But the march was interrupted by police, who used tear-gas grenades, to which the demonstrators responded with Molotov cocktails and fire bombs.' According to La Opinion: "After a period of charges and various incidents, security forces gaineu control of the situation and arrested about 100 persons. [/CP] -so it is especially urgent that we raise all £300 in September. We are confident that, with four For two weeks now, the Soviet press has been conducting a huge attack on Dr Andrei Sakharov. Pravda has been submerged with 'letters' not only from academicians, writers and musicians but also now from workers, war veterans, collective farmers, etc. All attack him for allowing himself to be used as an instrument of hostile propaganda against the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, and for inviting the West "to tollow its cold war policy' Why are such enormous resources being mar shailed to crush dissidents like Sakharov? To whom do a few oppositionist intellectuals pose such a threat? Posturing as defenders of communism, the party bosses declare Sakharov to be a threat to socialism in Russia; but at the same time they also declare that 'Sakharov speaks for nobody but himself', or, as Georges Marchais of the French Communist Party put it, 'dissent in the Soviet Union is limited to a hundred at most.
The answer is that what Sakharov does threaten is the travesty of socialism championed by the Soviet bureaucracy itself. The Stalinist destruction of workers democracy and soviet power is such an open denial of the communism of Lenin that even the weak and confused voices of a handful of intellectuals, totally isolated from the working masses, makes Brezhnev turn to emergency measures of re pression. "letters' in Pravda is that they do not in any way try to deny the realities of Soviet life as depicted by Sakharov. Their only concern is that Sakharov should issue statements - that can be used by the West. They do not rebuke him for the content of these statements The real threat to socialism comes from the people who have helped Nixon off the hook in Indochina, who practise class-collaboration throughout the world, who preach Chile type ' peaceful roads' to socialism, and who defend bureaucratic power and privilege in Russia. For this reason, genuine communists resolutely oppose every action by the Kremlin bureaucrats to preserve their power through crushing democratic oppositions.
Sakharov himself is by no means a Marxist, and displays a wealth of illusions, particularly about the capitalist West. He is quoted recently, for example, as saying: 'I have always held and still hold that the only way to solve world problems is mutual rapprochement, or convergence, between the capitalist and socialist system.' (Sunday Times, 9 September) Socialist militants can only oppose such sentiments: but ironically enough, they do summarise the whole thrust of the policy of the Soviet bureaucracy over the past period.
The non-socialist criticisms made by dissidents like Sakharov are used by CP leaders in the West to avoid making genuine communist criticisms of the Soviet bureaucracy. But the reason why the opposition in Russia is at present led by men like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn' is precisely because no genuine socialist, communist struggle against the world policies of the Soviet bureaucracy has been led by the mass workers parties in the West. That, of course, would have involved struggling against their own traditions of class collaboration and betrayal. The task therefore falls on the shoulders of the revolutionary marxists. weak as they still are.
Red Weekly 14 September Page 7
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