Khola Mayekiso on U.S. tour

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Moses Mayekiso hugs his wife, Khola, after being released on bail Khola Mayekiso, wife of jailed South African trade-union leader, Moses Mayekiso, is currently on a U.S. speaking tour. She will speak in New York on Friday, April 7 at 6:30pm at the District Council 37, AFSCME hall, 125 Barclay St. For further details about the tour contact the N.Y. Labor Committee Against Apartheid (718) 768-1756.

SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1989 11 York Times, March 16, 1989)

Gorbachev has offered to host peace talks between the ANC and the white-supremacist government. The substance of these talks was proposed by a Soviet official as long ago as December 1987 at an ANC-sponsored conference in Tanzania: "The ANC should expect to be part of a coalition government in the future and should not seek to dominate it if that would deepen political divisions." (Los Angeles Times, Feb. 5, 1988)

Gleb Starushenko, the deputy director of the Africa Institute in Moscow, even suggested a "bicameral parliament that would give the white minority an effective veto within a majority-ruled government." (Ibid.)

"Two-stage" struggle Moscow has influence over the ANC not only through diplomatic channels but also through the intervention of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which dominates the ANC central leadership.

Both the ANC and the SACP, like their sponsors in Moscow, put forward the Stalinist schema of a "two-stage" struggle in South Africa. During the current stage, the Stalinists maintain, the main task is to construct a multi-class front of all people who are against apartheid. after 900 days in prison.

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= socialists travel to Moscow (Left to right) Susan Weissman, Boris Kagarlitsky, Carl Finamore, and Ralph Schoenman discuss results of People's Front Founding Conference.

Paul Siegel (left) and an interpreter (right) speak with a woman, a Bukharin supporter, who survived Stalinist imprisonment. Her husband was shot Participants in the delegation to the Soviet Union Vlady Kibalchich, son of early Soviet revolutionary leader and author Victor Serge. "Vlady," as he is more commonly known, is a widely acclaimed artist and muralist. Born in Leningrad in 1920, he left the Soviet Union in 1936 after three years of internment, together with his father, in a Stalinist camp in Kazakhstan. After traveling throughout Europe in the 1930s and '40s, he settled in Mexico, where he currently lives.

Carl Finamore, staff director since 1985 of the San Francisco-based Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice, and a member of the National Committee of Socialist Action.

Finamore traveled to Poland in 1982 while it was under martial law. In 1988, in collaboration with Polish Solidarnose leader Zbigniew Kowalewski, he co-authored "Solidarnosc and the Struggle for Workers Self-Management in Poland."

Susan Weissman, noted Sovietologist, author, and host/coordinator of the KPFK Radio (Los Angeles) nationally broadcast program "Portraits of the U.S.S.R." Weissman is a member of the editorial boards of numerous scholarly publications on Soviet Studies and political affairs, including Critique and Against the Current. Her articles and lectures have included extensive research on the writings and ideas of noted Soviet revolutionary leader Ralph Schoenman, past Executive Director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and past convenor of a nationwide symposium "American Workers and Artists for Polish Solidarity." Schoenman is the author of numerous books including "Bertrand Russell:

Philosopher of the Century," "Prisoners of Israel," and "The Hidden History of Zionism,"

Paul Siegel, Professor-Emeritus of English at Long Island University, New York.

Siegel is a distinguished Shakespearean scholar. He is also co-chair of the Moscow Trials Campaign Committee, based in New York. This committee has organized a political campaign demanding the political rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky and other victims of Stalin's purges. Professor Siegel is the author of several books, including "Revolution and the 20th Century Novel" (1979), "Shakespeare's English and Roman History Plays: A Marxist Approach" (1986), and "The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the 12 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1989 (continued from page 16)

right now!"

They said this meeting was not all that unusual. They repeated what we had heard earlier from Medvedev, that there are regular seminars, panel discussions, and occasional articles in the press (and even on Leningrad TV several weeks ago) that raise the question of Trotsky's rehabilitation.

A friend offered us his car, and we rushed to the Writers' Union meeting. There were 150 people present. The keynote speaker was Dr. Stuartsev, who gave a two-hour presentation on the need to clear Trotsky's name and the role Trotsky played in history. The talk was followed by lively discussion from the audience. At one point, a 106-year-old Red Army veteran got up to speak about his personal experiences with Trotsky.

We were greeted as representatives of Trotsky's and Serge's family and were very warmly received. Vlady Kibalchich spoke in Russian from the podium in support of clearing the name of his father (Victor Serge), himself, and Trotsky. Vlady is still stripped of his Soviet citizenship.

The March 26 national elections Many aspects of the old Stalinist election law still exist. If you are a member of several official organizations you can vote many times. For example, if you're a member of the CPSU, the Academy of Science, the Writers' Union, and Komsomol (the CPSU youth organization)you can vote four times for the "official" candidates of each organization. The average Soviet citizen gets to vote only once in the general election.

But there are two new democratic features to the election law which create big opportunities for dissident organizations to raise their own ideas independently of the bureaucracy.

First, the new election law allows complete freedom of agitation for candidates without the obligation of obtaining permits for activities. This is often violated, however. When we were in Moscow, five People's Front activists holding an election meeting were arrested. So this law on paper is by no means enforced in practice.

We were asked by the defendants to go to the trial. The proceedings were postponed until they could get an attorney. One of the activists was in the hospital because he had been beaten. Two of the people refused to recognize the trial and failed to appear. The two who showed up told us they were going to sue the city because they had been illegally prevented from having a meeting in support of a candidate.

These examples of resistance, and even open defiance, of arbitrary treatment reflected a level of rebelliousness that did not exist even two or three years ago.

The second democratic feature of the new election law is one that allows unofficial organizations to make nominations for candidates to the new supreme governing body: the Congress of U.S.S.R. People's Deputies. This means that in any one of the and author Victor Serge.

published by Veritas Press.

World" (1986).

and her child died in a labor camp orphanage.

dozens of districts in Moscow a meeting of at least 500 people can make an unlimited number of nominations by majority vote.

The Moscow People's Front was able to get meetings of 500 people in most of the city's districts. This was a tremendous achievement.

As a result, the People's Front grew considerably. In one district, activists told us how they rang doorbells and visited about 200 people a day to convince them to come to a meeting. This club soon grew from three people to 50 people.

Boris Kagarlitsky, a leader of the 40-member Socialist Initiative Club, estimates that the People's Front has 2000 to 3000 people in Moscow. It is the most advanced and largest unofficial political organization in the city.

The People's Front nominated five of its own candidates in these district meetings and supported other candidates as well. It supported former Moscow regional CPSU chief Boris Yeltsin, for example. [See report by Ralph Schoenman on an explosive Yeltsin election meeting of 2500 people in the next issue of Socialist Action.] The second stage of the elections, however, is where the CPSU begins to assert its bureaucratic control by screening out the candidates. Electoral commissions exist in each district to screen all the candidates to determine which ones will be on the final ballot.

Of the five People's Front candidates, only one made it through this second stage. He is Sergei Stankievich, a leader of the Moscow People's Front and a CPSU member.

The screening process works as follows: CPSU-dominated structures (such as labor collectives comprising enterprises with anywhere from five to 500 workers) can make nominations on an equal footing with district meetings of 500 people. Every nominating meeting in turn gets seven seats on the electoral commission.

So if you have a meeting of 500, you get seven delegates to come to the electoral screening committee. If you are a labor collective of five, you also get seven delegates. And there are literally dozens of these small collectives. In addition, neighborhood organizations composed of pensioners are also represented on the electoral commissions. These people are very conservative because of their dependence on the state.

It is testimony to the growing strength of opposition forces that they were able to make substantial gains despite the many obstacles.

People's Front conference

We were present at the founding conference of the Moscow People's Front on March 1112. There were 55 delegates present from the 34 constituent clubs and about 100 guests.

The conference began with a discussion over the composition of the presiding committee. At the very beginning something occurred which showed the wide appeal of the People's Front. A lieutenant colonel in the army took the floor and stated why he should be elected to the presiding committee.

The officer joined the People's Front three days before the conference and said, "I am being repressed in the military because I am taking it upon myself to defend the families and the soldiers who are being demobilized from Eastern Europe and Afghanistan and are entering civilian life without any protection." He was elected overwhelmingly to the presiding committee.

There was also a debate on whether to have someone from the Russian Federation Club be part of the presiding committee. The nominee was a Russian nationalist who came under strong criticism because of his views, which many people considered anti-Semitic. He had previously condemned all the Jewish leaders of the People's Front by name.

The Russian Federation Club, according to Boris Kagarlitsky, is not as extremist in its views as Pamyat, the openly reactionary, anti-Semitic Russian chauvinist organization. However, the club did publish a Pamyat statement without comment, which led to a big uproar at the conference.

But even those who condemned this person for his views did not want the person expelled, with the exception of Kagarlitsky. It shows the extreme level of tolerance that exists among the intellectuals in the People's Front as an overreaction against the Stalinist purge mentality from which they want to desperately free themselves. As a result, they are overly tolerant.

The Russian Federation leader was not only elected to the presiding committee, but to the Coordinating Council, the seven-person ieadership body.

One of the main controversial debates at the conference was whether to adopt resolutions that were either hostile or conciliatory to the CPSU.

Whereas Kagarlitsky was for expelling the member from the Russian Federation Club, he was unwilling, when it came to a major programmatic question, to take a clear position. He considered the two motions—-to be hostile or conciliatory to the CPSU-to be a provocation, because the adoption of either motion would have split the People's Front membership. We were told that approximately 20 percent of the People's (continued on next page)

USSR/USA tour inspires Trotsky supporters The $30,000 fund drive launched by Walnut Publishing Co. to finance the USSR/USA tour of an international delegation of supporters of the program of Leon Trotsky got off to a roaring start last month. More than $6000 has been contributed by 41 socialists across the United States and Canada.

A number of the contributors are lifelong supporters of the program of Lenin and Trotsky and founders of the Fourth International, the world party initiated by Leon Trotsky. They were inspired by Trotsky's courageous fight against Stalin in which he counterposed the rule of the great majority through the vibrant soviets created in the caldron of the 1917 Russian Revolution to the bureaucratic rule of the Stalinist caste.

Walnut Publishing Co. President Jeff Mackler reported to Socialist Action that the Oct. 15 through Nov. 15 U.S. component of the tour will include Esteban Volkov and Pierre Broué, in addition to the American Trotskyists who recently returned from the Soviet Union.

Volkov, Leon Trotsky's grandson, has spearheaded an international campaign to request that the current Soviet leadership rehabilitate his grandfather. In December 1988, he traveled for the first time in 57 years to the Soviet Union to meet his half sister, Alexandra Sakharonovna, who he hadn't seen since he was a child and whose very existence he was unaware of until last October. [Alexandra died on March 10, during the visit of the delegation to the Soviet Union. See accompanying story.] Pierre Broué is the author of the most complete biography on Leon Trotsky yet to appear (available in French through Editions Fayard). Broué is also the director of the French-based Leon Trotsky Institute, which has published the complete works of Trotsky in French. Broué traveled to the Soviet Union in November 1988, where he met with leading anti-Stalinist historians and intellectuals and addressed a meeting of over 500 people, sponsored by the Memorial group, on the life and legacy of Leon Trotsky.

Mackler indicated that Walnut's plan to tour 12 U.S. cities-with several members of the international delegation appearing in each city-took a giant step forward in the first month of the fund drive. Contributions payable to "Walnut Publishing Co." can be sent to: 3435 Army Street, Suite 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

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We the undersigned-Vsievolod Volkov Bronstein, Veronica Volkow Fernandez, Nora Dolores Volkow Fernandez, Patricia Volkow Fernandez and Natalia Volkow Fernandez-grandson and that country. The participants in this study group-Vlady Kibalchich, Susan Weissman, Ralph great granddaughters respectively of the Russian Revolutionary Marxist Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, write you, with all due respect, to ask that our grandfather and great-grandfather, his family, and his comrades in struggle be officially cleared of all the slanders and false criminal charges that were leveled against them under We ask that the historical truth be fully brought to light concerning both the fundamental role played by Leon Trotsky, alongside Vladimir Lenin, in the development and triumph of th October Revolution, and the unequal and heroic struggle he waged against the Stalinist 1o His Excellency President Mikhail Gorbachev, to the highest Soviet authorities.

dictatorship-to the point of losing his life-in order to preserve the essential SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1989 13 Front members are CPSU members.

The People's Front program calls for socialist democracy, ecology, human rights, democratic reforms, self-management, and an end to price increases-but there is absolutely no fundamental challenge to perestroika.

The front's full name is the People's Front in Support of Perestroika, and that is not just simply a defensive formulation in order to avoid repression. The intellectuals and professional workers in the People's Front favor perestroika market reforms because they confuse these reforms with democracy and participation in economic decision-making. Their goal is solely limited to lessening the damaging effects of perestroika austerity reforms on the population.

The People's Front founding conference did not, therefore, offer alternative proposals of democratic planning, free trade unions, or the unrestricted right to strike. These urgent political planks are absent in both the statement of intentions of the Socialist Initiative Club, which is a more advanced Marxist club, and in the program of the People's Front as a whole.

Perhaps the central debate at the conference was whether to have the 34 clubs remain relatively autonomous or whether to adopt a more centralized coordinating committee. Those clubs that wanted to carry out their own political projects wanted to retain the decentralized character of the front.

The so-called Kagarlitsky program calling for the election of a central leadership body won overwhelmingly by 44 to 10.

Discussion with Kagarlitsky But a question arises. With the broadly formulated program of the People's Front and the widely divergent views of its component parts, is it in a position to act effectively and will it be able to maintain its political independence from the reform wing of the bureaucracy?

We discussed this question with Kagarlitsky and asked about the possibility of organizing united-front coalitions on specific issues (such as democratic election reform and the defense of political prisoners) while building an organization on a clearer political basis than the People's Front. Kagarlitsky didn't think this approach was correct. He defended the all-inclusive membership and broad program of the People's Front.

Kagarlitsky also stated that he favored restricting the People's Front to intellectuals and professional workers. He rejected having workers join the People's Front, claiming they would not be interested in the discussions. This is another problem. Without To His Excellency Mr. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev President of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Kremlin Moscow, U.S.S.R.

direct orders from Joseph Stalin.

Marxist-Leninist postulates of the October Revolution.

We also request that the writings of Leon Trotsky, which constitute of historical and contemporary Marxist teachings, be freely published You have written that the Soviet Union must find its way back to of Leninism. This is very necessary.

But for this to be accomplished, it is vital to uproot and discard methods of Stalinism so that the word socialism can never again totalitarianism, but rather with the fullest freedoms and authenti the Soviet Union once again stand as an example and beacon for h Sincerely, Mexico City, December 30, 1988 Venica Malin Vsievolod Verógica Volkow Fernández Dose Patricia Patricia Volkow Fernández Esteban (Vsievoloi) Volkov Cerro del Vigilante ¡ 191 Frac. Ronero le Terreros Mexico, 21, D.F. z.p. 04320 Carl Finamore/Socialist Actlon One of the high points of the tour was meeting Nadejda Joffe, the 82-year-old daughter of Adolf Joffe, a leading Left Oppositionist and friend of Trotsky's who committed suicide in 1927.

(In a farewell letter to Trotsky, Adolf the social weight of the working class, the People's Front is more vulnerable to the pressures from the powerful Gorbachev wing of the bureaucracy-and hence more likely to adapt to it.

Boris Kagarlitsky's Socialist Initiative Club is a Marxist group, though you do not have to be a Marxist to be a member. It does not really have a program itself; it has a statement of intention. Thus, even though it has more political definition, it closely follows the vague and broad political approach of the People's Front as a whole.

La valuable compilation in the Soviet Union.

forever the criminal be associated with : democracy. Only mankind.

Bronster ora dolores Vo alkow Fern Maracia Jachet Natalia Volkow Fernández Joffe emphasized that in committing suicide he was not despairingly giving up the struggle against Stalinism, but in his condition of extremely painful illness, for which Stalin had refused him permission to receive medical treatment abroad, it was the only form of protest against Stalinism he could make.)

Nadejda herself was a member of the Left Opposition. She suffered repression beginning in 1929. First, she was sent to Siberia for three years, and then she was sent for 10 years to the notorious Kolyma labor camp near the Bering Straits. Nadejda bore four children in this period. Her husband was shot after his second sentence.

In 1949, Nadejda was arrested for the third time and sent into permanent exile. She was released in 1956 during the Khrushchev thaw.

In an interview with the Trotskyist delegation, Nadejda emphatically stated her view that Stalinism is diametrically opposed to Bolshevism and … to the revolutionary ideas of Lenin and Trotsky. The revolution, she said with spirited conviction, aspired to be the highest intellectual, social, and cultural achievement in history. She ended by sending her greetings and best wishes to American Trotskyists.—PAUL SIEGEL Despite the questions we were left with, the contributions of the Socialist Initiative Club must be recognized as very important. It was Kagarlitsky, for example, who got the People's Front to adopt a position on socialist democracy, whereas many people did not even want the word socialist in the program. Some also just wanted economic— and not political reform mentioned in the program.

But without an approach toward the Soviet working class around clear demands for workers' control of production, mass demoTo To the Government of the Soviet Union, To participante i- ..

they may be freely published in the Soviet Union.

the participantEsteban sievolody Esteban Volkov Apdo. 21945 Mexico, 21, D.F.

Ralph Schoenman/Soclallst Action Vlady Kibalchich speaks at Writers Union.

cratic control of distribution, the right to strike, the right to form independent unions, and the freedom to form political parties, both the People's Front and the Socialist Initiative Club run the risk of being isolated from the only powerful section of society that has the power to defeat the bureaucracy and fulfill the original goals of the Russian Revolution.

Alexandra

Alexandra Sakharonovna, Leon Trotsky's granddaughter, died of cancer in Moscow on March 10. She was 65 years old.

One of the main goals of our trip was to meet "Sasha," as she was called by friends and relatives, and to bring her books and presents from American Trotskyists. But when we arrived in Moscow on March 3, she was already unconscious.

"Sasha" had only surfaced publicly as Trotsky's granddaughter last October, after she learned she had terminal cancer.

Fortunately, before her death she was able to meet Esteban Volkov, her half-brother, whom she hadn't seen since she was eight years old.

Volkov traveled to Moscow in December.

In an interview with Socialist Action, he recounted how he was filled with joy to see Sasha. "She was always smiling and full of optimism despite the advanced stage of her illness," Volkov said. For more information on the life of Alexandra Sakharonovna, see the January 1989 • issue oi socialist Action. - P.S.

-Volkor

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Paul Siegel/Soclalist Action Carl Finamore/Socialist Action

Paul Siegel on Leon Trotsky in the U.S.S.R. today Ralph Schoenman on Boris Yeltsin's election campaign Greetings from Socialist Action and delegation to founding • Interviews with Otto Latsis, Roy Medvedev & Boris Kagarlitsky Copies of letters presented by the delegation to Otto Latsis, Central Committee member of the Communist Party (CPSU).

Four-page special on U.S.S.R. conference of Moscow People's Front

Sakharonovna, Trotsky's granddaughter, dies

Mexico, D.F., Mexico •ou so that Very sincerely,