Leon Trotsky must be rehabilitated!

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SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1988 9 more a weapon for the sabotage of the country's economy.

"The bureaucratization of a backward and isolated workers' state and "the transformation of the bureaucracy into an all-powerful privileged caste constitute the most convincing refutation-not only theoretically but this time practically-of the theory of socialism in one country.

"The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains a degenerated workers' state. Such is the social diagnosis. The political prognosis has an alternative character: Either the bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism."

Gorbachev's economic reforms clearly reveal the bureaucracy's role as the transmission belt of the world capitalist class inside the workers' state. They represent a danger to the soviet workers and to the soviet workers' state.

In China, similar reforms have progressed to the point where illegal private banks have been allowed to exist, where special capitalist economic zones have been (continued on page 10)

Armenians continue struggle By PAUL The series of exonerations by the Soviet government of the Moscow Trials defendants-culminating in the recent exoneration of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Pyatakov, and Radek-constitute a victory of historic significance for world Trotskyism.

It is a victory, though, that still awaits the even greater victory of the exoneration of Trotsky himself and of his son and chief collaborator, Leon Sedov.

The acknowledgement that the trials were a gigantic frame-up of the men who were the founders of the Soviet Union serves to illuminate the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism, whose most implacable and far-sighted opponents were the Trotskyists.

The dispelling of the mythology of the trials—in which Trotsky was represented as the devil with whom the other defendants and entered into a hellish pact—is bound to arouse interest in the Soviet Union and in what Trotsky actually said about the course being taken by Stalin's regime.

What Trotsky had to say, not only about Stalinism but about the trials themselves, has been borne out by events.

Need for socialist democracy Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism helps to explain not just the trials but the process by which the verdicts of these trials have been reversed under Gorbachev.

In his book "The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky stated that, thanks to the nationalization of the means of production and economic planning, the Soviet Union made a tremendous advance in industrialization even though bureaucratic methods entailed enormous waste and human costs.

But, Trotsky said, in the next stage of development the quality of products (which cannot be achieved through bureaucratic centralized planning) and creative initiative will become all-important. For this, socialist democracy is necessary.

What Gorbachev has to say in his book "Perestroika" at times reads like a plagiarism of this comment of Trotsky's. This is not due, however, to Gorbachev's having secretly read Trotsky-whom in his speech at the 70th anniversary of the revolution, Gorbachev denounced as "anti-socialist." It is due to Trotsky's having so well understood the course that the Soviet NEW YORK-On June 29, six members of the Moscow Trials Committee met with several Soviet officials. The meeting took place in the offices of the Permanent Mission of the Ukranian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics to the United Nations.

We presented a list of demands to the delegation, which included clearing the names of all the victims of the Moscow Trials, publishing the works of the Bolshevik leaders whose writings have been suppressed, and restoring Leon Trotsky to his place in history.

One official expressed the opinion that the Gorbachev wing of the Soviet Communist Party is in favor of "rehabilitating" Trotsky. It goes without saying that he knew of Trotsky's life and work only through secondary (obviously anti-Trotsky) sources.

Other officials agreed that Trotsky's writings will "eventually" be published. But they argued that their newspaper reported it. When the economist Otto Latsis said the same thing at a subsequent news conference, it was again ignored by the Soviet press, with the sole exception of the newspaper of the Komsomols (Young Communist League).

Nevertheless, the fact that leading intellectuals called for the rehabilitation and publication of Trotsky-even though they took care to say that they were opposed to his views-and that even a single newspaper printed this is of great significance. The genie of free inquiry is out of the bottle and cannot be put back into it.

economy is in such straits that they barely have enough paper to satisfy present book-publishing demands. At that point, a member of our delegation remarked that now they "won't have to waste so much paper printing up anti-Trotskyist publications."

The affair turned into a sort of forum on topics ranging from the effect of market mechanisms in the Soviet Union to the lack of freedom for lesbians and gays in the country.

At the end, Yuri Chizhik, the Permanent Mission's press secretary, joined us to talk about increasing the power of the local soviets and politicizing the masses. But his remarks, on the whole, were superficial.

We think that the decision of the Soviet representatives to meet with us was in line with political happenings in the glasnost era and was probably not made at the local level. Although it may have been an exercise in pure public relations, the Moscow Trials Committee welcomed the event. We hope our demands will be accepted and expedited quickly.