WORLD

Our duty to those who sacrificed is
to ensure lasting peace — Gorbachev

By JACK PHILLIPS

MOSCOW — The following is a sum-
mary of a report by Mikhail Gorbachev,
General Secretary of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union, delivered on
May 8, 1985 on the occasion of the 40th
Anniversary of the defeat of fascism in
Europe.

* * *

The Soviet leader began by paying tri-
bute to the Soviet people and their val-
iant armed forces; to the partisans and
resistance fighters to all the war and labor
veterans who made victory possible.

He pointed out that 20 million Soviet
lives were lost and asked his listeners to
observe a minute’s silence in tribute to
their memory.

Mikhail Gorbachev then continued:
The last war has gone down in history as
the Great Patriotic War. The fate of our
country hung in the balance. Would our
people be free or would they disappear
into historical oblivion? This mortal
danger stirred the whole nation to fight a
people’s war, a sacred war. It was the
greatest historical clash with the shock
forces of imperialism.

The young socialist state had been in
the midst of a grand scale socialist trahs-
formation. We needed peace, nothing
but peace. The Communist Party and the
government did all they could to prevent
war. When war came, the attack was
cunning and brutal, with the economic
resources of enslaved Europe and a
potential twice as great as that of the
Soviet Union. The enemy also had the
advantage of surprise.

Incredible Suffering

‘Invasion brought our people incredible
suffering and privation. But even when
times were most difficult, we never lost
faith in victory and the triumph of our
cause. Soviet troops routed nazi hordes
at Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad and in
the Caucases and dealt them devastating
blows in the Kursk Bulge, the Ukraine.
The Soviet soldier was distinguished by
patriotism, courage and skill in combat.
The titanic battles brought out the skill of
Soviet commanders. More than one mil-
lion guerrillas fought the enemy in tem-
porarily-occupied territory.

The war revealed the advantages of a
socialist economy. Soviet steel and coal
output was then three or four times less
than the output of Germany and the oc-
cupied countries, but the Soviet Union
produced nearly twice as much military
equipment during the war. The nazis
hoped to set all ethnic groups in the
Soviet Union against each other. Noth-
ing came of these expectations. War
united all ethnic groups to give battle to
the aggressor.

The war was directed by the Commu-
nist Party and its Central Committee and
the National Defence Committee under
Stalin. Communists led at the front and in

the rear, where it was most dangerous
and where the responsibilities were
greatest. Three million Party members
gave their lives, but five million joined as
new members during the war.

Thé Red Army entered enslaved Eu-
rope to put an end to war and fascism and

to enable the peoples of Europe to live in °

conditions of stable and lasting peace.

Tribute to Allies

The Soviet people pay tribute to the
Allied armies of the United States,

Britain and France. Soviet people
will never forget the courage of the

8 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, MAY 29, 1985

Yugoslav people and their army of libera-
tion. They will always think highly of
Polish and Czechoslovak troops who
fought side by side with Soviet troops,
and of the part played in the defeat of
nazism by the patriots of Bulgaria,
Romania, and Hungary, Albania and
Greece.

Not forgotten is the way German
communists and anti-fascists, and the re-
sistance movement in Western Europe,
carried on their unequal battle against the
nazi regime. The Soviet Union played a
great role in the defeat of militarist Japan
and acted in close, militant co-operation
with the great Chinese people. Mongo-
lian troops also pounded the common
enemy and the patriots of Vietnam,
Korea and other Asian countries fought
the enemy tenaciously.

While recalling the joint struggle of the
allied nations against the common
enemy, we can take pride in the fact that
the outcome of World War Two was de-
cided on the Soviet-German front. Here,
the aggressor sustained more than 70 per
cent of his losses.

USSR Moving Ahead

Today, the Soviet Union has a highly
developed economy. Our industry has
developed twice as fast as those in the
developed capitalist countries. The
Soviet Union now has the skills and an
educated work force with a great many
engineers and scientists. The Soviet
Union built the first atomic power plant
and the first atomic powered icebreaker.
It launched the first earth satellite anda
Soviet citizen, Yuri Gagarin, was the first
person to see the earth from outer space.

There is a constantly rising standard of
living and real per capita incomes are
now more than six times above pre-war
levels. Our country has solved the major
social problems. Every person has a
sense of belonging to one big family, the
Soviet nation, a new social and inter-
national community. In this setting of
true, down-to-earth democracy and re-
spect for the dignity and rights of citi-
zens, more and more people are taking
part in local and national affairs. Self-
government is improving all the time.

Forty years after the great victory, the
Soviet Union is a strong and flourishing
power, confidently advancing towards a
communist future. But the dialectics of
development are such that every new
advance confronts the nation with more
complicated problems. Now we must
bring about an entirely new quality of life
in terms of the national economy, social
and political relations and working and
living conditions. We must quickly reach
the most advanced levels of productive
labor and national efficiency as a whole.
These are problems of an unusually
grand scale, but we have all that is
needed to solve them and we most cer-
tainly will.

Power of the People

With the approach of the 27th Con-
gress of the Party, the Central Commit-
tee is acting to make certain that the Par-
ty’s policy meets the needs of social
development and the interests and
wishes of the people. That policy enjoys
the support and warmest endorsement of
the great majority of Soviet people. Party
policy rests on a great faith in the active
power of the people. —

The nation defeated the enemy in out-
right battle, faced up to the difficult years
of post-war rehabilitation and went on to
make outstanding progress in national

‘development. It will triumph in the new

conditions and will meet the challenge of
the times.

The Second World War began long be-
fore the first battles were fought. It cast
its sinister shadow over humanity in the
days when some politicians were unable
to prevent nazism from coming to power
and others did not wish to. Now we know
more about who helped the fascist ruling
clique to arm and prepare for military
adventures and how they helped it.

Source of Shame

The Munich deal will always be a
source of shame for those who goaded
Hitler into attacking the Soviet Union,
those who despite the urgings of the
Soviet Union refused to form a common
front and stop the nazi adventurers. The
passage of time will never absolve them
of the responsibility for the disaster.
Nearly all of Western Europe had to be
overrun, Paris had to fall, London had to
be bombed and Pearl Harbor had to be
attacked before the cynical plans and
groundless hopes collapsed.

There had to be the brilliant victories
of the Red Army before the pledges of

co-operation with the Soviet Union .

began to take on tangible form. The ex-
perience of the anti-Hitler coalition

proved that nations with different social _

systems can unite their efforts against a
common enemy.

Today, all nations have one common
enemy. The threat of nuclear war. All
have one common and major task, the
job of removing that threat. Twice in this
century imperialist groups started a
world conflagration in the hope of achiev-
ing their class-oriented goals and further-
ing their egoistic interests. But history
had planned otherwise. Both wars began
as imperialist adventures and ended in
the defeat of those who started them.
Both wars ushered in a new series of
upheavals inside the-system that gen-
erates wars. When the Soviet people
saved the freedom and independence of
their country they simultaneously car-
ried out the great internationalist mission
of saving world civilization from fascism.
The defeat of fascism strengthened the
forces of progress and democracy and
led to the victory of a new social system
in various countries of Europe and Asia.

Rapid Changes

The post-war years have seen the for-
mation and rapid advance of a world-
wide system of socialism and the birth of
acommunity of socialist nations. Today,
socialism is an indomitable factor for
peace and the guarantor of the security of
nations. The nations of the socialist
community act as one and consistently
champion peace and disarmament. The
Warsaw Treaty Organization has a spe-
cial role to play here. Until the threat to
security and peace is removed, the
member nations will do everything
necessary to protect themselves from
any encroachment.

The great changes in the post-war —

world are also connected with the col-
lapse of colonialism. Scores of indepen-
dent states have risen where there were
colonies and semi-colonies and many of
them are playing an ever-more progres-
sive role in world politics. With the ac-
tive support of the socialist nations, they
are pressing energetically for a new and
more just economic order. The non-
aligned movement is an important factor
on the international scene.

As we see, the political pattern of the
world has changed radically in the past 40
years. The area of imperialist domination

has grown much smaller and the align-
ment inside the capitalist world has
changed. The United States is the leader
in the capitalist world in all the most im-
portant ways. Its ruling class is encour-
aged to aspire to world domination by the
fact that the U.S. was the only big coun-
try to gain fabulous wealth from the war.

U.S. policy is becoming more and
more belligerent and has become a nega-
tive factor in international relations. We
cannot ignore this. The aggressive aspi-
rations of the ruling elite of the U.S. ex-
press themselves in attempts to under-
mine the military strategic balance, the
basis of international security, and in
moves to speed up the arms race and,
especially, the nuclear arms race. It has
dangerous plans to militarize outer
space. :

The U.S. has developed barbaric doc-
trines for using nuclear weapons and has
established hundreds of military bases
and facilities on all continents. It pursues
a policy of ‘state terrorism against
Nicaragua.

There is a mounting danger of revan-
chist sentiments in the Federal Republic
of Germany and the U.S. administration
is working energetically to revive that
sentiment. When the leaders of the seven
major capitalist nations gathered in Bonn
a few days ago to mark the 40th anniver-
sary in their own way, they called into
question the territorial and_ political
realities in Europe. Some politicians are
prepared to forget and even justify the SS
cutthroats — more than that — to pay
honor to them. That is an insult to the
memory of the millions who were shot,
gassed and burnt.

Peace is Possible

Despite the complexity and even
dangerous character of the situation,
there is a real possibility of putting a
check on the forces of militarism. This is
borne out by the experience of the policy

,of peaceful co-existence. The only
reasonable way today is to arrange the
co-operation of all nations for the sake of
a common,-peaceful future. This is not a
simple problem. It requires a fairly high
degree of trust in relations among na-
tions. The trend of events can change
sharply if tangible progress proves to be
possible at the Soviet-American talks in
Geneva on nuclear and space weapons.

The experience of the 1970s is invalu-
able. A good political, legal, moral and
psychological basis was laid in the new
historical conditions for co-operation
among nations of the two systems. The
Soviet Unionis firmly in favor of reviving
the process of easing tension, but less
tension is not the ultimate goal in our
view. It is-only a necessary stage of
transition from a peace encumbered with
weapons to a reliable and comprehensive
system of international security. Look-
ing for opportunities to remove the
danger of nuclear war must become the
supreme obligation of governments and
of responsible statesmen.

The Soviet Union stands firmly for a
peace. Our dedication to the policy of
peaceful co-existence shows the strength
of the new social system and our faith in
its historical potential. This policy is in
the interests of all nations. It is imbued
with a truly humanitarian spirit and with
the ideals of peace and freedom that in-
spired the Soviet people in World War
Two. It is the duty of the living to the
millions who gave their lives for freedom
and social progress to protect the sacred
right of people to life and to ensure last-
ing peace.

This is our common duty to present
and future generations. :

ied pain. ial