Workers World Vol. 13, No. 1
January 15, 1971
On January 1, Workers World Party called for the exchange of the eleven Zionist prisoners in Leningrad for the thirteen Black Panther prisoners in New York City.
“Let the U.S. free the Panther defendants in New York for the freedom of the Zionists in Leningrad,” urged Sam Marcy, chairman of the party, at the organization’s conference during the New Year weekend.
“It is obvious that Washington regards these Zionists as its own – not as persecuted Jews, but as friends of Israel and U.S. imperialism,” continued Comrade Marcy.
“Only yesterday the capitalist press and the New York City Administration organized a demonstration of several thousand in Foley Square of New York City with the mayor addressing the crowd, whipping them up further in defense of the Leningrad defendants, while he and his class commit crime after crime against the people here. All the imperialist world media carried this foul demonstration and called for rights and liberty for the Soviet Jews. But how can they claim to be for an oppressed people without being for all the oppressed?
“At the very moment of this bourgeois masquerade, a genuine picket line was taking place just a block away in defense of the thirteen Black Panthers being tried in New York. But they didn’t write about that demonstration.
“These prisoners belong to the people. The Leningrad prisoners are claimed by the world bourgeoisie.”
SOVIETS SHOULD HAVE PROPOSED IT
“The Soviet leaders should have raised the idea of an exchange of prisoners. These officials are supposed to represent our class camp, the camp of the oppressed. And the moment they saw the U.S. generating such hysteria over the issue, pretending it was one of anti-Semitism, they should have put aside their maneuvers to conciliate imperialism and answered the U.S. blow for blow.
“They have put a great deal of emphasis on Cultural Exchange. Well, here is a cultural exchange that would really mean something. Panthers for Zionists. And at the same time it would expose the whole issue as a political and military one, and not a question of religious persecution at all.”
“Such an exchange of prisoners,” he said further, “would not necessarily mean that the eleven Zionists would come to the U.S. and the Panthers would go to the Soviet Union. Both groups conceivable could be freed in their own countries.”
The pressure to commute the death sentences of two the group, he explained, did not arise from humanitarian sentiments, but from the propaganda needs of U.S. imperialism and was intimately connected with the Arab-Israeli struggle.
CAPITULATION TO BOURGEOISIE
Any real friends of the Arabs, to say nothing of allies of the Black people in the United States, would seize at once on the proposal to exchange prisoners. In commuting the death sentence of the two condemned Zionists without proposing any such exchange of prisoners or taking similar action, the Soviet leaders capitulated to bourgeois pressure, he asserted. This was also the situation with the French and Italian parties, and of course the New York Daily World followed along with pleas for commutation of the death sentence. They all fell in line before the onslaught of capitalist propaganda – couched in “humanitarian” phrases, as it always is in such cases.
(Comrade Marcy demonstrated that Fascist dictator Franco yielded to essentially proletarian pressure in commuting the death sentences of the revolutionary Basques during the same week, and the revolutionary forces were strengthened by this act.)
“Were the Soviet leaders unaware of the possibility of demanding such an exchange of prisoners?” the speaker asked.
IMPORTANT PRECEDENT
“The Panthers themselves have publicly raised the question of ‘Panthers for Pilots’ repeatedly. And furthermore there was an outstanding precedent, played down in the U.S. press, of course, but well known to Soviet diplomats.
“This was the exchange of Francisco Molina from a New York State prison for the CIA puppet Artime and other prisoners held by Cuba after the U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.”
(Molina, a Cuban national, had been railroaded to almost life imprisonment after a bitter fist fight with Cuban counter-revolutionaries in a New York restaurant, during which a little South American girl was accidentally shot.
(Deirdre Griswold, co-editor of this paper, and formerly national secretary of the Molina Defense Committee, helped arrange the exchange. The U.S. official go-between told her that he would deny in public what he agreed to in private when she proposed the exchange. But, the exchange did take place.)
THE REAL ANTI-SEMITISM
“Now, there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union,” the party chairman conceded, “but is has almost nothing to do with this international hysteria over the Leningrad defendants.
“The world bourgeoisie never complemented Lenin and the Bolsheviks when the majority of the central committee were of Jewish origin. On the contrary, they said that communism was a Jewish plot.
“When Ana Pauker, a leader of the Romanian CP and an active partisan against Nazism, was purged, why didn’t Golda Meir champion her cause as a Jewish countrywoman? Why didn’t she bring up the question of Soviet anti-Semitism then? Because Ana Pauker was a communist, a left-winger, that’s why!
“And when the Hungarian bourgeois counter-revolution overthrew the Jewish-descended Rakosi, somehow the world bourgeoisie never called that anti-Semitism.
BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIAN CRITICISM
“It is a good idea to keep these facts in mind when we assess the bourgeois criticism of the Soviet Union.”
“But,” the speaker added, “there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. And today there are no Jews at all on the presidium of the Communist Party. This is of symptomatic importance. But we should ask why there is any anti-Semitism 53 years after the revolution? Is it because there is more communism – or less communism?
“The world bourgeoisie is not interested in restoring the fighting revolutionary communism of the period when half of Lenin’s central committee were of Jewish origin. Not at all. This is an internal problem for the working class movement to understand and to struggle to set right.”
Last updated: 11 May 2026