The arrest on May 29 of ten prominent signatories of Charter 77 is the latest and most aggressive move in the regime's drive to crush the civil-rights movement in that country. It is also the most sweeping act of repression seen in Czechoslovakia since the roundup of socialist oppositionists in 1971, and might lead rapidly to the harshest political trial since the 1950s.
By charging the ten civil-rights campaigners with subversion, the Stalinist bureaucracy merely acknowledges that the struggle for basic civil and democratic rights by working people in Czechoslovakia is subversive of bureaucratic power. The Czechoslovak regime has never accepted the existence of the Charter 77 movement and has used every means of harassment and intimidation short of mass arrests to try to weaken and destroy the movement.
The basic aims of Charter 77 are those of strengthening the role of working people in managing social and political life in that country; its methods have been those of openly spreading information and seeking to mobilize popular support for the demands of the Charter. These are the aims and methods used by the labor movements of Europe for more than one hundred years. Charter 77 deserves the unconditional and active solidarity of all socialists and working-class organizations. The Fourth International has, within its limited means, sought to give such support and mobilize labor movement opinion in the West behind Charter 77 since the movement's foundation in January 1977.
When Charter 77 was created, bourgeois circles in the West were happy to try to make use of it for the propaganda campaigns they were running at that time—during the run-up to the Helsinki Review Conference and before important elections involving possible electoral victories for the mass working-class parties in Western Europe. That was also a time of growing polemics between the major Communist parties and Moscow. In the changed circumstances of today, the Czechoslovak bureaucracy hopes that it can carry through the jailing of the main leaders of Charter 77 without attracting widespread condemnation from the labor movements of the West.
Domestically, the Husak regime enjoyed a brief period of social and political stability during the early and middle 1970s. Within a year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the working class, which had moved to the forefront of the popular struggle against the Soviet occupation, was deprived of political leadership and perspectives as a result of the capitulation of the Dubcek group. It was therefore forced to retreat from the political arena. The regime was then able to carry through a wholesale purge of the Communist Party and all other social and political institutions.
Aided by Moscow, the restored bureaucracy managed to achieve a temporary rise in living standards that lasted into the middle 1970s. But none of the fundamental problems of the Czechoslovak economy were touched by the new regime and these are now producing serious economic problems. A regime which has tried to win acceptance through its ability to offer an expanding range of consumer goods to the working class now faces the task of attacking working-class living standards. This is a dangerous course for a bureaucratic dictatorship totally lacking in political support among the Czechoslovak workers and it has made the regime all the more frightened of the existence of an organized, open, socialist opposition within the country.
The first signs of a new wave of open rejection of Stalinism has come from among working-class youth in the main Czech industrial cities. And during its two and a half years of activity it was above all in this section of the population that the Charter 77 movement sank roots. The Charter movement and especially the Committee in Defense of Unjustly Persecuted Persons (VONS), of which all ten of the recently arrested Chartists were members, took up the defense of these young people in their struggle against police harassment and bureaucratic bullying.
The call must go out from the labor movements of the West for the immediate release of all the imprisoned Charter 77 supporters. The vanguard of the workers movement throughout Western Europe should ensure that the mass organizations of the working class—the SPs, CPs, and the trade unions—demand an end to the repression of Charter 77. Civil-liberties organizations and socialist lawyers organizations should establish official links with VONS, their counterpart for working people in Czechoslovakia. Unions should protest firings for political reasons and intervene officially to this effect, addressing themselves to the Czechoslovak unions. Labor movement funds should be established to give material assistance to the families of imprisoned civil-rights campaigners in Czechoslovakia.
For international working-class defense of Charter 77!
End the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia!
Down with the counterrevolutionary Husak regime—for workers power and socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia!