PARTY DICTATORSHIP

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

David Landan's arguments for the relative helplessness of Stalin in the face of the great problems the Soviet Union faced in the wake of the Civil War are a cruel misinterpretation of what went wrong in history's first socialist revolution.

Landan claims that "much of the onus for the oppressive social and political atmosphere in the Soviet Union today must necessarily rest with Stalin's successors." Who then was responsible for crushing the Kronstadt revolt of 1921, where revolutionary sailors called for implementation of Lenin's own slogan of "All Power to the Soviets" and were massacred by troops sent by Lenin and commanded by Trotsky? Who shifted the practice of the Third International from prompting international revolution to defending the national interests of the Soviet government and attempting to change the course of other revolutionary movements by executive fiat and autocratic purge?

Who destroyed the Spanish revolution and slaughtered thousands of Spanish revolutionaries in the name of "fighting Fascism?" Who dissolved the Soviets as working popular bodies, and installed Henry Ford's methods of management and "efficiency" as the principles governing Soviet industry and labor, which Landau rightly castigates? Who was responsible for the decimation of the command of the Red Army and the illegal system which tried and executed thousands of revolutionaries for being "Nazi agents" and then a year later signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler?

All the undemocratic, consumerist internal polices of the Soviet Union and its equally contemptuous foreign policies (imperialist control of Eastern Europe and open cooperation and aid to capitalist and even feudalism governments abroad) have their roots in the party dictatorship which took hold in Russia as the Civil War drew to a close and to see them as having emerged all of sudden in 1953 as Stalin's body was cooling is an absurd travesty of historical fact.

Kazin is flatly wrong when he implies that my view of the Russian situation is one of emergent social and political problems on the heels of Stalin's death. I do not dispute that the creation and development of top-heavy Soviet Party machinery occurred under Salin's auspices. And I agree that Stalin's posture toward revolutionary movements in Spain and in China was cruel, self-interested, and entirely despicable.

What I intended to point out is that Stalinism-or at least that aspect of institutional Stalinism which remains distinct from the personality of the man himself-cannot be divorced from its historical context. Suppression of the Kronstad? revolt followed an invasion of the Soviet Union by 14 nations. In view of Russia's own starvation and impoverishment, the need for the Soviet Communists to treat international revolution in terms of the national interest" became a great deal more urgent. And the remarkable threats which Japan and the Nazis posed to Soviet national security-in combination with Stalin's own mental obsolescence-go far to explain the regime's treatment of sailors, soldiers, and Kulaks who were suspected of being "dissident"

Those who rule the Soviet nation today are well schooled in Lenin's theories of popular democracy, but they have conscientiously avoided any opportunity to put those theories into practice. Notably enough, the most severe political penalties meted out by the present regime are imposed on those who challenge the party's interpretation of Lenin's writings. In fact it would mean the regime's extinction if Soviet citizens were to regrasp a thought which Lenin did not live long enough to see fulfilled-that the final arbitration of society and history must not rest either with a government or even with the party, but rather with the people.