Allende was the candidate of the Popular Unity Front (UP) in which the Communist and Socialist Parties are the main forces.

            Peter Roman, correspondent for the Guardian, which is the leading news weekly of the radical revolutionary left, writes in the November 17, 1970 issue:

            “There have been some positive signs towards radicalization.  Take Allende’s cabinet for example.

            “The Minister of Interior, Jose Toha Gonzalez, has been the publisher of the Marxist newspaper Ultima Hora, linked closely with Allende’s Socialist Party (PS) and the most radical daily in Chile.  Clodomiro Ameyda Medina, the Foreign Minister, represents the radical wing of the PS and is a strong defender of both the Chinese and Cuban revolutions.  Jacques Chonchol Chait, Minister of Agriculture, supported President Eduardo Frei Montalva, the PDC candidate in 1964, but soon broke with Frei due to the lack of progress in agrarian reform and helped from the Popular Action Unity Movement (MAPU) with other dissident PDC leaders and youth.  MAPU is part of the UP.  Chonchol helped formulate the agrarian reform program in Cuba.

            “Pedro Voskovic Bravo, Minister of Economy, currently is director of the Ecnomic Institute of the University of Chile and defines himself as an independent Marxist.  Vuskovic has also headed the group formulating the economic policy for the UP.  Politically he is more of a question mark since while emphasizing the need to nationalize important sectors of the economy, to reorient production and distribution priorities, his analysis lacks socialist political content.

            “Allende, at least in his rhetoric in between presidential campaigns, has emphasized the need to be prepared for extra-electoral contingencies.  After the massacre of miners in 1965 he told a mass rally, ‘In the face of counter-revolutionary violence we must answer with revolutionary violence.’  A few days after the elections, Allende told a mass rally that if the right wing attempted to block his victory, he would call on peasants and workers to take over land and factories.”  Page 16.

            The Daily World (November 4, 1970), official organ of the American Communist Party, writes with approval of Allende’s action in restoring diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba.

            “In announcing Chile’s resumption of diplomatic relations with Socialist Cuba, President Salvador Allende on Thursday denounced the policies of the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States (OAS) as ‘unjust’ and ‘illegal’ and a violation of the right of peoples to self-determination.  Allende said the OAS sanctions invoked against Cuba in 1962 ‘were not authorized under the Inter-American Mutual Defense Treaty nor approved by the UN Security Council.’  A Chilean charge d’affairs will be sent to Cuba as soon as possible to open the diplomatic mission pending appointment of an ambassador.  Allende has also indicated Chile may establish relations with the Chinese People’s Republic, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Korean Democratic People’s Republic.”  Page 4.

            The situation is serious but not hopeless.  Seizure of power does not necessarily lead to consolidation of power.  Allende has achieved the first and is progressing steadily towards the second.  There are those who will be impatient because he does not advance enough fast enough and will constantly exert pressure for violent revolutionary action.  One such movement is the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) which was engaged in guerrilla warfare against the former Chilean government.  Peter Roman reports the present attitude of the “MIR” as follows:

            “The MIR and the rest of the revolutionary left have toned down their activities since the election.  They consider Chile has entered a pre-Revolutionary stage as opposed to a socialist revolution, since the bourgeois state apparatus, military and economic power remain intact.  Ultimately, they maintain, an armed confrontation will be necessary for the qualitative leap to workers’ democracy.  According to a statement of socialist students and professors at the University of Concepcion (the most radical campus in Chile): ‘We must call for a militant mobilization of the workers, peasants, slum dwellers and students, without worrying about how this may affect the nerves of the military. . .  Only a militant mobilization of the popular masses can halt the reactionaries’ plot.’  They call for tactical alliance with the UP to defend the people’s victory.” Guardian, November 7, 1970, page 16.

            The danger is great, but despair is not the appropriate response.  Concern, vigilance, and willingness to make sacrifices to strengthen the forces in Chile promoting democracy and freedom may yet avert the catastrophe which communist dictatorship would produce for the people of Chile, Latin America, the U.S.A. and the world.

STATISTICS OF COMMUNIST KILLINGS (continued)

            Taken from “The Human Cost of Soviet Communism,” published by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee.

Super Terror

            “On December 1, 1934, Stalin procured the murder in Leningrad of his close comrade and assistant, Sergei Kirov.  This was followed by the instant execution of a large number of alleged anti-Soviet prisoners in Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev.  A few weeks later a group of local young Communists were executed for the murder.  And over the following year, a frameup was gradually worked out to implicate Stalin’s former rivals for power within the party.”  Page 15.

            This culminated in the three great Moscow trials against leading communists.

            “In August 1936 came the first of these.  Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev—Lenin’s closest collaborators—and 14 other publicly confessed to having organized the Kirov murder, and were all executed.

            “In January 1937, after the leading member of the Politburo still opposed to these methods, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had been killed or forced to commit suicide, a similar trial took place.  Yuri Pyatakov and others were executed for a plot which had involved Pyatakov flying to Norway to receive instructions from Trotsky, then in Oslo.  (It was proved while the trial was still in progress that no aeroplane had in fact landed at or near Oslo during the month of the alleged visit.)  In June, Marshal Tukhachevsky and other leading officers were shot after a short closed trial on charges of being agents of Fascism.  This was followed by a vast purge in the Army which accounted for about half the officer corps, and in particular almost all the generals.  Most of them seem not to have been ‘tried’ at all; for example, we are told of Marshal Blyukher that ‘continuous interrogation broke down the health of this virile man’ and he was dead within three weeks of arrest.

            “In March 1938, a further trial ensued, that of Nikolai Bukharin, described by Lenin as ‘the darling of the party,’ Alexei Rykov (former Prime Minister of the Soviet Union) and others.  They were charged with treason, terrorism, sabotage, espionage, and various other crimes.  In particular, they had used several prominent Moscow doctors to poison various figures (including the writer, Maxim Gorky).”  Page 16.

1936-1939, Mass Arrests and Executions

            “The number of arrests in 1936-38 can be estimated by a variety of methods.  And although exact precision cannot be obtained, and should not be expected, every train of evidence and argument tends to a figure of about 7 million.

            “The prisons, during 1938, held about a million inmates.  The sufferings due to overcrowding may be judged from an account published in Budapest in 1965, by the Hungarian writer, Joszef Lengyel.  He describes his cell in Moscow’s Butyrka prison, then holding about 30,000 inmates.  275 men lived ‘in between and under 25 iron bedsteads.’

            “The labor camp population at this time (which included numbers who had started their sentences in the pre-1936 period) can be estimated at about 8 million.

            “The death rate in the camps was high-especially before they were to some extend rationalized in 1950-51.  Throughout the whole camp system (omitting the little known extermination camps of the far north) it seems never to have been below 10 percent per annum and often seems to have been considerably higher.  If we take the conservative figures of an average camp death rate of 10 percent and an average camp population of 8 million, over the whole Stalin period, not less than 12 million people must have died in the camps.

            “Similar estimates have been given by Academician Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet physicist.  And they have, for example, been accepted by prominent Communists like Roger Garaudy, when still a member of the politburo of the French Communist Party.  The usual cause of death was dystrophy, due to progressive starvation.  Rations remained inadequate for work—they were considerably lower than in the notorious Japanese prisoner-of-war camps on the River Kwai, for example.

            “The number of people actually executed in this period was something over a million.  We are told by Academician Sakharov that 600,000 party members alone were actually shot, quite apart from a further 550,000 to 600,000 who died in labor camps—that is, together a total of about half the party membership.”  Page 17.

Treatment of Families and Children

            “Families were, in any case, subject to the hostage principle—which was actually incorporated into Soviet published law in the particular case of escapees abroad.  Under the decree of June 9, 1935, even members of the family ignorant of the escapees’ plans were liable to penalties.  But, in fact, hostages were used widely, especially in the confession trials.

            “There was, indeed, we are told by a Soviet spokesman of the Khrushchev period, even a special category for the death penalty under the accusation ‘wife of an enemy of the people.’  Children, too, suffered, under a decree of April 7, 1935, which extended the death penalty down to the age of 12.  Tortskyite children down to this age were executed in the camps.  There were even trials of children alone. . .  This has since been described in greater detail by the Soviet liberal, Leonid Petrovsky, in his ‘Letter  to the Central Committee,’ dated March 5, 1969.  Four officials from the police and prosecutor’s office had rounded up, in all, 160 children mainly between the ages of 12 and 14.  After severe interrogation, they had confessed to espionage, terror, treason, and links with the Gestapo.  One 10-year-old, after an all night interrogation, broke down and admitted to anti-State activity, going back 3 years, to the time when he was only 7.  Petrovsky adds that similar mass trials of children has taken place in a number of other cities.”  Pages 18 and 19.

Police Methods

            “Torture (retrospectively authorized by a decree of the Central Committee of January 20, 1939); the ‘conveyor,’ continuous interrogation without sleep for up to 7 days; and, for the publicly tried, a long-drawn out breaking down of the will and personality over a period of months, these were the means employed.

            “A physicist tells us that the conveyor was ‘as painful as any torture.’  The groins swell, and violent pains set it.  After 2 or 3 days the prisoner is actually being physically poisoned by fatigue.”  Pages 16 and 17.

1938-1953, Chronic Extermination

            “From 1939 onward, a normal rate of terror, rather than the extremes of the previous 2 years, was maintained.  The country and the party had been broken.  Over the ensuing period, interrupted but not essentially altered by the war, the terror was simply a normal institution of the established Stalinist state.  During this period an influx into the labor camps of about a million new prisoners per annum made up for continuous erosion of the camp population by starvation and execution.  In fact, after the war, in the early fifties, the camps seem to have reached their maximum population which, Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells us in ‘The First Circle,’ was often exaggerated, being in fact no more than 12 or 15 million—figures approximately the same as those arrived at by the various evidence and deductions available in the West.”  Page 19.

Deportation and Destruction of Nationalities

            “The annexation of the Baltic States and the other border areas in Eastern Europe resulted in the imposition on these hitherto un-Sovietized areas of the Stalin penal system.  The listing of suspects for Lithuania indicate approximately 23 percent of the population.  In all, something in the nature of a million Balts seem to have been deported.  From the areas annexed from Poland, in addition to about 200,000 Polish prisoners of war, about 400,000 civilians were sentenced to labor camps.  Of these, about 270,000 died over the two and a half year period before they were released under the Polish-Soviet treaty.

            “In early 1940, when the Soviet Union was at peace, the Soviet Government ordered the massacre of the Polish prisoners of war held in the camps at Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostachkov.  There were about 15,000 of these, about 8,700 officers, 800 of them doctors.  The approximately 5,000 held at Kozielsk were taken into the Katyn Forest in April 1940, and there shot and buried in mass graves.  These were discovered when the Germans occupied the area.  In spite of a Soviet claim that is was the Germans, themselves, who had shot them, an international medical commission, including neutrals, representatives of the Polish underground, and Allied prisoners of war, were all clear that the German story was, for once, true.  The evidence may be examined in a number of books, but here it is only necessary to say that the Soviet story fails on a whole series of grounds and is nowhere credited by serious students.

            “It had long been Soviet practice to deport suspect minority nationalities from border areas.  The Koreans of the Maritime Province around Vladivostock were removed to Central Asia in the thirties, as were the Finnish Ingrians of the Leningrad area.  In 1941, and in 1943-44, the politburo ordered and organized the deportation of eight national groups, totaling one and a half million people, in the North Caucasus and elsewhere.  These included Crimean Tartars, the Kalmyks, and the Chechens.  These nations were sent en bloc, men, women, and children, to various parts of Soviet Asia where they were held in appalling conditions under police control.  The death rate ranged from about 25 percent (the Meskhetians) to over 46 percent (the Crimean Tartars)—the best estimate of the total of deaths seems to be just over half a million.  We are told by Academician Sakharov that the highest rate of casualties was among children and old people.”  Page 20.

Anti-Semitism

            “The turn to anti-Semitism in the modern style in the Soviet Union only came in 1943-44, though Zionism and the Jewish religion had been heavily persecuted for decades. Yugoslav Communists, visiting Moscow at that time, were astonished to hear that generals and others had been exposed as having Jewish blood.  In 1949, when a new wake of arrests swept various Soviet groupings, large numbers of Jewish cultural and public figures were arrested, including almost all the members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.  Over the following years, attacks became increasingly sharp.  The Yiddish theaters and periodicals were closed down.  The leading Jewish actor and producer, S. Mikoels, was shot down by NKVD gunmen in Minsk in 1949.  In 1952 came the still obscure Crimean affair, in connection with which all Yiddish cultural figures were executed—it is estimated that about 600 of these were shot over this period.

            “Stalin’s new wave of terror, which had included a large-scale killing of Leningrad Communists, culminated in the doctors plot of 1952-53, where, once again, Russia’s leading physicians were arrested and tortured into confession that they had plotted to poison the Soviet leadership, largely for motives of Jewish bourgeois nationalism.  Stalin gave personal instructions to the investigators on how to obtain these confessions: ‘Beat, beat, and beat again.’”  Pages 20 and 21.

After Stalin

            “After Stalin’s death in 1953, a considerable relaxation took place and by 1957 it seems that the camp population had been cut to about a third. . .  the laws against opposition to the state remained draconic and the rehabilitations were notably incomplete.  For example, none of these executed in the two first Moscow trials has ever been rehabilitated.

            “These changes mainly took place under the aegis of Nikita Khrushchev.  His attempt, if not radically to reform the system, at least to repudiate the horrors of the past, petered out with his fall in 1964.  The years since then have seen a progressive rehabilitations of Stalin himself, an increase in the prestige of the Secret Police, and the suppression—once again—of the more unpleasant facts of the Soviet past.  Indeed, there has been a progressive worsening of the situation. . .  Many of the camp complexes are still flourishing.  Estimates of the numbers inside vary from about half a million upwards.  And the worst feature of the whole system—the inadequacy of the camp ration—has remained quite unaltered. . .  One method, not indeed new but becoming more frequent nowadays, is the detention of leading advocates of political reform in lunatic asylums run by the Secret Police, where they can be submitted to various ‘cures’ often of a degrading and painful nature and always without medical justification.”  Page 21.

Comparison with Czarism

            “An excuse often advanced for these Soviet actions is, in effect, that things were as bad, or worse, in the previous Czarist period.  This was by no means the case. . .  Czarism had never produced anything remotely comparable to the terror of the Communist regime.

            “The last half century of Czarism, the only capital crimes were attempts on the life of the Emperor, his wife, and the heir to the throne, and certain offenses against quarantine laws.  In the 1870’s special courts were temporarily set up for terrorists.  But over the whole period before 1902 the death sentences amounted to no more (for 29 assassinations, including that of Czar Alexander II) than a few score.  A confidential Czarist document gives 48 executions, while a Soviet source (Small Soviet Encyclopedia, 1^st ed.) gives 94, from 1866 to 1900.

            “The other crime of which Czarism can be rightly accused, at least in a general sense, was the pogroms against the Jews—that is, members of the Jewish religion—which started in the latter part of the nineteenth century. . .  Czarist officialdom, at one level or another, was often involved in the incitement of these bloody riots.  The number killed over the whole period may have been over a thousand.  Generally speaking, if we set a limit of 25,000 for all executions, pogrom murders and deaths in prison of the period from 1867 to 1917, we will be safe.  The total maximum imprisoned (in 1912) was 183,949.  It is absurd to compare these figures with those of the Soviet epoch, let alone justify the latter by them.  Over the first half-century of Soviet rule, the executions were at least 50 times as numerous as over the last-half century of Czarist rule, and the maximum number of prisoners at least 70 times as great.  Moreover, in every other respect as well, the standards of humanitarianism had enormously worsened.  In Czarist times torture was the rarest and most scandalous exception; and the hostage system quite unknown.  Lenin himself, the most intransigent enemy of the Czarist regime, had suffered exile in a village where he was free to work, received letters, got an allowance, met his friends, hunted and so on.”  Pages 22 and 23.

            Our senses are numbed by the excess of brutality.  The tendency is to forget the past and believe that the present rulers of the Soviet Union have emerged from the dark night of terror and that they are now practicing much more humane policies and constantly increasing the area of individual liberty granted the Soviet citizen.  We should remember, however, that “those who will not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.”  The following relevant facts should not be forgotten:

GUS HALL, COMMUNISM, AND THE NEW LEFT

            Gus Hall, General Secretary of the American Communist Party, claims patent rights to the term “communist.”  In his mind, only those who are members of the American Communist Party are entitled to be called communists.  His name for other parties and individuals who claim to be communists, is “petty-bourgeois radicals.”  Using the terminology of Gus Hall, most of the active revolutionaries on the campuses would be classified as “petty-bourgeois radicals.”

            Gus Hall discusses the psychology and programs of these people in an article entitled “Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism,” published by Political Affairs, theoretical journal of the Communist Party, U.S.A., October 1970.  His analysis is based on the classical Marxist division of society into the competing classes—the proletariat or working class and the bourgeoisie or business class.  The basic fault of the petty-bourgeois radicals, according to Gus Hall, is that they originate in the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat.  He states:

            “Like all sectors, the petty-bourgeois strata tend to reflect their class position when they react to the issues of the class struggle.  They develop moments of great militancy.  At such moments they are a source of inspiration and militancy to other sectors, including the working class.  But they tend to go for short-term tactics.  When this does not result in victories, for some the militancy, the enthusiasm, turns into petty-bourgeois radicalism.”  Page 3.

Impatience

            He accuses the petty-bourgeois radicals of impatience.  They expect to achieve too much too quickly.  When their expectations are destroyed by reality, the radicals react in one of three ways:

1. They give up the struggle.
2. They indulge in individual terrorism.
3. They join the Communist Party.

Gus Hall believes that most of the radicals are choosing the third path.  He states:

            “As in the U.S., the world wave of petty-bourgeois radicalism is now also in a crisis and in the declining phase of the present cycle.  It is a world crisis of petty-bourgeois radicalism.  Its policies have come up against the realities of the class struggle.  Masses have gained new experiences in the fires of the class struggle.  They are not rejecting petty-bourgeois concepts as divisive and impractical.

            “The problems in the struggle against these concepts arise because they seem radical and revolutionary.  For many these people appear as the militants.  Most of the people who are influenced by such ideas honestly believe they are the most revolutionary.  But when such policies fail—when they do not result in revolutionary victories, those who honestly believe in them face a dilemma.  They can go one of three ways.  Some give up the struggle.  They use many excuses, but in essence they accept the status quo.  They move into positions of opportunism.  Others in frustration, move into isolation by accepting the path of anarchism.  This path destroys cadre as a meaningful revolutionary force.  But most, however, draw the correct conclusions.  They move into struggles and movements based on mass concepts.  They draw the necessary conclusions that one’s revolutionariness can be measured only in the framework of moving masses into struggle.”  Pages 6 and 7.

            Under the heading “petty-bourgeois radical,” Gus Hall includes the following: 1) the Mao Tse-tung clique in control of China; 2) the various varieties of Trotskyism; 3) the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society; 4) the Progressive Labor Party; and 5) the Anarchists.

            He contends all these movements are in a state of crisis and is confident that out of this crisis the Communist Party will reap a rich harvest.