CAMBRIDGE, MA – The bourgeois press is at it again, continuing systematically to oppress workers all around the world. Their latest crime, supporting Russian President Boris Yeltsin, was the subject of a recent lecture sponsored by the Harvard/Radcliffe Friends of the Sparticus Youth Club. Len Meyers, member of the Worker’s Vanguard editorial board, exhorted his followers for 90 minutes to “defeat the Yeltsin-Bush counter-revolution” in the USSR.

Of course, the idea that Bush and Yeltsin have secretly been collaborating to bring “capitalist oppression” to the Soviet Union is rather implausible on its face, given the Bush Administration’s unswerving loyalty to Gorbachev and its treatment of Yeltsin as a boorish inconvenience. Nonetheless, Meyers stressed the urgency of upholding Leninist principles against the Yeltsin-Bush onslaught.

Lenin’s Russia was “the freest society on the face of the earth,” he noted. Ignoring the inconvenient fact that within three years this “free society” bred a secret police force 16 times as large as the czars, Meyers focused on Lenin’s democratically-elected workers councils. These representatives were superior to those in the West, he insisted, because elected officials could be recalled immediately if the workers were dissatisfied. Not surprisingly, Meyers failed to add that within a matter of months, the right to recall officials was severely curtailed after disgruntled workers began to remove Bolsheviks.

But the two dozen starry-eyed revolutionaries in attendance swallowed Meyer’s lecture whole. They gave generously when a collection plate was passed around to support International Communist League activity in the USSR. The People’s Republic of Cambridge never ceases to amaze.

– Reprinted from Peninsula