Soviet speaking tour starts with a bang

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By SCOTT ADAMS-COOPER BOSTON-One hundred thirty people packed a meeting in Boylston Auditorium at Harvard University on Oct. 20 to hear Esteban "Sieva" Volkov (the grandson of Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky) and five other panelists on the first stop of a U.s. tour sponsored by Walnut Publishing Co. and Socialist Action.

Volkov was joined in Boston by Professor Pierre Broué, noted Marxist historian and biographer of Trotsky; Professor Paul Siegel, the co-chair of the Moscow Trials Campaign Committee; and Carl Finamore, a member of the National Committee of Socialist Action. Both Siegel and Finamore traveled to the Soviet Union last spring to deliver an appeal from Volkov and his family to Mikhail Gorbachev for the rehabilitation of Trotsky.

A featured speaker in Boston (and New York) was Nadezhda Joffe, the 82-year-old daughter of Trotsky's close collaborator Adolph Joffe and an organizer of the original Bolshevik opposition to Stalin who spent 30 years in a Siberian labor camp. She drew standing ovations before and after her talk. [See reprint of Joffe's Boston speech on opposite page.] Introducing the panelists was Bernie Sanders, former mayor of Burlington, Vt., who, in an article published the next day in The Harvard Crimson, described his presence on the same stage with these figures as "a humbling experience."

The Boylston meeting capped three days of excitement in the Boston area. Earlier in the week, Volkov, Broué, and Joffe addressed a seminar at the Harvard Center for European Studies, and then were feted at a reception attack sponsored by Harvard's Houghton Library, which houses the Trotsky Archives.

Volkov and Broué also traveled to Providence, R.I., where they spoke to a spirited group of scholars and students at Brown University's Center for Foreign Policy Development.

One enthusiastic student from Azerbaijan, who attended the Brown seminar, had his picture taken with Volkov because he said his friends back in the Soviet Union would "never believe that I met the grandson of Leon Trotsky."

The tour's beginning coincided with the publication of Walnut Publishing Co.'s new book "Gorbachev's USSR: Is Stalinism Dead?"-a collection of essays in defense of socialist democracy written by many of the tour participants. Dozens of copies of the book were sold throughout the tour.

The most moving remarks at all of the meetings were those by Nadezhda Joffe. Thirty years of life in Siberian labor camps gave her strength and vigor. Her voice rang loud and clear. She explained that she learned to be an effective orator because it was the only way to be heard over the ferocious Siberian winds.

The Boston leg of the tour produced an extensive article in the Boston Globe about Volkov, an interview on the local public television station, and two articles in The Harvard Crimson.

The Crimson article captured the spirit of the Oct. 20 Harvard meeting in its final paragraph: "The meeting concluded in grand socialist style as the panel spontaneously broke into a rendition of Internationale, the 1880s song of the international working class."

TUMSWA

Action Jonathan Halabi/Socialist Action