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Fourth International, October 1949

 

Press Clippings

Moshe Pyade

A Yugoslav on the Budapest Trial

 

From Fourth International, Vol.10 No.9, October 1949, p.287.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The following excerpts of a full front-page article in the Yugoslav newspaper Borba (September 22) entitled What Does the Budapest Trial Reveal by Moshe Pyade, member of the Politburo of the Yugoslav CP, are reprinted from a news summary of the text by the Information Service of the Yugoslav Embassy.

* * *

It is mostly reminiscent of the trials in the Soviet Union in 1936, the organizers of which could have helped in staging the Budapest trial with their abundant experience, Still the trials in Moscow, although they were of significance for all Communist parties, were the internal affair of the Soviet Union, the indictment charged and the trial was conducted against Soviet citizens accused of various crimes, among which was also of having linked up with German and Japanese fascism. But Hitler was not charged nor mentioned. A non-aggression pact was concluded with him a few years later, on which occasion even toasts to his health were exchanged.

... This means that the indictment itself suffices to denote this trial definitely, without hesitation, without any fear that an error can be committed, as a new foray of the counter-revolution directed from Moscow. This penetration into Europe of the sinister methods of the Soviet intelligence service is a harsh example of the application of the ‘leading role’ of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union ...

The trial reveals in a crude, almost cruel way the decline of some Communist Parties, of that in the Soviet Union and those in other Cominform countries. It reveals the full subservience of all these parties to the Soviet intelligence service, which has compelled this and which dictates the political line to them. It reveals the self-glorifying, Marxistically unjustified, petty bourgeois vanity, the ‘leading role’ of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union, in-practical international life means not only a tendency toward absolute subserviece of all Communist Parties in the world to one party, and all Socialist Countries to one country; not only the turning of countries, some of whose leaders surrendered their countries without reserve to the free disposal of the ‘leading’ power, into dependent, satellite countries which no longer have anything of their own either in internal or in foreign policy, but also the turning of the party leaderships and governments of these countries into ordinary police prefectures of a foreign country. “It reveals the real degeneration, and that can no longer be camouflaged, of one part of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. The Budapest trial is the fruit of this degeneration, the fruit of the ruthless greater-state, greater-Russian chauvinism, which does not hesitate before all means to penetrate into the life of the European peoples and to impose the Great Russian nation as being the world nation-leader. It is the fruit of a vainglorious madness which is assailing the most important fruits of the October Revolution, which is wrecking the unity of the revolutionary world workers’ movement and. the entire world democratic front, and thus rendering the greatest service to world reaction. What the indictment reveals is the veritable, ugly features of revised internationalism.

... And when today we recall those charges of March 1948 (the first Cominform attack against Yugoslavia – ed.) we do so because it has been proved since then that this false and unjustified charge, at that time, was actually self-accusation of the plantiffs, self-confession, self-betrayal, a concealment of their own reality, which they knew better than we did, because during this time it has been proved in practise that certain people in the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union have actually degenerated, that their guiding light is no longer international Socialism, but precisely as they themselves first said, ‘greater state chauvinism.’ And upon this this platform there can only be counter-revolution, and not the victory of Socialism in the world.

It has been proved that the counter-revolutionary attitude of these Bolshevik leaders towards Yugoslavia cannot be an exceptional or partial deviation from the general line, that it cannot progress parallel with a general, correct revolutionary attitude; but that it is a component part of a new policy, a new ideologicalline, which is a deviation from the basis of Marxism-Leninism itself, a work of revision which has encompassed all fields of theory and practise.

 
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