THE CAPITALIST PRESS AND THE KGB

Since the end of last year the Soviet political police (KGB) have intensified their campaign against dissidents of all kinds.

Many who have committed no indictable offence are held in psychiatric wards, others who are too prominent to be dealt with in this way are subject to continuous harassTheir movements are closely watched and careful note is kept of the visitors they receive. Their telephones are tapped 24 hours a day.

Some of the intellectual critics have recently been threatened with deportation to a labour camp or imprisonment in a psychiatric ward if they do not leave the country. Several have actually emigrated as a result of such pressure.

The Nobel - prizewinning novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in an interview with Moscow correspondent Robert Kaser that on some occasions both approaches to the courtyard leading to his apartment are watched by carloads of KGB men. Any visitors he receives are followed and one was beaten up.

The same treatment is meted out to the historian Pyotr Yakir whose father, Ionas Yakir, an outstanding Red Army general, was arrested and shot by Stalin in 1937. Pyotr himself spent 14 years in labour camps and emerged with a burning hatred Major - General Grigorenko, who became the leading spokesman of the communist opposition, was reduced to the rank of private in 1964 and later incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Condemned to a living death for his courageous fight for Leninist principles, his spirit remains unbroken.

These and many other fighters form the core of a movement of opposition to the bureaucracy which has found its own way to the political revolution, the need to overthrow the bureaucracy in order to defend the gains of the October Revolution.

The articles, documents and letters produced by this opposition and circulated in 'samizdat' form - copied by hand or typewritten - were extensively reproduced in this time few journals were interested in this material and the interest has not grown very much since.

Recently the capitalist press has given the Soviet opposition fuller treatment. Solzhenitsyn has become an internationally-known figure and so, to a lesser extent, have others. The 'Survey of Current Events', , one of the 'samizdat' publications, has been reprinted in volumn form and Amnesty International now brings out an English translation. The right-wing 'Sunday Telegraph' recently ran a fourpart survey of the opposition.

Most space was accorded to Jews wishing to leave for Israel and those sections of the opposition which are nationalist, liberal or religious in inspiration. Undoubtedly a pro-capitalist wing of the opposition does exist. Certain intellectuals are only too happy to find an individual solution by leaving the Soviet Union.

The idea that there is a more deeply - rooted and powerful movement, hated most of all by the bureaucracy, which turns for its inspiration to Marxism-Leninism, is also unwelcome to the capitalist media.

There is also another aspect to the growing interest of the capitalist media in the Soviet opposition. The KGB is happy to see the dissidents presented as anti-Soviet and compromised by the praise which they receive in hostile organs. They can then be described as agents of imperialism and isolated the more easily from the growing currents of criticism and discontent in the working class and among students and intellectuals.

Such a motive obviously lies behind the greater readiness with which Jews are permitted to emigrate and some dissidents are actually pressurized into doing so. It is then easy to depict the whole opposition as being in league with the imperialists and only being interested in personal objectives.

The information which is now being published in the capitalist press about the Soviet opposition comes as no surprise to the KGB. It may even assist western journalists to make the contacts and obtain the copy which they require all the better to compromise the oppositionists concerned.

It is now very much more difficult than it was in Stalin's day for the bureaucracy to order mass arrests and for people simply to disappear without any questions being asked. There are now unofficial bodies, like the Committee on Human Rights, founded by Academician Sakharov, which strive to give maximum publicity to every case where rights are abused.

If the oppositionists can be shown in a circumstantial way, through the publicity accorded them in the foreign press, to be in league with enemies of the Soviet state, it becomes that much easier to deal with them.

The establishment of closer relations with the United States through President Nixon's visit, and the possibility that this will be followed by a European security conference, makes the position of the opposition not less but more precarious. And this applies particularly to the revolutionary communists who represent as much a menace to the bourgeoisie in the West as to the bureaucracy.

The way may be being prepared for a clamp down on the opposition and the capitalist press, which has suddenly embraced the opposition may, wittingly or not, have lent itself to a provocation.

At the same time, the support of the bureaucracy for similar measures of oppression against the revolutionary Marxists in the capitalist countries is assured in advance. One has only to recall the manner in which the Soviet police collaborated with the Gestapo during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, to the extent of handing over German communists to Hitler's hangThat organ of ultra-conservatism, "The Sunday Telegraph', had the audacity to inform its readers a week or so ago that the KGB has become more decent in its behaviour.

'A new generation of intelligent and sophisticated officers, ' it writes, 'is at least of opposition, he suppression making a start with a gentler We can be sure that the reactionaries in this country will quietly applaud the sophisticated officers of the KGB as they go about the job of arresting and torturing revolutionaries like their sophisticated counterparts in Ulster. And there is plenty of evidence that they are already well prepared to carry out the same job nere.

ON