Yugoslavia, East Europe and the Fourth International

An Open Letter to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Written: 1948
Source: Prometheus Research Library, Prometheus Research Series No. 4, New York, 1993
Transcription/Markup/Proofing: John Heckman.
Public Domain: Encyclopedia of Trotskyism On-Line 200/Prometheus Research Library. You can freely copy, display and otherwise distribute this work. Please credit the Marxists Internet Archive & Prometheus Research Library as your source, include the url to this work, and note the transcribers & editors above.

The following letter by the International Secretariat of the Fourth International was published in the newspaper of the American Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, 26 July 1948.

Paris,
July 1, 1948

To the Central Committee and to All Members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia

Comrades,

We want to let you know that the attention of the entire international revolutionary workers’ movement is today centered on the conflict in which you have, for some time, been pitted against the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party and the Cominform.

The official press of the Communist parties is seeking to engulf you in a flood of slanders and insults. Their conduct is a good example of how proletarian democracy is dragged in the mud by these people who operate from Moscow the entire international machine which is at the service of the Soviet bureaucracy.

But we are not in the least duped by this system of slander campaigns which has in the past destroyed so many precious forces in the labor movement. Because under the worst difficulties, we have never ceased for one moment, ever since Lenin died, to continue his struggle in Russia and in the entire world for the world communist revolution, against capitalist and imperialist reaction, and against the Soviet bureaucracy which usurped Lenin’s party and the whole Communist International.

We know with what sinister inflexibility the bureaucratic machine in Moscow tries to nip in the bud every aspiration of independence or even a sign of a critical attitude toward itself. This Soviet bureaucracy has nothing in common with the Bolshevism of Lenin and the genuine defense of what still remains of the October conquests in the Soviet Union. The struggle—which has, since 1927, destroyed in Russia the entire Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party of the days of the October Revolution—was led by the Thermidorians of the Russian Revolution, who were able temporarily to triumph over the proletarian revolutionary wing of Russian Bolshevism.

Now you are in a position to understand, in the light of the infamous campaign of which you are the victims, the real meaning of the Moscow Trials and of the whole Stalinist struggle against Trotskyism.

You hold in your hands a mighty power if only you summon enough strength to persevere on the road of the socialist revolution and its program. This road is also the road of independence from the bureaucratic apparatus of Moscow. Looking for a way out are tremendous forces in the entire world labor movement—now caught in a vise between imperialism led from Washington on the one side, and on the other, the Soviet bureaucracy in the Kremlin, interested solely in keeping its own privileged caste interests in Russia.

Keep up your fight! Deepen the significance of your struggle with Moscow and its international machine! Do not yield to imperialist pressures! Establish a regime of genuine workers’ democracy in your party and in your country! Thereby you will contribute immensely to the rebirth of the international workers’ movement.

The International Secretariat of the Fourth International, the organization which unites around its program of Bolshevism and Leninism 35 sections on the five continents, wants to address itself in this our first message to you not concerning those things about which we must be critical of you with regards to your past and more recent course. We wish rather to take note of the promise in your resistance—the promise of victorious resistance by a revolutionary workers’ party against the most monstrous bureaucratic machine that has ever existed in the labor movement, the Kremlin machine.

We shall presently address to you and to your Congress and to all Yugoslav Communists an open letter in which we shall treat in detail our point of view on the historic meaning of your conflict with Moscow and its Cominform.

Long Live the Yugoslav Socialist Revolution! Long Live the Proletarian World Revolution!

International Secretariat of the Fourth International