Hostettler John

John Hostettler

Born in 1925, John (A?) Hosteller joined the Communist Party in 1942 and was a member of the national committee member of the Young Communist League (YCL) in the late 1940s.

Refering to Lenin's "The Valiant Path of the Lenin Young Communist League", he stated that what stood out to him was that: "It is significant that the Bolshevik Party formed the YCL in 1918 in the midst of the Civil War and the wars of intervention. It is clear that without the YCL the Revolution might have been lost"; Hostettler also pointed out that the noted hero of socialist labour, Stakhanov, was himself a YCLer.

He was a lawyer living in the West Middlesex district when he began service on the Party’s Appeals Committee from the late 1960s through to at least 1977. This was the body that heard the appeals against disciplinary action from members.

He would appear to be the Hostettler who in recent years produced “Law and terror in Stalin's Russia” (2002), which assigned the Bolshevik revolution and the entire project of the USSR to the ranks of being “no substitute for the rule of law".