I figured it looked like a forgery, since it seems totally un-Gorbylike both in content and style, but figured, hell, maybe if you had a horrible translation from Russian into Turkish, and then a horrible translation from Turkish into English, maybe there's a kernel of Gorbyness down there somewhere.
PS. There was some discussion a while back on left opposition groups in the USSR. I thought this was interesting. (From an analystic supplement that comes out on Johnson's Russia List from time to time.)
YOUTH AGAINST STALIN
SOURCE. Juliane Furst, "Prisoners of the Soviet Self?-- Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism," Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54 No. 3, May 2002, pp. 353-376.
We are accustomed to thinking of the Stalin regime as exercising surveillance over society so tight as to make organized dissent virtually impossible. But in fact that was not the case. On the basis of newly accessible NKVD (secret police) archives, interviews with former participants, and published memoirs, Juliane Furst (London School of Economics) has provided the first systematic account of one type of such dissent -- anti-Stalinist youth activism. Focusing on the postwar period (late Stalinism), she found evidence of no fewer than 27 illegal anti-Stalinist youth organizations with a combined membership numbering in the hundreds. True, all but one of these organizations was eventually discovered and suppressed by the NKVD.
The majority of organizations were active in large cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk [Yekaterinburg], and Tbilisi (in Georgia). But some of the organizations were based in medium-sized provincial centers: two were in Voronezh, including the Communist Party of Youth (KPM) with as many as 53 members, and another two in Astrakhan. There was even one organization in a village in the Stavropol Territory.
All the young anti-Stalinists claimed to be loyal to the Soviet system and true Marxism-Leninism, which they believed Stalin had perverted. Their Leninism is reflected in the names they gave their organizations (e.g., Union for Struggle for the Revolutionary Cause). In their hierarchical structure and many of their practices as well as in the language they used, they tended to imitate the official Communist Youth League (Komsomol). Indeed, some recruited only Komsomol members. It sometimes took NKVD investigators several months to make up their minds whether the social criticism voiced by members of a particular organization was or was not within permissible limits. Should they be considered basically loyal to the regime or branded as "counter-revolutionaries under the mask of revolutionary slogans"?
The public activity of the anti-Stalinist youth groups was severely constrained by the need for secrecy, though some did distribute fliers and write graffiti on walls. Despite the names of certain organizations such as "Army of the Revolution" and "Death to Beria," none of them ever committed any acts of violence.
The young anti-Stalinists took the risky step of forming illegal organizations because they could not stomach the abyss that separated idealistic official rhetoric from the grim reality surrounding them. Many felt marginalized and alienated as a result of their family background -- that is, their parents had been arrested in the purges or they were of Jewish origin. Some came from very prominent families: for instance, Boris Batuyev, founder of the KPM, was the son of the Second Secretary of the Voronezh Provincial Party Committee. Although their ideology had a certain resemblance to Trotskyism, they had worked it out on their own: they do not seem to have had any contact with oppositionists of the older generation, most of whom had by this time been killed or imprisoned.
What happened to these youngsters? For the first two years after the war, arrested anti-Stalinist activists were tried in local city or provincial courts and received relatively mild sentences, typically five years in camp. Many of these survived to tell the tale: some changed their political convictions in later life, others did not. In 1947 it was decided to send such cases to military tribunals, which handed out far harsher punishment, generally 25 years. The leaders of the last organization to be tried under Stalin, in 1952, were executed. Chris Doss The Russia Journal ------------------ Heh, Chris, that Gorby interview on Turkish radio really looks like a fabrication to me. When I first saw it on, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stalinist/ I had a good chuckle.
And, Liquidadate, though first used by Lenin in intra-party polemics, is much more a Stalinist phrase. Michael Pugliese