[The October 1 issue of Intercontinental Press published an interview with T. Psaradellis, a Greek Trotskyist, in which he commented on the new situation in Greece since the junta's amnesty of political prisoners. The interview was translated from the September 14 issue of the French Trotskyist newspaper, Rouge.
[The September 28 Rouge printed a letter from Psaradellis in which he corrected several mistakes made in the translation from Greek to French. We reprint below Psaradellis's letter.]
Dear Rouge,
You published my interview in your September 14 issue (No. 220). A translating error, no doubt, seriously altered the meaning. Thus, I would like to rectify the most important
Corrections in Interview With Psaradellis Corrections in Interview With Psaradellis was defended without being granted the right to speak, we have the Boursedu-Travail meeting, at which the MTA is muzzled. All this does is sow division when what is needed is unity.
"No exclusion! Workers democracy!"
Undoubtedly the bureaucrats acted out of concern for the immigrant workers. After all, why should a group that mobilized more than 30,000 immigrants in an unprecedented strike be given the floor at a meeting against racism? That would obviously play into the hands of the racists, however noble and innocent the speaker might have been.
points, without commenting on the rest.
1. It is very wrong to assert that the freed prisoners were broken by the repression; on the contrary. It is enough to read their statements in the bourgeois press to realize that for them, the release was just a beginning.
2. Far from contenting themselves with a pure and simple boycott of the present junta-controlled unions, the workers organizations are waging a persistent struggle against the "appointed leaderships," which obviously entails work within the unions.
3. The crisis of the Communist party is doubtless feeding the formation of a revolutionary vanguard, but its crystallization into a revolutionary party -leaving aside what nucleus it will be formed around - is obviously a much more complicated problem.
Revolutionary greetings T. Psaradellis ratization of Soviet society. As a dissident who recognizes the impasse in Soviet economic and cultural development that has resulted from bureaucratic mismanagement, Sakharov has been drawn more and more into defending political victims of the regime.
Because of Sakharov's international reputation and prestige, the Kremlin up to now has refrained from arresting him or otherwise forcing him to stop his activities. But it has sought to establish an atmosphere in which it could plausibly assert that Sakharov's "anti-Soviet" views overshadow hisprevious contribution to Soviet science.
The broad press campaign launched in late August was foreshadowed in February, when Literaturnaya Gazeta, organ of the Soviet Writers Union, attacked Sakharov for the ideas he had expressed in his 1968 article Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom. But since the concepts he had set forth there were merely a logical extension of the Kremlin's "peaceful coexistence" line, the bureaucracy was able to produce little in the way of substantive criticism and settled for calling Sakharov a "god's fool" (yurodivy).
In March Sakharov was called in for KGB questioning in connection with his appeal in defense of Yuri Shikhanovich, a dissident mathematician who had worked with Sakharov in the Human Rights Committee and had been arrested.
In July, after a Swedish newspaper published an interview with Sakharov, TASS and the Soviet press condemned him for having "slandered" the Soviet system.
The real, although unvoiced, charge was that Sakharov had criticized the bureaucracy.
Sakharov condemned the "lack of freedom" and the "bureaucratizing" of