In January 1972 the Soviet bureaucracy opened (2 years of prison, 5 years hard labour, and 5 up a campaign of mass arrests in an effort to smash the opposition movement. Since then almost 200 dissidents have been arrested, and many have been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.
The mass arrests proved most severe in Ukraine, where since the mid-fifties a new opposition arose prepared to give battle to the bureaucracy.
Since January 1972 close to 150 Ukrainians have been arrested by the KGB (Soviet secret police ).
Among the latest victims of police repression in Ukraine are two of the most prominent spokesmen of the Ukrainian socialist opposition:
Vyacheslav Chomovil and Ivan Dzyuba.
Chomovil recently received a 12 year sentence years enforced exile) for "anti-Soviet agitation" The Marxist-Leninist Ivan Dzyuba was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment on a similar charge.
Dzyuba is the author of Internationalism or Russification?, a Marxist-Leninist critique of the stalinist nationalities policy. His work (to be published shortly in a French edition by the Ligue Communiste) circulated widely in the Ukrainian underground, and has been called the symbol of the opposition. SOCIALISTS The Stalinist press has labelled those arrested as "bourgeois nationalists". Dzyuba, Chornovil and others have repeatedly denied this slander. As socialists they want the reestablishment not of capitalism but of social democracy.
Chomovil summarised what may be termed not only his personal, but the collective manifesto of the Ukrainian opposition when he wrote: "I categorically state contrary to all illogical assertions... that I have always firmly adhered to the principles of socialism and continue to do so. But not of that socialism that tries to regiment not merely the actions but also the thoughts of individuals. I cannot imagine true socialism without guaranteed democratic freedoms, without the widest political and economic self-government of all the cells of the state organism down to and including the smallest, without a real guarantee and not merely a paper one - of the rights of all nations within a multinational state."
(British Section of the Fourth International 182 Pentonville Road London N.1 1 would like more infor mation about the IMG and its activities.
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International Marxist Group