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Workers’ International News, October 1939

 

The Sale of Vilna

 

From Workers’ International News, Vol.2 No.10, October 1939, p.7.
Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The entry of the Red Army into Eastern Poland was accompanied by the “Sovietisation” of the occupied areas. The land-hungry peasants and the exploited workers found themselves suddenly and without any revolutionary action on their part the masters of the factories and the land.

But when Stalin assumed the role of liberator of the Polish workers and peasants it was only the accidentally progressive bye-product of his real aims, which are the protection of the national interests of the Kremlin. How little the interests of the toilers count in comparison with the needs of military strategy was amply demonstrated when, the workers and peasants of the Vilna district were traded back to the Lithuanian capitalists and landowners in return for military advantages. And since the population sold back into bandage in this cynical manner were not the agents of their own deliverance, they are unable to resist. Stalin gave and Stalin has taken away.

In the hands of this “guardian of the toilers” there still lies the heritage of the October revolution, and there can be no doubt that he will trade in the collectivised property of the Russian masses just as light-heartedly as he trafficked in the life interests of the people of Vilna. The Kremlin cliques, fighting. for their own security, constitute a menace to all that still remains of the gains made by the Russian workers in Lenin’s lifetime. Despite the episodic appearance of the Soviet bureaucracy as deliverers of the Eastern Polish people, they must be recognised as a reactionary force imperilling even those advances which they have accidentally made.

 
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