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Federation seen a

Continued from page 1

His visit was precipitated by the split last
month of the Lithuanian Communist Party
from the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, an act which Gorbachev has accu-
Tately assessed as meaning the Lithuanian
Party has caved in and lost the political
initiative to separatists.

Some of his words during that visit
teflected both the pressures he is under and
the Measure of the man. After listening to a
meeting of Lithuanian communists for four
hours, some of whom assailed him angrily
and relentlessly, Gorbachev opened his own
Temarks in heat: “You, comrades,” he said,

have still not emerged from your state of
euphoria and it is therefore very difficult to
direct the process of coming to grips with
what is happening in your republic into a
deeper channel. Nevertheless, we really
need to talk ....”

Everywhere Gorbachev argued, as he has
argued many times before, that only all the
Soviet peoples building a democratic,
humane socialism together could bring per-
estroika to success. Without all progressive
forces working together for these common
goals, he said, “our society may not stand
this and then there will appear other ‘formu-
las’, simple and easy to understand. Then
No symposiums will be required: just apply
the formula and everything will be ‘in
order.’ ”

Most crucially, Gorbachev confronted
and challenged those who interpret national
self-determination in terms of secession and
total independence at any cost. He did this

FROM
MOSCOW

cee testes nc a

not merely by marshalling arguments
against it — for that alone would be worse
than useless at this stage — but through the
most courageous and profoundly Leninist
move he could possibly make: he reaffirmed
the right of all nations to self-determination,
up to and including the right to secede. That
is a living principle upon which the USSR
was founded, he said, and it is essential if the
union is to have any democratic future.

_ But an abstract “right” is meaningless, he
said. “In this connection, we should accel-
erate the drafting and passing of a law on
the mechanism of the withdrawal of a con-
stituent republic from the Soviet Union....
There must be such a mechanism. If there is
such a right, then there must be a mecha-
nism for its implementation. I promise it
will be developed. Nevertheless, I remain
firm in my position: we need our federation.
It is the basis of socialist renewal.”

Now everything is in the open, and the
terms of struggle are to be clearly defined.
There will be constitutional process, there
will be democratic debate. Perestroika will
continue to address grievances, expand cho-
ices and change realities. Ultimately, the
people of each nation will decide for them-
selves. :

Said Gorbachev: “I have no intention of
being more Catholic than the Pope or more
Lithuanian than you.”

The Araxes River, which flows along the
Soviet-Iranian border, has. historically

defined the limits of Russian and Persian —

power. For the Azerbaijani people, it has
been the “river of tears,” the symbol. of the
division of their nation. Today some six
million of the Turkic-speaking Azeris live in
the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, while
nine million of their compatriots constitute
the largest ethnic minority in Iran.

It was on the Araxes, over New Year’s
weekend, that the latest outburst of Azeri

nationalism exploded as mobs vented their
rage against the border. But the violence
quickly spread, dragging the simmering bat-
tle over the mainly Armenian region of
Nagorno-Karabakh to new and bloody
depths. In Baku, the capital, horrifying
pogroms against the Armenian minority
forced the Soviet government to declare a
state of emergency and organize a hasty
evacuation of refugees across the Caspian
Sea.

Azerbaijan is no Lithuania. There are
progressive impulses within the Azerbaijani
Popular Front, demands for greater self-
government, economic independence and
grassroots control, which are similar to
what all Soviet people want. But here, the
character of the conflict has been and con-
tinues to be determined by ugly tradition
and the corrupt, privileged mafias who have
ruled Azerbaijan through the Stalin and
Brezhnev periods.

This elite has recognized that perestroika
means the end of their royal existence, and
have therefore set out to make Azerbaijan
ungovernable, to unleash the energies of the
population against the hereditary scapegoat
— the Armenians — and to direct the
national awakening down channels that do
not threaten the power and privilege of the
corrupt few. A similar logic is at work in
Armenia and Georgia as well.

There may be some in the West who will
say that the state of emergency and use of
the Red Army to restore order and protect
lives in the Caucasus compromises the
peaceful, political goals of perestroika. Few
in the Soviet Union think so: most want
democracy, but almost no one wants a des-
cent into chaos.

A tragic, brooding presence hangs over
the Caucasus. It is the ghost of Stepan Sha-
umian,

Shaumian was the key Bolshevik organ-
izer in the Transcaucasus (contrary to Stal-
in’s legend that he himself was. Shaumian
once said: “Stalin has the mind and morals
of a snake”’). Before the revolution Shaum-
lan spent many years in European exile with
Lenin, and many years in Baku organizing
Armenian and Azerbaijani workers against
the oil barons. Himself an Armenian, Sha-
umian’s grief and nemesis was always the
inter-communal violence whipped up by
Czarist authorities to divide the workers
against each other. Like most of the original
Bolsheviks, Shaumian was unyielding in his
internationalism.

When the revolution broke out, Shaum-
ian became head of the Baku commune,
and later was appointed by Lenin leader of
the Bolshevik government for the whole
Transcaucasus. His life was terminated, just
short of the age of 40, by a firing squad
acting under orders from the British inter-
ventionist forces, in 1918.

Many places in Armenia and Azerbaijan
today are named after Shaumian, including
the capital of the disputed region of
Nagorno- Karabakh, Stepanakert, and the
adjacent district of Shaumiansk — where
some of the bloodiest incidents have
occurred in recent days. In December,
mobs attacked and destroyed the monu-

ment to Stepan Shaumian in the centre of -

Baku, and others wrecked the Shaumian
museum.

Unspeakable slanders have been launched
against his name in the Azerbaijani press. It
is clear that Shaumian is being targeted not
simply because he was an Armenian, but
because he was an uncompromising inter-
nationalist who led Azerbaijanis and
Armenians together in revolution.

Stepan Shaumian was my wife’s great-
grandfather. It is my fate to have to watch
the pain and shock on the faces of his family
as this news of violence and hatred rolls in
from the Caucasus. If he could be here
himself to witness the fratricidal depths to
which his people have sunk, almost 72 years
after he died struggling to put an end to all
that, he would tear his hair in anguish and
rage.

GORBACHEV IN LITHUANIA...
visions of the future.

S vital to future

. his intervention opened debate on two opposing

New course for Polish
Workers’ Party launched

By CONRAD KOMOROSKI

The 230-member central committee of
the Polish United Workers Party
(PUWP) adopted a resolution Jan. 6 cal-
ling for its dissolution and organization
of a new party to work for “democratic
socialism.”

The resolution will be submitted to the
PUWP congress which will meet for
three days beginning Jan. 27.

The new party is visualized as having
‘a new structure and program,” accord-
ing to Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the
PUWP’s present first secretary. The
present PUWP has about two million
members.

A poll of party members taken in Sep-
tember and presented to the meeting Jan.
6 shows that 72 per cent favour changing
the party’s name and program. Among
the names submitted at the meeting for
consideration until the party congress
acts are: Socialist Party of Poland,
Socialist Party of Working People,
Social Democratic Party of Poland, Pol-
ish Party of Working People, Polish
Party of the Socialist Left, Polish Labour
Party, and the option of proposing other
names. The poll of party members on the
new name will be announced at the con-
gress.

The names indicate “the hopes which
working people have in achieving leftist
ideals,” according to Political Bureau
member Leeszek Miller. The resolution
states that the future of Poland lies with
democratic socialism which can guaran-
tee “freedom, democracy, social justice
and solidarity.”

The central committee concluded that
a new party is needed because the exist-
ing PUWP cannot effectively meet the
new situation which has developed in
Poland. Its resolution assessed the
PUWP?’s loss of credibility. A draft dec-
laration for a new program adopted for
submission to the congress rejected the
constitutional guarantee of the leading
role of the PUWP, and certain economic
political and social concepts which have
been linked with Stalinist policies.

The declaration is specific in rejecting
a capitalist future for Poland, and specif-
ically bases itself upon the Polish peo-
ple’s democratic socialist sentiments.

In the meantime, the Solidarity-domi-
nated government is proceeding with its
capitalist-oriented policies despite div-
isions within its own ranks as. well as a
rising tide of popular opposition. The
freeze on wages, rising unemployment
and exploding prices can become fuel for
social conflict.

Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowciz
has gone on television and radio in
addresses to the public to try to quiet

- complaints and defend the tough pro-
gram. He has argued that only the
beginning will be tough and that
improvement will soon follow.

However, the beginning has been
tougher than most Poles had imagined.
For example, within the first days of this
month, when the austerity plan went
into effect, 17,000 car owners turned in
their license plates and registration pap-
ers to the authorities because they could
no longer afford to drive following a 100
per cent increase in the price of gasoline
and a 60 per cent hike in the cost of tires.

Considering the sacrifices that most
Poles must make to obtain a car, it is not
hard to gauge the anger their loss entails.

The Solidarity-dominated government
told consumers that meat and other con-
sumer goods would become available
when prices were deregulated. But profit-

_ grubbers are holding up supplies and
pushing up prices even more — electricity

‘(up 500 per cent), coal for households
(up 600 per cent) — while wages are fro-
zen. Last Friday, the government pub-

: licly acknowledged what consumers

, already knew, that the shortages are con-
tinuing despite increased prices. It coun-
selled patience.

Workers are complaining about Soli-
darity’s policies of greatly increased rents
and the sale of national property, the
factories they own and work in. “You
must remember,” Andrzej Bociek, a fac-
tory worker, told a U.S. journalist, “that
for years my co-workers and I were told
that everything in the country was ours.
So it’s understandable that the workers
in the plant are reluctant to have it sold
now.”

Conrad Komorowkst is an international
affairs columnist for the People’s Daily
World in New York.

Pacific Tribune, January 22, 1990 e 9