils and combated superstition,” an opposition leader Samir Kumar Ray said.

(Link)

Have you ever wanted to put yourself in the place of someone detained by KGB officers during Soviet times? Well now you can. While Soviet museums and parks across Central and Eastern Europe have proved popular over the past decade, tourists are now seeking first-hand experiences of life behind the Iron Curtain at Lithuania’s newest Soviet attraction. Welcome to Deportation Day, a “live history lesson” based on the accounts given by victims of Stalin’s gulags. Complete with KGB guards, doctors barking orders in Russian and muscled interrogations, the four-hour dramatization takes tourists to a replica of one of the camps where millions of residents of the Soviet Union were detained:

(Link)

Mike Huckabee, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, says the effort to allow gays and lesbians to marry is comparable to legalizing incest, polygamy and drug use:

(Dead Link)

The Vatican’s second-in-command has linked child sex abuse by priests to homosexuality. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone denied celibacy was to blame for the sex scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, homosexuality and paedophilia were inextricably linked, the Vatican’s Secretary of State declared:

(Link)

The UK too is now more unequal—in incomes, wealth, health, education, and life chances—than at any time since the 1920s. There are more poor children in the UK than in any other country of the European Union. Since 1973, inequality in take-home pay increased more in the UK than anywhere except the US. Most of the new jobs created in Britain in the years 1977–2007 were at either the very high or the very low end of the pay scale:

(Dead Link)

On Keeping Things Dark (1943)

Editorial from the May 1943 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lowell, in his "Government of England" remarked that the right of M.P.s to probe into the doings of Cabinet Ministers and their departments has been valuable in helping to prevent the growth of that bureaucratic arrogance that he considered was unknown in this country though prevalent elsewhere. If he had been writing in wartime he would not have been so sure, but he was at any rate correct in regarding arrogant bureaucracy as an evil, and it is a fact that the working-class movement has been aided by the extent to which information has been made available through Parliamentary questions and the publication of official reports on the evils of the capitalist system. Marx was one who appreciated this, for he was much indebted to the courage and independence of men like Leonard Horner, inspector of factories in the middle of the 19th century, whose disclosures prevented factory owners from keeping the abominable working conditions from the public gaze. Marx observed that Horner rendered invaluable service to the English working-class by carrying on a lifelong struggle not only against the factory owners but also against Ministers of State, to whom the number of votes of factory owners in the House of Commons was of more importance than the number of hours worked by factory hands.

The inherent love of darkness and secrecy of the bureaucratic mind was shown up recently by a statement in the House of Commons made by Richard Law, M.P., Parliamentary Under Secretary of the Foreign Office. He had been asked about the wretched conditions of political prisoners in North Africa and replied:—

  The government attached importance to the release of all political prisoners in North Africa, but we should ask ourselves whether we were likely to further the objects we had in view by lecturing the authorities in French North Africa in a lofty and perhaps high-handed manner. As for the suggestion that a party of members of Parliament should inspect the camps, he wondered whether we would welcome three or four French members of Parliament going round our prisons here.— (Manchester Guardian, March 25.)

The answer to Mr. Law is that any person who wants to make the world worth living in for everybody would not have any objection at all to opening up all the dark spots to inspection. The bureaucratic mind abhors the light of day as also do all those who have something to hide because it will not bear inspection.

By an odd coincidence the next column of the Guardian gave an illustration of this. Some years ago the punishment of “pack drill" was officially abolished in the army and in army detention barracks, yet several cases have just been brought to light showing that it is still sometimes imposed.

The working class have everything to gain by the abolition of secrecy. Why should the workers, here or in any ether country, allow stupid national prejudice to stand in the way of exposure? It would do no harm—except to bureaucrats and others who have something to hide—and might do a considerable amount of good if M.P.s or anybody else, from France or from any other place, could have access to information now shrouded in secrecy. Some enlightened Americans or Russians might have quite a lot to say about English prisons, English slums, English working-class housing conditions and English factories, etc. Some visitors from countries where capital punishment has been abolished might have caustic remarks to make about hanging in English prisons and about the use of the Official Secrets Act to prevent Mrs. Van Der Elst from having access to prison medical reports. If, as was alleged, "they are most ghastly reading" (Evening Standard report of her trial, March 26) why should Government officials and ministers alone be allowed to read them? Some American visitors to Russia might do good work if allowed to tell us more about Russian concentration camps if we may judge by Quentin Reynolds' statement in "Only the Stars are Neutral" (Cassell & Co., 1942, page 174). He relates that he and another American journalist when in Kuibyshef in 1941 "passed one of the big concentration camps reserved for political prisoners. Beyond that we saw a long line of them working on a new road. There were about 800 of them. They were swinging pickaxes and wielding shovels, and on their faces there was no sign of hope. A few soldiers with rifles guarded them carelessly, for there was no place for them to run. Steele and I looked at each other and winced. Of course it wasn't as bad as the convict labour I'd seen in our own South, because these prisoners weren't shackled and they didn't wear stripes. We winced, I think, because these 800 prisoners were all women."

Then some enlightened Russians might return the compliment by studying and reporting on the American chain-gangs that Reynolds refers to; and on the way the American Constitution is evaded to prevent many negroes from voting in elections. And what about some independent-minded foreign snoopers looking into the way natives are treated in South Africa and elsewhere in the British Empire?

The stock answer of the bureaucrat will doubtless be to point to Germany and say that there you have the blackest spot of all; but that is no good reason for turning a blind eye on the rest of the world.

The working class gain from free and open discussion. Censorship and secrecy are traditional weapons of the ruling class.

Film Review: The Way Back (2012)

Film Review from the April 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Way Back (2010) Directed by Peter Weir

This DVD is bleak, long and grim. In these respects it may accurately represent the allegedly true story of an escape from a Siberian gulag in 1942. It is based on the bestselling book The Long Walk by Slawomir Rawicz who claimed to have escaped the gulag with six other POWs and walked 4,000 miles south through the Gobi Desert, Tibet and the Himalayas to British-ruled India. In a concession to commercial pressures, the dialogue is in English with a Russian accent, which does little for its credibility. Colin Farrell portrays a violent Russian petty criminal with nationalistic ideas and a tattoo of Lenin and Stalin on his chest. As by far the most interesting character it is a shame that he decides to stay in Russia out of some misguided loyalty “to the motherland”. As might be expected, the film makes some attempt to tie valid criticism of the Soviet Union into criticism of Communism by including, for instance, a desecrated church. Even if you can put this to one side (and these parts are small enough to ignore) the film is still only averagely enjoyable.

DJW

About Solzhenitsyn (1974)

Solzhenitsyn with Heinrich Böll in West Germany, 1974

From the April 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

So Solzhenitsyn is now able to voice his views openly. It is possible, for the first time, to see how he measures up to the problems not merely of writers in Russia, but of all mankind. What can this Nobel Prize winner tell us?

Before weighing in with criticisms of his manifesto (Sunday Times, March 3), we must make it clear, first, that we have always opposed all forms of censorship, and secondly, that in criticising his ideas we are in no way defending the Kremlinite creed, to which we have consistently expressed our hostility. But however sympathetic we may be to one who has struggled successfully and has made his views heard in spite of all the Soviet censorship and suppression machine, we cannot applaud his political views.

We should like to have greeted him as a world citizen, an internationalist not a nationalist. But his views are based on an insular patriotism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. He believes in the myth of the “national interest”: indeed he bases his argument against a Russian war with China, not on the view that working-class interests are not at stake, but simply on the calculation that Russia could not win such a war and therefore it would be against Russia’s “national interest”.

Although apparently a fervent Leninist when he started his prison career, he is now a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. If this is the result of incarceration in those inhuman prisons and labour-camps, it would seem to be an effective practical demonstration of the truth of Marx’s words:

  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.

On War and the Environment
In his manifesto Solzhenitsyn argues on two issues of the day. The first is the prospect of a Sino-Soviet war: he proposes that, since in his view ideology is the main cause of friction, the Russian government should abandon its ideology in the “national interest”. He seems to believe that, if this were done, there would be peace with China.

What the author of August 1914 should know is that nowhere can one find evidence of a war being fought solely because of ideology. Dogs may dislike each other’s colour or breed, but when they fight it is over a bone, or a bitch. Humans likewise don’t fight over creeds, but over markets and minerals, ports and provinces.

Solzhenitsyn’s second argument is not original and he names his sources — the Club of Rome and the Teilhard de Chardin Society. He has adopted their doomsday environmentalism, arguing against pollution and skyscraper cities and for a return to 2-storey houses and horse-transport. He sees a no-growth economy as the solution to the problems of mineral shortages, population pressures and pollution.

His argument, like that of other doomsday writers, takes no account of any possible re-structuring of society. Their computers are never programmed to tell us how world Socialism, with production for use not for profit, would employ the earth’s resources. Like the Club of Rome, Solzhenitsyn assumes that production for profit will go on for ever, and then argues that this system must be reformed to prevent it from destroying mankind’s habitat. Better surely to argue for an end to capitalism, since it is a system which generates waste and seeks constantly to increase the quantity of materials processed, year by year.

Solecisms Versus Marx
But when we come to his views on “ideology” it is plain that Solzhenitsyn has no knowledge of what Marxist theory really is. He has accepted the lies of the Kremlinites and so presents us with a distorted caricature of Marxism, a series of Aunt Sallys which he passionately shoots down in flames.

From this great sage, we learn that Marxism, “a primitive, superficial economic theory . . . declared that only the worker creates value and failed to take into account the contribution of either organizers, engineers, transport or market systems.” To start with, he ignores the fact that Marxist theory puts engineers and transport workers in the working class: they all have a living to earn, they all have to sell their labour-power. Also that in reckoning the value of a commodity, we take into account the wear and tear on machinery, the value of all raw materials used in manufacture and also any socially necessary labour time used in research and development (e.g. by engineers, organizers etc.)

The Marxist theory of value asserts simply that human labour is the sole source of value. But there is a lot more to Marxist economic theory than this basic proposition: to start with there are three volumes of Capital, and it is doubtful if even the sage Solzhenitsyn would describe them as “superficial”.

His other attacks on Marxism are similarly wide of the mark. Most of all he goes wrong on the question of revolution. According to him, Marxism “was mistaken through and through in its prediction that socialists could only come to power by an armed uprising.” Evidently Solzhenitsyn’s education in ideology did not include what Engels wrote on this subject:

  The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past.

Indeed Engels argued that for a complete transformation of society to be undertaken successfully, it must be on the basis of full participation and the support of the mass of the community.

Again, according to Solzhenitsyn, Marxism is wrong in stating that the Socialist movement will come to the fore in advanced and highly developed countries first. We have only to use our eyes, to look at countries such as Russia which claimed to be “socialist” and see that this vaunted pseudo-socialism is merely a nasty form of capitalism. In 1917 the S.P.G.B. was pointing to Russia’s backwardness as an indication that the revolution could only bring about an acceleration of capitalist development. Now in 1974 Solzhenitsyn describes how Russian technology has copied Western technology, how pollution increases due to greed for profits and how the people are oppressed by poverty:

  In practice, a man’s wage-level ought to be such that whether he has a family of two or even four children, the woman does not need to earn a separate pay-packet and does not need to support her family financially on top of all her other toils and troubles.

Russia is just as much a capitalist country as America or Britain, Cuba or Kenya. Everywhere the capitalist “mode of production” prevails: we see men and women who possess no land, no tools, nothing, who are driven by fear of want to sell their labour-power by the week or the month, mortgaging their lives in instalments so as to survive till the next pay-day. We see them producing goods galore, “an immense accumulation of commodities”, all their own work, yet they remain unable to afford most of what they need. We see human toil and human skills diverted from man’s real needs — food, clothing, health, housing, culture — to pander to the aristocracy of Big Business, the wasteful war-machine, the accountants, the luxury resorts, and so on.

This is what Marxists oppose: a worldwide system of exploitation of the many by, and for the benefit of, the few. A system which combines wanton waste with wasteful want. Shame it is that Solzhenitsyn has failed to join the movement to end it and has instead sided with those who say that authoritarianism can be made tolerable by reform. He is indeed one of those who “wear their chains with decency”.

Charmian Skelton

Workers against The Gulag (1981)

Book Review from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers Against The Gulag, edited by Olga Semyonova and Viktor Haynes. (Pluto Press £1.95)

"I am a Russian worker, aged 46. I have worked in production for 30 years, 22 on electrical work, repairs. The archives of the KGB hold three folders of documents confirming that I am a skilled electrician, conscientious in my work, practically don't drink, and don't smoke.

"I will list some of the reasons which led me in 1959 to take the risk of illegally crossing the border, and in 1964 and 1966 to ask for permission to emigrate.

(1) The low level of pay  . . . I have spent the best years of my life slaving for a crust.

(2) The lack of free Trade Unions.

(3) The cruel, humiliating treatment of men in Labour Camps. I spent many days in freezing solitary confinement in Camp No. * of the Omsk, UMZ.

(4) The continual ever-growing tendency of the KGB to use "psychiatry" to strengthen its punitive powers."

On the 21 December 1976, V. A. Ivanov appeared in Revolution Square in Moscow with a placard: "To the Soviet Authorities. I demand permission to emigrate. I have gone through Hell in your Camps and Gas-Chambers. What else is left?" Ten minutes later Ivanov was seized, spent 24 hours in the police station, and was then sent home, out of Moscow. In November he addressed a letter to George Meaney, President of the American AFL/CIO: "I am a Russian worker, a highly qualified electrician with thirty years record  . . . I ask you to help me leave Russia and thereby escape further persecution."

This book is one of the most damning indictments to come from Russia so far, consisting of a series of documents smuggled out and published, for the first time, in Britain. These documents tell the facts behind the glossy government propaganda tracts. Ninety per cent of the Russian working-class are on piece-work rates, based on impossible so-called "norms". The minimum official poverty line is 50 Roubles a week; 10,000 families in Leningrad alone fall below this line. Every Soviet citizen has to carry an "internal passport" (just like under the Czar), which is also a residential permit. In addition, every worker has to carry his Labour Book, giving his work record, and without which he cannot get employment. Food is dear, in winter often unobtainable, especially butter, milk and eggs. The average Russian citizen gets less than half as much meat as West European workers. Serious widespread strikes have broken out as in Novcherkass, and been brutally suppressed. These workers in their protests actually betray the same naiveté as their grandfathers did in 1905 when they appealed to the Czar (the Little Father); asking "Comrade Brezhnev to intervene on their behalf, and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to prevent the local Communist officials from persecuting them is as futile.

In their appeals they declare their support of the Russian system and say they want to "make it work". The most moving, harrowing parts of the book are the accounts of the brutal persecution and ill-treatment of workers by the criminal thugs of the KGB and the Russian CP. For daring to protest against corruption (more rife in Russia than in New York), thieving of state property, swindling workers of their pay, rigging elections to the official state "unions", workers have been dismissed, had their furniture and children thrown out on the street, in the depths of Russian winter, been beaten up in police stations, and sent to "Psychiatric Hospitals" and Labour Camps.

All of which shows how terrified the authorities really are. In spite of everything, with incredible courage, Vladimir Klebanov and his friends have formed a free Trade Union, demanded recognition, and appealed to the west for help, which the KGB with all its powers has failed to suppress. The first Russian Free Trade Union has been driven underground, but still exists. This book confirms our view of the anti-working class politics in Russia.

Horatio