What if a communist member of the Russian Congress of People's Deputies were to address the U.S. Congress? What if she or he had the chance to challenge the version of things now being put forth by the U.S. government and media?Here's what such a Russian deputy could say in an open letter to the U.S. Congress.
Dear members of the U.S. Congress:
As you well know, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin imbued their joint April 4 news conference at the close of the Vancouver, Canada, summit with a spirit of camaraderie and good fellowship. Indeed, that was the sense of the whole weekend.
But good will is hardly an accurate description of the United States government's attitude toward Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union. Nothing better reveals the reality than the Grayling submarine incident.
On March 20, the U.S.S. Grayling--an attack submarine equipped with 16 ocean-spanning nuclear missiles--collided with a Russian submarine. According to the Pentagon, the Grayling was engaged in "routine" intelligence surveillance.
That is hardly the case. Both submerged vessels were seriously damaged when they collided in the Arctic Ocean 105 nautical miles north of Murmansk--off the Russian coast in Russian territorial waters.
Imagine how you would have reacted if a Russian nuclear submarine had collided with a U.S. vessel off the Florida coast. It would have been an international incident of monumental proportions.
President Clinton was obliged to apologize at the April 4 news conference. He said, "I don't mind saying to this whole assembly that I told President Yeltsin I very much regretted the submarine incident." But we had to look with a fine-toothed comb to find the apology in your supposedly democratic press.
In its March 23 report the New York Times had called the incident "the latest round of a cat-and-mouse game that has outlived the Cold War." It was actually much more than that. It was a most dangerous development that pushed humanity toward the edge of nuclear war.
We had thought those dark days were over. Now we find that was a cruel illusion.
A dangerous game
These incidents used to occur quite frequently. The U.S. Navy regularly reported "sightings" of Soviet Navy vessels in supposedly threatening positions, and even concocted non-existent incidents--collisions and the like--when it suited its purpose. The incidents were never confirmed.
As Harrison Salisbury pointed out a long time ago, Naval sightings of Russian subs always coincided with Congressional hearings on military appropriations, for the Navy in particular. Playing up the "Soviet threat," the Pentagon successfully pitched for more and more money.
At the same time, the Pentagon was able to mislead the public in this country by spinning fantasies about Soviet military aggression. It was a dangerous game, and it created a dangerous situation.
Now the Pentagon is again ready to mislead the public and create another dangerous situation, pushing for military measures to accomplish U.S. imperialism's political and economic goals.
The media in your country portray the armed forces of the former Soviet Union as completely disintegrated--a pushover. They make it appear that the once-mighty Red Army is all washed up, finished.
In a recent editorial, the New York Times took malicious delight in sarcastically asking, "What Red Army?" The Times answered: "The Red Army, once one of the world's most formidable fighting forces, is in an advanced state of disintegration. Its finest divisions have splintered, its draft calls go largely unheeded, its equipment is inoperative. . . . "
That's all true for the present. But the implication is that the way is now clear for the Pentagon to force its hand. That is not correct.
This is a great illusion--and an extremely perilous one if it leads the Pentagon to become adventurous and reckless. The enemies of the Soviet Union have made that mistake before.
The Red Army appeared to be disintegrating and breaking up during the great purges of 1937. Hitler thought the Soviet armed forces were finished because of the purges in the army and elsewhere. He thought the Soviet people would not fight. So he launched what he called Operation Barbarossa.
But to the world bourgeoisie's amazement the Red Army regrouped and recovered, defeated the Nazis, and in the process became a great industrial, technological and military power.
Now, it is certainly true that at this moment the forces of counter-revolution have the upper hand in the former USSR. So what is the purpose of all this military maneuvering by the Pentagon?
The purpose is to pressure the Yeltsin cabal of counter-revolutionaries to surrender on all the U.S. government's demands, both external and domestic. Can it be a coincidence that the submarine-ramming incident took place the very same day that Yeltsin announced on Russian television that he would rule by decree?
Or was it a signal from the military-industrial complex, reminding Yeltsin about who's really in control and whose bidding he must do?
The U.S. is offering the carrot of economic aid and at the same time brandishing the stick of military intervention. Together, the two tactics are aimed at making the former Soviet Union capitulate economically--and finally, to completely hand the whole country over to private ownership, dominated by the U.S. bourgeoisie.
And your press is not reporting it.
Elected by the people
It's unfortunate that our Congress of People's Deputies didn't take advantage of the opportunity to roundly expose the purpose of the the April 3-4 summit.
Had I and some of my colleagues had our way, we would have called upon the Russian people to come out in the hundreds of thousands for a giant demonstration that would really show where the people stand.
Unfortunately, my colleagues did not mount a campaign to counter the one issuing from Clinton and Yeltsin. Nor did they use diplomatic channels to answer the slanders against them and the Soviet people that constantly appear in the U.S. press.
But it is time to expose the canard, repeated in your ruling class-controlled press time and time again, that the Congress of People's Deputies is an undemocratically elected body.
If you're so convinced the Congress is undemocratic, why don't you ever mention that it is the same body that elected Yeltsin and all the members of his Cabinet? Congress first appointed Yeltsin president of Russia in 1990. The general election didn't occur until over a year later.
The current members of the Congress were elected in March 1990--not on the basis of a single slate or candidate, but in a multi-party election. When this idea was first broached it was applauded in the United States.
Our Congress was elected by the people. Each deputy was directly elected. If you had any criticism of these elections, it was not evident in your press at the time the vote took place three years ago.
Not even newspapers that have always closely followed events in the USSR, like the Washington Post and New York Times, criticized the elections. The elections established the present character of the Congress. Yet at the time you barely noticed it. How odd.
You had claimed for years that the Soviet Union was an autocratic, undemocratic entity, that the Congress of People's Deputies was an unelected body. You demanded pluralistic, contested elections in our country. But once we deputies were elected on that basis, you refused to even comment on it.
Apparently the election results were not satisfactory to your government. That's too bad. It must be why the press is now singing a different tune--excoriating the Congress of People's Deputies as an undemocratic body and praising a president who seeks to arrogate dictatorial powers to himself.
It might be worth your time to delve into the recent past. You'll remember that the United States Congress and the Congress of People's Deputies have had regular diplomatic relations with each other for many years. Again, not a word of it in your press. Inter-parliamentary delegations have traveled from your country to ours and from our country to yours.
This is clear evidence that the respective governments recognized the legitimacy of the two congresses. How can you forget all that, with not even a whisper in the press?
Remember the Alabama
Recognizing only one arm of a government and regarding the other as illegal and illegitimate constitutes rank interference in a country's internal affairs. It is unthinkable that you would ever allow such treatment from another country.
You certainly didn't during your Civil War against slavery, when England rudely interfered in your internal affairs by supporting the South. Britain actively supported the Confederacy. It built ships to transport war materiel to the South, and warships that inflicted considerable damage on the Northern fleet.
Many of you are lawyers. So you must remember the case of the Alabama. You have studied this famous case, known as "the Alabama claims," in your law schools.
The Alabama was a Confederate cruiser built and outfitted by Britain. After the war, the U.S. government claimed damages for the harm the Alabama did.
Under the 1871 Treaty of Washington, an international arbitration tribunal judged Britain guilty of interference in the internal affairs of another country. The panel held Britain liable for $15,500,000 in damages for losses the Alabama inflicted.
So your own history offers a lesson on what happens when countries intervene in the affairs of others. Yet that is precisely what your government has done since Yeltsin made his move to seize power March 20.
White House Communications Director George Stephanophoulos intervened first, with a swift public statement supporting Yeltsin and opposing the Congress of People's Deputies. Then President Clinton confirmed it, making U.S. policy official.
To come out against the Russian Congress in such a flagrant way is a most shocking form of interference--in fact, intervention--in another country's internal affairs.
This cannot be. It will not stand the test of history.
We should also take note of the fact that not everyone in your capitalist establishment agrees about what is going on in Russia, or what the United States should do about it.
For instance, then-CIA head Robert Gates had very enthusiastically announced the end of communism in December 1991. He was obliged some 15 months later to acknowledge, in a considerably subdued tone, that U.S. influence in Russia--meaning internal interference in the former Soviet Union--is only "marginal." That's a considerable come-down.
It prompted former Secretary of State James Baker, who served in two administrations, to attack. He wrote in the April 5 issue of Newsweek that to "wait out the political storm in Moscow . . . [is] both dangerous and naive."
This shows that in your ruling establishment there is a division of opinion rather than unanimity about the "aid" package--or, more precisely, about how and when to intervene in our affairs.
Teach us banking?
Our country, the Soviet Union, was up until just recently able to dispense billions of dollars in aid and assistance to other countries, in the developing world and the socialist bloc. Our economy grew every year.
Your banks--U.S. banks--regarded the USSR as the most credit-worthy country in the world.
So now we find it rather amusing to hear you say you're going to send people over here to teach us banking, accounting and all that. How did we manage up to now?
How did we build a mighty industrial power--with full employment, housing, health care and education for all--if we didn't know anything about money management? How did we victoriously defeat the counter-revolution and win the civil war, including driving out your invading forces after the Bolsehviks seized state power? How did we triumph over the Nazis?
How did we maintain a stable ruble and no inflation all those years? But now you suddenly come up with the idea that we have no bankers, no one with any understanding of finance.
We know what you're doing. You're not really interested in teaching us banking and accounting methods.
The real goal is to penetrate our government with an influx of State Department/CIA representatives. That's who these "bankers," "scholars" and so on really are. It's a bald move toward intervention, albeit under the thin cover of "helping the economy get in shape."
Surely no one thinks we're fooled by any of this. We understand these operations. We know what they are. If you really were coming here to teach us, it would be incredible arrogance on your part. But that's not what's happening at all.
You're coming in as a conqueror, not as a friendly collaborator.
Look at your $1.6 billion in "aid," which Clinton graciously presented to Yeltsin in Vancouver. Frankly, we in Russia regard it with scorn. You are taking advantage of the fact that our country, unfortunately, is temporarily represented by a bankrupt politician who needs a bail-out.
Yeltsin represents Western capitalist interests and the thin stratum of Russian capitalists you are so desperately trying to cultivate. But you're barking up the wrong tree with him. You can't grow giant oaks from crabgrass.
The "aid" itself doesn't really amount to much. Its purpose is not to advance our country's interests. Rather, the lenders are advancing their own interests. That's the whole idea.
One of your own newspapers--the New York Times-- actually expressed this view in its April 4 coverage of the Vancouver summit, in an article subtitled "No Matter Who Counts, It Is Not As Advertised," by Celestine Bohlen.
Revolution overthrew Russian capitalism
President Clinton has said time and again that Russia has never had a democracy, never had any free markets or a free economy. When he says the market system never existed and no one contests that absurd statement, it shows that your country has a totally monolithic press.
What a ridiculous thing to say, especially the point regarding free markets--by which he undoubtedly means a capitalist market. This has existed for several centuries, in Russia in particular.
Your bourgeoisie isn't introducing anything new to Russia with private markets and so on. Lenin was among the first to write about the development of capitalism in Russia, in 1903. And there have been many other books on it.
Private interests, private ownership of the means of production--in other words, the profit system--were the very reason a great proletarian revolution took place in 1917. The people rose up to overthrow that system and establish a socialist system instead.
The Bolsheviks' central slogan before the overthrow of the old regime was "down with the 10 capitalist ministers." They were capitalists. Capitalism was bad for Russia. And for that reason it was overthrown.
We even had a democracy here in Russia--of the type about which you U.S. politicians tend to get very enthused. Remember? The Kerensky democracy. It was a democracy; even Lenin called it the freest in the world. Free press, freedom of religion, all the freedoms that are generally accepted in the most advanced capitalist countries.
But this democracy wouldn't stand by its promise to withdraw from the imperialist war--World War I--and stop the carnage. In contrast, the Bolsheviks were ready, willing and able--and did stop the war. They gave land to the peasants and bread to the masses.
So why continue to say Russia is so ignorant, it never had a democracy, it never had free markets? These are all slanders. Why don't your press or you politicians get up to denounce them?
It is shameless to not even mention that the Kerensky regime was a democracy--true, a bourgeois democracy, but it was a democracy. Like all capitalist democracies in case of imperialist war, it stood with the imperialists and thereby undid itself.
U.S. intervention must stop
Your Congress has the power of the purse. Yet it's the president who has now made $1.6 billion in commitments.
To the best of our knowledge, no new "aid" package has been approved by the U.S. Congress. No Congressional oversight committee has been established. And there have been no Congressional hearings on how long this "aid" will continue.
We regret that so few members of the U.S. Congress have participated in this process. This unanimity on your part, as elected government officials, is very disturbing. It is reminiscent of the fascism that you denounce in other countries.
If the whole Congress is indeed in accord with Clinton's policy, why haven't you, as elected representatives, taken part in the decision-making? And have your constituents had a say? Do the people of your country want the U.S. to intervene in our country--and have they been informed of what that might bring?
If all this interference and intervention in our internal affairs continues--and as so many commentators have said, it may bring about civil war--it will become the biggest super-quagmire you've ever been in.
Let's not forget how you intervened in the war in China. Your government provided the principal financial, political and arms support for Chiang Kai-shek. That lasted for 27 years, and then you had to withdraw when the Chinese Revolution swept into power.
How do you justify all the interventions in which your government engages? Right now in your own Western Hemisphere your government is actively intervening in two sovereign nations--in both cases against the cause of democracy.
In Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was duly elected president only to be deposed by a military regime nine months later. Your government is playing a key role in placing obstacles to his return to power. And in Cuba, the people face deepening hardships because you are maintaining a murderous blockade to punish them for building a socialist society.
As for our country, you intervened here once before. We can still visit U.S. soldiers' graves from the 1919 intervention. They died here in the Soviet Union, in an illegal war into which you entered along with 14 other imperialist countries.
If there's war again, this time it will drain your government's resources as nothing else has. Isn't it time to call a halt to the campaign of vilification against the Congress of People's Deputies?