Prague show trials CZECH STALINISTS FEAR TROTSKYISM

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Czech crowds vent their hostility on Stalinist soldier in 1968 embarassment to the Czech Europe, . know that their Stalinists, they are a deliberate position is far from stable in the move to warn off any would-be next period. In Poland, a semiThe Czech bureaucrats, like that there is: labour bureaucracy who told through the law end up. ment in 1976.

The defendants are also members of Charter 77-the majority of whose 242 signatories are workers.

The Czechoslovak bureaucracy clearly sees in such bodies the danger of a political opposition that, while originating amongst the intelligentsia, reaches the powerful Czech working class.

Any such mass opposition could fuel a political movement that challenges the dictatorial powers and material privileges of the bureaucracy -their cars, sumptuous living standards, their private flats and country houses.

Jail sentence

And this danger must seem the greater because among the six defendants is Peter Uhl, a professed Trotskyist. Uhl is a supporter of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

He has already served one four-year jail sentence for organising the RSP as a Trotskyist party in 1971.

Though he now appears to have gone backwards politically and no longer believes it necessary to build a revolutionary party, the fact that Uhl is an open supporter of Trotsky represents a profound political threat to the bureaucracy. He received the longest sentence of all -five years.

World famous playwright Vaclav Havel received 4½ years; and three others received 3 year sentences.

Though the trials will be a source of international political opponents.

their fellows throughout Eastern official report has pointed out "An acute crisis which has "trouble makers' to stay away and who called a pathetic demonstration of 200 or so well away from the 'closed' area.

Plans to mount a peaceful pıcket on the pier were called off after police objected.

The WL does not call for legal or state bans to prevent the fascists meeting and marching but for united working class action to deny them facilities and where necessary confront them physically in order to deny them a platform for their racist and anti-working class views.

The Great Yarmouth fiasco is a good example of where attempts to deal with fascists embraced basic fields of social, political and economic life... The socialism which people see is compared with the socialism they would like to see and the difference between the reality and the model is painful."

Living standards

The report also anticipates a fall in working class living standards over the next 2-3 years. The same is undoubtedly true of Czechoslovakia.

The trials are thus a move to Trotsky forestall an explosion of political anger against the bureaucracy whose parasitic and dictatorial power holds back the potential development of the productive forces and acts on a world scale to prop up imperialism.

The Prague trials follow the method of the Stalinist bureaucracy that emerged in the isolated Soviet Union after the death of Lenin.

To preserve its unstable political power against the politcal opposition led by Leon Trotsky the bureaucracy had by the late 1930s executed the majority of the survivors of Lenin's Bolshevik Central Committee.

A focal point of this political terror was the notorious Moscow Trials.

And in 1940 Leon Trotsky himself, in exile in Mexico, was murdered by a Stalinist agent because he represented a fight not for liberal reforms but for the continuity of Leninism and in particular for the exercise of proletarian power through the reconstruction of sovietsworkers' councils-from which the bureaucracy would be excluded.

Trotsky insisted that, though warped almost out of recognition under Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship, the Soviet Union remained a workers' state in which the historic gain of the 1917 Revolution-the nationalisation of the economy-remained intact.

What was needed was not the social overthrow of a capitalist class, but a political revolution through which the working class must drive out the bureaucracy and assert its management over the economy.

Key to struggle

It is this approach which remains the key to the struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to this day.

The post-war period and the extension of bureaucratic control over East Europe has seen Stalinist rulers use various tactics to maintain control of the masses. Initially, suppression led to a wave of trials which in Czechoslovakia brought the execution in 1952 of CP General Secretary Rudolf Slansky and other leading figures.

But the 1953 uprising in Germany and the death of Stalin saw an attempt by the Kremlin leaders to put forward a more liberal' line in order to placate the masses.

The real iron fist behind this velvet glove was revealed in the brutal invasion of Hungary by Russian tanks in 1956.

The Stalinists recognised that, in forming workers councils, in smashing the Hungarian secret police and setting up a workers', soldiers? and students' militia, the Hungarian masses posed a direct threat to bureaucratic power and privilege-a threat that had to be crushed if it was not to grow throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR itself.

Prague Spring The "Prague Spring" of 1968, on the other hand, was much more the product of "liberal' bureaucrat Dubcek, who attempted to appease both the masses and the Kremlin.

The movement did not advance to the level of the Hungarian workers' councils and militia-but the warning signs pointed in that direction. Once again Stalinist tanks rolled in to show the real face of bureauCont'd back page, col. 4

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