WfJltNE/iS '''N'O''''

25
No. 165 8 July 1977
Rightist Reaction Pushes Anti-Homosexual Hy'steria
Heroic Soviet Spies....6
orate the killing of a homosexual, can
"gay liberation" be far behind? Yes
indeed it can. The election of liberal
Democrat Abzug would do "Gays for'
Bella" about as m"ch good as black
capitalist politicians in their daishikis
have done the impoverished ghetto
masses.
The homosexua1 movement has now
become, in some areas of the country, a
recognized constituency, and is thus
sometimes catered to and everyw.here
abused. That is, a few "gay leade,tS" can
now aspire to become part of the all-
inclusive party of everybody's betrayal,
the Democratic Party-i.e., to point
Jimmy Carter's nuclear-missile subma-
rines toward Russia so that Russian
dissidents might be "saved" by an
imperialism whose hypocrisy exceeds
that of Nazi Germany while it competes
in the "kill count" category. Manifestly,
homosexual working people jlike
blacks, women, etc.) can only be left in
the lurch, and ultimately grossly betray-
ed, by these ordinary operations of
token cooption. "Welcome, homosexu-
continued on page 8
PART 1 OF 2
gains of the last decade of liberalism.
Recent targets include legal and safe
abortions, especially for poor women;
the Equal Rights Amendment; busing to
combat school segregation; preferential
minority-group college admissions. The
"right-to-lifers" screaming for the death
penalty grasp the logic of the Bryant
crusade far better than do some of its
opponents.
Reactionaries of every stripe have
found Carter's anti-Soviet "human
rights" moralism a favorable climate in
which to mount their mobilizations
against homosexuals, minority groups,
women and eventually the working class
directly. Yet homosexual activists still
look to the Democratic Party to lead the
fight against the victimization of homo-
sexuals! The impressive numbers at
"gay rights" demonstrations have unfor-
tunately been dominated by sub-
reformist "lifestyle" politics, which like
all New Left "constituency" politics
collapses into mainstream - pressure-
group horse-trading and tokenism. If
San Francisco mayor Moscone will tly
the city's flags at half mast to commem-
.' /.
Paul Hosefros/New York Times
HundretJs of thousands of demonstrators turned out across the country June 26 to voice their opposition to
discrimination against homosexuals.
eratic rights are indivisible. Those who
imagine that hostility toward
uals can be eradicated through favor-
able publicity and "progre.ssive" educa-
tion under capitalism ignore the
ultimately genocidal logic of the reac-
tionary bigotry which in the final
analysis is wielded by the ruling class
against the proletariat. Thus, along with
communists, working-class militants,
Jews and other "inferior races," homo-
sexuals were rounded up for Nazi
concentration camps, scapegoated for
thehisis of German capitalism. The
Protestant Church of Austria recently
estimated that 220,000 alleged homo-
sexuals perished in" Hitler's "death
mills." Similarly, during the first days
after Pinochet's bloody rightist coup in
Chile, troops marching through the
streets of Santiago chanted "Death to
the faggots!"; random killing of Chilean
homosexuals was reported.
To struggle effectively against the
persecution of homosexuals, "gay
rights" activists must begin by under-
standing that bourgeois democracy is
partial, fragile and reversible. Just as
"black is beautiful" does not abolish the
horror of white racism, so the affirma-
tion of "gay pride" cannot effectively
combat the Bryant campaign. The
struggle fundamentally is not about sex
but about all-sided democratic rights.
The "Save Our Children" mobilization
is presently the most visible component
of a much broader rightist offensive
aimed at rolling back real and token
More than a hundred thousand
people demonstrated in San Francisco.
They were protesting against the reac-
tionary anti-homosexual crusade of
Anita Bryant, the fanatic Bible-
thumping bigot whb has proclaimed
herself the nemesis of democratic rights
for homosexuals. Bryant's right-wing
rampage is obscene and dangerous.
Outraged "gay rights" activists have
taken to the streets in response. The San
Francisco protest was by far the largest,
but just about every majQr American
city has witnessed mobilizations in
defiance of the Bryant crusade; In fact,
the "gay movement"-the last gasp of
New Left lifestyle radicalism--is seem-
ingly the most vociferous liberal/radical
mobilization this side of the Vietnam
war. Whether this wave' of anti-bigotry
protest will have any significant effect
on the American social climate depends
on whether the working class can be
mobilized in a fight for democratic
rights through a class-struggle program
to fight social oppression.
The presem wave of homosexual
activism was precipitated by Bryant's
June 7 "Save Our Children" victory in
Dade County, Florida. Appealing to the
most disgusting backwardness with
scare tactics designed to conjure up
images of sinister homosexuals lurking
in school playgrounds, Bryant suc-
ceeded in repealing an ordinance pro-
hibiting discrimination against homo-
sexuals. The repeal is an outrage against
elementary democratic rights, in effect
declaring "open season" on homosexu-
als and encouraging employers, land-
lords, etc., to put their prejudices into
practice.
Bryant has vowed that Dade County
is only the beginning of her "divine
mission" and that she will now take her
vicious anti-homosexual crusade "wher-
ever God sends me." She has already
appeared at a Shriners' Flag Day
celebration in Chicago, where local cops
showed their support for her "cause" by
brutally attacking and arresting some of
the 3,000 people who had turned out to
protest her appearance. Bryant's reac-
tionary rampage must be stopped!
But many "gay liberation" spokesmen
seem to consider Anita Bryant more of a
joke than a threat; some have gone so far
as to proclaim that she has done
homosexuals a favor by publicizing
their oppression and forcing them to
"unite" against it. The Spartacist
League (SL) and Red Flag Union
(Bolshevik Tendency) (RFU-BT, for-
merly Lavender and Red Union) recog-
nize that the Bryant campaign-which
has rallied forces representing the
aggressive hard core of virulent reaction
in this country-is a grave threat not
only to homosexuals but to all con-
cerned with democratic rights. The drive
to create a favorable climate of opinion
for overt victimization of homosexuals
retlects something far more sinister than
narrow-mindedness on the part of
individuals.
The oppression of homosexuals, like
the oppression of women, has historical-
ly served as an index of more general
social and political attitudes, for demo-
------_Letters.... ...... __
Dictatorship of the
Proletariat: leninism
ys. De Leonism
June 22, 1977
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Dear Workers Vanguard:
As a DeLeonist and soon-to-be-
member of the Socialist Labor Party, I
found Joseph Seymour's article on
"Leninism and Workers Control" (WV
[No. 162], 17 June) to be of great
interest.
In my opinion, Seymour's article is
flawed by his failure to distinguish
between workers' control of production
in two very different contexts: under-
developed and developed capitalist
nations. In the former, direct workers'
control of production through mass,
democratic workers' organizations
(such as soviets) is materially impossible
due to the limited development of the
productive forces. In such situations,
the SL's formula of control by a
workers' government (presumably a
Party-state) and a consultative role for
the mass workers' organizations is, I
believe, correct. I should add that the
only legitimate functions of such a
government would be the suppression of
counterrevolution and the most rapid
possible development of the economy-
gradually surreRdering its powers to
the workers' own mass economic
organizations.
In the context of a developed capital-
ist nation, this formula is totally
inapplicable. In nations where a high
level of development of the productive
forces prevails, the workers are capable
of .administering production in a
planned, democratic way-quite with-
out a separate "workers' government."
Of course, some central authority would
be necessary, but it must be an authority
which is derived from the workers' own
mass economic organizations-their
General Executive Board, or whatever it
may be called.
Moreover, the workers' mass organi-
zations would be quite capable of
militarily suppressing counterrevolu-
tion. With the military elimination of
counterrevolutibn, the mass economic
organizations would cease funttioning
as a state-their functions as a state
would "die out." Thenceforth, they
would be concerned with the "conduct
of the processes of production." In the
developed capitalist countries, no politi-
cal group could exercise authority apart
from that of the workers' own mass.
economic organizations without be-
coming a parasitical formation-totally
unnecessary and an impediment to the
establishment of a classless, stateless,
communist society.
In closing it should be noted that
Seymour is led to uphold a misleading
appraisal of history in the service of his
statist conception of socialism: it is
simply not true that, historically, "work-
ers' control has emerged after, not
before, the government was over-
thrown." His ambiguous use of the
term, "the government," allows Sey-
mour to conceal the fact that the
emergence of workers' control has
always, and must necessarily, precede
the proletarian overthrow of any essen-
tially bourgeois government. (Workers'
control is not, however, a necessary
precondition for the military defeat of a
bourgeois government by a Party acting
in the interests of the working class. But
unless effective workers' control
emerges after the seizure of power by the
Party, the Party will have no alternative
but to act as a new ruling class.) "
In sum, the essence of socialism is
social control of the productive forces.
2
Workers must manage all the industries
and services-directly, democratically,
and in a planned way-through their
own government, based on economic
constituencies.
Fraternally,
Steve Miles
WV replies: Our basic difference with
De Leonism does not concern workers
control (as this is generally understood),
but rather the nature or, more precisely,
existence of the dictatorship of the
proletariat as a transition from capital-
ism to socialism. Steve Miles believes
that the overthrow of capitalism in an
advanced country leads directly and
immediately from the government of
persons to the administration of things.
As Marxists, we hold that this is not
possible. Further, his absolute dichoto-
my between advanced and backward
countries implies the prospect of social-
ism in one advanced country, like the
U.S., amid poverty, starvation and
barbarism for most of humanity. We
reject such an anti-egalitarian, chauvin-
ist concept.
Steve Miles' counterposition of De
Leonism to Leninism is marred by self-
contradictions and confusions concern-
ing workers control of production. In
the Leninist tradition, workers' control
is used in two different senses. One is
that of dual power at the point of
production during a revolutionary
crisis. The other is that of an authorita-
tive consultative role by factory com-
mittees in the context of centralized
planning by a workers government.
What the author of the letter
describes as workers control is actually
centralized management by the eco-
nomic organs of the laboring popula-
tion. Daniel De Leon, so far as we know,
never used the term workers control,
and certainly did not use that term to
describe the organization of the econo-
my following the overthrow of capital-
ism. In his 1905 Socialist Reconstruc-
tion of Society, De Leon speaks of
Industrial Unionism as the framework
for "the governmental administration of
the Republic of Labor." There are basic
differences between the Leninist con-
cept of a communist vanguard govern-
ing on the basis ofsoviet democracy and
the De Leonist Industrial Union govern-
ment, a syndicalist version of socialism.
But these differences are only confused
by identifying the latter with workers
control.
The basic differences between the
dictatorship of the proletariat and
socialism can be summarized as follows:
The dictatorship of the proletariat
requires a distinct administrative appa-
ratus. Under socialism, all administra-
tive functions are fulfilled through the
rotation of the general population. The
dictatorship of the proletariat requires
an organized pUblic force whose tasks
are broader than simply suppressing
counterrevolutionary conspiracies. Un-
der socialism, organized violence will
have disappeared from social life.
During the transition"l epoch, there
exist divisions and conflicts
of interest within the laboring popula-
tion; these express themselves in separ-
ate political parties vying for govern-
mental power through soviet
democracy. Under socialist abundance
and the cultural level associated with it,
there is no reason to expect permanent
divisions over economic and social
policy; differences over such questions
. will be episodic.
Classes will not disappear overnight.
Even after the smashing of the capitalist
state apparatus and the expropriation of
the bourgeoisie, there will still be a
working class, an urban petty bourgeoi-
sie, in many countries a peasantry, and
atomized remnants of the exploiting
classes. Consequently, class conflict will
persist. Economic differentiation will
continue to exist, as will uneven and
inadequate cultural levels and reaction-
ary ideological attitudes. For these
reasons a workers government must
have an organized apparatus of coe'r-
cion. Because we seek to build upon the
already existing cultural and economic
levels, specialized professionals (statisti-
cians, doctors, administrators) will be
utilized to the maximum by the victori-
ous workers government. However,
police methods may sometimes be
necessary to 'Prevent and reverse bu-
reaucratic abuses arising from this
petty-bourgeois administrative stratum.
Backward elements among the laboring
population may resist the policies of the
socialist majority through violence,
political strikes and other forms of
direct action. (A workers government
would seek to deal differently with
backward workers who engage in vio-
lence than with counterrevolutionary
terrorists. )
For a concrete sense as to why a
workers government may have to
employ force against backward work-
ers, look at the race question in the U.S.
Certainly a socialist government would
aggressively implement racial integra-
tion in housing, schools, etc. In sharp
contrast to the liberal bourgeoisie, a
workers government would not imple-
ment integrationist policies in ways that
undermine or threaten the material
interests of white working people. Of
course, for there to be a proletarian
revolution in the U.S. it will be neces-
sary for the key sectors of the working
class to have overcome racial divisions
in order to wage a united struggle
against capitalism. Nonetheless, it is
entirely possible that residual pockets of
white racists would still violently resist
school integration, just as they have
done in Boston these past few years. No
genuine socialist could deny the need for
a workers government to use force to
defend black children and implement
school integration in the face of violent
racist reaction. I
The race question in the U.S. is an
example of the divisions and conflicts of
interests that will exist in the immediate
post-capitalist period. Conflicts arising
from economic scarcity will be aggra-
vated by reactionary ideological preju-
dices-racism, national chauvinism,
religious fundamentalism (a la Anita
Bryant)-ultimately reflecting the heri-
tage of material deprivation and cultu-
ral obscurantism. The situation is
further complicated by the fact that
soviet democracy will not be restricted
to the organized working class of the old
bourgeois society, but will also embrace
much of the petty bourgeoisie of the old
society (e.g., low-level government
officials, salesmen), as well as former
lumpenproletarians newly drawn into
the labor process.
The laboring population as it emerges
from capitalist society will give rise to
serious divisions and conflicts of interest
over such questions as the structure of
labor payment, the level and distribu-
tion of social services (e.g., housing), the
rate of investment and the scale of aid to
backward countries. A communist van-
guard will be needed to oppose political-
ly, not bureaucratically, those back-
parochial and short-sighted
tendencies within the working class.
It is evident that Steve Miles identifies
the Leninist concept of a workers
government with the Stalinist "one-
party" regimes of the Sino-Soviet
degenerated and deformed workers
states. Such an identification is wholly
false. The Bolsheviks took power in
1917 after having attained a majority in
the soviets (workers councils). Lenin's
party neither intended nor desired to
eliminate the soviets and govern without
the sanction of the working class as a
whole. It was the social-democratic
Mensheviks and petty-bourgeois popu-
list Social Revolutionaries who rejected
soviet constitutionalism and pursued
policies which would have led to the
victory of bourgeois counterrevolution.
The atrophying of the soviets and
elevation of the Bolshevik party to a
monopoly of political organization was
an unfortunate result of the civil war.
Lenin did not regard the governmental
situation in Russia as it emerged from the
civil war in 1921 as a programmatic
norm; we look forward to the fullest
soviet democracy including all tenden-
cies recognized by the laboring masses.
Furthermore, the Communist Parties
of the Soviet bloc are not parties-
'voluntary associations based on a
shared program-at all. They are organs
of an uncontrolled state bureaucracy.
The basic statement of Trotskyism,
the 1938 Transitional Program, asserts
that the struggle against the Stalinist
bureaucracy is the struggle for soviet
democracy:
"It is necessary to return to the soviets
not only their free democratic form but
also their class content. As once the
bourgeoisie and kulaks were not per-
mitted to enter the soviets, so now it is
necessary to drive the bureaucracy and
the newaristocracy out ofthe soviets. In
the soviets there is room only for the
representatives of the workers, rank-
and-file collective (armers, peasant and
Red Army men.
"Democratization of the soviets is
impossible without legalization of
soviet parties. The workers and peas-
ants themselves by their oWn free vote
will indicate what parties they recogni?-e
as soviet parties." [emphasis in originall
The De Leonists' absolute dichotomy
between advanced and backward coun-
tries implies the prospect for socialism
in one country, like the U.S. Closing the
gap between the most developed and the
poorest countries is the responsibility of
the international proletariat as a whole.
International socialist planning will
strive to secure a higher rate of econom-
ic growth for backward thailIor
advanced workers states. Backward
elements in th& advanced countries,
imbued with national chauvinist atti-
tudes, will undoubtedly want to limit the
international redistribution of wealth to
a minimum. They would also oppose
increased i'mmmigration from poor
nations. A communist vanguard will
have to fight for a genuinely internation-
alist economic program. It is the
internationalist component of socialism'
which, above all, requires a communist
vanguard governing a workers state
during the transitional epoch.
Workers
Vanguard
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WORKERS VANGUARD
Uproar in London
over Police Attack
on Pickets
EDITOR: Jan Norden
PRODUCTION MANAGER: Karen Allen
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-WfJRNERI
'ANGUARD
3
the hook by a few gestures at Grunwick.
. strike has already elicited
slgmflcant labour solidarity. Print
workers at the Sunday Telegraph and
the Observer carried out job actions to
force their newspapers to run pro-union
replies to particularly noxious attacks
on the embattled Grunwicks workers.
Civil Service Union members, who drive
the police were reportedly
refusmg to contmue ferrying these
uniformed thugs to the plant. Protests
by members of the college teachers
union led to the police Special Patrol
Group being thrown out of facilities it
was using at Willesten Technical Col-
lege. Camden Direct Workers Depart-
ment staged a one-day strike on 17 June
in support of the Grunwick workers.
Manifestly, a hundred workers
cannot win this strike while production
is carried on by scabs. Blacking must be
continued, and particularly in the case
of the post office, all deliveries to and
from the plant must be shut off. Mass
picketing must bring in thousands to
close the entrances-then the police will
not be able to escort busloads of scabs
through the lines. A plant occupation is
also clearly called for. An area-wide
sympathy strike could bring tremen-
dous pressure on the recalcitrant em-
ployer, and turning the scheduled
demonstration of I I July into a one-day
national solidarity work stoppage
would serve notice that Britain's work-
ers are determined to win this struggle.
The demands of such a work stoppage
and mass demonstration should not be
limited to the Grunwick strike, however.
They must become a stepping stone to a
militant battle for massive wage in-
creases, for a sliding-scale of wages and
hours to put an end to depression-level
unemployment and salvage the working
class from economic ruin. Not by tailing
Labour "lefts" and "militant" union
bureaucrats can such a struggle be won,
but only through building a Trotskyist
vanguard party that can unleash the
power of the British working class, by
breaking the grip of Labourite reform-
ism. Victory to the Grunwick's strike!
Smash the Social Contract!
would never have done during strikes by
Leyland car workers earlier this year.
There the Social Contract was directly
threatened. But even in this small strike
national publicity and mass
could let it get "out of hand," and this
explains the reluctance of Labour and
TUC tops to give the strike more than
grudging support. Instead they are
seeking to use the conflict at Grunwick's
to bolster the authority of their discred-
ited mediation machinery, hoping to
defuse the class struggle. In an article in
the 3 July Observer, TUC general
secretary Len Murray wrote:
"ACAS is industry's peacemaker. ...
"All those in all the parties and all the
?rganisati?ns who gave their blessing to
Its formation and functions ought now
to be outspoken and persuasive in
supporting its efforts to bring peace to
Grunwick's factories.
"That does not mean taking sides in the
dispute (although I see the best of
reasons for taking the side of APEX); it
means lining up on the side of concilia-
tion, not confrontation."
If James Callaghan's government at
Westminster, Labour bigwigs at Trans-
port House and the TUC brass view the
Grunwick's strike as a troublesome
nuisance which must be channeled into
a more manageable framework, the left
groups who join the lines daily see it as
the focus of the class struggle in Britain.
The geriatric fake-Trotskyists of the
Militant group ran a lead article in their
24 June issue headlined: "Grunwick-
The Acid Test." Similarly, the
reformist-syndicalist Socialist Workers
Party (formerly International Social-
ists) maintains that, "The battle of
Grunwick is a battle for trade union
organisation itself' (Socialist Worker,
25 June).
This assumes that this "self-made"
small entrepreneur stands in the fore-
front of a generalised ruling-class
offensive against the whole union
movement. But, in fact, even the
conservative Economist (25 June) refers
to Ward as a "maverick," and offers free
advice on salvaging the mediation
machinery. The rights of immigrant
workers in marginal industries are
certainly at stake in the Grunwick
struggle, and must be defended at all
costs. But a small strike at a single shop
must not be allowed to become a means
of diverting attention from the main
issue facing the union movement in
Britain today: the Social Contract.
This "voluntary" ceiling on wage
increases has subjected the working
class to a steady hemorrhaging in its
living standards in the three years since
Labour came to power. Now the bulk of
the union ranks are fed up as they face
unrelenting inflation despite their "res-
traint." Already the engineers
(AUEW-metal workers) have turned
down Stage Three of the government's
incomes policy, and annual conferences
are scheduled soon for the miners
(NUM) and transport workers
(T&GWU) where opposition is massive.
Revolutionaries must fight to turn this
rejection of the labour fakers' c1ass-
collaborationist scheme into a wave of
industrial action to break through the
Social Contract. Labour "lefts" like
Wise and "militant" union leaders like
Scargill must not be allowed to get

Police open way for scabs at struck Grunwlck factory In North
unofficially, and despite threats of
suspension, 64 bags of Grunwick's mail
have piled up.
Frustrated by the ineffectivness of the
strike in mid-May, Dromey and the
strike committee, with the cooperation
of the Brent Trades Council and APEX
issued a call for mass pickets.
to this call, Ward began busing
10 workers.) At this point, Dromey
envIsIOned about 200 pickets at each of
the four gates. The first day of the
picketing was 13 June. The police
reacted with violent assaults, arresting
over 70 people that day. Arrests now
total over 250.
The picket lines, fluctuating from 200
to 2,000 daily, have attracted trade-
union militants, the entire left-of-
Labour spectrum, Labour MP's and
prominent union bureaucrats. Arthur
Scargill, leader of the Yorkshire miners
and Mrs. Audrey Wise, MP, a Labou;
"left" even managed to get themselves
arrested. Meanwhile, two senior Tory
MP's began to ride with the scabs in the
buses, and the National Association For
Freedom placed advertisements
throughout the bourgeois press asking
for monetary support for Ward.
The police were reinforced with the
hated Special Branch and the Special
Patrol Group (specialising in "crowd
control"). At times there were almost as
many cops as pickets. They unleashed
daily attacks, and injured several pick-
ets. As a whole, the bourgeois press has
played down police brutality while
pillorying the workers for defending
themselves. In particular, it played up
an incident when a policeman hit his
head on a flying bottle. The Tories have
commended the police for their "res-
traint" as has Labour _Party Home
Secretary Merlyn Rees.
The response of the Labour Party
"moderates" has been continued sup-
port of APEX, but condemnation of the
violence, which they attribute to the "far
left" groups. The secretary of state for
employment, Albert Booth, "suggested"
in Commons debate: "I have every
reason to believe that the general
secretary of Apex will seek to cooperate
fully with the police in every way he can
to avoid any further violence or distur-
bances outside the plant" (Times [Lon-
don], I July).
Booth has set up a Court of Inquiry,
headed by Sir Leslie Scarman, the High
Court judge who oversaw the official
whitewash of the 1974 police murder of
a young leftist during an anti-fascist
demonstration in London's Red Lion
Square. It also includes one employers'
"representative" and one union official,
to provide a veneer of neutrality. The
Court itself has no legal power: Ward
repeatedly states that he will not be
bound by it if the decision is against him,
and he has been backed by the NAFF in
this.
This hard-fought and protracted
strike is an important test of strength for
the trade-union movement. It is also an
opportunity for mobilising the union
ranks around a popular, militant
struggle of the sort which the anti-
working-class "Social Contract" is
intended to avoid. Because it involves a
marginal group of workers, a number of
union leaders have been coming to the
Grunwick's picket lines, something they
struggle for union recog-
mtlOn at a small film processing plant in
northern London, now in its eleventh
month, has suddenly become front-page
news. The recent introduction of mass
picketing at the struck plant and the
violent police response have turned the
dispute into a focal point of sharpening
class polarisation in Britain. The Tories
siding with the employers, bewail
power of the unions and the closed shop.
The Labour Party leaders, reluctantly
forced to give verbal support to the
strikers, defend the right of union
recognition in the abstract while seeking
to gain credibility for the state as a
"neutral mediator." At the same time as
the government they bear responsibility
for the actions of the police, who daily
rough up picketers in the course of
enforcing capitalist "law and order."
The dispute began last August when a
worker at Grunwick Film Processing
was sacked for "talking back" to a boss.
Fifty workers walked out soon after to
be joined a week later by another 1'00.
Mrs. Jayaben Desai, one of the first to
walk out and now one of the most
prominent members of the strike com-
mittee, suggested that they join a union.
The strikers contacted Jack Dromey, a
Tribunite who is secretary of the Brent
Trades Council. Dromey put them in
touch with the Trades Union Congress
(TUC). The TUC, in turn, referred the
striking workers to the right-wing
Association of Professional, Executive,
Clerical and Computer Staff (APEX).
On 31 August 1976 APEX declared
the strike official. By this time 137
workers, primarily Asian, were involved
(91 full-time workers and 48 students).
Two days later George Ward, managing
director of Grunwick, told them they
were fired. The workers took the dispute
to an industrial tribunal, claiming unfair
dismissal, but lost the case. The tribunal
upheld Ward's contention that the
workers were sacked for "breach of
contract," not for joining a union.
After six weeks of fruitless picketing,
APEX asked the government's Adviso-
ry, Conciliation and Arbitration Service
(ACAS) to recognize its right to
represent the Grunwick workers. Set up
under the 1975 Employment Protection
Act, ACAS attempted to poll the
Grunwick workers to see if they wanted
a union to represent them. Ward, on the
advice of the ultra right-wing National
Association For Freedom (NAFF), has
consistently refused to cooperate with
ACAS and denied it access to his
remaining 216 employees. On 9 March,
ACAS, only able to ballot the striking
workers (91 out of 93 for union
representation), issued a report con-
cluding that Grunwick should recognize
APEX. Grunwick responded by taking
. the matter to the High Court, claiming
that the ballot was carried out improp-
erly since not all the workers had been
polled (i.e., the 216 or so scabs).
Back in November, the strike
committee had requested blacking [hot
cargoing] of supplies to Grunwick. The
Cricklewood Post Office workers com-
plied by refusing to deliver mail to the
plant. Using the NAFF solicitors, Ward
applied to the High Court to order the
resumption of deliveries, and the Postal
Workers union backed down. Since
June 17, however, the Cricklewood
workers have continued the blacking
8 JULY 1977
Varga Commission Finishes Work
The Commission Meets
ing to the iSt, an enraged LIRQI'
accused the iSt of being agents of the
OCI because of our principled refusal
to participate in the captive LIRQI
commissions. As we said in our "Decla-
ration" (WV No. 85, 14 Nov. 1975):
"We cannot take part in a cynical
operation totally devoid of the most
minimal democratic principles, whose
only aim appears to be to whitewash
Varga in the hope of factional advan-
tage against the OCI. We are equally
against whitewashes and frame-ups."
On La's initiative, a real commission
of inquiry was formed in March 1976.
From April until December 1976, the
Commission gathered testimony, docu-
ments, whatever was relevant to the
"Varga affair."
At the beginning, the OCI took a very
aggressive attitude toward the Commis-
sion. It repeatedly stated that the
Commission should confine itself to
"authenticating" the documents from
Varga's archives, and congratulated
itself that the members of the Commis-
sion "admitted" the documents' authen-
ticity. The OCI suggested over and over
in /0 (in June 1976 and again in
October) that the iSt shared its accusa-
tions against Varga. To make this
amalgam, the OCI quoted our criticisms
of Varga (passing over in silence our
criticisms of the OCI) in a way calculat-
ed to suggest that we shared its charac-
terization of Varga. It was only after the
iSt addressed a letter of protest to 10
that the OCI ceased to put forth this
kind of amalgam.
In throwing up this smokescreen, the
OCI hoped to obscure the fact that the
real question was whether or not the
documents confirmed the OCI's accusa-
tions. It is now established that they do
not confirm the charges, which are
therefore revealed as slanders. All the
more so since the OCI representatives
systematically refused to present other
elements which might have aided in
"proving" the a<:cusations; it must be
concluded that "other" proofs do not
exist.
The OCI's attitude toward the Com-
mission came out in its refusal (despite
its protestations to the contrary) to
make the entire archives available to the
Commission or to groups which had
requested them. Testifying before the
Commission on 22 April 1976, Claude
Chisserey of the OCI leadership claimed
that the 80 percent of the archives which
the OCI kept to itself consisted of
bulletins and documents internal to the
OCI and thus he "saw no point" in
turning them over to the
which, said Chisserey, alluding disin-
genuously to the exchange of internal
bulletins between the OCI and SWP, the
Commission was certainly familiar with
already. But the SWP representative
later stated that the SWP had never
received any such bulletins.
Later, the OCI refused to allow Pierre
Broue and Jean-Jacques Marie (who
had collaborated with Varga on the
journal of his Institute) or Roger
Monnier (with whom Varga had left his
archives) to testify before the
Commission.
Toward the end of the Commission's
deliberations, the OeI found itself
continued on page IO
WORKERS VANGUARD
Jaume Mar
doubt hoping the Commission would
never see the light of day. Since at least
the end of 1974 the SWP had been
maneuvering with the OCI to facilitate
the latter's entry into the USee, and it
was obvious that a condemnation of the
OCl's lies by an impartial and authori-
tative commission of inquiry would
damage these maneuvers.
As for the LCR and La, they never
objected in principle to participating in
a commission which included the
LIRQI. La went so far as to say that it
was prepared to accept the OCI into a
commission alongside the LIRQI! The
iSt "Declaration" of 3 November was
drawn up after a meeting on 30 October
1975 during which the LCRand LO had
agreed to participate in a commission on
the bases proposed by the LIRQI-i.e.,
condemning in advance the OCl's
accusations. At the meeting where our
declaration was read, however, the LCR
and La pulled back from the LIRQI
"commission"-not for reasons of prin-
ciple, but solely for reasons of "effi-
ciency" and "credibility."
Thus the Vargaites were in a position
to accuse the LCR and La of capitulat-
ing to the iSt. This accusation was not
totally unfounded, as the LCR's and
LO's hesitations are to be explained
above all by their factionally motivated
desire to condemn the OCI. Any means
would have sufficed, including the
LIRQl's "commission." If these organi-
zations surrendered to the principled
arguments of the representative of the
LTF-a tiny organization compared to
the LCR and LO-it is no doubt
because they believed that a condemna-
tion of the OCI by a commission which
did not include the LIRQI would have
greater authority. The recognized au-
thority of the iSt regarding the "Varga
affair" also stemmed from the fact that
we were the only organization to check
the OCl's translations of Varga's
materials.
When its maneuver blew up in its face,
the LIRQI set up its own "commission
of inquiry," of which it was in fact the
only component. Not content with
accusing the LCR and La of capitulat-
...
,.
. 1\
'-.
organizations in France and elsewhere
to mask its right turn.
But the OCI did not reckon with the
iSt. After seven months of repeated
requests, the OCI released a part (20
percent, by its own account) of the
"Varga archives" in August 1974. Seven
months to xerox 200 pages!
Meanwhile, Varga was pursuing his
mendicant methods. In the late 1950's he
had sought funds from the U.S. State
Department. Now his organization was
running after the iSt, not in order to
engage in political discussion but simply
cynically in the naive hope of getting
financing for its own "international
conference."
In February 1975 the Spartacist ten-
dency took the step of publishing a long
article entitled "A Workers Commission
Must Try Varga." The article's main
positions on Varga and the OCI's
baseless accusations were eventually
confirmed by the deliberations of the
Commission of Inquiry; our stand
might have been drawn directly from the
Commission's conclusions. We wrote:
"Unfortunately, the irresponsible crim-
inal conduct of the OCI, which refused
to present its case against Varga
honestly before the workers movement,
is surpassed only by the astonishingly
light-minded response of the Varga
group to accusations which, if they are
founded on' fact, would define this
tendency as a sinister clique."
-Spartacist [Mition
February 1975
While denouncing the OCI's Stalinist
methods as "foreign to the methodology
and morality of Bolshevism," we estab-
lished that in his letters Varga "showed
himself to be anti-Semitic, racist and
utterly cynical ... a basically dishonest
individual [acting] in bad faith."
From February until November 1975
the iSt, represented by its French
sympathizing section, the Ligue Trot-
skyste de France (LTF), led the battle
for an impartial commission, without
the participation of the accused LIRQI.
The record of this fight is detailed in our
"Declaration to the Commission of
Inquiry on the Varga Affair" of 3
November 1975. During this entire
period the SWP held itself aloof, no
Michel Varga
The documents reproduced in' this
bulletin testify to the struggle by the
international Spartacist tendency (iSt)
to construct, and then to carry through
to a conclusion, the work of a commis-
sion of inquiry to investigate the "Varga
affair." They document efforts by the
Organisation Communiste Internatio-
naliste (OCI) and the Vargaite group
(LIRQI, which now styles itself the
"Fourth International") first to block
even the existence of an impartial
commission in the tradition of the
Dewey commission of inquiry into the
Moscow Trials, and then to create
obstacles to the Commission's work.
And they reveal the equivocations of the
other organizations-the Ligue Com-
muniste Revolutionnaire (LCR), Lutte
Ouvriere (La) and the American Social-
ist Workers Party (SWP)-which par-
ticipated in the Commission.
Origins of the Commission
4
The following article is slightly adapted
from the introduction to a bulletin of
documents concerning the Commission
of Inquiry into the" Varga affair," to be
published shortly by the ligue Trot-
skyste de France, sympathizing section
ofthe international Spartacist tendency.
The French-language bulletin will con-
tain documentation of the iSt's battle
for an impartial commission of inquiry
as well as selections from testimony to
the Commission and documents made
available to it. The bulletin can be
ordered from Pascal Alessandri, B. P.
336, 75011 Paris, France, or from
Spartacist Publishing, Box /377, GPO,
New York,. NY 10001.
Although increasingly sharp political
differences separated the OCI and
Varga since at least September 1972, it
was not until the end of June 1973, after
the "discovery" of Varga's archives
around May 1973, that the OCI publicly
accused Varga-falsely, as the Commis-
sion established-of being an agent of
the Stalinist secret police (Informations
Ouvrieres, 27 June 1973) and, later, of
the CIA as well. It subsequently took
more than six months for the OCI to
state that working-class organizations
could examine these archives, and it was
not until March 1974 that a pamphlet
announced in the first 10 article finally
appeared.
The "Varga affair" went hand in hand
with a very rapid right turn of the OCI,
expressed above aU by its capitulation
before the popular front in the 1973 and
1974 elections, as well as its rapproche-
ment, beginning in early 1973, with the
reformist SWP. In a centrist organiza-
tion such as the OCI, the formation of a
left tendency opposing the leadership's
right turn might have been expected.
And in fact wobbles showed up in 10
which looked like the stirrings of left
oppositionists in the OCI. But the
"Varga affair" cut short any potential
crystallization ora serious left tendency
in the OCI. Just as the Vargaites
cynically sought to take up positions to
the left of the OCI, so too the OCI took
advantage of its accusations against
Varga to seal off anything resembling an
opposition. It was obvious that at the
outset the OCI was counting on the
disinterest of th,e ostensibly Trotskyist
OCI Slanders, But Varga Still Dubious
Figure
Conclusions the Committee of Inquiry into
the Varga' Affair

Draft Condusions on the Varga

Affair Submitted by the iSt
[Revolutionary Workers League](name
adopted by the French section of the
LI RQI), the OCI representatives denied
this, or refused to reply.
2) It was at the request of the LIRQI
that the organizations making up the
Commission of Inquiry to form
it. But the LIRQI demanded that the
Commission of Inquiry be formed on
the basis of an a priori recognition that
the OCI's accusations were slanders.
Seeing that the organizations in ques-
tion did not share its point of view, the
LIRQI then formed its own commission
of inquiry, the "Commission of Inquiry
against the Slanders about Michel
Varga," of which it is in fact the only
member. Subsequently, on occa-
si'on, LlRQI members agreed to testify
before the Commission on the question
of the [OCl's] use of violence. ReJecting
the Commission in advance as a
"maneuver," Michel Varga explicitly
refused any collaboration with the
Commission.
Despite the attitude of the OCI and
the LOR toward the Commission of
Inquiry, the undersigned members of it
have arrived at the following conclu-
sions, which they share in common:
I) Was Varga a KGB agent?
The OCI has not furnished any
evidence proving that Michel Varga had
relations with the KGB or the Soviet
government. According to the words of
the OCI leaders themselves, this accusa-
tion is based solely on "political
reasoning."
According to the Commission, this
accusation is therefore unproved.
2) Was Varga a CIA agent?
In order to assert this, the OCI bases
itself mainly on the "Varga archives"
relating to the period 1957-1960.
These archives show that during this
period, after leaving Hungary and
before joining the OCI, Michel Varga
sought financial support from many
sources, including sources close to the
American government, the [U.S.] State
Department or the Free Europe Com-
mittee, in order to finance the Imre
Nagy Institute. The archives show that
he actively sought this money, knowing
full well what he ,was doing and
attempting to hide the source of the
money.
But these archives do not prove that
at this time Varga was a CIA agent.
They do not prove that Varga was a CIA
agent after he joined the ranks of the
OCI in 1962, nor that he had contact
with the CIA during this period.
According to the Commission. the
accusation that he belonged to the CIA.
is therefore unproved.
3) Did the DCI know of Vqrga's past
before accepting him in its ranks?
There are no documents which make
it pQ,ssible to answer this question.
In the LIRQI's publications,
Varga has asserted that the O<;Iras
fully informed about his past
joined its ranks. But Michel Varga
refused to give his testimony to the
Commission.
As for the OCI, it has reasserted that
it did not know of Varga's past as it
appears in light of the archives. Pierre
Lambert repeated this in his testimony
before the Commission of Inquiry.
The Commission also heard the
testimony of Albi and Kaldy, two
Hungarian militants presently members
of the LCR and LO respectively, who
worked with Varga after 1962 in his
Hungarian Trotskyist organization, the
LRSH [Revolutionary League of Hun-
garian Socialists]. According to their
continued on page 11
5
Michel Varga (the political pseudo-
nym used by Balasz Nagy) is today the
main leader.of the Ligue Internationale
de Reconstruction de la Quatrieme
Internationale (International League
Reconstructing the Fourth Interna-
tional-LIRQI), which now simply pro-
claims itself the "Fourth International."
After the 1956 uprising in Hungary he
emigrated to West Europe and, in the
la.te 1950's, became a founder of the
"Imre Nagy Institute of Political
Science" and of its journal, ttudes. The
purpose of this institute, as Varga
presented it in 1958, was to analyze
problems of socialism, particularly the
problems of Hungary from 1948 to
1956. For these projects Varga entered
The Commission of Inquiry was
formed by Lutte Ouvrie're, the Ligue
Communiste Revolutionnaire, the So-
cialist Workers Party and the interna-
tional Spartacist tendency, with the sole
aim of arriving at conclusions about the
"Varga affair." Although composed of
organizations otherwise having serious
political differences among themselves,
the Commission is united in its determi-
nation to safeguard the workers move-
ment against the alien practices of
violence and slander and to denounce
such practices whenever they "may
occur, thereby rejecting any attempt to
turn it into the tool of any political
alliance or regroupment.
On the basis of testimony and
documents presented to it, the Commis-
sion of Inquiry has arrived at the
following conclusions:
I. The Commission notes that,
although representatives of the OCI
twice appeared before it, the OCI infact
refused to collaborate with the Commis-
sion of Inquiry, above all by not turning
over to it the tntire documentation at its
disposal; and by refusing to allow
testimony from its members who, based
on their own experience, could have
answered the Commission's ques-
tions-on the pretext that the Commis-
sion should limit itself to stating
whether or not the documents presented
by the OCI were authentic or not.
2. The Commission also denounces
the attitUlJe of the LIRQI and its
organizations toward the Commission.
With the failure of the LI RQI's attempts
to prevent the creation of an
independent Commission of Inquiry in
the best traditions of the workers move-
ment-in particular that represented by
the Dewey Commission-the LIRQI set
up a so-called "impartial" commission
composed overwhelmingly of its own
organizations! The LIRQI's slanders of
the Commission, which it terms "Lam-
bertist agents," merely show its impo-
tent fury following the refusal by the
organizations which formed the Com-
mission to cover for its maneuvers.
3. The OCI did not present any
sufficient proof to demonstrate the
correctness of its accusations against
Balasz Nagy. known as Varga;
namely that Michel Varga was suppo-
sedlya paid agent of the CIA and KGB.
Moreover, the OCI dishonestly manipu-
lated the quotations it extracted from
Varga's letters. The testimony, docu-
ments and information gathered by the
Commission lead to the conclusion that
these accusations can only be consid-
8 JULY 1977
into contact with various groups and
individuals in the workers movement.
In 1961 Michel Varga broke with the
Institute and the journal. In 1962 he
joined the Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste (OCI). Toward the end
of 1972 a split occurred between a group
led by Varga and the OCI. The group
founded by Varga first took the name
OCI-LIRQI Faction.
In 1973 the OCI published material
(translated from Hungarian) excerpted
from Varga's archives which it had
obtained. This material dealt with the
period of 1957-1960, and the excerpts
published by the OCI are mostly parts of
Varga's correspondence. On the basis of
these excerpts, the OCI accused Varga
ered false, and therefore lying and
slanderous.
4. It goes without saying that the
Commission of Inquiry condemns the
OCI's procedures, which are of a
Stalinist nature. The OCI may have
been familiar with the "Varga archives."
It is quite probable that it at least knew
of their existence. The OCI therefore
had -a special responsibility to try to
examine these archives, given the
central importance of a complete and
unambiguous break with imperialism
on the part of those who claim to have
broken with the Stalinist bureaucracies
in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Thus
the OCI chose to launch a slanderous
campaign, sole aim was to
intimidate and discredit Varga, only
after his political differences with the
OCI appeared. .
5. The Commission condemns the
scandalous lightmindedness of Michel
Varga, who refused to appear before it
or to make any deposition. He has
thereby refused to clarify his present
position vis-a-vis his past activities.
Consequently, the Commission can
only note the fact that between 1957 and
1960-61 Varga consciously solicited
funds from sources functioning as
agents of American imperialism, and
even from the U.S. State Department.
And although Varga himself publicly
admitted having undertaken conscious-
ly anti-eommunist activities in order to
"combat Marxism," he has never
explained-nor' has he explicitly
renounced-certain formulations to be
found in his at that time, which
enable us to-characterize his attitudes as
anti-Semitic and racist, Varga therefore
appears as a highly dubious figure.
6. According to depositions taken by
the Commission of Inquiry, the OCI has
for a long time practiced violence
against competing organizations in the
workers movement. The OCI simply
used its unfounded accusations against
Varga as a pretext-following the
emergence of political differences-to
physically attack members of organiza-
tions which included Varga. The Com-
mission vigorously condemns the OCI
for its slanders and its violence of a
purely Stalinist sort, alien to the best
practices of the workers movement.
In addition, the fact that the LIRQI
invoked bourgeois justice against mem-
bers of the OCI demonstrates that
despite its protestations, it does not
fundamentally differ from the OCI on
the question of workers democracy.
[Paris, December 1976]
of being an agent of the CIA and the
KGB.
On 27 March 1976the LigueCommu-
niste Revolutionnaire, Lutte Ouvriere,
Socialist Workers Party USA, the
international Spartacist tendency and
the Workers Socialist League (Great.
Britain) decided to form a Commission
of Inquiry on the basis of the following
declaration:
"Some time ago, the Organisation
Communiste Internationaliste (OCI)
put forth certain accusations, asserting
that Balasz Nagy, known as Michel
Varga, was an 'agent paid by the CIA'
and 'a GPU provocateur.' The leaders
of the LI RQI, the of which
Michel Varga is a member, have called
for a 'workers commission of inquiry' to
take a position on 'the campaign of
unfounded accusations launched by the
DCI leadership' as well as on 'the
extension of these accusations to the
International League [LlRQI] as such,
going as far as repeated physical attacks
upon militants of the DCI-LIRQI
faction [the French LIRQI group]. in
particular during the joint demonstra-
tions against Francoism and the leaflet-
ting outside the meeting to free Soviet
mathematician Leonid Plyushch.'
"We consider that such accusations
against a militant or an organization are
sufficiently serious that it is incumbent
upon the entire revolutionary move-
ment to determine whether or not they
are justified. That is why we have
decided to constitute ourselves as a
Commission of Inquiry for the purpose
of inviting the OClleadership to present
all evidence it claims to possess, and in
order to request all those who could
furnish evidence concerning this matter
to come and testify.
"The Commission's goal is a scrupulous
verification of the facts and documents,
which it will make public. In order for
this verification to take place with the
greatest possible authority. it invites all
organizations claimingadherence to the
revolhtionary workers movement to
participate actively in its deliberations,"
-signed by representatives of:
Lutte Ouvriere
Ligue Communiste
Revolutionnaire
Socialist Workers Party
international SJ?artacist tendency
Workers SocialIst League
After a year of proceedings. the
Commission of Inquiry now feels that it
has come to its end. It has recorded
and sought to verify it to the
degree possible.
For practical the represen-
tative of the Workers Socialist League
was unable to participate regularly in
the Commission's work. Five persons
participated regularly: Andre Frys
(LO), Andre Roussel (LO), Gus Horo-
witz (SWP), Georges Marion (LCR) and
Jean Lesueur (iSt). This report is
made by the following three participants
in the Commission of Inquiry: Gus
Horowitz (SWP), Jean Lesueur (iSt),
Georges Marion (LCR).
Preliminary Conclusions
The members of the Commission of
Inquiry, at the end of their proceedings,
wish to formulate thefollowing prelimi-
nary observations dealing with the
ongoing development of the inquiry
itself.
I) On two occasions members of the
OCI-first Claude Chisserey and Ge-
rard Bloch, then Pierre Lambert-
agreed to answer the Commission's
questions. But numerous letters and
requests by the Commission of Inquiry
for testimony from other members of
the OCI remain unanswered by the OCI.
Pierre Lambert, for one, stated concern-
ing this matter: "We will not allow the
Commission of Inquiry to investigate
inside the OCI. The goal of your
Commission is to state whether the
documents produced by the OCI are
-authentic or not." Concerning the use of
violence by members of the OCI against
the LlRQI, subsequently the LOR
II
, '1
Basic Conclusions
I

I.
I
I
I'
L
r
r
Red Army commander-in-chief Marsl
chevsky, assassinated by Stalin.
WORKERS VANGUARD
Nazi file photograph of Leopold Treppe
possibilities seemed remote. Such situa-
tions produced cadres who had acquired
certain military-technical skills, had
been battle-tested and hardened
through clandestinity and lacked cur-
rent opportunities in their native coun-
tries. Thus there were, for instance, a
number of German participants in the
abortive October 1923 uprising who
subsequently carried out military
missions for the Comintern. Among the
authors of the classic 1928 handbook on
Armed Insurrection (published under
the pseudonym of A. Neuberg, but
actually jointly produced by Red Army
and Comintern specialists) were Erich
Wollenberg and Hans Kippenberger.
And the Comintern military /
intelligence emissaries to China in the
late 1920's included Wilhelm Zaisser
(who later gained fame as "General
Gomez," commander of the Interna-
PART 1 OF 2
Who Were the Soviet Spies?
totalitarianism" in the USSR. One of
the standard distortions of Soviet
history is the claim that Stalin's crimes
were the natural outgrowth of the Red
Army, secret police and intelligence
apparatus set up under Lenin and
Trotsky. Thus a recent academic study
asserts:
"It was under Lenin's guidance and
direction that the salient features of the
secret police... were crystallized. After
Lenin's death. the secret police was
gradually transformed into an instru-
ment of Stalin's personal dictatorship.
But it was Lenin, the founder' of the
Soviet state. not Stalin. who entrenched
the power of the secret police and
created the institutional foundations for
rule bv terror."
. Leonard Gerson. The Secret
Police in unin's Russia (1977)
Or take the reactionary ideologue
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a speech to
the American AFL-CIO he favorably
compared tsarist Russia and the Span-
ish Inquisition (!) t<r the Bolsheviks'
revolutionary justice, concluding:
"there never was any sJ.lch thing asStal-
inism.... in reality Lenin had managed
to give shape to all the main features
before Stalin came to power. ... He is
the one who created the Cheka, the
secret police, and the concentration
camps" (Warning to the West, 1976).
But contrary to Solzhenitsyn's slander-
ous attempt to blame Stalin's Gulag on
B.olshevism, the military and security
organs of the Soviet state originally
attracted some of the most scrupulous
and self-sacfificing revolutionaries.
The successors to the VChK
(acronym for the All-Russian Extraord-
inary Commission, popularly
to as the GPU (State
Political Administration) and later
NK became from the mid-
1920's on an arm of Stalinist terror. But
many of the more honorable. elements
sought refuge in the Comintern appara-
tus and the Red Army's Fourth Depart-
ment. There they attempted to escape
politics by burying themselves in techni-
cal work, assuaging their consciences
with the thought that at least they were
aiding the defense of the USSR from its
imperialist enemies.
It was from this layer that Trepper,
Reiss and of the most
celebrated and effective Soviet intelli-
gence officers of the
drawn. Trotsky wrote of Reiss and those
like him. "Men keep hoping fur a
miracle which will on the morrow switch
the policy of the ruling clique back to the
old in this hope they keep
toiling on." But in the end, because they
failed to with the Stalinist
bureaucracy, they were pulverized not
only physically but also morally, as
Trepper put it, "between the hammer of
Hitler and the anvil of Stalin."
For the bourgeois mind, which sees
all spies as daredevils and bon vivants.
driven by purely personal concerns such
as money and adventure, the Soviet
intelligence network was a closed book.
They could marvel at did Hitler,
who declared in 1942 that "The Bolshe-
viks are our superiors in only one field.
espionage"-but they could not under-
stand or imitate it. While all the Soviet
networks, which provided the highest
quality intelligence during World War
II. relied on traditional sources-
disgruntled ruling-class individuals with
access to vital secrets--at their core
stood long-time revolutionary militants
who had been won to the communist
cause in the days of Lenin and Trotsky.
. These militants came from
remarkably similar backgrounds. Typi-
cally they were members of Communist
parties in countries where revolutionary
struggles had been smashed and future
Ignace Reiss
Pathfinder Press
McGraw-Hili.
General Jan Berzin, victim of the
purge.
Game. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1977), concerning the origins and
activities of the Red Orchestra, the
subsequent Funkspiel ("radio game")
that outsmarted his Nazi captors, and
Trepper's years in Stalinist prisons after
the war. Hoping'to tap the huge markets
for Second World War literature and
escapist spy novels of the Ian Fleming
genre, advertising for The Great Game
describes it as packed with "all the
unbearable suspense of the very best
espionage thriller." But this and rdated
books are more than mere thrillers: they
starkly confirm Trotsky's contention
that the Kremlin was "the central nest of
defeatism" and provide revealing in-
sights into the tragedy of a generation of
communists caught in Stalin's coun-
terrevolutionary web.
Although they lacked the political
fortitude to join the Trotskyist Left
Opposition-except for Ignace Reiss
(Poretsky), who was assassinated six
weeks after his 1937 declaration for the
Fourth of the
Soviet intelligence agents of the period
were not at all the sadistic torturers and
assassins generally (and correctly) asso-
ciated with the Stalinist secret police.
Both Trepper and Sorge, along with
many others of lesser fame in the Soviet
military/intelligence apparatus, an-
guished over Stalin's treacherous poli-
cies and his murderous liquidation of
the remnants of Lenin's Bolshevik
party. But they remained paralyzed with
fear.
The very existence of this layer
Trotsky called the "Reiss faction" of the
the heart of the Soviet
state apparatus flies in the face of
bourgeois theories of "Communist
A review of: The. Great Game, by
Leopold Trepper; The Red
Orchestra, by Gilles Perrault;
Our Own People, by Elisabeth
Poretsky; Codename Dora: Me-
moirs of a Russian Spy, by
Sandor Rado.
Heroic Soviet" Spies
On 21 June 1941 more than 150
divisions of Hitler's Wehrmacht in-
vaded the USSR in what was intended
as the classic Blitzkrieg of all time,
"Operation Barbarossa." Launching a
surprise attack along a front extending
from the Baltic to the Black Sea,
German army Panzers quickly drove
hundreds of kilometers deep into Soviet
territory. The Russian border troops,
completely unprepared, fell back in a
total rout. Within five days the White
Russian capital of Minsk was taken and
in the north Finnish troops stood at the
gates of Leningrad. "The greater part of
the Russian air force was wiped out in
"Soviet Totalitarianism"?
In recent years there have appeared in
the West a number of books dealing
with the exploits of leading Soviet spies
during the World War II period. The
latest, and best, in this field is the
memoirs of Leopold Trepper, The Great
6
the first few days; the Russians lost
thousands of tanks; hundreds of thou-
sands, perhaps as many as a million
Russian soldiers were taken prisoner in
a series of spectacular encirclements
during the first fortnight" (Alexander
Werth, Russia at War, 1941-1944).
Just a few hours before the Nazi
attack began, the Soviet army air force
attache to the Petain government in
Vichy, in Moscow for
called into the office of
Marshal Golikov, director of the Fourth
Department (military intelligence) of
the Red Army. A message was to be
taken to a key Soviet intelligence officer
operating from Paris. "You can tell
. Otto," Golikov had told the attache,
"that I have passed on the information
on the imminence of the German attack
to the big boss [Stalin]. The big boss is
amazed that a man like Otto, an old
militant and an intelligence man, has
allowed himself to be intoxicated by
English propaganda. You can tell him
again that the big boss is completely
convinced that the war with Germany
will not start before I944"!
"Otto" was the code name of Leopold
Trepper, the head of the Soviet spy
. network operating in Nazi-occupied
western Europe which was to become
famous as the "Red Orchestra," the
name assigned to it by Germany army
counterintelligence. With sources at the
highest level of the Wehrmacht com-
. mand in Berlin, the "Red Orchestra"
had for months been supplying
with detailed information about the
- impending attack, including the pro-
posed plan of batttle. Nor was it alone.
Another Soviet spy, Richard Sorge in
Tokyo. had obtained the exact date of
the invasion and the precise number of
divisions involved. But these reports
were routinely stamped "double agent"
or "BritislT source." Stalin placed his
trust instead in the Molotov-
Ribbentrop pact which had been
signed with :"J"azi Germany in 1939. The
entire Soviet people paid dearly, at a
cost of millions of lives. for this criminal
negligence of the defense of the USSR.
This was the price for the Kremlin's
reliance on deals with the imperialists
instead of mobilizing the world prole-
tariat to overthrow its exploiters.

I
'5
I
I
II
tional Brigades in the Spanish civil war)
and the notorious adventurer Hans
Neumann.
A similar case was that of Richard
Sorge, who joined the German Commu-
nist Party in 1919 and spent the next
several turbulent years in clandestine
work among the mine workers of the
Ruhr, going to Moscow after the
collapse of the 1923 insurrection.
Another Soviet intelligence officer, who
later defected to the West, expressed a
common viewpoint among these
militants:
"When we saw the collapse of the
Comintern's efforts, we said: 'Let's. save
what we can of the German revolution.'
We took the best men developed by our
Party Intelligence and the Zersetzungs-
dienst [sabotage squad] and incorporat-
ed them into the Soviet Military
Intelligence. Out of the ruins of the
Communist revolution we built in
Germany for Soviet Russia a brilliant
intelligence service. the envy of every
other nation."
-Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin's
Secret Service
While there were plenty of Germans
in the Soviet intelligence networks, the
core of the spy apparatus was made up
of homeless East Europeans-Latvians,
Hungarians and especially Polish Jews.
Many of the latter had emigrated to
Palestine in the early 1920's, joined the
Communist Party and later arrived by
one means or another in West Europe.
Trepper, for example, Was born in
Polish Galicia, joined the left-Zionist
Hashomer Hatzair youth group after
World War I. took part in a workers'
uprising in Krakau in 1923, was black-
listed by the Pilsudski dictatorship and
decided to flee to Palestine. There he
joined the Palestine Communist Party
and initiated the Ichud ("Unity") move-
ment of Jewish and Arab workers.
Leading a clandestine existence for
several years, after repeated arrests he
was finally deported to France.
In Paris he at first lived with a
childhood friend, Alter Strom, who had
left Palestine a year earlier than he.
Three years later, in 1932, he decided to
leave France when Strom was arrested
by the police as part of the "Fantomas"
Soviet espionage ring. (The head of the
network, Isaiah Bir, was yet another
Polish Jew who had immigrated to
France after a stint in Palestine.)
Thereupon Trepper went to the Soviet
Union, where he eventually came to the
attention of the military intelligence'
branch on the recommendation of
Strom. And when he returned to Fr-ance
in 1938 to set up the "Red Orchestra"
network, he turned to former associates
from his Palestine days, Leo Grossvogel
and Hillel Katz, both of whom had been
active in the Ichud movement.
This was not the only circle of emigre
Polish Jews working for Soviet intelli-
gence. Ignace Reiss was born in Austri-
an Galicia and after 1919 became a
member of the Polish Communist
Party. He worked for a time for the
Comintern apparatus in Vienna. then
entered his intelligence career by seeking
to obtain military information about
Pilsudski's forces during the Red Ar-
my's 1920 drive on Warsaw. A book by
Reiss's \"idow, Elisabeth Poretsky (Our
(Jim People, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press. 1969), recounts how
Reiss. Krivitsky and four otherlewish
bovhood friends from the same border
town all e\entuallv joined the Soviet
illtelilgcncc scnice.' .
The Dark Night of Stalinism
lIlc initial plans for a Soviet
intelligence network din;cted against
Hitkr's Rcich were laid in Moscow in
1937 by GencralJan Berzin, head of the
hlllrth Department. Berlin, a Latvian
Old Bolshevik. had spent years in jail for
anti-tsarist activities. During the Civil
War he commanded a regiment guard-
ing l.enin and the government. and he
had worked under Trotsky in setting up
the intelligence section. A c1ose-
associate of Red Army commander-.in-
chief M.N. Tukhachevsky, he was
already under the shadow of Stalin's
8 JULY 1977
blood purge. However, he was deter-
mined to go on defending the Soviet
Union and sought to get around the
Kremlin directive against setting up an
active network on German territory.
In selecting the comrades to lead such
vital and difficult work he sought out
those who in their own minds were still
seeking to aid world revolution. Trepper
says of his decision to join the Fourth
Department:
"Over and above our confusion and our
anguish was the necessity of defending
the Soviet Union, even though it had
ceased to be the homeland of the
socialism we had hoped for. This
obvious fact forced my decision, and
General Berzin's proposition allowed
me to save my conscience.... by fighting
far from Moscow, in the forefront of the
anti-Nazi struggle, I could continue to
be what I had always been: a militant
revolutionary."
Many others were attracted to the
Fourth Department out of similar
motives-an apparent escape route
from politics which would afford
veteran militants a limited, technical
avenue to continue to work for social-
ism. Elisabeth Poretsky describes an
archetypal case, that of the Hungarian
communist Theodore Maly. He joined
the Cheka during the Civil War, then
stayed on but finally could continue no
longer after the brutal massacres of the
Stalinist collectivization campaigns. "I
went to the foreign division of the
N.K.Y.D. and asked for an assignment
abroad.... I could not bear to live in the
Soviet Union any more. I had to run
away somewhere...." But there was no
escaping Stalinism for old party cadres:
either one succumbed to it or resisted,
and the chances of survival were not
qualitatively higher for the capitulators.
Maly was shot in 1937.
The purge of the Red Army began at
the top, with Marshal Mikhail Tukha-
chevsky. Tukhachevsky had been depu-
ty chief of staff when Trotsky was
commissar for the army but was
removed when Stalin's flunky Voroshi-
lov took over in 1925. According to
Wollenberg, "Tukha never published a
derogatory or even a critical statement
about Trotsky," and in his contribution
to the 1928 manual on armed insurrec-
tion quoted from one of the Red Army
founder's orders of the day. Stalin
doubtless planned for years to eliminate
the popular and rt:spected "Tukha," but
the Kremlin's fear of war with Japan in
the early 1930's forced Voroshilov to
take him back. Then in the summer of
1937 Moscow papers suddenly an-
nounced the arrest of the Red Army
commander and seven top generals, all
old Communists and heroes of the Civil
War, on charges of plotting with the
Nazis to stage a coup and restore
capitalism. The next day their execution
was reported.
The details of the Tukhachevsky
affair are still murky. Trepper says that
Gestapo sources told him they had
learned of plans for a coup and decided
to back Stalin by planting doctored
documents linking the Red Army
commander to the Nazis. But whether
or not Stalin had additional aid (as in
the case of Comintern organizational
secretary Ossip Piatnitsky, who was
framed by phony German documents),
his aim was to clean out the last, key
sector of the Soviet state apparatus. In
aiL 13 out of 19 army corps command-
ers, 110 out of 135 division and brigade
commanders, half the regimental com-
manders and most of the political
commissars were executed, and a total
of 25.000 Soviet officers were affected.
On the eve of World War II, the Red
Army was decapitated by Stalin and
nearly destroyed.
Trotsky analyzed the purges:
"The generals rushed to defend the Red
Army from the demoralizing intrigues
of the GPU. They defended the best
officers from false accusations. Thev
resisted the establishment of the GPU"s
dictatorship over the Red Army.. :. The
generals fought for the security of the
continued on page 11
Trepper on Stalin's
Sabotage of Soviet
Defense
-Excerpted from Leopold Trepper, The Great Game (New York, 1977)
On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Directive Number 21, better
known as Operation Barbarossa. The first sentence of this plan was
explicit: "The German armed forces must be ready before the end of
the war against Great Britain to defeat the Soviet Union by means of a
Blitzkrieg. "
Richard Sorge warned the Center immediately; he forwarded them a
copy of the directive. Week after week, the heads of Red Army
Intelligence received updates on the Wehrmacht's preparations. Atthe
beginni ng of 1941, SchuIze-Boysen sent the Center precise i nforma-
tion on the operation being planned: massive bombardments of Lenin-
grad, Kiev, and Vyborg; the number of divisions involved-I n February,
I sent a detailed 'dispatch giving the exact number of divisions
withdrawn from France and Belgium, and sent to the east. In May,
through the Soviet military attache in Vichy, General Susloparov, I
sent the proposed plan of attack, and indicated the original date, May
15, then the revised date, and the final date. On May 12, Sorge warned
Moscow that 150 German divisions were massed along the frontier. On
the 15th, he cited June 21 st for the beginning of the operations, a date
that was confirmed by Schulze-Boysen in Berlin....
He who closes his eyes sees nothing, even in the full light of day. This
was the case with Stalin and his entourage. The generalissimo
preferred to trust his political instinct rather than the secret reports
piled up on his desk. Convinced that he had signed an eternal pact of
friendship with Germany, sucked on the pipe of peace. He had
buried his tomahawk and he was not ready to dig it up yet.
Thirty years after the war was over, Marshal Golikov, writing in a
Soviet historical review, officially confirmed the value of the informa-
tion received. ...
'The Soviet Intelligence Services had learned in good time the dates
of the attack against the USSR and had given the alarm before it was
too late.... The intelligence services provided accurate information
regarcijng the military potential of Hitler's Germany, the exact number
of armed forces, the quantities of arms, and the strategic plans of the
commanders of the Wehrmacht. .....
Marshal Golikov was in a good position to make such a statement.
From June, 1940, to July, 1941, he was the Director of Red Army
Intelligence. If the Russian chiefs of staff were so well informed, what
was the reason for the debacle after the German attack? The answer is
no doubt contained in a note Golikov himself addressed to his services
on March 20, 1941:
"All the documents claiming that war is imminent must be regarded
as forgeries emanating from British' or even German sources."
On the most important dispatches sent to him by Sorge, Schulze-
Boysen, and me, Golikov noted in the margin "Double agent" or
source......
On June 21, 1941, we had confirmation from Vasily Maximovich and
Schulze-Boysen that the invasion was set for the next day. There was
still time to put the Red Army in a state of alert. I rushed to Vichy with
Leo Grossvogel. ... 1 insisted that Susloparov send the dispatch. Late
that evening I went back to my hotel. At four in the morning the
manager woke me up, shouting in my ear,
"It's happened, Monsieur Gilbert! Germany is at war with the Soviet
Union!"
On the 23rd, WOlosiuk, the attache for the army air force under
Susloparov, arrived in Vichy, having left Moscow a few hours before
the outbreak of the war. He told me that before his departure, he had
been called in to see the Director, who had given him a message for me:
"You can tell Otto"-my code name-"that I have passed on the
information on the imminence of the German attack to the big boss.
The big boss is amazed that a man like Otto, an old militant and an
intelligence man, has allowed himself to be intoxicated by English
propaganda. You can tell him again that the big boss is completely
convinced that the war with Germany will not start before 1944-"
The "complete conviction" of the big boss, Stalin, wap to be
expensive. Having decapitated the Red Army in was
responsible for the first defeats-the inspired strategist then turned
over what was left of the army to Hitler's hordes. During the first hours
of the German offensive-in defiance of all the evidence, and because
he had the idea of a planted rumor so firmly in mind-he refused to
allow a counterattack....
The results: the airfields pounded by German bombers; the airplanes
smashed to pieces on the grounds; the German fighter planes masters
of the sky, transforming the Russian plains into graveyards strewn with
demolished tanks. On the evening of the 22nd, the leaders of the army,
whom Stal in had forbidden to put their troops on alert, received the
order to drive the enemy outside their borders. By this time the
hrmored divisions of the Wehrmacht had already penetrated several
hundred kilometers into Soviet territory.
It would take the sacrifices of a whole nation rising up against its
invader to reverse the military situation. But meanwhile, Stalin's error
would cost Russia millions of lives and prolong the war.
7
Letter from the RFU
Anita Bryant..'.
(continued from page 1)
als! You too can help draw the chariot of
your oppressor."
Like feminism and black nationalism,
the ideology of "gay liberation" is
rooted in the New Left polyvanguardist
notion that each stratum of the op-
pressed must "unite" in an "autonomous
movement" to fight their speical oppres-
sion. The commonality of "sexual
orientation" is presumed to transcend
class differences as workers and their
bosses, tenants and their landlords,
supposedly discover "unity" around
their "common interests."
What "common interests"? The work-
ing class and its allies have no stake in
the perpetuation of capitalist exploita-
tion and oppression. The bourgeoisie
and its professional servants in the
Democratic and Republican Parties
have a real material interest in the
maintenance of the capitalist system of
war, racism and oppression, including
its ideological and institutional props.
Homosexuality is seen as a threat to
bourgeois morality and the institution
of the family. Whether homosexuals are
. marginally and grudgingly tolerated or
are persecuted, reviled and ultimately
perhaps even slaughtered depends far
less on the size of "gay rights" demon-
strations than on the immediacy of
capitalism's need to frontally assault the
working class. In periods of crisis, when
fascist irrationality is revealed as capi-
talism's last resort, leftists, unionists,
minorities and social "deviants" will
discover just how much "common
interest" they have with the "democrat-
ic" bourgeoisie! The fundamental tenet
of "democracy" under capitalism is the
bourgeoisie's "right" to exploit the
working class; the rest is ultimately
dispensable. Only those who take the
liberation of the working masses as their
cause can effectively defend the rights of
homosexuals.
Fake-Lefts Patronize "Gay
Rights"
Political identity is not defined by
sexual orientation. Despite its militan-
cy, the "gay movement" will remain a
sandbox for Democratic Party cynics
and "lifestyle" radicals unless its most
thoughtful militants transcend their
parochialism and transform themselves
into disciplined class-struggle fighters.
But this challenging task has been made
immeasurably more difficult by the
fake-Marxist organizations. The vari-
ous Stalinists, with their anti-
homosexual backwardness, feed the
noxious anti-communism pervasive in
this petty-bourgeois milieu. Meanwhile
the tail-endists exemplified by the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) patron-
izingly enthuse over the classless "life-
style" radicalism of the "independent
gay movement," thereby in effect
recruiting for liberal Democratic
politicians.
Most notorious among the Stalinists
is the Maoist Revolutionary Commu-
nist Party, which labels homosexuality a
"sickness" and bars homosexuals from
membership. This attitude is common
to all "hard Stalinist" formations,
whether pro-Russian or pro-Chinese. It
owes less to "workerism" (gutless
capitUlation before the social backward-
ness of American workers) than to the
need to apologi.ze for the regimes of the
deformed workers states, which-
unable and unwilling to replace the
nuclear family-replicate the back-
wardness of capitalism, persecuting
homosexuals and glorifying the family
as "a fighting unit of socialism."
The opportunists of the SWP have
become the most sophisticated apolo-
gists for the "autonomous" organiza-
tions of homosexuals. Knowledgeable
homosexual radicals are infuriated to
find the SWP portraying itself as their
champion, for it was only a few years
ago that the SWP abandoned (but never
publicly acknowledged or repudiated)
8
its practice of barring homosexuals
from SWP membership. Irreconcilably
opposed to a class-struggle program for
democratic rights which can win homo-
sexual activists to the socialist cause, the
SWP recently used the "gay rights" issue
to serve as a left cover for Jj'mmy
Carter's anti-Soviet "human rights"
campaign (see box).
Youth Against War and Fascism
(YAWF), another cheerleader for mili-
tant parochialism of the oppressed, has
called a national demonstration under
the slogan "Demonstrate for Human
Rights." The Vietnamese workers and
. peasants massacred by U.S. imperialism
must be turning over in their graves as
the American fake-lefts lend credence to
the "human rights" pretensions of the
number-one imperialist chieftain.
YAWF boasts of its "Gay Caucus"; such
a structure, which would have no place
in a Leninist organization, indicates
only that YAWF views the struggle for
homosexual rights as the responsibility
of its homosexual members rather than
of the organization as a whole.
In the Leninist tradition, the
Spartacist League has always made the
demand for full democratic rights of
homosexuals a part of its program and
has defended homosexuals against
persecution and victimization. The
labor movement-and in particular the
teachers' unions-must resist the reac-
tionary crusaders' proposals to impose
Coglrades,
The article in the June 24 issue of WV,
"Lifestylers Attack Trotskyism at RFU
Conference," while it generally captured
the essence of the conference made an
error in analyzing the politi&1 evolution
of the Red Flag Union. The WVarticle
states, "Recoiling from Stalinist bigotry
against homosexuals, the RFU devel-
oped toward Trotskyism through its
study of Trotsky's theory of permanent
revolution...."
In point of fact, it was not primarily
Stalinist bigotry that impelled us toward
Trotskyism.
The RFU (until recently the Lavender
and Red Union) despite its Maoist
leanings was ostracized by the vast
majority of the Maoist left because we
are homosexuals. So while we were
sympathetic to this milieu we were never
fully a part of it.
The L&RU's anti-Stalinism repre-
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"heterosexuality oaths" as a require-
ment for employment. The struggle to
break the unions from backward capi-
talist ideology requires the construction
of class-struggle caucuses in opposition
to' the pro-capitalist pureaucracy which
prevents the power of the working class
from being mobilized against the forces
of oppression and reaction.
The SL has entered into a process of
discussion and common work with the
RFU(BT), with the aim of principled
fusion. A key to the convergence of the
two organizations has been the under-
standing that the class axis is primary
and that the fight against all special'
oppression rrnJ.st be led by the proletari-
an vanguard party.
Refusing to conciliate "lifestyle"
radicalism and autonomist illusions, the
SL and RFU(BT) seek to pose a class
axis in the fight against all special
oppression. Our insistence that sexuali-
ty is a private and not a political matter
may sometimes shock "gay activists"
accustomed to opportunist patronizing,
but our revolutionary program will
attract the most serious elements from
the "gay liberation" milieu.
Bryant's reactionary crusade only
underlines the urgency of the fight to
weld together a disciplined cadre of
proletarian fighters to counterpose a
socialist solution to capitalist
degradation.
sented an impressionistic revulsion
against the manifold atrocities of the
Stalinist regimes, and preceded our anti-
Maoism. Specifically, our position
centered on the elimination of party
democracy in the Bolshevik Party under
Stalin, Stalin's claim that socialism had
been built in the Soviet Union (though
we did not yet believe that socialism
could not be built in one country) and
the relative to sexuality
and the family.
Our movement from the point of
moral outrage against Stalinist atroci-
ties of all kinds to the current impending
fusion with the SL was primarily
brought about by the intersection of the
L&RU/ RFU with the SL and our
understanding of and commitment to
the building of a Leninist vanguard
communist party.
In the spring of 1976the L&RU began
being baited as Trotskyist despite the
fact that we didn't know much about
Trotskyism and (at that time) we didn't
care to know much. In addition, the
crushing defeats of the NYC workers,
the wilting of the Portuguese revolution,
the shameless antics of Chinese foreign
policy in Angola and elsewhere sent us
into a tailspin. W'e were not sufficiently
tainted by Maoism so as t() be incapable
of seeing a betrayal as a betrayal. Inca-
pable as we were of understanding these
phenomena we were headed directly for
political disillusionment and inactivity.
It was around this time that we began
. attending an SL class on Trotskyism.
We entitled our pamphlet on
Trotsky's theory of permanent revolu-
tion, "Permanent Revolution: A Vindi-
c,ation of Marxism," because it, along
with the Trotskyist understanding of the
Russian question, rehabilitated for us
the Marxist principles of proletarian
internationalism, workers democracy
and communist morality.
Given our contradictory status in the
Maoist camp and the petty-bourgeois
life-stylist gay liberation movement, we
were open to investigating Trotskyism.
Ultimately it was our understanding of
the crisis of revolutionary leadership
that has proved decisive in our move-
ment toward the SL, the nucleus of the
vanguard communist party.
Fraternally,
Mike Weinstein
(for the) Bolshevik Tendency of the
Red Flag Union
SWP Tails
carter's
"Human
Rights" Hoax
The ex-Trotskyist Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) has seized on
the recent demonstrations protest-
ing the persecution of homosex-
uals not only to pander to the most
backward elements of "gay rights"
activism but also to do its bit for
Carter's anti-Soviet "human rights"
campaign.
On June 28 the Coalition for
Lesbian and Gay Rights-a tho-
roughly reformist hodgepodge
which includes the SWP, the
National Gay Task Force, the
Feminist Liberation Front, the Gay
Activist Alliance, NOW, the NA-
ACP and the Prairie Fire Organiz-
ing Committee-held a "mass
meeting" (about 100 people
showed up) in New York "to build a
mass movement in the community
to fight for protective legislation for
Lesbians and Gays." The main
point on. the agenda was the
planning of a demonstration at the
United Nations in August around
the slogan "Defend Human Rights
for Lesbians and Gays."
A supporter of the Shachtmanite
Revolutionary Socialist League
who ,spoke in /(avor of both the
demonstration and the proposed
slogan, noted piously that it was
important to avoid being used as a
left cover for Carter's imperialist
campaign. This caveat
apparently stirred the Committee of
Lesbian and Gay Male Socialists-
which includes supporters of Inter-
national Socialists and the Marxist
Education Collective-to put for-
ward a motion from the floor "that
the tone and content of the demon-
stration explicitly differentiate our-
selves from Carter's Human Rights
campaign." The m()tion passed 55
to 54 with the SWPvotingagainst!
Soon after, this meeting of self-
appointed spokesmen of various
sections of the oppressed degenerat-
ed rapidly into screaming and race-
baiting. The final confrontation
was precipitated when a man in the
audience addressed himself to "the
lady in the back." The term "lady"
was too much for the "brothers and
sisters." The chairman, who called
for order, found herself the subject
of a motion to "condemn the chair
for preventing her sisters from
fighting a sexist attack!" Other
women stormed out of the meeting
shouting, "This isn't a coalition to
fight for our rights. It's a white,
male-supremacist, racist
organization!"
Two days later the SWP held a
public forum in Los Angeles on the
question of homosexual oppres-
sion. Represented on the panel were
the SWP, NOW and the ACLU.
There was also a lesbian feminist
and one Morris Knight, who played
the role of strikebreaker during a
protracted strike of workers at the
Gay Community Services Center
where he serves on the board of
directors.
The SWP chaired the meeting in
its usual fashion; i.e., appealing to
the most apolitical elements in the
audience and refusing to recognize
political opponents. When the
spokesman for the ACLU said that
communists, along with fascists and
the church, were the worst enemies
of homosexuals, the SWPers did
not utter a word of protest. Ques-
,tioned about this later, they assert-
ed that the comment was
"irrelevant."
WORKERS VANGUARD

Terry Moore/Newark Times

left, company-hired gun thugs in position behind barricade face striking Stearns miners, right, across "no man's land."
C o m ~ y ' Thugs Wound Striker
Solidarity with Stearns Miners I
Last week a striking coal miner was
shot by company gun thugs in Stearns,
Kentucky. While on picket duty June
23, the miner, Ray Hamlin, was hit in
the leg with a shotgun blast, indicating
that the strikebreaking criminals of the
Storm Security Service had advanced
from behind their mine site fortifica-
tions 200 yards from the picket line,
crept through a wooded "no man's land"
and fired from close range on the
pickets.
Tensions have skyrocketed in the
wake of the shooting and the miners
have called for a mass protest rally July
8. Plans by the Blue Diamond Coal
Company to begin bringing security
guards into the mine through the picket
line, ostensibly out of fear that
previously-used helicopters may be shot
down, could soon lead to an explosive
confrontation. When asked what will
happen if Blue Diamond tries to bring in
scabs to re-open the mine, United Mine
Workers (UMW) spokesman Chuck
Shuford told WV, "It'd be a holocaust."
The day after the shooting, 125
miners, their wives and children, dem-
onstrated in front of Blue Diamond's
Knoxville, Tennessee, headquarters.
Though the demonstration was planned
some weeks earlier, the pickets were
doubly incensed over the shooting the
night before. Angry miners marched
around the building taunting company
officials who peered out of office
windows above. A group of miners
attempted to enter the building. "We
want to see how you live," one striker
yelled at a Blue Diamond official, who
locked the door as three police cars
arrived at the scene. One UMW organiz-
er remarked to a reporter, "It was pretty
tough controlling some of these guys
when we got here this morning.... A lot
of these men were on the picket line last
night" (Louisville Courier-Journal, 25
June).
Nearly 160 miners have been on strike
since last July 17fora UMWcontract at
the Stearns Justus mine. Since Febru-
ary, when Blue Diamond hired the
security guards to break the picket line
and pave the way for scab labor, the
miners have been subjected to a hail of
gunfire almost every night, and some-
times in broad daylight. The company
goons are heavily armed with shotguns,
pistols, rifles and even high-powered
semi-automatic AR-15's, the "civilian"
version of the Army's M-16.
But the coal miners are not about to
8 JULY 1977
be run off. They have dug in on a piece
of property they bought on their side of
the picket line, built their own protective
sandbag barriers and have shown
militant determination to defend their
strike by the means necessary.
The strikers face not only an
intransigent anti-union boss and his
hired gunmen, but the pro-company
cops and courts as well. Kentucky state
police regularly escort company offi-
cials across the picket line but look the
other way when up to 500rounds a night
pour into the miners' picket camp. Unti!
the arrest of the guard charged with
shooting Hamlin, the police had not
arrested a single one of the trigger-
happy thugs. The apprehended guard
was immediately released when Storm
Security put up his bail.
In contrast, 27- miners plus UMW
organizer Lee Potter face up to 60 years
each in jail on felony charges based on
the trumped-up charges by the gun
thugs that miners have "assaulted"
them. Circuit Judge J. B. Johnson, who
is scheduled to hear the case, has already
shown what kind of "justice" the miners
can expect. He has forbidden mass
picketing, threatened to close down the
miners' picket camp, issued blanket
contempt citations against the union
(which even the Kentucky Supreme
Court had to throw out as illegal) and
forced the UMW to post a $100,000
bond to cOlier the possibility of future
"damages" to Blue Diamond property.
On the day of the recent shooting,
UMW director of organizing John Cox
sent a telegram to Kentucky governor
Julian Carroll protesting the rampant
violence against the miners and the
strikebreaking role of the state police,
and urgently requesting a meeting.
Predictably, the governor has not
responded. But that same night 29 state
police cars were reported massed at the
local courthouse, ready to sweep down
on the miners.
The Stearns strike has become the
flashpoint of class warfare in the
southeastern coalfields. The recent
escalation of violence has even caught
the attention of the bourgeois media,
which up to now have ignored the strike.
An NBC television crew was on hand
June 25, pinned down with the miners
by the murderous, unrelenting gunfire
from the mine guards. CBS toured the
mine site July I and the anti-labor New
York Times ran an article the same day
that struck an obnoxiously neutral
posture, commenting on the "irony" of
such violence in a strike centered on
mine safety and noting the long hours
and difficult working conditions of the
Storm Security guards!
But the strike has an importance far
beyond its media appeal. The attention
of coal operators and miners through-
out the region, which is still predomi-
nantly non-union, is riveted on this
The Stearns strikers face a barrage
not only from the mine guards but
from the courts. Twenty-seven of
the strikers and UMW organizer
Lee Potter go on trial in October,
charged with three felonies euh
and facing up to 60 years in jail.
These militants require the financial
assistance of all friends of the labor
movement. The Partisan Defense
Committee urges that donations for
legal expenses be sent to the Miners
Legal Defense Fund, 1521 16th
Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.
20036.
bitter test of strength. If the strike is
broken, many companies will try tojunk
the UMW when the current contract
expires December 6. A prime target for
an employer offensive would clearly be
the Brookside mine in nearby Harlan
County, organized in a 13-month strike
in 1973-74. Workers Vanguard was the
first left newspaper to publicize the
Stearns strike (see "Miners Resist Coal
Operators' Gun Thugs," WV No. 158,
20 May), and we have repeatedly
stressed the importance of winning this
crucial strike.
For its part, the employers' Bitu-
minous Coal Operators Association
(BCOA) has lined up solidly behind
Blue Diamond and its owner, Gordon
Bonnyman, who has kept the union out
of his other two mines at Scotia and
Leatherwood. The BCOA, determined
to crush the growing militancy and
wildcats which disrupt its dictatorial
control, is gearing up for a showdown
with the UMW and is backed up by the
Carter administration, whose energy
policy demands "labor peace" in the
coal fields.
The BCOA has repeatedly provoked
the Mine Workers, taking advantage of
the union's divided and spineless leader-
ship to try to batter the union to its
knees even before the expected coal
strike this winter. In the latest incident,
the BCOA refused to transfer available
cash to cover the Health and Retirement
Fund, causing big benefit cutbacks. This
sparked a wildcat, centered in West
Virginia, which grew to 35,000 miners
but was cut short by the annual two-
week vacation period which began June
24. Knowledgeable sources in the UMW
expect the strike to mushroom when the
vacation period ends.
UMW president Arnold Miller, with
no idea how to counter the bosses'
attacks or contain the ranks, is also
facing challenges of his recent narrow
re-election. These have a new impetus
since Miller's attempt to enforce the
highly unpopular health benefit cuts.
Lee Roy Patterson filed motions for a
new election July I and Miller's other
presidential opponent, Harry Patrick, is
also pushing for a rerun. Since Miller's
foes control the union's International
Executive Board, a new election is a
definite possibility Miller is expected to
appeal to the federal courts to avoid a
rerun, a move which will embroil the
union in renewed government interven-
tion on the very eve of a national strike.
While Patterson, Miller and Patrick
plot how to bring the strikebreaking
government into union affairs to feather
their own nests and how best to quash
the wildcats, none has given more than
lip service to the Steams strikers. Just as
the violent strike at Brookside required
a nationwide shutdown to win, so the
fight at Stearns cries out for solidarity
action by the entire UMW. The .coal
operators cannot be defeated byel{uivo-
cal compromises and evasive maneu-
vers. Their escalating provocations
must be met by a nationwide strike.
Coal miners must prepare now by
electing strike committees from their
ranks to take on the BCOA. The miners
cannot wait until one of their own is
killed on the battle lines at Stearns.
'Strike the coal fields! Stop the union
busters! Victory to the Stearns strike!
Euro-Communlsm: Joining
Carter's "Human Rights"
S
Campaign?
peaker:
ED CLARKSON
Spartacist League
Saturday. July 9 at 7:30 p.m.
215 W. 23rd Street (between 7th and
8th Avenues)
New York City
9
SPA R7A CIS T edition fran<;:aise
pour loute commande s'adresser it:
maintained that the main culprit
was... Varga! It is the responsibility of
the SWP above all that the Commis-
sion's conclusions do not state the
obvious: the lack of proof of the OCl's
accusations against Varga renders them
lying and slanderous. It was also the
SWP which insisted on weakening the
rejection of the accusations, substituting
"these accusations have not been
proved" for ..... have in no way been
proved."
As for LO and the LCR, in their
common aim of scoring points on the
OCI they maintained that Varga's past
was of interest only to his own organiza-
tion and that a condemnation of the
OCI would suffice. Thus LO refused to
draw the obvious conclusion about
Varga, already contained in the draft
conclusions submitted by the LTF
representative, mandated by the iSt:
..... although Varga himself publicly
admitted having undertaken conscious-
ly anti-communist activities in order to
'combat Marxism; he has never ex-
plained-nor has he explicitly re-
nounced-certain formulations found
in his letters at that time, which enable
us to characterize his attitudes as anti-
Semitic and racist. Varga therefore
appears as a highly dubious figure."
The LCR and LO wanted to condemn
the OCI but refused to characterize
Varga's attitude; the SWP, by way of
contrast, was more than willing to
characterize Varga, but refused to
condemn the OCI. Caught in a bind, the
Commission rejected the conclusions
drafted by the iSt, and called instead on
the SWP reformists to write the most in-
nocuous conclusions possible. Though
the LCR might have preferred to
condemn the OCI, it refused to break
with its partner in the USec rotten bloc.
Seizing the pretext that the conclu-
sions did not characterize the OCl's
accusations against Varga as false
because unproved, LO refused to sign
the conclusions. The iSt, on the other
hand, agreed to sign the Commission's
conclusions on the condition that an
appended iSt statement be published
with them. While the conclusions
represented the absolute minimum of
what had been established by the
Commission, the iSt signed them in the
interest of arriving at clear and authori-
tative conclusions. LO's refusal to
sign-under an obvious pretext-can
only undermine the Commission's
authority and thus lessen the impact of
the very conclusions which LOclaims to
support.
All these petty and factionally moti-
vated maneuvers stand in complete
contradiction with the methods and
traditions established by the Dewey
Commission. While maintaining a sense
of historical proportion, we must recall
that Trotsky strongly insisted that-
since the Dewey Commission had
amassed sufficient proofs to show that
Trotsky and Sedov were not guilty-it
was both just and necessary to take one
step further and accept the moral and
P91itical responsibility for drawing the
conclusion that the Moscow Trials were
frame-ups.
In opposition to all the other
organizations participating in the Com-
mission, the iSt assumes this responsi-
bility in drawing a two-sided conclu-
sion: since the OCI has adduced no
sufficient proof to back up its accusa-
tions against Varga, these accusations
must be characterized as false and
therefore lying and slanderous. The
OCI's practice of violence against the
Vargaites is therefore shown to be
drawn from the Stalinist arsenal. On the
other hand, Varga's refusal to explain
himself-his past and the content of his
letters-shows 0 him to be a shady
character, a "highly dubious" figure.
CWA...
(continued from page 12)
Taft-Hartley-anyone who to
cash in on Carter's campaign promises
will be unpleasantly surprised.
Oppositions Crumbl.e
AT&T is a capitalist giant which has
trampled on its employees' rights and
the interests of working people for
decades. Its operations are run like a
medieval fiefdom: impossible produc-
tion standards subject phone company
workers to arbitrary harassment and
discipline; pay raises can be held up at
the whim of the foreman; more than
three to five days illness per year is
considered excessive, and may result in
discipline and firing. Women
employees-over half the CWA
membership-are concentrated in un-
derpaid job classifications and are
routinely subjected to the most inhu-
man, petty company abuse, traditional-
ly with the tolerance of the union
leadership.
With the addition of the spectre of
massive job losses to this already
infuriating pattern of management
abuse, there is a felt need among.
telephone workers for a nationwide
CWA strike against the Bell system. Yet
the International bureaucracy's long
history of defeats, cowardice and active
sabotage of strikes has made many
union members doubt the chance of
waging a successful strike against the
all-powerful Ma Bell. Workers in New
York Local 1101 well remember how
they were left out on a limb in 1971 by
Beirne, walking the picket lines alone
for more than half a year only to be
forced to settle for a $1 per hour
increase. This sellout led to the 1974
introduction of "national bargaining,"
which simply meant that everything was
decided at the top through the protec-
tion of a rigid news blackout on the
negotiations, and abandoning those
locals who walked out on the principle
of "no contract, no work."
In several recent conventions, such
betrayals by the International have
sparked protests from
feeling pressure from their outraged
ranks. Thus at the 1975 convention,
District 10 officials, among others,
protested vehemently against the news
blackouts and other backroom maneu-
vers. Such "militant" talk was cheap
when nothing was at stake. But today,
with the contract expiration little more
than a month away, even these phony
bureaucratic "oppositions" have eva-
porated. At the annual (!) Local 1101
membership meeting last week Presi-
dent Ed Dempsey, one-time critic of the
International, announced that his rela-
tions with Watts were never better, and
that the crucial issue of job security will
not even be part of the national
bargaining demands (being relegated to
local negotiations). As 1101 well knows,
not even the most militant local can hold
out alone against AT&T. Yet there was
not the slightest challenge at the meeting
to Dempsey's convention report.
The unanimous re-election of the
International Executive Board at Kan-
sas City and the absence of a single
challenger was an indication of the
crumbling of bureaucratic and reformist
oppositions in the CWA. The only floor
fight at this year's convention was over
the credentials of the Atlanta delegates,
with local rank and filers protesting that
elections had been held without notify-
ing the membership. The president
answered haughtily, "We always hold
our elections this way."
The United Action Caucus (UAC),
which in the past had sent delegates to
the convention, went unrepresented this
year, and consequently the Internation-
al's decision upholding the decision of a
Local 1101 trial board suspending four
UACers for five years went unchal-
lenged. The UAC, true to its policy of
tailing after left-talking "democratic"
bureaucrats, had supported Dempsey in
Mickey Mouse Phone: what
,System "develops" with
increases.
1972 only to be shafted by their
candidate a few years later. And where a
genuine class-struggle opposition would
seek to mobilize union members' sup-
port against the bureaucracy's attempt
to purge oppositionists from the union,
the UAC reacted by threatening to take
the CWA to court.
Despite the systematic betrayals of
the Watts/Beirne bureaucracy and
consequent cynicism in the ranks, so
intense is the present threat of job losses
that there would be a real basis for
support for a nationwide CWA strike
were there a leadership in the union with
the demonstrated capacity and militant
determination to bring it off. But only
the Militant Action Caucus (MAC) in
Bay Area CWA locals has shown the
way forward in the intense crisis facing
phone company workers. At the 1973
convention MAC led the fight to defeat
the bureaucrats' "19-2-C" clause which
would hamstring all oppositionists in
the union. And last year MAC success-
fully waged a year-long fight based on
mobilizing the membership to win back
the job of fired MAC member Jane
Margolis. This struggle-one of the few
times in memory where a militant
successfully won a job back after being
fired by Ma Bell-was significant in
proving that the phone company can be
defeated.
During the present contract period,
the Militant Action Caucus has been
fighting for a nationwide strike against
all layoffs, downgrades and forced
transfers; for a 20-hour week with 40
hours pay; for an across-the-board wage
increase to close the gap between
traditional male and female job classifi-
cations; and for a full cost-of-living
allowance. The key to a succesful strike
must be the mobilization of militant
picket lines which shut down the
buildings. No one-not non-unionized
operators and clerical workers and
especially not management-must be
allowed to pass! Since automated phone
equipment enables skeleton crews of
management scabs to maintain opera-
tions, militants must demand that the
union occupy key telephone installa-
tions to prevent such scabbing. The
Watts machine would naturally oppose
such militant measures, so strike com-
mittees must be elected to prevent
bureaucratic sabotage and to ensure
that effective picketing protects the
workers inside struck buildings.
This is the way forward for .phone
workers, a road that can only be opened
up through ousting the pro-company
bureaucracy. As a recent MAC leaflet
distributed to Bay Area phone locations
said:
"We will drive the Company back only
by determined militant action. The
union has considerable power-500,OOO
members. We could control the com-
munications of the entire nation. We
must strike in our own defense and we
must strike nationally....
"Phone workers must thoughtfully
prepare for a struggle. The Internation-
al has a record that we can remember
and it shows determination in keeping
us encased in cement. When we, the
ranks of the union, break out of their
grip, we will forge a leadership that we
can trust to fight on our side.".
OCI Slanders...
(continued from page 4)
obliged to testify once more. Unable to
reply to the questions posed by Com-
mission members, Pierre Lambert was
repeatedly reduced to enraged mutter-
ings such as:
"Draw whatever conclusion you like,
listen, it's your business. I'm not here for
that. ... You're not here to ask me
questions about my organisation."
-testimony, 16 December 1976
Yet the OCl's utter irresponsibility at
the time that Varga joined emerges with
perfect clarity from Lambert's testi-
mony. First of all, he admitted that
Varga's archives had been accessible to
the OCI ever since Vargajoined in about
1962: "this was a fellow who kept his
archives, at his place everything was well
classified, etc." Then Lambert explicitly
declared that, prior to Varga's joining,
"nobody asked him" for explanations of
his political activity and that "if we had
asked him, he didn't have to say
anything." As for the OCI's attitude
toward the Varga archives at that time,
Lambert was eloquent: "They were
letters in Hungarian mostly, in Russian.
Not problems of direct interest to us."
As the Spartacist tendency said in our
draft conclusions, the OCI had:
"... a special responsibility to try to
examme these archives, given the
central. importance of a complete and
unambiguous break with imperialism
on the part of those who claim to have
broken with the Stalinist bureaucracies
in Eastern Europe and the USSR."
But all these "problems"-including the
possibility of agents infiltrating would-
be Trotskyists' ranks-did not "inter-
est" the OCI!
Now, there are two possibilities. One,
that the OCI is telling the truth: it was
not familiar with Varga's past, because
"there were no problems of direct
interest" to the OCI. In that case, it
would seem that the OCI accepted
Varga without worrying in the least
about possible infiltration by police
agents-KGB or CIA-into its organi-
zation, without asking him the slightest
question about his previous political
activity. Or two-and this seems more
likely-that the 0 OCI was aware of
Varga's character and a good part of his
past, but covered it up in order to show
off its "Eastern European work." It is
certainly no accident that the OCl's
noble concern about the character of the
main leader of its much-vaunted "East-
ern European work" dates from the
emergence of political differences with
Varga.
For us as Trotskyists, it is essential to
verify the total break from any illusions
that the Stalinist bureaucracy will
reform itself, as well as from Stalino-
phobia, on the part of militants like
Varga who come out of the degenerated
and deformed workers states, before
accepting them as members.
Still on the defensive, the OCI several
months later drew the Commission's
attention to an interviewwith Varga in a
Spanish newspaper and, in one final
brief, urged the Commission to uphold
"at least" the iSt's position:
"Starting from the documents, Varga
cannot be characterized-at the least-
differently than did Spartacist, as a
'highly dubious' figure; i.e., to the extent
that it is not a question of a 'moral'
characterization, as an individual who
had kept up a certain kind of relations
with the imperialist dens."
-letter, 8 March 1977
SWP: OCI's Best Defender
The Commission was also the scene of
a factional struggle between the two
wings of the USec. In the beginning, the
SWP, trying its best to protect the OCI,
did not even want testimony taped!
More generally, the SWP representative
systematically intervened to limit the
scope of criticisms against the OCI. In
the last analysis, the SWP had to grant
that the OCI had proved nothing-and
that the OCI employs violence -against
competing organizations-but still
Pascal Alessandri
BoP. 336
75011 Paris
FRANCE
3,00 F.F.
Spartacist Publishing Co.
Box 1377. GPO
New York, N.Y. 10001
USA
$.75 US/Canada
10
WORKERS VANGUARD
Soviet Spies...
(continued from page 7)
Soviet Union against the of
Stalin's security. That is why they died."
-"Army Opposed to Stalin,"
6 March 1938
Berzin was one of the most important of
this group. He had been in Spain acting
as military adviser to the anti-Franco
forces, then returned to Moscow in 1937
(voluntarily or on recall; the versions
vary) to protest the GPU massacres of .
anarchists and anti-Stalinist commu-
nists in the Republican areas. Fora time
he was back at the head of the Fourth
Department, and it was during this
period that he commissioned Trepper to
set up an anti-Hitler spy network. Later
that year Berzin was removed from his
position, then shot in December 1938.
But Trepper, as he saw it, remained
"faithful to bur agreement" and carried
out the mission entrusted to him. Here
was the pitiful tragedy of Reiss and his
comrades, who kept hoping for a
miracle and kept toiling on.
The Red Orchestra Plays
But in spite of everything, the Reisses,
Treppers and Sorges accomplished
brilliant work, heroically risking their
lives to defend the USSR. Trepper
waited for two years, painstakingly
building up a legitimate business cover
with the aid of Grossvogel, who had
entered the rubber trade some years
earlier. The import-export companies
he set up-Simex in Paris and Simexco
and the "Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat
Company" (!) in Belgium-also served
as direct sources of information, via
their black-market dealings with the
German Todt Organization, which
supervised construction work for the
Wehrmacht. By day the network con-
ducted its business, wining and dining
German officials in fancy restaurants
and luxurious apartments. By night the
Orchestra transmitted.
"Between 1940 and 1943, the
musicians of the Red Orchestra-that
is, the radio operators, also known as
'pianists'-sent the Center about ISOO
dispatches," Trepper reports. One cate-
gory concerned war materiel and wea-
pons development, where the network
scored some vital successes. Plans for a
new German tank were obtained and
transmitted to Moscow in time for
Soviet industr; to prepare an even
better version, the KV tank. Plans for a
new Messerschmidt fighter were deliv-
ered on microfilm, and within months a
superior Soviet version was rolling off
production lines. A second category of
dispatches concerned information on
the military situation and plans. Thus
when Hitler met with the German High
Command in eastern Prussia in the fall
of 1941 and proposals for the encircle-
ment of Moscow were drawn up, the
stenographer who took down the
remarks of Hitler and the generals was a
member of the Orchestra. Trepper can
write proudly: "The Soviet chiefs of staff
were informed ;of every' detail of the
attack, in time to prepare the counterof-
fensive that succeeded in driving off the
Wehrmacht."
The Red Orchestra included groups
in Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen
and Paris, but by far the most important
was the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen
group in Berlin. Arvid Harnack was a
Marxist scholar from a family of
respected intellectuals and government
officials and heJd a responsible position
in the ministry of economics, from
which he was able to ferret out much
information useful for the Soviet war
effort. Harro Schulze-Boysen came
from a conservative monarchist family
with a long tradition of sending its sons
into the officer corps. Already a leftist,
Schulze-Boysen had his anti-Nazi con-
victions strengthened by a brief impris-
onment and brutal beating by the
Gestapo in 1933. As an intelligence
officer in Goering's air force ministry he .
8 JULY 1977
fed vital statistics on military produc-
tion and plans directly to Moscow.
In 1939 the two joined forces in a
broad anti-Nazi underground resistance
grouping whose components were listed
by Trepper as including:
"the writer Dr. Adam Kuckhoff and his
wife Greta; Dr. Adolf Grimme, the
socialist ex-minister of Prussia; Johann
Sieg, an old militant and editor of the
Rote Fahne, the ,newspaper of the
German Communist Party; and Hans
Coppi, Heinrich Scheel, Hans Lau-
tenschlager, and Ina Ender, former
members of communist youth organiza-
tions. When the war,broke out, the best
members of the group were assigned to
intelligence work, but in practice there
was no rigid separation between the
Red Orchestra network and their
resistance. activities. Schulze-Boysen
ran both of these-and this confusion of
tasks was which
would be paid for very dearly."
Part of the group was busy setting up
escape routes for Jews and prisoners,
sabotaging war production and putting
out underground propaganda. One of
its most spectacular efforts was the
overnight plastering of Berlin with
posters attacking Goebbels' propagan-
da exhibit on "The Soviet Paradise"; the
posters proclaimed, "Nazi Paradise =
War, Famine, Lies, Gestapo. How
Much Longer?" Meanwhile, the intelli-
gence apparatus was feeding high-level
information to Moscow, including:
German high command plans for the
spring 1942 offensive in the Caucasus;
Luftwaffe parachute raid schedules;
monthly aircraft production figures;
reports of tension within the military
high command, etc.
The Orchestra Smashed
The Wehrmacht first stumbled on the
Soviet intelligence apparatus headed by
Trepper on 26 June 1941, just five days
after the German invasion of the USSR,
when a radio operator routinely moni-
toring a Norwegian transmitter picked
up a mysterious call signal and coded
message. Hundreds of these messages,
which the German military counterin-
telligence (Abwehr) was initially unable
to decipher, were picked up over the
next few months, as 'well as unmistak-
#able evidence that another "pianist" was
from the very heart of the
Third Reich. The hunt for the network
which the Germans called the "Rote
Kapelle" was on.
In this stealthy battle the radio
transmitters of the Orchestra were vital,
and also inevitably its weakest point. As
Gilles Perrault points out in his excel-
lent history, The Red Orchestra (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1969):
"Without a transmitter, a network loses
all value; it has been set up for the sole
purpostC of collecting information and
can be effective only if it passes that
information on. Yet the very instrument
that justifies its existence automatically
places the network in jeopardy, for it
alerts the other side to its activities.
Take the heads of the Abwehr: they had
no idea that a Soviet spy ring was
operating in Belgium, much less in
Germany; it was the pianists who put
them on the track."
It was only a matter of time before
German technology and the vast re-
sources mobilized by a special comman-
do formed by Heinrich Miiller'sGestapo
and Admiral Canaris' Abwehr would
undo the network. The ability of the
German regime to use hundreds of
clerks to fit together the tiniest bits of
information, to send its agents through-
out occupied Europe, made the dis-
covery of at least part of Trepper's
apparatus almost inevitable.
tactics employed by members ofthe Red
Orchestra within the very radio com-
pany supplying the A.bwehr with equip-
ment delayed the end for a while.) Thus
it took the Sonderkommando only
about six months each to destroy all of
Trepper's groups: two in Belgium, one in
Berlin and the central group in France.
On 12 December 1941, German
counterintelligence finally closed in on
the Red Orchestra transmitter at IOI,
rue des Atrebates in Brussels. Sophie
Poznanska had been decoding messages
but heard the sound of boots on the
staircase and threw everything she could
into the fireplace. David Kamy had been
monitoring a transmission in another
room and was caught only after a wild
chase. Trepper himself narrowly es-
caped that first round-up: he rang the
doorbell in the midst of the Abwehr raid
and only managed to extract himself by
indignantly showing his papers from the
Todt Organization.
There followed a desperate battle of
wits as Trepper sought to salvage his
network: the narrow escapes, the search
for a transmitter, the activation of a
replacement for the Orchestra's second-
in-command, Kent, whose nervousness
had made him a liability. Inside the
prisons there were harrowing scenes of
torture, confessiOns, suicides and the
heroism of comrades who refused to
talk at the cost of their lives. Hitler's
"Nacht und Nebel" (night and fog)
decree of December 1941 aimed at spies,
traitors and anyone suspected of
"crimes against the Third Reich" au-
thorized any and all measures to obtain
information, as well as execution
without appearing before a tribunal.
Many of those captured in the Belgian
group were sent to Breendonk prison.
Here many of Trepper's associates
heroically met their fates, t6rtured by
thumb screws, red-hot irons and electric
needles. Hillel Katz had his fingernails
extracted and disappeared a year later.
David Kamy was shot in 1942; Sophie
Poznanska committed suicide. In Ber-
lin, the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group
was broken up in the summer of 1942
with over 100 arrested and tortured.
More than SO were eventually executed,
some by beheading, others (like the two
leaders) by hanging on specially con-
structed hooks. Some succumbed to the
unbearable pain and talked, for which
no one can condemn them. As Trepper
wrote:
"A person who has not experienced the
atrocities of the Gestapo cannot ima-
gine them.... The survivors of the Red
Orchestra who have returned from hell
SPARTACIST LEAGUE
LOCAL DIRfCTORY
ANN ARBOR (313) 769-6376
c/o SYL, Room 4316
Michigan Union, U, of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
BERKELEY/
OAKLAND (415) 835-1535
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Chicago, IL 60680
CLEVELAND (216) 281-4781
Box 6765
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Box 663A, General P.O. .
Detroit, MI 48232
HOUSTON
Box 26474
Houston, TX 77207
LOS ANGELES .... (213) 662-1564
Box 26282, Edendale Station
Los Angeles, CA 90026
MADISON
c/o SYL, Box 3334
Madison, WI 53704
NEW YORK (212) 925-2426
Box 1377, G.P.O.
New York, NY 10001
PHILADELPHIA
clO SYL, P.O. Box 131381
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SAN DIEGO
P.O. Box 2034
Chula Vista, CA 92012
SAN FRANCiSCO (415) 564..2845
Box 5712
San francisco, CA 94101
TROTSKYIST LEAGU
Of CANADA
TORONTO (416) 366-4107
Box 7198, Station A
Toronto, Ontario
VANCOUVER ... (604) 291-8993
Box 26, Station A
Vancouver, B.C.
carry the memoJ' of ravaged flesh,
which to this day Jerks them awake in
the night."
The "Big Chief" (Trepper) was
himself finally caught in November 1942
in Paris. The Germans hoped to use
Trepper and his captured radio opera-
tors in a great "Funkspiel" (radio game)
with Moscow, feeding the center false
information on rumors of a separate
peace. Trepper agreed to go along,
seei ng in this risky game his only chance
to slip a secret warning to Moscow of
the real situation (the FunkspieJ had
already begun some months earlier, and
the center was accepting the phony
messages as valid despite Trepper's
warnings that the "pianists" had been
arrested). He managed to smuggle out a
message detailing the whole scheme,
and ten months later escaped from his
German captors by walking into a
pharmacy during an outing.
TO BE CONTINUED
Varga Affair
Conclusions...
(continuedfrom page 5)
statements, the OCI was in possession of
sufficient information about Varga's
past to have warranted suspicion con-
cerning the source of financing for the
Imre Nagy Institute. However, Pierre
Lambert testified that in 1961 the OCI
had no grounds for such suspicion.
Two OCI leaders, Pierre Broue and
Jean-Jacques Marie, collaborated with
the journal edited by the Imre Nagy
Institute, Etudes, on several occasions
prior to 1962. They therefore at least
knew of the Institute's existence. But the
Commission was unable to hear their
testimony concerning the extent oftheir
knowledge of the Institute in this period,
due to the OCI's refusal [to allow them
to testify]. For the same reason it was
unable to hear testimony from Roger
Monnier, the OCI member with whom
Varga had deposited his archives.
The Commission is therefore not in a
position to know whether the OCI
learned about the archives only in 1973.
4) The use of violence.
The Commission heard testimony
indicating that on several o$:casions the
OCI has used violence against LIRQI
members in order to prevent them from
distributing their press, and not in self-
defense. This testimony comes from
different individuals and different
organizations.
The Commission is therefore con-
vinced that these attacks did indeed take
place. It is inadmissible for an organiza-
tion in the workers movement to act in
this fashion, and this must stop.

The Commission ofInquiry's minutes
, are public in nature, before the entire
working-class movement, in order to
allow all working-class militants who
may so desire to form their own opinion.
The Commission makes the entire
workers movement judge of the "Varga
affair" and of the attitude adopted by its
protagonists.
Paris, 29 May 1977
signed by:
Gus Horowitz
(Socia:'"t Workers Party)
Jean Lesueur
(international Spartacist tendency)
Georges Marion
(Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire)
The international Spartacist tendency
wishes to note that it votes in favor of
these conclusions with the following
reservations, whose reproductioh consti-
tutes a condition to signing the
conclusions:
I) The OCI's unproved accusations
must be characterized as slanders;
2) Varga's current attitude, namely to
refuse to shed light on his past, must lead
to characterizing him as a suspicious and
highly dubious individual;
3) The OCl's use of violence against
Varga's supporters must be character-
ized as deriving from Stalinist methods.
11
\
WfJliNEIiS ""IUIlIiIJ
CWA ranks face company's drive to cut jobs through automation.
Convention Rep'ort:
CWA Tops Defend Bell Monopoly
Profits, Ignore Job Threat
The nearly 100,000 telephone workers
whose jobs have been eliminated by the
Bell System during the last few years will
get a bitter laugh from U.S. vice
president Mondale's remark to the 39th
annual convention of the Communica-
tions Workers of America (CWA), held
in Kansas City June 19-24, that the
CWA is the "best union in America."
From the standpoint of Ma Bell and the
bosses' government, this may be true,
but not for phone workers.
The key issue facing communications
workers across the country is jobs. Yet
the CWA bureaucracy has done nothing
to halt the phone monopoly's assault on
working conditions and the livelihoods
of its employees. The convention dem-
onstrated that they have no intention of
lifting a finger in the future, either. The
facts speak for themselves:
Since 1963 almost 100,000 jobs
lost.
Over half of Western Electric
installation locals throughout the U.S.
with members on layoff, some with up
to ten years seniority.
Massive automation of central
offices, at the rate of one a day, through
the introduction of Electronic Switch-
ing Systems (ESS) which can replace
400 workers with 35 technicians.
Opening of "phone stores," where
customers purchase their telephones for
self-installation.
Drastic cutbacks in CWA Western
Union locals; the 3,600 unionized
employees in 1966 now down to below
1,000.
As for "affirmative action" programs,
touted by government and management
as the answer to past job discrimination
by the Bell System, recent figures report
an increase of 500 top-salaried women
at executive level ... and a net loss of
10,000 to 15,000 women workers over
the last four years.
It is no secret that American
Telephone and Telegraph management
is planning a major new wave of layoffs
of phone workers. The question is: what
12
is the CWA planning to do about it? The
major provisions under the heading "job
security" in the report of the union's Bell
System Bargaining Council to the recent
convention called for eliminating sub-
contracting; making all overtime volun-
tary, at a minim'Jm rate of double-time;
providing for a shorter work year,
through longer vacations, a 32-hour
workweek, ten "personal days" off with
pay yearly, etc.
Most of these demands are minimal
enough. The call for a shorter workweek
does not even include a provision for no
cut in pay, and CWA International vice
president for District 5, Ray Stevens,
wrote in the union newsletter "Take
Five" that the 32-hour week should be a
legislative rather than a contractual
demand (i.e., phone workers should beg
Congress instead of flexing their indus-
trial strength). But the kicker is that
even these "demands" have no relation-
ship whatsoever to what the CWA
bureaucracy will fight for.
The CWA Executive Board Report,
1977 puts down in black and white that
the labor fakers are prepared to accept
continued job cuts in phone. In the
section on organizing, the International
baldly admits: "Despite an expected
increase in business volume annually,
employment in the telephone industry
will continue to drop because of
technological advancements." Instead'
of fighting for more jobs for communi-
cations workers, the CWA leadership is
seeking to protect its dues base by
roping in members "from virtually every
kind of industry that exists." A list of
organizing projects over the last year
included nurses, librarians, furniture
movers and even strikebreaking cops in
two cities.
What phone workers need is a
militant strike against Ma Bell. Such a
strike, fought around key demands like
a 20-hour workweek at 40 hours' pay, is
the only way to bring AT&T to its knees
and stave off the decimation of the
union. But CWA president Watts has
-
made it clear that he will do everything
he can to avoid a confrontation with the
company. In February he announced,
"For the first time in our 39 years of
dealing with Bell, CWA will try this year
to get an early settlement."
What's Good for Ma Bell ...
The motto of CWA tops is, what's
good for Ma Bell is good for the union.
In the past, union bureaucrats have
repeatedly defended requests for rate
increases by AT&T affiliates, and at this
convention a resolution was unan-
imously passed protesting attempts by
electronics corporations (RCA, IBM,
ITT) to horn in on Bell's profitable
"interconnect" (business communica-
tions systems) revenues. The convention
also went on record against any attempt
by the Federal Communications Com-
mission to force divestiture of Western
Electric and perhaps the operating
companies as well.
But higher profits for AT&T do not
mean more jobs for phone workers. An
example obvious even to the CWA
bureaucracy is the introduction of
customer charges for directory assist-
ance in 19 states. This policy, certainly
p>rofitable for Bell, is directly responsi-
ble for the elimination of thousands of
operators' jobs. Meanwhile, increased
Bell System profits (third quarter after-
tax earnings in 1976 topped $1 billion)
are invested in purchasing more auto-
mated equipment to replace additional
thousands of union members.
Anti-trust schemes to attack the
phone company's power by forced
divestiture of the highly integrated Bell
System are nothing but a backward
looking utopia; their inevitable failure is
shown by the hoax of the break-up of
Standard Oil or U.S. Steel. But the
alternative is not to defend the bloated
profits of this universally hated monop-
oly at the expense of CWA members and
the masses of consumers gouged by
AT&T. The Bell system should be
nationalized without compensation,
and urban phone service provioeO free
of charge.
The CWA misleaders will never raise
such militant class-struggle demands.
Watts' predecessor, Joe Beirne,
coalesced the CWA out of several of
company unions during the late 1940's,
establishing a union that has been
doggedly company-loyal ever since. It
was not surprising, therefore, to see
AT&T management present at the
convention as invited guests, as they are
every year. Just as natural was the
appearance of Democrat Mondale,
since the CWA was an early and
enthusiastic backer of Carter in the last
presidential elections. Yet despite its
slavish devotion to "friend of labor"
. Democrats (the CWA even stuck by
McGovern in 1972), the phone union
and the rest of the labor movement have
gotten nothing but a kick in the teeth
from the capitalist parties and
government.
_ Among a recent spate of anti-labor
court decisions was one in New York
state ruling that strikers are not eligible
to receive unemployment benefits. This
case grew out of the several-month
strike by New York CWA locals in 1971-
72, and if the decision is upheld on
appeal the strikers may be required by
the courts to repay seven months of
jobless benefits. While forced to recog-
nize that the Carter administration has
been somewhat less than wholehearted-
ly pro-labor, all Watts could do was cry
crocodile tears. "To be perfectly blunt,"
he told the convention, "we must insist
that our national leaders have the
intestinal fortitude to match their
commitment, the commitments that
they have made in the past." But as
George Meany has already found out-
after administration moves led to the
rapid-succession defeat of the construc-
tion site picketing bill, an AFL-CIO
proposal to raise the minimum wage to a
measly $3 per hour, and efforts to
eliminate the open shop provisions of
continued on page 10
8 JULY 1977