JUDGMENT AT MOSCOW
Stephen Handelman questions the
methods and motives of those who plan to put the Communist Party in the dock
Moscow IN THE DAYS when the cold war was still cold, a senior member of the Canadian Communist Party received an astrakhan fur coat from the Kremlin for her 60th birthday. The idea for the gift came from a local party chief who wanted to reward a hard-working loyalist. 1This] great friend of the Soviet Union has occupied a most principled position with regard to all prob- lems of the international Commmunist movement,' he wrote to Moscow. The Soviet Central Committee, the party's highest organ, concurred. The wife of the Soviet consul in Montreal, then on home leave in Moscow, was ordered to smuggle the coat into Canada as part of her person- al baggage. Moscow bureaucrats, mixing thrift with political correctness, set a ceil- ing of £150 on the purchase.
The 'Astrakhan caper', documented in recently declassified party files, compares neither in scale nor in venality with dozens of juicier tales about the secret activities of the Soviet Communist Party which have only now come to light. Over the past month, for example, we have been given the first hard evidence of the Kremlin's clandestine support for terrorism in the Middle East, of its plots to buy gold and influence in South Africa and Afghanistan, and of political surveillance and domestic corruption that lasted well into the era of perestroika. But even such a minor exam- ple of overseas patronage as a smuggled fur coat brings into focus one of the dilem- mas of the post-Soviet world: how far is it healthy or rational to go in exposing the dirty linen — fur-lined and all — of the old regime?
An obsession with past scandals and dirty tricks has already destabilised the politics of transition in the former Soviet Union's former East European satrapies like Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Ger- many. Inevitably, the process has reached the motherland of all socialism, or what is left of it. KGB agents are said to be co- operating with Hollywood in plans for a mini-series on their cold-war adventures, with plots taken directly from Lyubianka files. Academics and publishers are bid- ding for rights to secret Soviet archives, raising the intriguing prospect of future publishing coups such as: How I Bugged Sakharov's Computers, or Secret Tunnels of the Kremlin. No one doubts there is suffi- cient material here to interest even the most jaded thriller reader, but it is already obvious that this torrent of truth-telling if that is what it is — carries a political, as well as a market, price. For proof of this, one need look no further than the Russian government, at the moment the leading purveyor of party secrets.
Russian officials have been throwing open the dankest closets of the Kremlin without the slightest effort to hide their political agenda. Exposure of commu- nism's crimes, they say, is the only way to ensure history will not be repeated. But there is also reason to fear that the pro- cess of ferreting out skeletons will not only backfire on its perpetrators but bring down Russia's fragile democratic struc- ture.
Exhibit A is the Russian Constitutional Court investigation of communist activi- ties, scheduled to re-open on Tuesday 7 July. It is no coincidence — as the com- munists used to say — that the trickle of revelations about party skulduggery has turned into a flood as the court date approaches. Government officials, who have billed this variously as 'the trial of the century' and 'Russia's answer to Nurem- burg', fervently believe that the court hear- ings will end once and for all any lingering nostalgia for the old regime and discredit those Russian politicians attempting to revive the party in various forms. The release of suddenly declassified secret doc- uments is part of their plan. 'The materials we will make public will make the world tremble with indignation,' said Mikhail Poltaranin, the Russian Information Minis- ter, as he opened the campaign. Over the next few weeks, Mr Poltaranin was not timid about using the threat of disclosure to cow the government's political oppo- nents, not least the former Soviet presi- dent, Mikhail Gorbachev. 'We could bury Gorbachev with one blow,' he warned. Mr Poltaranin and other like-minded officials may need reminding that the political use of\ damaging files was a tactic honed to an art by their predecessors in the Kremlin. This month's hearings already convey the faint, worrying smell of a 'show trial'. • In defence of the Russian government, it must be noted that the communists actually started the battle when they brought a suit in Russia's highest court to challenge the legality of President Boris Yeltsin's suspen- sion of the Soviet and Russian Communist Parties after the aborted August coup. The brief filed by communist deputies main- tained the president had no authority to suspend a legitimate political party. That gave the president's lawyers the opening they needed. In a counter-suit, the Yeltsin government argued that the Communist Party, in both its Soviet and Russian vari- ants, was not a legitimate party at all but an agent for the former Soviet state's illegal activities, and asked the court to rule the party unconstitutional. Angry communists tried to get the second petition ruled out of order. But on 27 May, the first day of the hearings, the 13-member court voted to hear both suits. As the trial adjourned for six weeks, to the stunned bewilderment of the elderly Politburo types in the court- room the government was claiming victory: the issue had become the legality of the party rather than the legality of its suspen- sion.
Much as one would like to cheer any attempt to show up the old Communist Party for the hypocritical, savage machine that it was, the future progress of the trial raises some worrying points. The thorniest question is how to define 'unconstitution- ality'.
Lawyers for both sides will be in the awkward position of testing their argu- ments against a constitution whose own constitutionality must be in doubt, having been written for another era and another political system. While drafts of a new Russian constitution are tied up in parlia- ment, the previous one has to be turned clumsily against the only organisation which gave it legitimacy. If, as we all know, the Soviet Communist Party was effective- ly the Soviet state, how can it be judged illegal? What law or constitutional provi- sion could it be deemed to have violated if its actions — whether the financing of ter- rorism or paying for a foreign comrade's fur coat — were part of state policy?
Some of the Russian government's lawyers, invoking the Nuremburg prece- dent, talk of condemning the whole edifice for 'crimes against humanity'. But a crime needs discernible victims as well as a per- petrator. It is just as likely, considering the Russian penchant for putting everybody and everything on trial, that the current government could some day find itself in the dock on similarly ambiguous grounds. In the worst case, government lawyers will have to ask the court to find the Commu- nist Party guilty as charged simply because popular opinion — and political necessity — demand it. We do not need to be told, of course, where that can lead.
Stephen Handelman is Moscow Bureau Chief of the Toronto Star
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