_ WORLD INTERNATIONAL FOCUS Tom Morris Turning wine into water In as patently greedy amove _ 48 could be imagined, the or- ganizing committee for the 1988 Calgary Winter Games (OCO) has ignored the Olym- pic charter, which prohibits _using the Games symbol with alcohol or tobacco advertising, and permitted Labatt brewer- ies to put the five-ringed Olympic symbol on its beer Cans and bottles. Money, you see, is what Calgary ’88 is all about — and John Labatt offered fistfulls of money. The OCO isn’t really a Games organizing group as much as it’s a sales team. Beer, Cars, cameras, clothing, ‘‘ex- Clusive rights’? — peddling the hame and logo to corporate giants, is what OCO does best. Sports and athletes are sim- ply the excuse. Labatt, owner _ of the Toronto Blue Jays base- ball team, is living proof of this theory. To “‘fit’? Labatt into the Olympics, the OCO reverted to magic. It ruled that beer and wines aren’t alcoholic. 2000 years ago Jesus turned water into wine. The OCO has managed to mess up a miracle for a few pieces of silver. I guess had Johnny Walker offered big bucks, OCO would declare whiskey a fruit juice. Cigarettes then could be called candy and lung cancer a minor headache. No let-up to harassment Botha’s regime is certainly nothing short of perverse. . No sooner had it released Govan Mbeki after 23 years imprisonment (banning him the following day), then it un- leashed its police and soldiers against the home of Winnie Mandela. = At 5:30a.m., Nov. 13, police and troops rushed into Man- dela’s home, arrested five of Winnie Mandela stands outside her house, her grandson in her ~ arms, as cops search the prem- ises. her guards and searched the premises. They also ordered her daughter Zindzi to report to the police station. Mandela said this is just the latest in many such acts of har- assment against her family. More like Hitler than Horatius Reagan’s Central America policy received another sting- ing defeat Nov. 12 when the United Nations General As- sembly voted 94-2 demanding the U.S. comply. with last year’s World Court ruling which called for an immediate end to contra aid. On June 27, 1986, the Inter- national Court of Justice found the U.S. guilty of violating both the UN Charter and international law ‘‘. . . by train- ing, arming, equipping, financing and supplying contra forces...’’ It rejected the American contention that the Court had no jurisdiction in the matter and ordered Washing- ton to stop its illegal interven- tion. The U.S. reply last year was to arrogantly and angrily reject the Court’s ruling. It appointed itself the sole judge of its own policy in the region which has so far cost 50,000 Nicaraguan lives and devastated that coun- try’s economy. And last week, joined by only Israel, the U.S. again set itself against the world. The UN vote was its re- sponse to Nicaragua’s plea to give the Arias Peace Plan, signed on August 7 by the five regional presidents, a chance to live. Central to the Plan’s hope for success, the delegates were reminded, is an end to all outside military aid. : Like Horatius at the Subli- cian bridge, Reagan appears to be hell-bent on single-handedly preventing peace and indepen- dence from breaking out in Central America. He seems determined to spend the last 13 months of his disasterous presidency breathing life into the corpse of American gun- boat diplomacy. But Reagan hardly cuts the heroic Horatius-like figure holding off the Etruscans. He more closely resembles Hitler during his last hours in his Ber- lin bunker. tvization was carried out is to some ex- tent responsible for the problems we Ve in agriculture today.” ss During these years Chudinova knew _ 4nd worked\very often with Joseph Stal- M. She remémbers very clearly how he @Ppeared at meetings. Fecalls. ‘‘I would say that he was a phy- Sically ugly person. His diction was very Dad. He spoke as if he was always chew- -!N8 something in his mouth. But he was able to speak in a manner that was highly _ Persuasive — you couldn’t help but agree with what he was saying.”’ Chudinova remembers her feeling in the mid-to-late 1930s that dark clouds — Crushed in whole regions, the kulaks (ich peasants) and others expelled from their homes. It happened very rapidly, and without a careful plan. As a result terrible mistakes were made, and in SOme areas the peasants were liquidated almost completely. I.am.quite-sure. that You can’t do in two minutes what takes a Year of work ... The way the collec- _ “Toften met Stalin in those days,”’ she . Chudinova’s interrogation alone last- ed two years. “‘I trained myself never to pronounce the word ‘yes’,’’ she says. ‘And in the protocols of my interroga- tion — which I was able to read many years later — the word ‘yes’ never ap- pears.”’. Following. this,..she. spent 15 more years in prison camps. ‘That was a very painful time for me,”’ | she says. “‘I had six children, and I wor- ried about them constantly while I was in prison. During the war, two of my sons fought in the Red Army. One of them was killed at the front.”” A spasm of pain crosses Chudinova’s face as she remem- bers this. ; Following Stalin’s death, Chudinov was one of the first to be amnestied. The party immediately sent her back into the camps to work with the prisoners, to help speed procedures of release. She brings out a document that was issued to her by the Special Department of the Ministry of the Interior in Krasno- yarsk. It is dated May, 1954, and bears her name. It says ‘‘Completely rehabili- slowly with a finger, and stops at the final line. It reads: “They should take 17 years off your age — and put them back in our country’s history.”” Chudinova has powerful memories of the 20th Congress of the Communist Par- ty, where the crimes of Stalin were finally revealed and repudiated. ‘‘You know, after the 20th Congress I think my social- ist convictions became stronger than ever,” she says. ‘That congress opened sible. I recall what Lenin said at the 8th party congress, after a certain black market had been forced to close down in Moscow. He said: ‘Comrades, it is not so easy to shut down the black market with- in us.’ This is the problem that disturbs us now. ““Gorbachev always stresses this point. We must reconstruct our con- sciousness,’’ she says. **T think that if we could have one Gor- ‘Lenin was right: No revolution is possible without a cultural revolution...’ a ‘We have to reconstruct, or continue in the old way and degenerate...’ Were gathering in Soviet life. ‘‘Before I Was arrested, I began to understand that Something was wrong around me,” she | Says. ““T saw many of Lenin’s compan- we arrested and shot. The most terrible Ing was to see so many of our military Cers arrested.”’ he herself was taken in 1938. ‘I was eused of anti-Soviet Trotskyist activi- Ss,” she remembers. ‘‘I was never a Totskyist. I have always been a direct Onductor of the party’s voice,’ she , ‘ays, visibly shaking with emotion. tated.’ But: further down, Chudinova notes, it says that her sentence had been extended three times while she was in the camps. “I was never even informed about this at the time,’ she says. There is a strange look on her face. It seems to me to be a look of fierce pride, but tempered with sadness. In her life it has been no easy or simple matter to remain an hon- est Communist. Then she brings out a verse, written for her on her 80th birthday by the Soviet poetess Leontiova. She traces the page our eyes. Of course, we had seen every- thing ourselves, but this congress opened our eyes.” She stops to collect her thoughts. ‘‘I want to say,’ she begins again, ‘‘that I never believed in Stalin the slogan, Stalin the myth. The achievements — real achievements — of our time were ac- complished by the whole Soviet people working together.”’ Chudinova also had an extensive ac- quaintance with Krushchev, whom she remembers well. “I worked with Krush- chev,” she says. “He had a good atti- tude. I know all of the mistakes that he made, but none of these can be compared with those of Stalin. And the good he did was enormous: In the first place, he freed millions of people, and set our country on a new road. His main negative feature, I would say, was his personal lack of education.” And what does she think of today’s perestroika? ‘The situation today is very difficult,”’ she says. ‘We cannot reconstruct in a moment, it is psychologically impos- bachev in every city and town of the USSR, the success of perestroika would be guaranteed. You know, the Russian people are very persistent. If everybody makes some effort, we will succeed. In reality, we have no alternative. We have to reconstruct, or continue in the old way and degenerate.” : She stops and thinks for a minute again. “I am totally in favour of pere- stroika,”’ she says. “*I have always want- ed to see our country prosper and be respected by the world. ‘‘There aren’t many of us old Bolshe- viks left now,’’ she says softly. She is growing tired. ‘‘Yes, I am the oldest one, the longest-serving member of the party who is left. Those of us who survive, we are one hundred per cent behind the re- structuring. Yes, I am still enthusiastic.” As we are leaving she tells us: ‘‘I have a plan. I want to tell the whole story, but I need five more years. I hope I can make iC PHOTOS — COURTESY OF NOVOSTI AGENCY PACIFIC TRIBUNE, NOVEMBER 25, 1987 e 9 Resin ae aac ot ened Le ne wae er Ree a EE a WA a Pa al NG