[This unsigned article is reprinted from Peking Review, #4,
Jan. 25, 1974, pp. 12-14. The Soviet “state security committee”
referred to in this article is generally known as the KGB in the West.]
THE Soviet revisionist renegade clique, the new tsars, is sitting on a volcano. In recent years it has brazenly reinforced its fascist dictatorship in suppressing the people who have put up sustained and mounting resistance to the reactionary rule of Soviet revisionism. The Soviet Union today is by no means “stable” and “harmonious” as Brezhnev and his types describe it. It is filled with sharp class antagonisms, national contradictions and social upheavals.
Striving to maintain its reactionary rule, the Brezhnev clique never stops clamouring for the alleged strengthening of “law and order.” It raves that “it is a task of the whole country and whole party to strengthen their legal system and law and order,” and that it is necessary to “strengthen the social order in all fields of life.”
Since 1965, it has enforced many reactionary laws, ordinances and decisions aimed at stepping up persecution of the people. These include the “decision on measures for further strengthening the Soviet militia,” the “ordinance on the administrative control of the militia organization over persons freed from prisons,” the “decision on the education in socialist labour disciplines,” the “law on additions and modifications of the principles of penal laws for the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet republics,” the “principles of reform-through-labour legislation for the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet republics,” the “regulation on preliminary commitment,” the “decree on confiscation of fire-arms” and the “principles on the labour laws.”
Under the “regulation on preliminary commitment” of July 1969, those to be persecuted can be detained and tried at will on the charge of being “suspects” and subjected to long-term commitment. If they show any sign of resistance, they are liable to be shackled and chained and forced into a straight jacket. They can even be shot. The attacks are particularly directed against “political offenders” who resist the dark rule of the Soviet revisionists and against revolutionary actions by the masses. The “law on additions and modifications of principles of penal laws for the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet republics,” promulgated in July 1969, emphasizes the suppression of “extremely dangerous political offenders,” “massive riots” and “murder of militiamen.”
Since 1965, the Brezhnev clique has considerably amplified its fascist dictatorship machinery, setting up many new organizations and reinforcing the police and special agent departments. It has turned “the state security committee” under the direct control of the central committee of Soviet revisionist party into a large secret service with a nationwide network to enforce rigid supervision of the broad masses and cadres. Formed in 1966, “the ministry of social security” was two years later changed into “the ministry of the interior” and enlarged. In 1968, police power was also expanded, the number of police greatly increased and “professional security offices,” “night-shift police stations” and “motorized police units” were set up. The most modern equipment for reconnaissance and suppression was introduced. In 1970, a judicial department previously abolished was re-established, the old courts were extended and new ones built. Since the “party and state control committee” was changed into the “people’s control committee” in 1965, an extensive network for supervision has been formed from central organs to the grass-roots units.
In addition to new prisons, the Soviet revisionists have in the last few years set up many “labour camps” for the suppression of revolutionary people. These are divided into “ordinary,” “intensified,” “rigid discipline” and “special” camps. “Political offenders” are usually put into “rigid discipline camps” or “special camps.” It is reported that there are over 1,000 “labour camps” with a total of more than a million “prisoners.”
The Brezhnev clique also makes use of “mental hospitals” to torture those opposed to the dark rule of the Soviet revisionists. Those who show discontent with Soviet revisionist fascist rule and dare to rebel against it are arbitrarily declared “lunatics,” “mentally disordered,” “schizophrenic” and “mental patients” and thrown into “mental hospitals” controlled by the “state security committee” and the “ministry of the interior.” One report says several thousand people are imprisoned in one “mental hospital” alone. The internees in these places are subjected to cruel beatings and forced to submit to drastic treatment, including poisonous drugs, in an effort to make them change their political views. Some of them have been bodily and mentally injured and have become incurable wrecks.
The Soviet revisionist renegades have time and again dispatched police and military forces, including tanks and armoured units and paratroops, to carry out bloody suppression of the Soviet people who have risen in rebellion.
Reactionary laws, however, cannot stop the people’s rising discontent, while ruthless suppression only arouses stronger resistance. The Soviet people today are struggling in various ways against Soviet revisionist rule—resorting to slow-downs, strikes, protest meetings and demonstrations, forming underground revolutionary organizations, distributing leaflets, issuing appeals to carry out struggle and staging rebellions.
Angry waves of resistance have been rolling on in various parts of the country. The last few years saw Soviet workers struggling uninterruptedly against oppression and exploitation. News of this has time and again leaked out to the rest of the world despite the attempted complete blackout by the Brezhnev clique. Apart from the well-known large-scale mass struggle against repression in the city of Chimkent in 1967, thousands of workers in the Kharkov Tractor Plant staged a strike in November the same year. Since 1968, a number of revolutionary organizations in the Soviet Union have published articles and leaflets, calling on the Soviet working class and labouring people to rise and overthrow the rule of the Soviet revisionist renegade clique and re-establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. In May 1969, workers at the Kiev Hydro-Power Station held a demonstration. Thousands of workers in the city of Dniepropetrovsk downed tools and demonstrated in September 1972.
Struggles by national minorities against the Soviet revisionist great-Russian chauvinist policy have been more frequent in the last few years. Each one was on a larger scale and lasted longer than the one before. From the Ukraine to Central Asia, from the Baltic Coast to the mountainous areas of the Caucasus, these struggles broke out one after another in 1972. In Kaunas city in Lithuania, thousands took to the streets shouting the slogan “Give Lithuania freedom.” They attacked the buildings of the municipal party committee and the police station, and fought military police and paratroopers. Seventeen veteran party members in Latvia sent long letters to people inside and outside the Soviet Union exposing the Soviet revisionists’ betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and their policy of arbitrary assimilation of the national minorities. In Tallin, Estonia, demonstrations were held by college students. In Dnieprodzerzhinsk, the Ukraine, over 10,000 demonstrators attacked the regional Soviet party and government buildings and the “state security committee” building and tore up portraits of Brezhnev and others. Protest actions were frequently reported from the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Soviet intellectuals also are deeply dissatisfied with the Brezhnev clique’s fascist rule. Many have condemned in different ways the ruling clique for its rule of white terror and for its frantic arms expansion and war preparations. Young students in Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk and other cities constantly have taken part in protest activities in the last few years.
The broad masses of the Soviet people have frequently boycotted and opposed the Brezhnev clique’s foreign policy of aggression and expansion. Some revolutionary organizations in the country have published articles and leaflets strongly condemning the anti-China crimes of the Soviet revisionist renegade clique. When the Soviet revisionist authorities occupied Czechoslovakia by military force in August 1968, demonstrations and protest meetings took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, New Siberia and other cities. When the Polish working class rose in the storm of revolution in December 1970, strikes in support broke out in Kaliningrad, Lvov, Byelorussia and other places.
The Soviet revisionist bosses are very averse to be told that the world is in great disorder. They invariably describe the regime which they administer as tranquil and stable. However, disorder or “stability” is independent of the will of the Soviet revisionist chieftains. Where there is oppression and exploitation, there is opposition and struggle. The more rigid the oppression, the stronger the opposition; the longer the storm of struggle brews, the more violently will it erupt. This is the dialectics of history. The heroic struggles of the Soviet working class and national minorities will surely strike and shake the dark rule of the social-imperialists ever more violently.
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