World eat Delegates cross Red Square (top left); Opening of the 19th All-Union CPSU Conference (centre); Mikhail Gorbachev (above). about either before the people or before the world. We are the ruling party, and the tuling party in any country forms a government and wields power at different levels.” However, he said, the import of this Proposal is that CPSU leaders will now have to get out of the back rooms, where they have long exercised executive power, and submit themselves to the “democratic test” of election by the people. If they fail to win election, he said, their party organiza- tion will have to “draw the appropriate con- clusions.” Henceforth Party leaders will work openly in the representative bodies, the Soviets, rather than the executive - bodies — the civil service — and _ their authority will help to bring the focus of power under public control. The conference also recommended creat- ing a permanent sitting parliament — some- thing the USSR has never had — with its chairperson, or president of the country, to be the leader of the CPSU - Some urgent measures to accelerate this process, adopted by the conference, include provisions for new Party elections and a full-scale membership review — something that has many functionaries in a cold sweat — which will effect a long overdue house-cleaning of the Party apparatus, as early as this autumn. By next spring, elec- tions to the new permanent parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies, may take place, while elections to Republican and local Soviets will come in the fall of 1989. According to new rules, all elections will take place by secret ballot, from a field of multiple candidates, and no office-holder may serve for more than two consecutive 5-year terms. Some controversies that flared-up during the conference help to illuminate more clearly the sometimes halting and uneven march of change. On historical issues — which occupy extraordinary prominence in this country — the conference resolved to build in Mos- cow a monument to the victims of Stalin’s repression, an idea first put forward by Nik- ita Khrushchev at the 22nd CPSU Congress in 1956 and dormant ever since. Just before the conference, and clear signs of the times, the Soviet Supreme Court moved to reha- bilitate old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev. Former “dissident” historian Roy Med- vedev appeared at a press conference spon- sored by the Novosti press agency to inform startled reporters that he has had “several offers” to publish his monumental study of the Stalin era, Let History Judge, and the editor of the journal Novy Mir announced plans to shortly print Alexander Solzhenit- syn’s long-banned novel, Cancer Ward in the Soviet Union. 5; Yet it was also clear at the conference that there are many who feel the exhumation of _Stalin’s crimes is getting out of hand, that the “baby is being thrown out with the bath water,” and the country is losing its sense of historical direction. This view was put explicitly by Yegor Ligachev, who drew pointed attention to the immense past accomplishments of the Soviet people, and asked: “How can we, comrades, agree with the fact that historical truth is often distorted under the banner of restoring it? Can we agree with the fact that the Soviet people are portrayed (Imagine, in our own publications!) as slaves who were allegedly fed only with lies and demago- guery and subject to brutal exploitation?” Glasnost, said Gorbachev, was the “hero of the hour,” and while no one challenged this, there were many who attacked particu- lar newspapers or lamented the extremes of the press in general. The conference defined the central prin- ciples of glasnost as: “‘The inalienable right of every citizen to full and authentic information — other than state or military secrets — on any issue of public affairs and the right to discuss any socially significant matter openly and freely.” Recommenda- tions include legal guarantees for a free flow of information, the right to publish as well - as respond to criticism in the press. Perhaps the most riveting moment of the conference — which many had said would never be allowed to happen — came when Boris Yeltsin, removed last year as leader of the Moscow party organization, rose to ask the conference for his “political rehabilita- tion.” Arguing that he agreed with the main - line of the Party, and had made only tactical mistakes in the past, Yeltsin charged that last year’s Central Committee characteriza- tion of him as “politically incorrect” ran counter to the principles of socialist plural- ism as endorsed by the conference. Yeltsin insisted, as he had in the past, that many of the gains of perestroika remain on paper, that the people are not being involved in the process, and that powerful conservatives are standing in the way of progress and must be removed. Then Ligachev took the floor. A leader who has been tarred in the Western media — and by a good part of the Soviet intelligentsia as well — simplistically, as an arch-conservative and enemy of peres- troika, he said emotionally: “Perestroika is ‘the cause of my life.” The 19th conference of the Commu- nist Party of the Soviet Union provided a “ruthless” critique of the shortcomings in all aspects of life in the world’s first socialist state. But, Canada’s Communist Party leader told a Vancouver forum last week, that very process shows the resilience of socialism and its superiority over the cap- italist system. George Hewison said the process known to the world as perestroika will allow the Soviet Union to “take the moral high road” in world peace, inter- national relations and the environment, and in solving its internal problems. Speaking to a crowd of more than 100 in the Centre for Socialist Education July 11, the Communist Party of Canada’s general secretary said the 19th confer- ence found the gains of perestroika — the restructuring of the Soviet economy — to be modest. Hewison quoted the CPSU’s political bureau as acknowledging that, “The past three years of our life might be legiti- mately described as a radical turn. The party and the working people managed to halt the country’s drift towards eco- nomic, spiritual and social crisis.” However, “results weren’t as far reaching as anticipated. They had under- estimated the depth of stagnation and of force of habit,” he said. The Politbureau said the old ways of management, bureaucratic and centralis- tic, “are no longer in keeping with the productive forces existing in the Soviet Union today,” Hewison related. Hewison said the party conference found some gains, but still big problems, in the areas of food production and dis- tribution, housing, and services and trade. “The old managerial practices, output by quotas, and fiat from above — admin- istrative measures that do not involve the fullest potential of socialism — certainly are handicapping the’progress.” The conference found scientific endeav- ours have too long been lopsided in favour of applied sciences and that much more must be spent on “pure” scientific research, Hewison noted. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev lambasted the country’s cultural under- takings with the statement, “For much too long uniformity, monotonous con- formity and mediocrity were made out to be the hallmarks of progress.”’ He advo- cated a return to Lenin’s principles, “to highlight the human being, to enrich the people spiritually,” Hewison said. On human rights, the Soviet Union is, in Gorbachev’s words, “prepared to work with other countries to compare notes and scrupulously honour our commitments.” “And in that he’s laying down the gauntlet to imperialism and capitalism: Put up or shut up,” Hewison observed. An overwhelming call for the partici- Socialism’s future optimistic: Hewison pation of Soviet citizens in the day to day workings of the country characterized debate on political reform, said Hewi- son. He said the move is viewed as a return to Lenin’s principles, where peo- ples’ commissions exercised controls over bureaucracy and administration. The “new political thinking” in for- eign policy has seen a lessening in reliance on armed defence and more emphasis placed on peace initiatives. While the defence of socialism is still paramount, the new thinking takes into GEORGE HEWISON account that there is “more than one way to fight back” against imperialism, Hew- ison said. The new view takes into account that, whether its the arms race, the environ- ment or the economy, the two major systems in the world are contradictory but also “interdependent. They share a planet, and they can sink one another,” he said. The climate of improved world rela- tions does not mean the Soviet Union is blind to imperialism’s designs on social- ism, Hewison cautioned, observing that the recent spy scare shows the Canadian government is ready to “return to the days of the ‘evil empire.’ ” The significance for Canadians is that people here can look with new interest at a society that is able to “ruthlessly exam- ine itself and admit past mistakes.” “Tt obviously can’t be done (here) and still be capitalism, because to ruthlessly strip it down to its essence what we see is a system that is in difficulty, a system that can not satisfy the needs of human beings in Canada, the United States or any- where else in the world,” Hewison said to applause. In spite of the mistakes and setbacks, the USSR “has emerged as a modern economy and it’s perfecting itself and criticizing itself and it is launching the biggest debate the world has even known,” Hewison declared. He said perestroika “gives socialists a reason to be very optimistic about the future of socialism in the world.” -Ligachev went on to spell out his own attitude and approach to change: “Peres- troika is a difficult and lengthy process,” he said, “and it is important not to dodge urgent problems, to solve them vigorously, in a new way, but without dashes, with caution and due account of the consequen- ces. Policy-making is not a piece of cake after all. Resolve should always go together with caution. There is much truth in the saying: “Look before you leap’.” Here, perhaps, was the most unexpected triumph of the conference. In the intersec- -tion of these divergent viewpoints, and Gorbachev's closing commentary on them, the spectrum of opinions and approaches within the CPSU finally came into clear focus. And in giving voice to these diverse views the conference produced, not the much-heralded split, but a new level of unity in the struggle to reconstruct society. We have glimpsed the Gorbachev vision of the future and it is, much as Lenin’s was — of an open, dynamic, tolerant society, whose central tenet is: Bring everyone along with us. Pacific Tribune, July 20, 1988 « 5