The Fourth International salutes the Soviet citizens Pavel Litvinov, Larissa Daniel, Vladimir Delone, Konstantin Babitsky, and Vladimir Dremlyuga. It salutes these Soviet citizens, who were given harsh sentences of exile and prison for their attempt to demonstrate in Red Square on August 25 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the Soviet Union and its allies.
The Fourth International denounces the bureaucratic court of "justice" which compounded its subservience to the regime by a ridiculous pretense that this case had nothing to do with politics and that the years of exile and prison it meted out were for obstructing traffic in the streets of Moscow.
The attempted demonstration of August 25 is an important step forward in the revival of political life in the Soviet Union. This was not a demonstration like previous ones in which Soviet citizens protested sanctions against writers. It was no longer just the bureaucracy's cultural policy that was challenged. This demonstration challenged one of the regime's most important moves, a premeditated action against a popular upsurge seeking to establish socialist democracy in a workers state.
It was this bureaucratic crime that the demonstration in Red Square stigmatized. This demonstration will reverberate in the consciousness of a growing number of Soviet citizens. And this is particularly true for the young soldiers, who, assured that they were being mobilized against counterrevolutionaries, were sent to suppress a people on the march toward socialist democracy.
While the "judges" in Moscow are still subservient to the Kremlin, the "defendants" are no longer broken types such as were once put on trial. They are a vanguard of citizens expressing the deepest aspirations of the peoples of the Soviet Union.
The Fourth International calls on all revolutionary militants and all workers to demand that the Soviet authorities release Pavel Litvinov and his comrades at once and without any conditions.