A DECISIVE battle is now being waged in the Soviet
Union. It is not simply between the Baltic peoples, or even the national movements in general, and Moscow, It is between all those who support democratic rights to one degree or another and the leadership of the Stalinist bureaucracy, desperate to roll back the democratic gains that the masses have made in the
Soviet Union as a whole.
### GERRY FOLEY mass movements.
In fact, it has not only been the press in the local languages that has become an open forum, but also the Russianlanguage papers published in the Baltic
A prime example has been the former all-Union Komsomol daily, Sovetskaya Molodezh, published in Riga.
The editors of the latter paper that I talked with in June did not show a great enthusiasm for Latvian national aspirations, but they had a friendly relationship with the People's Front on the basis of a common interest in democracy.
It is notable also that the crackdown on the Baltic governments was accompanied by blows at the more independent Russian and all-Union media.
The Kremlin's main political line of attack on these movements in the last period has become the charge that they threaten to impose a new "totalitarianism" because Communism and chauvinistic intoler-
There have been emotional reactions against the experience of Stalinism that have led to anti-Communist expressions.
Mistake to ban pro-Moscow party
The Lithuanian government also made a mistake in trying to ban the pro-Moscow Communist party as "foreign based". It failed to make the necessary distinction between defending political ideas, even if the mother organization is foreign, and acting as the material agent of a foreign enemy.
But the recent events have shown quite clearly that the pro-Moscow CPs in the Baltic republics serve only as pawns of, and political cover for, the Soviet armed forces.
They are collaborators of an oppressor power, and have to expect to be treated as
Salvation Committee," lished prominently in Pravda of January 17, was decked with "left" Stalinist rhetoric: "Lithuania was transformed by the Western special services into a carefully defended base for a peaceful attack on the USSR in order to restore capitalism."
It went on to say, "Now in Lithuania dual power has arisen, the power of the bourgeois nationalist Supreme Soviet and the power of the National Salvation Com-
"Dual power cannot last long. At any moment, it can be resolved by a civil
Supposedly, to prevent bloodshed, the Committee called on the workers and "engineer-technicans" to "take power in the factories".
With breathtaking hypocrisy, it called for "driving out of the collectives the thieves who are robbing the people under the banner of privatization."
### Bureaucracy favours restoration
The fact is that it is the Stalinist bureaucrats above all who are doing that, and who are openly for restoring capitalist relations, with themselves as the beneficiaries
There is no reason to think that the national-democrats are in any way more restorationist than the "internationalist" bureaucracy.
Moreover, unlike the advocates of economic reform in Moscow, who stress the need for "a firm hand" to impose painful changes, the Baltic movements have generally placed their economic programs in the context of a thoroughgoing democratization of all decision-making in the socie-
So far, it seems that few if any workers in the USSR have been taken in by the left rhetoric of the neo-Stalinists.
and socialists in the West should not be either.
It is essential that socialists and democrats now defend the embattled Baltic movements without hesitations or reservations.
"For their freedom and ours!" *