"However, the neo-Stalinist danger has no means disappeared. Its strength doesn't popular support but in the surviving repressive

Scan page 17

forces, primarily the army. The Stalinists' appeals have, in fact, been focused mainly on SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1992 15 the officer corps."

Communist Party was still essentially intact on most of the territory of the USSR, 70 percent of the population voted for preserving the essential framework of the Soviet Union.

This neo-Stalinist "constitutionalism" is the polar opposite of the Bolsheviks' concept of workers' democracy. They based themselves on bodies elected directly by the workers and recallable at any time, which had to stay in touch with the opinions of those who elected them.

But the neo-Stalinists are trying to base themselves on elections held a year ago and two years ago, since which vast changes have occurred. Even when they were held, it is highly dubious that the elections in question were genuinely representative. At the time, the Communist Party's totalitarian machine still dominated most of the old USe "constitutional and "democratic" arguments of the neo-Stalinists amount to the thinnest of pretexts for trying to reimpose a repressive straitjacket on the population of the old USSR as a whole, and to drive the peoples who have begun to exercise their right of self-determination back into an even grimmer "prison house of peoples."

Right-wingers join the rally At the March 17 demonstration in Moscow, red flags and the republic banners were mingled with the old Russian imperial standard, reflecting the participation of the self-proclaimed bourgeois right-wing parties of the Russian National Assembly. This is the continuation of the People's Agreement bloc that walked out of Democratic Russia, the coalition that has supported Yeltsin, when the latter refused to support Yeltsin's attempt to crack down on the Chechen government that defied Russian authority.

The main components of this bloc are the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets), named after the principal bourgeois party in prerevolutionary Russia, and the Christian Democrats.

These were also the main components of the Congress of Civic and Patriotic Forces held on Feb. 9 and addressed by Rutskoi, in which the neo-fascists of Pamyat and the National Republican Party participated.

A Kadet speaker, Artem Artemov, announced from the platform that the bloc was holding its own demonstration on April 5 to demand Yeltsin's impeachment and that he hoped there would be fewer red flags there.

On the other hand, he said, the Russian flag used by Yeltsin (blue, red, and white) was unacceptable because "they [Yeltsin and the majority of Democratic Russia] ... have soiled it with their filthy paws.

talist restorationist policies but their failure to defend the "territorial integrity" of Russia.)

The speakers included two relatives of leaders of the attempted coup in August, who appealed for their release. The civil courage of the demonstrators was hailed by Aleksandr Nevzorov, a notoriously chauvinist and anti-Semitic TV newscaster. He said that it was a shame that the March 17 assembly was not held during the August coup to better support it.

The former dissident writer Edward Limonov raised the slogan, "We have one people, the Soviet people, and one country!" (Limonov has also become an advocate of an alliance with neo-Stalinist Serbia on the basis of the Eastern Orthodox tradition Russia shares with that nation.) The old Hymn to the Soviet Union, with its verse, "Great Russia has welded together an inseparable union of free republics," was often intoned. "USSR! USSR!" was one of the most popular chants.

Some leftists are impressed The relative strength of the neo-Stalinist demonstrations have apparently impressed at least some of those who have devoted themselves to rebuilding a new socialist movement on a non-Stalinist basis.

Thus, Boris Kagarlitsky wrote in the Feb. 13 issue of the British Socialist Organizer that the new Labor Party in which he is working decided that it was a mistake not to participate in the Feb. 9 demonstration. "It would have been better to join the demonstration using our own slogans," he said.

There have in fact been many slogans in the neo-Stalinist demonstrations that attack the policies of the Yeltsin government from the left. But they have not changed the fundamentally chauyinist nature of these actions, nor discouraged procapitalist iehtists from participating (under th imperial standard!).

The masses also probably remember that