The "normalisation" of the situation in Czechoslovakia is following the logic of the process which begun in August 1968 with the invasion of Soviet and other "allied" troops of the Warsaw pact. After the elimination of Dubcek from the government, after the purge of the Central Committee, the repression has been generalised with the discovery of a "Trotskyist plot". Soviet "historians" who completed their studies in the Soviet KGB and had previously helped prepare the Slansky trial, have just arrived in Prague.
The reactionary character of the political, social and cultural line of the Kosygin-Brezhnev leadership and those who follow it in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, is completely revealed by these events. The real reason for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968 is crystal clear: it was not provoked by any real danger of the restoration of capitalism, but was the bureaucratic response to the example being set by a people taking serious steps to achieve their aspirations for socialist democracy, an example dangerous to the domination of the bureaucracy in all of Eastern [illegible]
Formally, the accused cannot even be called "plotters". During the short "Prague spring" as well as in the [illegible] months, they acted fully in the open, widely distributing documents they edited, first as the Movement of Revolutionary Youth, then as the Revolutionary Socialist Party—even signing them with their name and address. If there was a "plot" those guilty are not these accused militants, but those who secretly prepared and helped the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The charges themselves are based on the old Stalinist model, an amalgam of frame-up criminal charges and political accusations. It is not necessary to dwell upon the criminal charges, which were lifted right out of the infamous Moscow trials: sabotage, arson, collaboration with the CIA. The accused were supposed to have received fabulous amounts of money from the CIA—although apparently only enough to allow them to publish leaflets mimeo[graphed] [illegible]
The accusations of having received political material (books, brochures, newspapers) from revolutionary groups in foreign countries is particularly striking, since this charge comes from gentlemen who, after having been kicked out by the people of their own country, were installed in power not by political propaganda but by half a million armed foreigners who entered the country by surprise. This is normal for people who cannot lead an "ideological struggle" without first calling upon the services of the censor.
The following are the political charges levelled against the accused: they extol "anti-bureaucratic revolution", they developed links between the students and the workers, they wanted to replace the police and army by armed workers' units in the factories, they thought the programme of anti-bureaucratic revolution was applicable to other Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union, and they were for the world revolution. That, apparently, is an "anti-constitutional" programme. But for the Kremlin and its servants to change the Central Committee and the government of a "brother country" with tanks is apparently a perfectly "constitutional" undertaking.
In fact, the accused have in this programme shown that they have drawn the lesson of the Dubcek experience: one cannot hope for a reform of the bureaucracy which will lead to socialist democracy. The overthrow of the bureaucratic power is the only way, [illegible] about what is ripening in the Soviet Union itself.
The United Secretariat of the Fourth International calls on all the workers, students, vanguard intellectuals and especially those in the Communist Parties and communist militants who have denounced the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to demand the release of the revolutionary militants imprisoned in that country. They should understand that the arrest of these militants is nothing less than the beginning of a campaign of repression which will strike the majority of the leading Czechoslovakian Communist Party cadres of the January-August 1968 period, and the majority of the leadership elected at the 14th Congress of the Party. Immediate action must be taken against the resurgence of Stalinism and to help all those who, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, aspire to lead to victory the struggle against the bureaucracy and for socialist democracy.