OPPOSITION DETERMINED TO FIGHT

He has still not been tried, and it is feared that like hundreds of others he may instead be committed to a mental hospital.

Amalrik was one of the Soviet oppositionists who appeared in filmed interviews with American correspondent William Cole in '24 HOURS' (BBC-1, Friday).

Shot and recorded inside the USSR, these interviews provided one of the most moving and informative experiences to have been captured on television.

Here were men who had experienced years of repression, who had not the slightest doubt that the authorities would pursue them yet again; but they stood determined to fight on, whatever the consequences personally.

LABOUR CAMPS

Piotr Yakir, already having served 17 years in labour camps, son of the Soviet military commander murdered by Stalin, spoke out yet again:

'There's no going back. If we're not here, there'll be others. There are already many of us-many young 'They'li beat us and they'll kill us.

'All the same, people will go on thinking differently.' Inside the Potma prison camp from which he was recently transferred to a camp of even harder regime, writer Alexander Ginsburg had recorded on tape the following wards:

'Camps, prisons and the death of those near to usthat is what we are surrounded by, and nevertheless we hope to hold out.

'We are sustained, not by the so-called decisive stand of the Soviet Union, nor by the good will of the governments of the great powers but by the wrath, protests and solidarity of all honest people; of all who hold dear the dignity of man, democracy and peace.

'In decisive resistance to modern barbarism, I see the only real guarantee that the rights of man will be observed —here and throughout the BBC-1 Friday, August Filmed interviews with Soviet oppositionists Guest revier principles rather than Marxist ones, and this is inevitable after all the years of Stalinism.

But of course we have considerable evidence of the number of oppositionists who stand openly for the defence of the gains of the October revolution. and see the struggle against the Stalinist bureaucracy as part of the international struggle of the working class against imperialism. (See the Samizdat extracts in the current 'Fourth International'.)

The living struggle of the Fourth Internationa! AOURNALIOH 1970 THE YEAR OF LENIN AND TROTSKY MẠŘŽI$M DOCUMENTS OF SOVIET OPPOSITION UXEMBURG EBKNECHT® HIGH STREET AVAILABLE FROM NEW PARK PUBLICATIONS LONDON SW4 PRICE 5s Ginsberg opposition-even in the fragments presented to us in this programmefulfils and at the same time begins to enrich the analysis and the perspectives of Ieon Trotsky, who himself died 30 years ago at the hands of a Stalinist assassin.

Amalrik, like Bukovsky, showed us a fleeting glimpse of what rich developments of Marxism we can expect when the Russian working class makes its own contribution to the cadres of the Fourth International.

NTERNAT ONAL PUBLISHER BY SHE PINTERNAILONAL Dismissing with cold contempt the theories of 'liberalization' of Stalinism, Amalrik at the same time seeks a historical perspective for struggle against the bureaucracy.

Their repressions come from their weakness, just as the failure of the repression to silence the opposition comes from the crisis from the senility of the system of bureaucratic control.

Asked about the political attitudes of the workers of town and country in the Soviet Union, Amalrik gave a fascinating account of how his section of the intellectuals sees its relation to the proletariat: the workers had not yet begun to generalize and question the nature of the regime as such, but were manifesting dissasfaction with many aspects of it.

Workers were dissatisfied with the level of their wages compared with better-paid sec-