THREE JAILED IN YUGOSLAVIA On Red Wednesday, as the five dockers were being released from jail, the following report appeared in Le Monde: "Two male students and one female student of the University of Belgrade, accused of attempting to create a "terrorist group and to resuscitate Trotsky's Fourth International were condemned last Friday to between 18 months and 2 years imprisonment by the Belgrade Departmental court."
This trial has been rather a del for the Yugoslav bureaucracy. The problem was to demonstrate how dangerous were the ideas of these students without having to explain the nature of these ideas. As the report noted: "During the trial, which had been adjourned a number of times, the court refused requests by the defence for the appearance as a witness of the rector of the University of Zagreb, a specialist on Trotskyism who would have been able to define precisely the nature of this doctrine.
To further obscure the communist programme of the Belgrade students, the Yugoslav bureaucracy cleverly staged the simultaneous trial of a reactionary, anti-communist group of Croatian nationalists.
MORE TRIALS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA The Husak regime has already sent many revolutionary marxists into its prisons and further trials of communist militants have been launched there over the last few days. Husak has been attempting to learn his lessons from his "Soviet' masters who have been pressurising him for the last three years to dispose of the "subversives" who call for genuine soviet democracy to be established.
ANOTHER RUSSIAN LESSON But the junior partners of the Kremlin bosses should also take note of the actual experience of their mentors in the Soviet Union. They have 40 years of experience in the art of repression and have progressed far beyond the show trial techniques of the 1930s. The modern method is psychiatric repression, imprisonment in so-called mental asylums on the basis of a "specialist's" report. But the results of this repression have in fact been to spread the movement of opposition in the U.S.S.R. Since the famous trial of two literary intellectuals in 1966 - the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel - the opposition movement has thrown up a whole series of new leaders. In 1968 demonstrations took place against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, including a protest in Red Square organised by Pavel Litvinov. The civil rights movement has spread west from Moscow into Belorussia under Pyotr Yakir and east to Tashkent under Pyotr Grigorenko - both of whom openly proclaim their adherence to Leninist principles of soviet democracy and communism.
Andrei A malrik & his wife The movement among writers has grown enormously under the impact of repression against Solzhenitsyn and has spread into the scientific intelligentsia: Andrei Amalrik has directly pointed to the existence of bureaucratic domination in the U.S.S.R. Academician Sakharov, the doyen of Russian nuclear science, has become a major figure in the civil rights movement, leading the protest against Yakir's second imprisonment.
Chernyakhorsk prison hospital in the U.S.S.R. The new feature within the opposition movement in the U.S.S.R. is the emergence of currents which openly link themselves with the revolutionary heritage of the Russian working class. This is the most worrying long-term development for the Kremlin bureaucracy and its adherents in the rest of Eastern Europe. Each year new evidence comes to light proving that the entire Stalinist project of liquidating eyery trace of the Leninist oppositions of the 1920s has failed.
So far the movement of solidarity with the oppositionists in Eastern Europe has been weak in comparison with the publicity campaigns of capitalist publishing houses hungry for the profits they can reap from oppositionist writers who can claim no royalties. The urgent responsibility of all communists is to launch a campaign with the victims of bureaucratic repression in Eastern Europe.
Solzhenitsyn A Pyotr Grigorenko Larissa Daniel * Pavel Litvino