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