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Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters! (Quote of the Week) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 was the last heroic chapter of Poland’s combative Jewish proletariat during World War II. Some 40,000 men, women and children held off elite Nazi troops for 42 days before they were nearly all dragged off to the gas chambers. We reprint below an excerpt from Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag), the newspaper of the Jewish Trotskyists in the Warsaw Ghetto, hailing the Red Army shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This selection originally appeared in WV No. 573 (9 April 1993). In the intervening period, we have misplaced the source material. The first workers state is fighting for its existence. The fate of the Russian Revolution and—to a considerable degree—the fate of the international revolution weigh in the balance. The workers of the whole world follow with bated breath the course of the greatest class war in the world, and their hearts and souls are with the Red Army…. Under which slogans will the Soviet bureaucracy lead the war? Under patriotic or revolutionary ones, “democratic” or class? The history of the last 17 years, beginning from the foundation of the theory of “socialism in one country,” and especially the “gains” of the last six years—the “people’s front,” betrayal of the Spanish revolution, the Moscow trials, the pogrom against the Bolshevik elite, the restoration of the officer caste in the Red Army, triumphant reaction in all spheres of Soviet life, the propagation of the cult of [tsarist generals] Suvorov, Kutuzov and similar “heroes,” the assassination of Trotsky and the friendship with Hitler, all Stalin’s crimes—the whole Soviet Thermidor would have had no sense if the Soviet bureaucracy were to show itself suddenly willing and capable to conduct revolutionary war…. We defend the workers state regardless of the Stalinist regime, as we defend every workers organization from the blows of the class enemy regardless of the reformist regime ruling it…. The war of the USSR against Hitler—is the war of the international proletariat, it is our war! “We accept the workers’ state as it is and we assert, ‘This is our state.’ Despite its heritage of backwardness, despite starvation and sluggishness, despite the bureaucratic mistakes and even abominations, the workers of the entire world must defend tooth and nail their future socialist fatherland which this state represents” (Trotsky, 1932). Long Live the Red Army! Long Live the Russian Revolution! Long Live the International Revolution! —“Our War,” Czerwony Sztandar (July 1941)
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