Snivelling apology for new pogrom of Soviet Jews

THE BRITISH Communist Party statement on the Leningrad trial is nothing more than a snivelling apology for judicial murder.

Ceylon wants Heath meeting on without delay.' surcharges Communist Party sink? GET intervie wan British interme Ministe ates betwee dward Heati retched 'statement'?

statement goes on: Its main purpose is to clear the Kremlin of all charges of We repudiate those ir Ramelson and company ritain and elsewhere who apparently have no objection mply this trial was inspire to the verdict itself.

They do not share the qualms of their unidentified Of the death sentences - 'Friends of the Soviet Union' been passed on that score.

For these time-serving In co 'Many friends of the Soviet Union gravely conimposed th hope shat tes TWO SPECIAL performances by 'cellist Mstislav Rostropohigher authorities will com- vich, pianist Svyatoslav Richter mute these death sentences and violinist David Oistrakh, unexpectedly cancelled on How much lower can the Monday, were yesterday resStalinist leaders of the British tored to the programme of the Moscow Conservatory.

Who exactly are these 'man) Last month Rostropovich riends of the Soviet Union'? wrote an open letter in defence Do they include those CP of the persecuted Soviet eaders who approved thi oppositionist and writer AlexPander Solzhenitsyn, saying:

We think not. For the 'Please explain to me why so often in literature and art people absolutely incompetent No objection in this field have the final word.' •While dissociating ourselves The switches of plan also come hard on the heels of death sentences passed on two Jews in the Leningrad 'hijacking' trial.

A large proportion of Soviet musicians are of Jewish origin.

Earlier this month Oistrakh cancelled a planned tour of So Gollan, Matthews, Spain in protest against the ncert trial of Basque socialists in Burgos.

No official reason was given for either of the changes of plan. But a staff member of the Conservatory told one caller that the concerts were cancelled because the artists had felt unwell ... and restored because they were now better.

Among the works to be played is Beethoven's triple concerto for piano, violin and 'cello.

Planes kill 500 BOMBERS of Emperor Haile Selassie's Air Force have killed 500 people near Keren village in N. Ethiopia, according to a statement in Damascus by an Eritrean Liberation Army spokesman.

apologists of Stalinism are in truth . friends of the bureaucracy.

Their plea is not for these victims of Stalinist justice, but for their own opportunist relations with 'left' (and often pro-Zionist) Labourites, trade union bureaucrats, liberals and gentlemen of the clergy.

*Shoot if you must, but please, do it the decent, British way' sums up the position of the CP leadership.

Gollan" must know from long experience that following the strikes. and fighting in Poland, a new Stalinist crackdown is under way throughout E Europe and the Soviet Union.

Last purge He was, as a delegate to the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, present in Moscow at the height of Stalin's last purge, climaxed by the so-called Jewish doctors' plot' and the antiSemitic Slansky trial in Then, as now, Gollan's