Dy uilt reinan
[Jiri Pelikan was a director of the Czechoslovak TV network under the Dubcek government. After the Soviet occupation, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist party at its clandestine Fourth Congress, held in a factory outside Prague under the protection of the workers. He was forced into exile by the reconsolidation of Stalinist repression in his country. He now edits a journal of the Czechoslovak socialist emigration, the monthly Listy. The following article was published in the January 14 issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The appearance of the Charter 77 movement represents a new stage in the development of the opposition in Czechoslovakia, and by the same token an addition to the opposition movement throughout the East European countries. It has this significance because it offers a political platform uniting the various opposition currents and the various social layers in the country behind a common purpose: To defend the democratic rights and freedoms guaranteed by the country's constitution and by the international conventionstogether with the Helsinki Accords-to which Czechoslovak governments have adhered, rights and freedoms that nonetheless have been consistently violated by the occupation regime.
Charter 77 has not replaced the various opposition movements and groups. These will continue to function in accordance with their own perspectives. What it has done is bring them together so that they can carry out common actions which will be more effective as a result.
It is also an important fact that this initiative comes at a time when the spirit of resistance has begun to rise with a new force in the other East European countries. This is exemplified in Poland by the formation of the Committee to Defend Worker Victims of the Repression and the work it has done, in the USSR by Sakharov's Committee for Human Rights and Yuri Orlov's group set up to supervise implementation of the Helsinki Accords, and in the German Democratic Republic by the movement to protest the expulsion of the communist poet Wolf Biermann.
Despite the different situations in these various East European countries, the goals of the struggle are the same, or very similar, in every case-to defend freedom of expression and organization; to raise the demand for independence for the trade unions, for workers' participation in factory management, and for an end to the oneparty bureaucracy's monopoly of power, as well as to censorship and repression.
Although it has its negative aspects for the more developed countries, the economic, political, and military integration of the and Comecon countries is
Warsaw Pact bringing with it a gradual evening out of living conditions in all the Soviet bloc countries. As a result, there is a growing awareness of what is happening in neighboring countries, and this is enabling the opposition movement to emerge from the atomization and national egoism that marked it in the past and led to the defeats in 1956 and 1968.
Nor is it by chance that the growth and broadening of these movements coincide with the fading of the mythical perspective of a nonpolitical consumer society that the normalizers offered in the hope of defusing the workers' discontent. The economic crisis in the East European countries, which is rooted in bureaucratic management and Soviet economic domination and is being intensified by the capitalist economic crisis, will deepen still further in the coming two or three years. This sharpening of the economic crisis will propel into the opposition movement those social layers that at the moment remain passive or are taking a wait-and-see attitude.
The leading groups in the East European countries will no doubt try to stifle this movement once again by means of a new wave of repression. Today, however, they face a stronger and more determined adversary, one imbued with the truly internationalist solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Further, the illusions about the USSR traditionally held in the West are beginning to fade. So, a step-up in repression by the East European regimes would mean a complete break with the "Euro-Communist" CPs.
The leading groups, thus, are faced with two choices-either make concessions, grant reforms of the sort demanded by the oppositionists, or face the eventuality of a spontaneous explosion, and maybe a number of them, which could have dramatie consequences.
The
Western left and the socialist opposition currents in the East European countries must prepare themselves to confront these two eventualities with a bold but realistic program for a socialist alternative.