[10 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1992 der, Ishmael Flores…]

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10 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 1992 der, Ishmael Flores, Gil Green and Herbert Aptheker, are no longer members of the inner circle of elected leaders —an inner circle who for so many decades were unanimous in their declarations of fidelity to the leadership of the now defunct and misnamed Communist Party of the Soviet A new course?

Herbert Aptheker, today a leading dissident in the still-Stalinist CPUSA, has been for the past five decades a loyal party historian, intellectual and theoretician. His book, "The Truth About Hungary," written in 1956 shortly after Stalin's heirs sent Soviet tanks to crush the workers' revolution in Hungary, was an abject apologia of Kremlin policy. It typified the "big lie" school of falsification employed by Stalinists at that time and to this day.

Aptheker portrayed the 1956 rebellion of the Hungarian workers as a fascist plot led by anti-Semitic remnants of the pre-war, pro-Hitler, Horthy regime. The rebellious Hungarians' rejection of the dictatorial rule of the Stalinist Hungarian Communist Party and their formation of democratic workers' councils to rule their country were slandered as a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency conspiracy to restore capitalism.

Similarly, Aptheker applied his pen to defend the sending of Soviet tanks to Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring of 1968.

Prior to the failed coup of August 1991, Aptheker and the entire CPUSA leadership were supporters of then-Soviet President Gorbachev, just as they had been supporters of every Soviet head of state from the time of Stalin. Published interviews with Aptheker recorded his glowing praise for Gorbachev's policies, which were characterized as shining examples of the renewal of CONVENTION wasn't socialism in the USSR. But today, as we shall see, Aptheker and a significant layer of CP stalwarts are charting a new course.

For the past two years there has been a great uneasiness in the American CP. In the face of the worldwide repudiation of Soviet Stalinism and its associated parties, the rule has been for these self-serving parties which long ago ceased to function as defenders of the working class, to either formally dissolve or to convert themselves into openly pro-capitalist social-democratic formations.

Not long ago, the central party leadership around Gus Hall began to wonder whether the Gorbachev leadership's restorationist course would not jeopardize the hold of the entire Soviet Communist Party apparatus on the reins of power in the USSR itself. Neither Hall, Aptheker, or any other CPUSA leader, however, had voiced objection to Gorbachev's general course over most of the past six years.

At the level of foreign policy not a word was uttered about Gorbachev's capitulation to U.S. imperialism during the Gulf War. The cutting of Soviet aid to the beleaguered Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Soviet pressure on the South African CP and ANC to negotiate for a coalition capitalist fail like the one in Moscow.

government with the De Klerk regime, the slashing of vital aid to Cuba, were ignored or justified by the CPUSA.

In regard to Soviet domestic policy, CPUSA tops said little or nothing about Gorbachev's privatization policies. The fake CP-controlled "soviets" were praised as examples of democratic renewal, while strike-breaking laws and attacks on Soviet workers and oppressed nationalities were ignored or supported.

For the CPUSA leadership the key question was whether the Gorbachev wing, that is, the majority of the Stalinist privileged middle-class apparatus in the USSR, could retain power. The fact that Gorbachev, like his opponents in the Soviet CP, aimed at presiding over a capitalist USSR was not a factor in the considerations of Hall, his associates, or the ever-more vocal opposition in the CPUSA.

But the disintegration of the Stalinist Communist Parties in Eastern Europe and the associated dissolution or crippling splits in most CPs around the globe (England, Italy, Denmark, etc.), led for the first time in six decades to an open and sometimes public discussion in the CPUSA itself. This was partially reflected over the course of the past two years in letters to from the elected government of working class power and installed an unelected, appointed government, with emergency powers to rule by decree."

Hall continues, "[This] ...'new thinking' resulted in setbacks around the world. It set the stage for right opportunism trends worldwide. The new thinking is in essence right opportunism."

And again: "I have argued that the flaws in the Soviet Union are not systemic. This crisis developed as a result of serious mistakes by the leadership."

Oppositionist Herbert Aptheker, in a quite remarkable polemic, took up some of Hall's contentions during his remarks to the convention.

[The quotes from the speech by Herbert Aptheker below, including the emphasis, appeared in the "Special Supplement" intended for publication in the Dec. 21, 1991, People's Weekly World.] Using the foil of responding to a Nov. 23, 1991 letter published in the People's Weekly World, which argued that the crisis in the USSR was due to human error and imperialist sabotage, Aptheker observes: "Certainly there was human error and certainly there was imperialist sabotage and most assuredly ... the cause of the crisis is not socialism."

Aptheker continues: "To speak of a systematic source of the crisis and collapse in the USSR-and in Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary-is to insist that the nature of the governing parties in all these cases was the basic source of the crisis. And what was the nature-it was authoritarian, domineering, brutal and guilty of colossal crimes—not only suppression but also massive human extermination. It is possible to under(continued page)

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