Letter from a Moscow Student
Seeds of Revolution IN THE FIRST PHASE of the post-Stalin era (March 1953 - February 1956), revolutionary impulses originating in the East European satellites appeared to disintegrate on reaching...
...These, Pravda admitted, threatened to turn the Party's calculated de-Stalinization into a repudiation of basic Party doctrine...
...The fact that no action was taken against the publishers, although the Leningrad Komsomol offices attacked them bitterly, made a great impression in Moscow...
...The first document was written by .. Moscow student at the beginning of January, and was translated and published in Forum, Austrian magazine of the Congress for Cultural Freedom...
...But elsewhere in the USSR, and particularly in crucial Moscow, little response was evident...
...The following resolution was passed: "Demagogic elements in the ranks of our youth have broken the frame of internal Party democracy, misused the right to criticize freely and have directed massive, mainly unjust attacks against local and central Party functionaries, Party leaders and against the system itself...
...On the following day [December 1], hand-written papers appeared on the bulletin boards of the Komsomol organization at Lomonosov University demanding a true report and open discussion on Hungary...
...To he sure, the East German revolt (June 1953) reverberated a month later in a strike of forced laborers at Vorkuta in northern Russia...
...With the Polish and Hungarian revolutions, the fissures in Russia deepened...
...Until 1956, the Kremlin Presidium itself appeared more sensitive to the stirrings in East Europe than did the broad Soviet masses or the lower echelons of the Soviet elite...
...But the discussion continued and several active members of the Komsomol were also drawn into it...
...At lunchtime, new notices announced a meeting of the Komsomol Committee at which the "shameful events" of the previous day were to be discussed...
...He declared that it was the duty of the Komsomol to avoid a repetition of such academically debasing excesses as had taken place the day before...
...The contents of these slips of paper, which disappeared when lectures began, were passed on from mouth to mouth during the morning...
...We gathered that the Komsomol leaders had first tried to ascertain whether what had occurred should be regarded in a positive or in a negative manner...
...The letter has been abridged and "depersonalized" to avoid identification...
...Here he referred to Hungary, but a comparison with the Soviet Union was evident...
...It was the first time in the history of the university that the rector had been forced to stop lectures because teachers had been unable to cope with questions arising during discussions...
...The word "shameful" was crossed out, but the notices remained posted...
...Finally, Lenin's classic definition of the task of the "New Type of Party," whose duty it was to take over the demands proclaimed by workers during a general strike and steer them along the right course, was cited...
...The attitude of the Komsomol and its often all-too-hasty measures impart to individual groups the secure feeling that they do not stand alone and that practically the entire Soviet youth has been drawn into the new wave of discussions...
...In a speedily improvised vote, "The Hungarian Problem in the Light of Marxism-Leninism" was established as the only item on the agenda...
...Students there, in keeping with the old Leningrad revolutionary tradition, went much further than we had done...
...In reply, Professor Syroyechkovich could only quote the daily press...
...Hungarian events were used to illustrate a development for which certain prerequisites existed everywhere, the Soviet Union included...
...There is not yet a Russian PetSfi Club or Po Prostu, but the accomplished facts of Poland and Hungary may act, in new forms, to accelerate the process among the Russians...
...Merely one distinguishing mark of the exploiting class—i.e., personal property rights to the means of production—had changed...
...See "Labor in the Soviet Orbit," by Anatole Shub, December 24-31, 1956 and "After Hungary," by Ignazio Silone, January 21, 1957...
...The Kremlin, quite aware of these revolutionary possibilities, is energetically attempting to spike them with all sorts of quasi-reforms, of which industrial "decentralization" (NL, May 6) has been the best publicized...
...to protect themselves, those who profit by it have created the same class justice as exists in bourgeois society for the protection of the exploiting class...
...And is it not admissible, even necessary, to apply the old Marxist weapon of class-struggle—i.e., the general strike—against it, too...
...After Professor B. E. Syroyechkovich had dutifully read extracts on Marxism-Leninism, the usual discussion took place, during which a student asked a question of decisive significance—perhaps even the fatal question about our Marxism...
...He began talking about the terror caused by Horthv-Fascist officers and the diversionary activity of Western imperialists, but his words were drowned by the storm of protest which rose among the students, who proved to him with a flood of Lenin quotations that he had not answered the question put to him...
...Immediately, the first speaker talked of an "over-bureaucratized machine" which had alienated itself from the masses and therefore tried to remain in power by means of the methods of Beria, who had already been unmasked...
...On December 3, the rector in fact expelled a total of 140 students for "khuliganstvo" (rowdyism) and announced simultaneously that lectures on Marxism-Leninism would cease until after the New Year's holiday...
...As important as the street demonstrations by students and others in Tiflis, Georgia, were the heated debates in Party cells in Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere...
...November 30, 1956 is a memorable day for us Russian students—some say a historic day...
...This remark was followed by new "excess...
...One is bound to wonder whether disregard of the resolutions of the 20th Party Congress could not also evoke such developments over here and whether one of these days our workers, under Lenin's banner, will not rise against their 'bureaucratized' exploiters who have become 'tarnished by the bourgeois brush.'" When Linkov protested he came up against such tremendous resistance that he had to leave the room with his collaborators...
...But , this meant that the target of the October Revolution had been reversed...
...The Baltic universities had also been reached by the general wave of discussions and we know that in Kiev, Kharkov, Sverdlovsk, Novosibirsk and even in Central Asia {i.e., Tashkent) animated discussions are taking place at various universities...
...Some dozen incidents of new political boldness by students and workers last fall have already been reported here...
...Polish and Yugoslav papers, with their siren songs of dissidenee, continue to sell out on arrival in Moscow, and the most popular Russian literary works are those which subtly indict or ignore Stalinist canons...
...At the same time, the secretaries of the University Komsomol were reprimanded for "lack of real contact with students and defects in ideological teaching...
...The periodical still appears and many of its contributions, which are copied here, supply a basis for fresh discussions...
...In the middle of December, the active members of the Komsomol of the Moscow military district were forced to meet in order to deal with similar occurrences within the garrisons...
...But soon the incident had spread around to the students' quarters at the back of the university...
...From this there emerged another question—that of the class character of Soviet society...
...Gradually, a question crystallized which is of utmost importance in the system of "realized socialism...
...The second phase, in which fissures appear in Russia itself, began with the 20th Communist Party Congress in February 1956...
...Next day, reports were circulated announcing a conference which the Moscow Town Council of the Komsomol had called to discuss the incidents at Lomonosov University...
...Artemov, a member of the Council, expressed the view that action should be taken against those demagogues who had gone too far, but that the events themselves should be regarded in a positive manner as their nature was such as might draw the youth movement out of its long-standing state of stagnation...
...The significance which the Komsomol attached to the discussions in the universities had the remarkable effect of causing such discussions to flame up elsewhere as well...
...Almost all participants in the discussion were of the opinion that even in the Soviet Union the difference between the exploiting and the exploited continues to exist...
...Hungarian student guests were dragged out of bed and asked to talk of conditions in their home country...
...In dealing with general strikes, the "New Type of Party" was never to use the methods of the bourgeois exploiting state—i.e., drumhead court martials, recourse to arms, and forced dissolution of workers' councils...
...Letter from a Moscow Student We gather from the news bulletins of Western radio stations and from a Warsaw radio report that the news of the occurrences in Lomonosov University has spread to Western countries, fjowever, we ascertained that the actual extent of these events was not really appreciated...
...In the new socialist system, as in the old capitalist one, every resistance to the exploiters was branded by a "classless" justice as high treason and liable to penal servitude...
...When he had . . . added that a general strike could never be the weapon of the exploiting class, he asked how it was possible that in a socialist country, more specifically in the People's Democracy of Hungary, a general strike had occurred—as, surely, no general strike could take place in a country which had a Communist government comprised of workers and peasants...
...At this point, the discussion turned into rowdy confusion and the Professor withdrew from the scene...
...The students regarded this as a triumph . . [and] the discussions continued in clubs and students' quarters...
...In the evening, the discussion was resumed by a group of young writers and students in the Literature Building...
...Linkov, secretary of the Komsomol organization, opened the meeting at the Ostrovsky Club House...
...First, he upheld the incontestable Leninist view that a general strike is the weapon of the proletariat and that under certain historical conditions an economic general strike can turn into a political one and finally end in an armed insurrection...
...But Artemov did not get his way...
...The Committee decided to "urge" the rector of Lomonosov University to expel a number of students whose names were to appear on a list which the Committee was to compile...
...The discussions went on and, late in the evening...
...At regular intervals they publish a mimeographed students' paper entitled Goluboi Buton ("The Blue Bud") which is controlled neither by the rector nor by the Komsomol and in which questions of contemporary Marxism, artistic creation and related subjects are discussed...
...in that it determines the latter's utilization and controls the employment and salaries of workers...
...this was inadequate for a university discussion...
...Seeds of Revolution IN THE FIRST PHASE of the post-Stalin era (March 1953 - February 1956), revolutionary impulses originating in the East European satellites appeared to disintegrate on reaching the Soviet frontier...
...But the present workers' property rights to the means of production only existed "on paper" and the Party's preference for heavy industry, supported by a central administrative system, had also fixed the class character of the Soviet community from the legal point of view...
...These attacks, brought about by ultra-revolutionary slogans, have reached a point where they may be described as being reactionary and counter-revolutionary threats.'' In the middle of December, the news reached us in Moscow that similar incidents had also occurred in Leningrad colleges...
...The two documents which follow make it clear that Soviet students and writers have now entered precisely the stage their Polish and Hungarian counterparts reached in the spring of 1955: sharp "literary" and "theoretical" discussions with omnipresent political overtones, the revolt still couched in terms of a "purer" Leninism but ever more insistent and obstinate...
...Namely: "Hasn't party bureaucracy, although it is not formally entitled to own the means of production of the community, become an exploiting class in the original Marxist sense through the practical control it exercises over die various branches of production...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 20
