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- <text id=92TT1303>
- <title>
- June 08, 1992: Moscow Plans Its Next Show Trial
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992
- June 08, 1992 The Balkans
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- THE WEEK, Page 26
- WORLD
- Moscow Plans Its Next Show Trial
- </hdr><body>
- <p>In an explosive court case, Russia will re-examine its ban on
- the communists
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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.
- </p>
- <p> 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."
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-