Rumbles and rumblings in the Soviet empire as Party conference convenes. High Soviet military officials admit to press that USSR made bad foreign policy decisions under Leonid Brezhnev, including resorting to force (Czechoslovakia? Afghanistan?) rather than first considering other options . . . Andrei Sakharov gathers thirty thousand signatures for monument to Stalin’s victims and has written chapter in a book calling for investigation of KGB . . . Aleksandr Lukashov, of Democratic Union, harangues crowd in Moscow on need for free press, dismantling of KGB, and right to organize political parties, while police stand around doing nothing. Says one police officer, Vyacheslav Nikishin: “Nobody has told us what to do, so we decided just to let people stay.” … A few hours earlier, stick-wielding police had broken up demonstration demanding the return of Tatars to their homeland, detaining two hundred. Crowds, instead of standing around apathetically as police moved in, shouted, “Fascists! Fascists!” and “Freedom! Freedom!” … In Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, anti-Stalin demonstrations turn into home-rule demonstrations, and most are not broken up. Stanislaus Zukulis, head of Latvian KGB, who calls high level meeting to discuss situation, is heard to comment that perestroika can’t be such a good thing if the West likes it so much. (His statement was leaked.) . . . Lev Timofeyev, human-rights activist, calls for a monument to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for writing Gulag, and Novy Mir says it’s considering publishing Solzhenitsyn’s banned Cancer Ward. Cancer Ward was set in type in 1968 (before Prague Spring crackdown) but never published in Russia . . . Otto Latsis, deputy editor of Kommunist, writes in Komsomolskaya Pravda that though Leon Trotsky’s political views are still “anathema,” he was “neither a spy nor a murderer” and his works should be published and his part in Soviet history acknowledged. (There has been no mention of the man Trotsky in official Soviet literature, only of the deviation known as Trotskyism.) … In the satellites, thirty thousand Hungarians are permitted to march on the Rumanian embassy in Budapest to protest persecution of Hungarian minority in Rumania. In retaliation, unreconstructed Rumanian tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu closes a Hungarian consulate . . . Voice of America correspondent Jolyon Naegele gets 45-minute interview with Alexander Dubcek, architect of Prague Spring, and beams it back to Czechoslovakia. A year ago, Naegele couldn’t have gotten to Dubcek, and if he had, Dubcek wouldn’t have dared talk to him. … In fine Iberian gesture, Spanish Communist Party celebrates spirit of glasnost by purging the hammer and sickle from its publications.
“They couldn’t find any insurance coverage they could afford.”
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