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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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1992-09-22
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THE WEEK, Page 26WORLDMoscow Plans Its Next Show Trial
In an explosive court case, Russia will re-examine its ban on
the communists
Any country that is serious about democracy will think twice
about banning a political organization, even one so steeped in
misdeeds and corruption as the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union. The new Constitutional Court in Moscow has decided to do
its rethinking by combining two cases -- a challenge from former
communists to President Boris Yeltsin's decree outlawing the
party and a plea from the government to declare the former
Soviet Communist Party unconstitutional.
Yeltsin's legal team, led by Sergei Shakhrai, a member of
Parliament, will argue that the communist apparatus of the
Soviet Union and Russia were "not parties in the political or
legal sense" but actually governmental and criminal
organizations.
At a press conference last week, Shakhrai displayed a
tantalizing foretaste: a May 1975 order that directed the KGB
to provide arms to one of the most militant Palestinian
terrorist organizations, the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, based in Syria. The weaponry was to be used, said
Shakhrai, "to carry out operations against American and Israeli
personnel in third countries."