A HISTORY of PUSHKIN SQUARE: 1967 to 2021

In Moscow, last Saturday, an estimated 15,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Pushkin Square in the city centre, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Some were beaten with batons.

Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested. Police eventually pushed demonstrators out of the square. Thousands then regrouped along a wide boulevard about a kilometer (half-mile) away, many of them throwing snowballs at the police before dispersing.

Some later went to protest near the jail where Navalny is held. Police made an undetermined number of arrests there.

Perhaps it would bee helpful if we compare what is happening now under Vladimir Putin today with what took place in Pushkin Square in 1967 in the Soviet Communist Era when a demo took place in protesting the arrests of some then political dissidents and the use of Article 70 of the then Criminal Code with regard to its use conflicting with the constitution.

**********************************

OVER 50 years ago on the 22nd, January, 1967 at 6p.m., a group of twenty to thirty young people gathhered in Pushkin Square carrying banners calling for the release of four prisoners and calling for the revision of Article 70 of the Criminal Code. As they unfolded their banners men in plain clothes rushed up from all sides of the square, seized the banners and arrested several people. Most of the others scattered, and among the small group remaining one shouted 'Down with the dictatorship! Release Dobrovolsky!' All the prisoners were taken to the HQ of the Komsomol. After some hours' questioning, two were released (Gabay and Delaunay) and two others (Kushev and Khaustov) taken to the KGB investigation centre* at Lefortovo prison.

Later on the 25th and 26th of January 1967, Gabay and Delaunay were re-arrested and another demonstrator was taken into custody. The houses of all the prisoners were carefully searched; the police were particularly interested in samizdat manuscipts** and confistcated most of them. Some hundred witnesses were questioned by the Prosecutor's Office and the KGB.

SPEECH FOR THE PROSECUTION ***

'Comrade Judges! This year is a great date for us - it is the 50th year of the Soviet Regime. The struggle for the maintenance of public order continues throughout the country. In Moscow, the maintenance of public order is particularly important. We have largely been sussessful in this respect. Imagine, in the circumstances, the astonishment and indignation of the citizens who witnessed what occurred in Pushkin Square on the 22nd, of January 1967. The place which these self-syled demonstrators chose for their activities - the vicinity of a great poet's monument - is a placewhich everyon holds sacred. Their gathering might have attracted large crowds - not, of course, of like-minded citizen but of curious onlookers. Had the Druzhinniki not put a stop to it straight away, it might have led to a large disturbance.'

* * KGB: translated in English as the Committee for State Security, was the secret police force that was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until 6 November 1991, when it split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation.

** samizdat manuscipts: The remarkably viable underground press in the Soviet Union is called samizdat: The word is a play on Gosizdat, which is a telescoping of Gosudarstvennoye Izdatelstvo, the name of the monopoly‐wielding State Publish ing House. The sam part of the new word means “self.” The whole samizdat—translates as: “We publish ourselves”—that is, not the state, but we, the people.

*** The Demonstration in Pushkin Square by Pavel Litvinov (1968).

Film Review: STALIN’S OMELETTE

  by Christopher Draper

POLISH DIRECTOR Agnieszka Holland’s important new film tells the story of Gareth Jones’ courageous reporting of Stalin’s murderous 1932-33 “Holomodor”.  This Soviet “holocaust” was alternately ignored and denied by the world’s press and remains so today.  Jones’ reports and reputation were traduced by his press colleagues, orchestrated by Walter Duranty, the celebrated, Pullitzer Prize-winning, resident Moscow correspondent of the New York Times who shockingly trivialised the deaths of four million Ukrainians with the observation, 'You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.'

Mr Jones goes Free-range

Whilst the salaried correspondents of the international press were content to remain in Moscow, wined, dined and accommodated in relative luxury as favoured mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda, Gareth Jones investigated independently as an irregular 'stringer'.  After interviewing, on his own initiative, numerous Russian representatives in Moscow, in March 1933 Jones obtained official permission to travel by rail to visit and report on a 'model' Soviet tractor factory in Kharkiv.  Gareth duly boarded the train in Moscow but got off well before reaching Kharkiv so that he could conduct his own 'unofficial' investigations into conditions on the ground in rural Ukraine.

Already aware of widespread rumours of Stalin’s ruthless treatment of rural Ukraine, Jones, a fluent Russian speaker, trudged forty miles on foot, passing through fourteen villages and everywhere encountering starving people.  Peasants expressed their fierce resentment against Bolshevik battalions corralling them into collectivized farms and then stealing away their pitiful produce with no regard for their former ways of farming, culture, co-operation and exchange.  Despite this mechanistic regimentation of rural labour resulting in a catastrophic diminution of production Stalin demanded and appropriated ever increasing amounts of grain, meat and vegetables.

Inconvenient Truths

Jones left Russia at the end of March and immediately filed newspaper reports and delivered public lectures on the starvation conditions he’d witnessed and just as promptly he came under attack from Stalin’s apologists, led by Walter Duranty.  The first of more than twenty of Jones’ published reports appeared in the Manchester Guardian on 30 March 1933 headlined 'FAMINE IN RUSSIA'.  The very next day the New York Times printed Duranty’s dismissive, 'RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING'.  Referring to Jones by name, Duranty described Gareth’s account as 'a big scare story'.

Holland’s film does an excellent job of raising the profile of the myriad key issues around the Holodomor and its reporting.  The production values are high and visually the picture looks well alongside other 'art-house' productions but characterisation has been sacrificed to inaccurately accentuate a desired narrative.  Like the original reporting of the Holodomor, the film shows signs of clumsy political manipulation.  Absolute integrity and telling inconvenient truths were the essence of Gareth Jones’ reporting yet Agnieszka Holland has taken several absurd liberties with the truth to sex up her picture.  To be specific:

a) There is no evidence that Jones, inadvertently, or otherwise, indulged in or even witnessed any incidents of cannibalism in the Ukraine.

b) Jones explicitly states that he saw no dead bodies lying around unburied.

c) Whilst living in Paris it’s quite possible that Duranty previously indulged in the sort of sex parties depicted, there’s no evidence, and it’s most unlikely, that he did so in Moscow in the 1930’s and placing Jones at such an event is absurd.

d) Jones never met George Orwell, nor is there any evidence that his reporting inspired Animal Farm.

e) The key character 'Paul Klebb' who, in the film, posthumously inspires and informs Jones’ Ukraine journey never existed but was doubtless inserted as a spurious, politically motivated reference to a similarly named individual who was likely murdered on Putin’s orders.

Good Effort but no Cigar

Despite the film’s shortcomings it should be seen and reflected upon.  It’s not unvarnished truth, if that were ever possible, but it’s accessible, reasonably entertaining and essential viewing for anyone with a serious interest in history or politics though it’s far from the last word.

Many lies and inaccuracies about the Holomodor remain to be challenged and as this film exemplifies, new untruths are still being manufactured so in “HOLOMODOR - Part Two” (to be published shortly on this website) I’ll identify false claims made by (amongst others) authors, Anne Applebaum, Sally J Taylor, James William Cowl and the Communist Party of Great Britain and examine Stalin’s role in the 1935 murder of Gareth Jones.

*******************

RUSSIA: WHEN THE NEEDLES GOT STUCK?

  International Brigade deplores EU Remembrance Resolution

 YOU'VE certainly got to hand it to those few people on the British left who still stick with the idea that Russia offers some form of hope for human civilisation.  It is an idea that somehow a remnant of a golden age ideal rooted in historical Marxist-Leninism, will emerge through the person of  Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin; (a former student of law at Leningrad University and later a KGB foreign intelligence officer going on to be Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor agency). 

In this country the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) is seemingly one of those bodies dedicated to upholding the myth of this new Russian Saint Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.   As evidence of this on the 5th,  October 2019, at the LONDON AGM of the Chair Jim Jump moved a motion expressing dismay at the decision of the European Parliament to approve a remembrance resolution. 

The actual text of the EU resolution,  of which the IBMT so violently disapproves, reads as follows:

'This strand supports activities inviting reflection on European cultural diversity and on common values. It aims to finance projects reflecting on causes of totalitarian regimes in Europe's modern history (especially, but not exclusively, Nazism that led to the Holocaust, Fascism, Stalinism and totalitarian communist regimes) and to commemorate the victims of their crimes.

'This strand also concerns other defining moments and reference points in recent European history. Preference will be given to projects encouraging tolerance, mutual understanding, intercultural dialogue and reconciliation.'

Now the International Brigade resolution, which was agreed unanimously,  begins sa follows:  

'The European Parliament’s recent decision to equate communism with Nazism and to ignore British appeasement of fascism as one of the key factors leading to the Second World War has been roundly condemned by the IBMT.'   

This is the opening wording with which the International Brigade AGM motion begins condemns European Parliament’s remembrance resolution as an ‘insult’ to anti-fascists!   What this IBMT motion blatantly ignores is the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,^[a] officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,^[b] was a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by Foreign Ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.^[8]

In the end it was the Germans that broke with this pact not the Soviets.  The British International Brigade.  However, it would good if we could conclude the crimes of the Soviet Union with a dodgy pact taken out with a neighbouring regime in the difficult circumstances of the1930s.  Any disinterested observer of 20th century history must know this cannot be the case.  As I write this I am reviewing a book 'THE RESPONSIBILITY OF INTELLECTUALS: Reflections by Noam Chomsky & others after 50 years' which which deals with what honest journalists and academics ought to be doing to tell truth to the powerful.  In this book Craig Murray* writes about 'The abdication of responsibility':  'It is worth noting the clear-eyed recognition in Chamsky's work that the Soviet Union was also a rival empire.  Even while deporing Russophobia and continual threat posture of encirclement - which Chomsky also note in his essay - I always find it is worth reminding people that Russia itself still is an empire.  Much of its current land - and I mean Russia itself, not the former Soviet Republics - was acquired in the nineteenth century by imperial conquest precisely contempororary with British acquisitions in India or indeed the westward expansion of the USA.  These territories are majority Muslim.  Russian imperialism is quite real.'  

This is indeed an inconvenient truth which the IBMT and those who sell the Morning Star may wish to forget.  It's harder to forget the mountains of  corpses in the  Ukrainian Famine of 1933-4 or Stalin's Show Trials and purges in the later 1930s, but George Orwell described in December 1945 in a penetrating essay entitled 'Through a Glass, Rosily', an attack on a Tribune's Vienna correspondent for revealing 100,000 rape cases owing to the inappropriate misbehavior of the Russian occupying troops with the local citizenship.  At that time Orwell argued that some readers of  Tribune seemed to imply that (even if true) the '100,000 rape cases in Vienna are not a good advertisement for the Soviet regime:  therefore, even if they happened, don't mention them.  Anglo-Russian relations are more likely to prosper if inconvenient facts are kept dark.'

What the wrong-headed motion, which originates from the International Brigade Memorial Trust, and is now being promoted by the Morning Star salesmen, is doing is to throw historical facts down the Orwellian 'Memory Hole'.  What these people are saying is 'don't reveal inconvenient facts' like the Ukrainian Famine in 1933-4 or mass rapes by Russian troops of citizens in occupied wartime Vienna or the purges, simply it because it will play into the hands of the enemy.

 But the trouble with this kind of cover-up is that when it gets out that it is false then people tend not to believe you even when you are telling the truth.  The Morning Star itself has few readers and it little credibility in intellectual circles.  By contrast the International Brigade has retained some degree of integrity over the years, but now by associating itself with the motion it risks bring its own organisation into disrepute:  any body who is willing to weigh the management of the Russia's Soviet gulags more favourably than the gas-chambers of Nazi Germany has surely an unenviable task?

Orwell introduced the term 'Inverted Nationalism', to explain how some people came to embrace either Germany or Russia in contrast to their own countries in the 1930s.  With some people on the left somehow the needle got stuck, and despite Russian regime now being committed to the Orthodox Church and passionate Slav nationalism these same people still cling emotionally to this Oriental despotism.  It's as if there is some deep physological need for these attachments.

*****************

*  Craig Murray is author of Murder in Samarkand (Mainstream Publishing, 2006).  Became well known when he resigned as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in protest against British collusion with the Uzbek dictatorship during the 'war on terror'.  He received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence in 2006.

Men, Massacres & Monuments

 

Image of James Keogh by Clifford Harper on N.V.13

AROUND 2008, Tameside Trade Union Council applied for a blue plaque for James Keogh, an Ashton-under-Lyne lad who was killed in action fighting with the International Brigade for freedom and democracy in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. This initial nomination was rejected by the Arts & Events committee of Tameside MBC on the grounds that Mr. Keogh's contribution may not have been unique, and that there may have been other local people who fought in Spain. It turned out that there had been a number of others but that James Keogh was the only one, so far as we know, who was actually killed in action. The research involved in finding out about Mr. Keogh, who died in March 1938 near Calaceite in the northern Spanish province of Aragón, and investigating the other residents of Ashton who went to Spain, was onerous and it was not until 25th November 2011 that a Blue Plaque was unveiled to James at Ashton-under-Lyne library. This followed a long campaign by Tameside TUC, and his family for recognition; this despite the fact that Mr. Keogh fitted all the criteria.                                                                                                

                                                                                                              
In contrast, Rochdale Council wasted no time in awarding a blue plaque to Sir Cyril Smith, the former Rochdale MP 1972-92, after he died in 2010: his blue plaque was erected outside Rochdale Town Hall in October 2011, even though it turned out that he didn't fit the criteria set down by English Heritage having been dead for just over a year. The person responsible at that time in the Rochdale Tourist Bureau, when asked, told Northern Voices that the town didn't need to meet the criteria suggested by English Heritage. Of course, it was revealed in November 2012 that Cyril Smith was very unique by any standards of human conduct, and that he had molested young lads in the 20th century on a significanr scale. Now four empty screw holes is all that remains in the grey stone wall of Rochdale Town Hall, where the commemorate blue plaque to Sir Cyril was once affixed. Fear of vandalism was the reason given by the Council Leader, Colin Lambert, for the removal of the plaque, and yet, I understand that a picture of Cyril still adorns' the inner walls of the Town Hall and that there is still a 'Sir Cyril Smith Room' within to remember the great man.

This business of commemorating significant figures, men or women, is tricky.   Last Saturday's Spanish paper El Pais had an acticle reporting on a meeting this month at 26, Kutuzuvski Avenue in Moscow, at which an event took place with the motive of remounting a plaque to commemorate Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (Russian: Леони́д Ильи́ч Бре́жнев, IPA: [lʲɪɐˈnʲid ɪlʲˈjitɕ ˈbrʲeʐnʲɪf] who led the Soviet Union for 18 years till his death in 1982.  The original plaque had been taken down in 1991.  The ceremony, according to El Pais, was 'solemn' and took place 'thanks to the inniative of one of the most polemical deputies in the State Duma (Russian Parliament) Alexandr Jinshtein'.  There is also talk of reinstalling a statute of Felix Dzherzhinski, founder of the Checa, the organisation that preceeded the KGB (Soviet Secret Police outfit):  this statue of huge dimensions, was originally pulled down, El Pais reports, 'by a furious mulitude  in 1991 when it adorned the Lubianka Square in front of the headquarters of the secret police' - today it can be viewed in an exhibion at a museum of sculptures.  El Pais further reports that the Russian President Putin at a press conference recently said that he didn't see much difference 'between Stalin and Cromwell'. 

Meanwhile, it seems that before the edifice of the KGB in a nearby garden there now stands a simple monument, which El Pais says is 'much more simple:  a stone commemorative of the Solovki concentration camp, in the north of Russia, in rememberance of the 11 million people who died during the years of the Soviet Terror'.