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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court, who acted as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, recently made some unusual statements about the Soviet Union. In an address on Dec. 8, Jackson pointed to Stalin’s persecution of Soviet scientists, his bureaucratic straitjacket on thought and information, and said; “I condemn it as inhuman, but I don’t think it imperils our security.” He then drew the astounding conclusion:
“What I think we need to fear would be an open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union, thirsting for truth.”
In an indirect and somewhat distorted fashion, these words express the hundred-fold greater fear that U.S. imperialism has of a democratic workers’ regime in the Soviet Union than of the reactionary nationalistic, totalitarian regime of Stalin.
The astute imperialists recognize that a genuinely revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union would have long since inspired the workers of Europe and Asia to the overthrow of capitalism. The capitalists infinitely prefer the totalitarianism and narrow nationalism of Stalin, whose policies and methods have discredited the ideas of communism, turned many millions against the Soviet Union and disoriented and betrayed revolutionary struggles everywhere.
Look back 31 years to the time when the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky had just made a revolution and founded the first workers state in history. They had the most democratic government ever known, directly run by the workers and peasants through their elected councils, known as soviets. This government had no money, no arms, no food and medical supplies – its only heritage from Czarism and the imperialist war was famine and ruin. Yet the capitalist governments of the world were frenzied in their fear of it. They couldn’t allow it to live for a minute if they could help it. They blockaded it. They poured armies on a score of fronts onto Russian soil in a desperate effort to destroy it.
For the capitalists recognized then – and have always recognized – that the peril of the Soviet Union to them lay not in its armies, but in the revolutionary ideas and party that gave it birth. It was the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky they wanted to stamp out at all cost.
Stalinism gave world capitalism a new lease on life by destroying the party and program of Lenin and Trotsky and building a counter-revolutionary machine designed solely to maintain the powers and privileges of the new bureaucracy. Stalinism sold out the revolutionary movements everywhere for the sake of temporary deals with the imperialists, from Hitler to Churchill and Roosevelt.
That is why a Jackson can sincerely say that the thing he and his class fear most is an “open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union” – that is, a Soviet Union that would reawaken the revolutionary fervor of the oppressed of the world and inspire them to complete the socialist task that Lenin and Trotsky began in October 1917.
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