Czech dissident speaks on Gorbachev's reforms Chart

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Leon Trotsky: Chief organizer of the October insurrection; chief defendant, in SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1987 13 In April 1987, shortly before Mikhail Gorbachev's state visit to Czechoslovakia, the Charter 77 democratic-rights organization sent a letter to the Soviet leader in which it urged that all Soviet troops and nuclear missiles be withdrawn from Czechoslovakia.

The letter stated: "If the Soviet Union eliminates the principal barrier that it has placed in the path of the development of democracy in Czechoslovakia, it will contribute to the acceleration of its own process of democratization and will simultaneously reinforce the confidence between our two peoples and states, without which even the bestintentioned initiatives are doomed to fail."

In interview in the 13, "I believe the purpose of Charter 77 is to promote human rights," Uhl said. "In that sense it is legitimate for the Charter 77 movement to demand that Gorbachev withdraw all Soviet troops stationed in Czechoslovakia."

"But what is not legitimate," Uhl said, "is for the Charter 77 people to take a political position on the so-called democratization in the Soviet Union, on the reforms, on glasnost. The Charter has a plurality of political views and opinions and should not take political positions on these matters."

"Moreover, it is profoundly incorrect," Uhl continued, "to express even the slightest sympathy for Gorbachev's program... In my opinion, the Soviet system is not reformable. Even if the Gorbachev reforms are progressive in the domain of censorship, culture, and other aspects of political life, these reforms do not in any manner propose to democratize the country in the pluralist sense of the term. absentia, at the Moscow Trials.

However, families of some of the defendants are still living in the Soviet Union. Some had also suffered imprisonment and exile. It is worth recalling that a review of all these cases was promised by Khrushchev, but this promise was broken.

We the undersigned therefore call on the Soviet government to re-examine the cases against all these victims of the perversion of Soviet justice, as took place with Krestinsky. We are confident that all those accused in the Trials of 1936-38 will be shown to have been innocent. They should immediately be rehabilitated, their honor free all the defendants.

Trotsky and artistic freedom In 1924, Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution, outlined the relationship of the Soviet state to the various artistic groups and tendencies in the Soviet "While holding over them all the categorical criterion for the revolution or against the revolution, to give them complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination."

This relationship existed with a government that still operated in the interest of the Soviet and world working class. The Stalinist bureaucracy which took control of the Soviet Union soon after 1924 and which still rules the Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe must operate under different norms.

The ruling bureaucracy exists at the expense of the Czech workers. It maintains its privileges through austerity measures and Soviet military presence. The bureaucracy's cultural guidelines are based on: for or against the ruling bureaucracy. Of course, this narrows the field for artistic self-determination more than a bit.

In the midst of new political "reforms" emanating from the Soviet Union, the Jazz Section incident provides an interesting indication of the limits to how far the corrupt bureaucracies are capable of going.

The Jazz Section leaders must be released and allowed to exist and function legally. The only criminals in Czechoslovakia are the ruling bureaucrats who cannot allow genuine cultural freedom.