Moscow Plans Its Next Show Trial

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."