Declaration of the Party of Labour

May 12, 1993
Issue 

Declaration of the Party of Labour

The brutal assault on the May Day demonstration showed that the Yeltsin regime is interpreting the results of the referendum in its own distinctive fashion: as a mandate to use clubs and water-cannons against attempts by workers, women, children and old people to say "No" to a policy of plunder.

The Party of Labour does not endorse the slogans of the extremist elements in the Front for National Salvation and the Russian Communist Workers Party. Nevertheless, we have stood and will continue to stand together with working people in their struggle to defend their inalienable rights against a "democratic" regime whose only argument against its opponents is the use of crude force.

It is clear that the attack on the peaceful May Day demonstration was a deliberately thought-out and carefully staged provocation. The demonstrators were met with clubs and water cannons in the narrowest part of Lenin Prospect, toward which the march was directed by a solid row of dozens of heavy vehicles and hundreds of armed and trained "guardians of law and order".

This bloody assault, and the mass media hysteria which preceded it, bear the marks of a rehearsal for the introduction of a dictatorship to be sanctified by the overthrow of the constitution. This must not be allowed to happen!

We demand an investigation into this crime, and the trial and punishment of those who organised the carnage.

We demand the holding of parliamentary hearings to determine the degree to which high-placed state officials are responsible for these events.

We say "No!" to the president's authoritarian regime!

"No!" to the constitution which the regime is trying to force through using such methods!

"Yes!" to popular power and to early general elections!
1 May 1993

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