The "normalization" of the situation in Czechoslovakia continues to follow the logic set in motion in August 1968 by the entry into the country of troops from the Soviet Union and its other Warsaw Pact "allies." After Dubcek's elimination from the government, after the purge of the Central Committee, the repression is becoming all-pervasive. Now they have discovered a "Trotskyite plot.” The Soviet "historians," who learned their trade in the KGB {[Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti pri Sovete Ministrov—the Council of Ministers' Committee on State Security, the Soviet secret police] and who did the scenario for the Slansky trial, have now come to Prague.
Thus we see in full bloom the line of cultural, social and political reaction followed by the Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership and its supporters both in the Soviet Union and throughout the countries of Eastern Europe. Here, without the slightest ambiguity, is displayed the underlying reason for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. There was no danger of a capitalist restoration; what had appeared was a dangerous example, challenging the rule of the bureaucracy in the East European countries and in the Soviet Union itself, the example of a people seeking socialist democracy and taking serious steps toward establishing it.
The accused cannot be described as "plotters" even in a judicial sense, inasmuch as both during the brief "Prague spring" and in the months that followed they worked in the open, distributing everywhere the documents they drew up first in the name of the Revolutionary Youth and then of the Revolutionary Socialist party. If there was any plot, they were not in it; they were not the ones who in secret prepared and aided the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The accusation is built on the old Stalinist model, lumping together of trumped-up crimina! charges and political allegations. There is no point in spending time on the criminal charges, which have been rehashed from the Moscow trials—sabotage, arson, collaboration with the CIA. It is sufficient to note that the fabulous sums the accused are alleged te have received enabled them to do no more than publish material on a cheap duplicating machine.
The charge that the accused received political publications (books, pamphlets, journals) from foreign revolutionary groups is particularly piquant, coming from a group that, after being driven from office by the people of their own country, returned to power not as a result of political propaganda but with the aid of half a million armed foreign troops, who entered the country by surprise. This accusation is of the kind to be expected from. men who cannot conduct an ideological struggle without first introducing a censorship.
There remains the political program charged against the imprisoned persons. The accused advocated an “antibureaucratic revolution.” They developed liaisons with students and workers. They wanted to replace the police and army with an armed workers militia in the factories. They thought the program of antibureaucratic revolution was valid for the other East European countries and the Soviet Union. They were for a world socialist revolution. This program, it seems, is “unconstitutional.” But it was not “unconstitutional” for the Kremlin and its lackeys to change the Central Committee and the government of a "sister country" by sending in columns of tanks.
In fact, in this program the accused showed that they had drawn the lesson of the Dubcek experience —that you cannot expect the bureaucracy to grant any reform permitting the establishment of socialist democracy, that you have to prepare to overthrow the bureaucratic regime. Their real crime was to formulate this program at a time when the men in the Kremlin are terrified at the process ripening in the Soviet Union itself.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International calls on all the workers, students, vanguard intellectuals, and especially the Communist parties and Communist activists who denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to demand the release of the revolutionary militants imprisoned in Czechoslovakia. They must be alert to the fact that a public or secret trial would only be the prelude to police repression against the majority of the Czechoslovak CP leadership of the January-August 1968 period and against the leadership elected at the Fourteenth Congress of the Czechoslovak CP. This is the immediate action that must be undertaken to block the resurgence of Stalinism and to aid all those in the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe that seek to mount a struggle against the bureaucracy and for the triumph of socialist democracy.