Why the fall of USSR was a tragedy for all mankind
RedRedRed
Why We Fought to Defend the Soviet Union
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 809 and 810, 12 and 26 September
2003.
We print below an edited and expanded version of a presentation by
comrade Victor Gibbons at a public Spartacist educational in New York
City on April 27. In particular we have added a more extensive account
of the intervention of the International Communist League in the USSR
in the early 1990s, which was taken from a later presentation by
comrade Gibbons in London on July 12. As a member of the ICL's Moscow
Station at the time, the speaker was centrally involved in the
struggle to carry out the Trotskyist program in the Soviet Union at
that crucial moment in world history.
Millions around the world burn with rage at the sight of Iraq reduced
to rubble and humiliated by old-style colonial pillage. The images of
U.S. troops trampling with their jackboots over a country which
American imperialism first starved, then bombed and bled white in a
display of global dominance by the "world's only superpower" are truly
obscene. This just outrage must be raised to a political understanding
that the enslavement of Iraq is yet another price that the
international working class and the oppressed peoples of the Third
World are paying for the destruction of the Soviet Union through
capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. Today's imperialist global
rampage was impossible when the USSR still existed.
It is especially important to understand this because among the main
organizers of the current antiwar protests are reformist "socialists"
who today proclaim themselves antiwar and "anti-imperialist" but who
yesterday joined with the American and West European imperialists in
cheering the demise of the USSR. We Trotskyists of the International
Communist League fought to the end in defense of the Soviet workers
state and the collectivized economy ushered in by the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917. This defense was despite and against the Stalinist
misrule that had undermined the foundations of the workers state for
six decades and had opened the door to counterrevolution. Uniquely,
the ICL intervened in the Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s
seeking to mobilize the working class against the powerful forces,
backed by world (centrally American) imperialism, driving toward
capitalist restoration. This was part of our struggle for new October
Revolutions around the world.
Just as we Trotskyists had always warned would happen, the demise of
the USSR decisively altered the political landscape on this planet in
many ways. Despite the Stalinist bureaucratic degeneration, the Soviet
Union represented the industrial and military powerhouse protecting
every other country that had overthrown capitalist rule, from China to
Vietnam to Cuba. It was only fear of possible Soviet retaliation that
held American imperialism back from using nuclear weapons against
North Korea and China in the Korean War of the early 1950s and against
North Vietnam in the 1960s.
While the U.S. rulers are now grabbing more of the oil wealth of the
Near East, their main and ultimate target is the People's Republic of
China, by far the largest and strongest of those remaining states
where capitalism has been overthrown. China is confronting mounting
American military pressure, from the expansion of U.S. bases in the
Philippines to new U.S. bases across Central Asia. China (and North
Korea) are among those states explicitly indicated as potential
targets for a U.S. nuclear first strike as laid out in the Pentagon's
2002 "Nuclear Posture Review." This makes all the more clear our duty
to fight for the unconditional military defense of China and North
Korea, bureaucratically deformed workers states, against the
imperialist powers. And that means defending the right of North Korea
to develop nuclear weapons. As we did in the former USSR and the East
European deformed workers states, we also call for proletarian
political revolutions to get rid of the ruling nationalist
bureaucracies--whose policies undermine and weaken those states--and
install governments based on workers democracy and revolutionary
internationalism.
Another result of the Soviet Union's demise is that the nominally
independent countries of the Third World can no longer maneuver
between the "two superpowers." They thus face the unrestrained
economic exactions and brute military force of the imperialists. Look
at the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where the overturn of the
October Revolution has led to the intensification of imperialist
bloodsucking, and with it, the increased starvation and
bloodshed--ethnic group against ethnic group, country against country,
everybody out for some advantage in a battle for survival. This has
occurred because the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have
demanded repayment of the money they had given previously as a sop to
these African countries during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
Finally, the destruction of the USSR has inflamed the rivalries
between the imperialist states of North America, West Europe and Japan
whose conflicts of interest are no longer restrained by their
capitalist rulers' shared commitment to the former anti-Soviet
alliance. These rivalries spur the rulers' efforts to achieve greater
economic competitiveness in the world market by intensifying the rate
of exploitation of labor in their own countries. Thus the bourgeoisie
has been trashing what is left of the "welfare state" in West Europe
and the far more meager social programs in the United States.
The Trotskyist movement had long predicted that a counterrevolution in
Soviet Russia would enormously strengthen the forces of capitalist
reaction on a global scale. For example, in 1929, a founding document
of the International Left Opposition in the U.S. forewarned:
"The collapse of the Russian revolution as the dictatorship of the
proletariat would signify the retardation for decades of the
revolutionary movement in Europe and America and the uprisings of the
colonial peoples, whose main point of support today is the victory of
the Russian October. A collapse would be followed by an unequaled
reign of reaction throughout the world and would entail a restoration
of world imperialist rule without precedent in the last two or three
decades."
-- "Platform of the Communist Opposition" (February 1929); reprinted
in James P. Cannon Writings and Speeches, 1928-31: The Left Opposition
in the U.S. 1928-31 (Monad Press [1981])
Social Catastrophe of Post-Soviet Russia
The greatest devastation brought about by the fall of the USSR has
taken place on its own former territory. The face of the "new Russia"
can be seen not only in the economic catastrophe that has befallen the
population but in the degradation of women and national minorities and
in the slaughter and destruction inflicted by Russian occupation
forces in Chechnya. A central goal of the counterrevolutionary regime
of Boris Yeltsin was to destroy the collectivized economy inherited
from the former Soviet Union. Against all complaints over incompetence
or corruption, Yeltsin's stock answer was to point out he had achieved
the main thing he'd promised: no more communism in Russia.
And in place of what it destroyed, what has capitalism built in these
12 years? Just as Soviet progress could be measured in the figures of
concrete, steel and education, so now can capitalism's return be
measured in figures of ruin, disease and barbarism. In these 12 years
capitalism's profit system reveals itself as a deadly enemy of
humanity--a machine not for the advancement of the international
productive forces and culture but for their destruction.
Capitalism has passed a death sentence on the Russian population: in
absolute numbers deaths exceeded births during the first six years
after the capitalist counterrevolution by 3.5 million; by 2001 this
figure had become 6.75 million; and by now even conservative estimates
of the population contraction are closer to 8 million! In 1989,
average male life expectancy was 64.2 years. In Yeltsin's Russia of
1994, it dropped to 57.6 years. This historically unprecedented sudden
drop in life expectancy equals, for the nine-year period from 1987 to
1996, the ghosts of 11 million stolen lifetimes. A 16-year-old boy has
less of a chance to survive to 60 in Putin's Russia than in the
benighted filth of 19th-century tsarism! The population of the Russian
Federation, now smaller than Pakistan's, has seen its greatest
reversal in a 1,000-year expansion from the country's origins in
medieval Kievan Rus.
The death rate is not centered on the very young or old, as is typical
of impoverished societies, but rather on men in their prime. In 2002,
the State Statistical Committee predicted as its "most probable
forecast" that the population of the Russian Federation would fall
from 144 million to 101 million by 2050. In a worst-case scenario, the
population would fall to 77 million, a reduction of almost 50 percent!
This holocaust is looming not over a marginal hinterland, but the
nuclear-armed colossus of Eurasia.
What is behind this catastrophe? The economic collapse of post-Soviet
Russia was unprecedented for a modern society: gross domestic product
fell by over 80 percent from 1991 to 1997; according to official
(understated) statistics, capital investment dropped over 90 percent.
By the middle of the decade, 40 percent of the population of the
Russian Federation was living below the official poverty line and a
further 36 percent only a little above it. Millions were literally
starving.
This massive economic and social immiseration has combined with the
destruction of the public health system. Tuberculosis (TB), which had
been effectively eradicated in the Soviet Union, has returned as a
scourge of Russia's poor. Recent estimates put the number of Russians
with TB at 88 per 100,000, compared to a rate of 4 to 10 per 100,000
in West Europe and America. The number of those infected with HIV/AIDS
is increasing faster in Russia and Ukraine than anywhere else in the
world.
Capitalism has wiped out a century of social progress, and what a
century! What is being destroyed in Russia today is everything that
Soviet workers and rural toilers had built, everything that their
parents and grandparents before them had constructed with such
sacrifice and heroism in the face of the Civil War and imperialist
interventions of 1918-21, the murderous excesses of agricultural
collectivization and forced-march industrialization, the invasion by
Nazi Germany in the Second World War, the horrors of Stalin's terror
which reached into every family. All of this had been endured in the
bitter resolve that it would someday, somehow lead to a better,
socialist society. Now the proletariat's very will to live is being
torn away, as everything they had built over the generations is
smashed to pieces and looted as the officially sanctioned and
celebrated private property of vulgar capitalist gangsters--who in
many cases are the very same Communist Party leaders and apparatchiks
who had so long been falsely identified with "socialism."
Red October 1917
To understand the social catastrophe that has befallen post-Soviet
Russia and to save the banner of socialism, it is necessary to
understand the origins of the Soviet Union in the October 1917
Revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky, and
its subsequent bureaucratic degeneration under J.V. Stalin and his
heirs.
The October Revolution arose out of the imperialist slaughter of the
First World War. It was the signal act of the 20th century, which
Lenin described as the epoch of imperialist decay and socialist
revolution. It took the question of socialist revolution out of the
realm of theory and made it real in the former Russian tsarist empire.
The October Revolution created a workers state based on workers
councils (soviets) and roused the toilers to forge a Red Army that
triumphed in a civil war against the counterrevolutionary White forces
and the expeditionary forces of every major imperialist power. The
Soviet government of Lenin and Trotsky expropriated both the Russian
capitalist and Western imperialist holdings and repudiated outright
Russia's massive debt to foreign bankers. It proclaimed the right of
working people to jobs, health, housing and education, and took the
first steps to building a socialist society.
The revolutionary government gave land to the peasants and
self-determination to the many oppressed nations (themselves largely
made up of peasants) of the former tsarist empire. It tore down the
whole edifice of Russian patriarchal medievalism upon which the
tsarist autocracy had rested. The early Soviet government not only
separated church and state, it poured funds into secular education and
science, promoting a thoroughly materialist worldview. It eliminated
all laws discriminating against national and ethnic minorities and
women. Soviet Russia eliminated all discriminatory laws, including
against homosexuals. Soviet Russia was the first country of
significance to give the vote to women, causing the Western capitalist
"democracies" (e.g., the United States and Britain) to scramble to
catch up.
The Bolshevik Revolution was seen from the beginning as only the start
of what was to be a European-wide workers revolution. On the eve of
the October uprising in Petrograd, the workers of the giant Putilov
munitions factory and the pro-Bolshevik soldiers of the Pavlovsky
Regiment exchanged banners of solidarity. The Putilov banner read:
"Long Live the Russian Revolution as the Prologue to the Social
Revolution in Europe!"
Internationally, the Bolshevik victory inspired revolutionary
uprisings throughout Europe, most notably in Germany, Italy, Finland
and Hungary. Its thunderous message of national and social
emancipation also inspired the workers and rural toilers of the
colonial world. The Bolsheviks launched the Communist International
(Comintern), which by 1921 had attracted six million workers to its
banner. And during its first four congresses, the Comintern educated
and trained workers around the world in the program and strategy of
revolutionary struggle. This was a massive factor in the world
political arena.
To give just one example: in the relatively politically backward USA,
it was the leaders of the Russian Revolution who made the important
connection between the cause of black liberation and workers
revolution. Black poet Claude McKay tells the story of his 1922 visit
to Soviet Russia, where he was feted by factory workers and Red Army
soldiers:
"At every meeting I was received with boisterous acclaim, mobbed with
friendly demonstration. The women workers of the great bank in Moscow
insisted on hearing about the working conditions of the colored women
of America.... When I got through, the Russian women passed a
resolution sending greetings to the colored women workers of America,
exhorting them to organize their forces and send a woman
representative to Russia."
McKay saw that this revolutionary spirit was not just a popular mood
but also expressed the principles of the early Soviet government and
Comintern:
"When the Russian workers overturned their infamous government in
1917, one of the first acts of the new Premier, Lenin, was a
proclamation greeting all the oppressed peoples throughout the world,
exhorting them to organize and unite against the common international
oppressor--Private Capitalism. Later on in Moscow, Lenin himself
grappled with the question of the American Negroes and spoke on the
subject before the Second Congress of the Third International. He
consulted with John Reed, the American journalist, and dwelt on the
urgent necessity of propaganda and organizational work among the
Negroes of the South. The subject was not allowed to drop."
In short, a workers state, stretching across Eurasia, had emerged
victorious from war and civil war and had launched a movement of the
world's exploited and oppressed to expropriate the entire bourgeoisie
and smash their imperialist order.
The Stalinist Political Counterrevolution and the Trotskyist Left
Opposition
The bourgeoisie and its lackeys have done everything in their power to
poison, or wipe out entirely, any memory of what the Bolshevik
Revolution and the Soviet workers state were really about. They
cynically push the lie of the "death of communism," but their real
oath against the October Revolution is "Never again!" The biggest lie,
the most effective slander, the one that weighs most heavily on the
minds of workers and youth looking for an effective way to fight
capitalism, is shared by open imperialist ideologues, social
democrats, Stalinists and anarchists alike. They all claim that
"Leninism led to Stalinism." The best answer to this is a Marxist
materialist analysis of the qualitative changes in the USSR that made
it possible for the Stalinist bureaucracy to usurp political control
from the revolutionary core of the party and begin a process of
anti-Leninist degeneration. This analysis also shows that against the
Stalinist reaction, the banner of Leninism was carried forward by
Trotsky's International Left Opposition, continuing with the Fourth
International founded in 1938 and, today, our own International
Communist League.
As powerful as the Bolshevik Revolution's international impact was,
especially in Europe, the insurgent workers failed to take power
elsewhere due to a lack of sufficiently capable revolutionary parties
similar to the Bolshevik Party in Russia. This meant that by the end
of 1923 Soviet Russia for the first time had come face to face with an
indefinite but prolonged period of isolation. Although the Bolshevik
Red Army had successfully repulsed all of the imperialist invasions
and won the Civil War, Soviet Russia emerged from this exhausted and
bled white.
Industry was in ruins and the vibrant proletariat that had
accomplished the 1917 Revolution had practically ceased to exist as a
class. Soviet Russia had counted on the material resources of a
European workers revolution to help it quickly rebuild its
infrastructure and industries, which had been devastated by seven
years of interimperialist war and then civil war. And this was all the
more urgent as Russia was shackled with a technically and socially
backward agricultural base. And now the postwar famine in the
countryside had reached the point of cannibalism.
Not only had the revolution's social base and the world context
changed, so had its leadership. The most conscious and experienced
layers of revolutionary workers, and many of the Bolshevik cadre of
1917, had died on the front lines of the Civil War. By the time of
Lenin's death in 1924, only about 2 percent of the Communist Party had
pre-revolutionary experience, extensive Marxist schooling or a
familiarity with what the European workers movement was really like.
Many of the veteran Bolshevik militants who survived the Civil War
were co-opted into the state and ruling Communist Party apparatus (and
necessarily so). But this did tend to tear them away from what
remained of the working class.
Under these conditions, a new conservative and bureaucratized layer in
the party and state apparatus came to the fore, intent on preserving
its relatively privileged status amid extreme poverty, scarcity and
imperialist hostility. The defeat of the emerging Left Opposition by
these forces at the rigged 13th Party Conference in January 1924
marked the qualitative point at which the bureaucratic caste seized
political power--from then on, the people who ruled the USSR, the way
the USSR was ruled and the purposes for which it was ruled all
changed. This was a political counterrevolution rather than a social
one, because the nascent bureaucracy hijacked the governmental
apparatus but did not overturn the socialized property forms created
by October. But the struggle did not end there. It took a series of
bloody purges through the 1930s for the Stalin clique to consolidate
its rule. Throughout, Trotsky's Left Opposition continued the fight
for authentic Bolshevism and in defense of October.
In place of the October Revolution's banner of world socialist
revolution, Stalin in the autumn of 1924 put forward the false dogma
of impossible economic autarky and isolationism known as "socialism in
one country." As the Kremlin bureaucracy gradually became more
conscious of its position, this "theory" became the ideological
justification for transforming the foreign Communist parties into
bargaining chips in an illusory search for "peaceful coexistence" with
imperialism. Over the coming decades, it meant the strangulation of
one after another opportunity for socialist revolution in the
capitalist countries.
From the mid 1920s until he was assassinated by a Stalinist agent in
1940, Leon Trotsky--co-leader with Lenin of the October
Revolution--sought to rally communist militants throughout the world
on the basis of the authentic principles and program of Bolshevism
(i.e., revolutionary Marxism). In 1933, when the Stalinists' failure
to prevent Hitler's rise to power in Germany did not even precipitate
any fundamental struggle within the Comintern to change course,
Trotsky called for new parties and a new, Fourth International. The
1938 Transitional Program of the Trotskyist Fourth International
defined the Soviet Union under Stalin as a bureaucratically
degenerated workers state and laid out the two basic historical
alternatives confronting it:
"The USSR thus embodies terrific contradictions. But it still remains
a degenerated workers' state. Such is the social diagnosis. The
political prognosis has an alternative character: either the
bureaucracy, becoming ever more the organ of the world bourgeoisie in
the workers' state, will overthrow the new forms of property and
plunge the country back to capitalism; or the working class will crush
the bureaucracy and open the way to socialism."
Trotsky posed a program to resolve this contradiction in the positive
through the program and methods of Bolshevik internationalism. As he
put it in the last great political struggle of his life, the 1939-40
fight against an anti-Soviet opposition led by Max Shachtman and James
Burnham in the American Socialist Workers Party:
"We must formulate our slogans in such a way that the workers see
clearly just what we are defending in the USSR (state property and
planned economy), and against whom we are conducting a ruthless
struggle (the parasitic bureaucracy and its Comintern). We must not
lose sight for a single moment of the fact that the question of
overthrowing the Soviet bureaucracy is for us subordinate to the
question of preserving state property in the means of production in
the USSR; that the question of preserving state property in the means
of production in the USSR is subordinate for us to the question of the
world proletarian revolution."
-- "The USSR in War" (September 1939), In Defense of Marxism
(Pathfinder, 1973)
Contradictions of Soviet Economic Growth
Even though strapped by imperialist encirclement and bureaucratic
parasitism and mismanagement, the USSR proved the superior capacities
of a collectivized planned economy to unleash productive forces. In
The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936 when the capitalist world was
mired in an economic depression, Trotsky pointed out that over the
previous six years the Soviet Union had increased its industrial
production by three and a half times. Over the previous ten years
(1925 to 1935), heavy industry in the USSR had increased its
production more than tenfold:
"Socialism has demonstrated its right to victory, not on the pages of
Das Kapital, but in an industrial arena comprising a sixth part of the
earth's surface--not in the language of dialectics, but in the
language of steel, cement and electricity. Even if the Soviet Union,
as a result of internal difficulties, external blows and the mistakes
of its leadership, were to collapse--which we firmly hope will not
happen--there would remain as an earnest of the future this
indestructible fact, that thanks solely to a proletarian revolution a
backward country has achieved in less than ten years successes
unexampled in history."
But in contrast to the Stalinist lie that socialism--a classless,
egalitarian society based on material abundance--could be built in a
single country, Trotsky warned that:
"The dynamic coefficients of Soviet industry are unexampled. But they
are still far from decisive. The Soviet Union is lifting itself from a
terribly low level, while the capitalist countries are slipping down
from a very high one. The correlation of forces at the present moment
is determined not by the rate of growth, but by contrasting the entire
power of the two camps as expressed in material accumulations,
technique, culture and, above all, the productivity of human labor.
When we approach the matter from this statistical point of view, the
situation changes at once, and to the extreme disadvantage of the
Soviet Union.
"The question formulated by Lenin--Who shall prevail?--is a question
of the correlation of forces between the Soviet Union and the world
revolutionary proletariat on the one hand, and on the other
international capital and the hostile forces within the Union. The
economic successes of the Soviet Union make it possible for her to
fortify herself, advance, arm herself, and, when necessary, retreat
and wait--in a word, hold out. But in its essence the question, Who
shall prevail--not only as a military, but still more as an economic
question--confronts the Soviet Union on a world scale."
The same Bolshevik internationalism that guided the October Revolution
determined the Left Opposition's economic perspectives for the USSR:
the international productive forces had to be torn out of the hands of
the imperialists; the profit system and the bourgeois nation-state had
to be scrapped by an international socialist revolution.
Trotsky also explained that the Stalinist bureaucracy was capable of
extensive but not intensive economic growth. What does that mean? It
means that the Kremlin oligarchy could and did expand the Soviet
economy by crudely transplanting advanced capitalist methods and even
entire factories from abroad, but it was incapable of constantly
raising the overall level of technology and labor productivity. As
Trotsky put it in The Revolution Betrayed: "Under a nationalized
economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers,
freedom of criticism and initiative--conditions incompatible with a
totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery."
I can tell you a firsthand story about how the Stalinist bureaucracy
blocked high-tech advancement. In 1991, I went to the editorial
offices of Pravda, the main CPSU newspaper, in Moscow as part of my
job and got a tour of the printing plant. To my amazement, I saw
typesetting was still done in "hot type," that is, a technology
superseded decades ago in the West. The bureaucrats preferred this
lumbering, laborious method because it was so much easier to
politically monitor and control than computerized printing processes.
After the tour, I was taken upstairs to Pravda's "emergency room"
housing two parallel state of the art Macintosh-Linotronic systems
allowing a special crew to supplant the entire operation below in the
event of strikes and other disruptions. That was the heart of it: only
a specially vetted and monitored crew could be trusted with powerful
information technology.
Nonetheless, the USSR was able to sustain a bounding, extensive
economic growth well into the 1960s. As long as additional layers of
workers were drawn from Russia's vast countryside into the cities, it
also meant that overall labor productivity in the Soviet Union
continued to rise as well. However, the limits and contradictions of
Soviet economic growth came to the fore in the last part of the
lengthy regime of Leonid Brezhnev, who occupied the Kremlin from the
mid 1960s until the early 1980s.
During the first half of this period, American imperialism was bogged
down in the long, losing war in Vietnam. One consequence was that the
USSR was able to achieve approximate nuclear military parity with the
U.S. The Soviet economy also got a big boost in the early 1970s from
the multiple increases in the world-market price of oil. However, in
the late 1970s the new Democratic administration of U.S. president
Jimmy Carter launched a renewed Cold War offensive against the Soviet
bloc in the name of "human rights," combining increased military,
economic and political pressure.
The Brezhnev regime responded by continuing to invest heavily in
defense, seeking to maintain nuclear parity with the U.S. It also
continued to buy domestic stability by maintaining and even improving
the living standards of the Soviet working class and collective
farmers. But these economic policies came at the expense of investment
in the technological renewal of Soviet industry. By the late 1970s,
the steady annual economic growth rate of 5 percent of the past two
decades had fallen to about half that. And by the beginning of the
1980s, the economy was clearly stagnating, in the face of the
imperialist anti-Soviet offensive.
The Final Undoing of the October Revolution
As the USSR began to fall behind Western capitalism dramatically,
growing sections of the bureaucracy became convinced that the Soviet
economy could never catch up on its own, and chose to cut back the
massive burden of military spending by offering "partnership" to
imperialism. Hostile from the outset to workers democracy and the
fight for international extension of the revolution as the road to
socialist development, Stalin's heirs now repudiated the ideology of
"socialism in one country" in the negative, in favor of increasingly
open expressions of belief in the economic superiority of Western-type
capitalism. Underlying this ideological attitude was the appetite of
these privileged social strata, especially the younger layer of
intellectuals and bureaucratic functionaries, to further enrich
themselves at the expense of the working class.
The accelerating rightward slide of the Soviet bureaucracy and
affiliated intelligentsia was represented by the new regime of the
younger CPSU leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who took over the Kremlin in
1985. Restraints were eased on intellectual and, later, political life
under the banner of glasnost (openness). Centralized economic planning
and management were scrapped and replaced by market-directed
mechanisms under the rubric of perestroika (restructuring). A global
policy of appeasing and capitulating to Western (centrally American)
imperialism was carried out in the name of "new thinking."
The war in Afghanistan during the 1980s was a crucial turning point in
the fate of the USSR and therefore of world history. In December 1979,
Brezhnev's Kremlin intervened militarily in Afghanistan to shore up a
strategically important client state along the southern border of
Soviet Central Asia. The modernizing bourgeois-nationalist regime in
Kabul had repeatedly requested Soviet aid against a reactionary
Islamic insurgency--backed and armed by the U.S.--which had been
provoked by the regime's modest social reforms, especially those which
improved the horribly oppressed condition of Afghan women.
It came as a surprise to Moscow when the Americans escalated this
insurgency into a massive proxy war against the Soviet Union,
launching the biggest CIA covert operation in history. Jimmy Carter's
chief foreign policy adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later bragged about
how they had long planned to bleed the Soviets. Texas Democratic
Congressman Charles Wilson spelled it out at the time: "There were
58,000 [American] dead in Vietnam, and we owe the Russians one."
This should have been an easy war for any leftist to take a principled
stand on. It was doubly progressive, posing both the fate of women and
elemental social progress in Afghanistan together with the defense of
the USSR's southern flank. But under the onslaught of the war hysteria
cranked out by the U.S. ruling class--beginning with Jimmy Carter's
"human rights" demagogy and escalating to Ronald Reagan's crusade
against the Soviet "evil empire"--a defining moment took place for the
"left" internationally. Here in the U.S., Vietnam War-era prodigal
sons of the Democratic Party rushed to redeem themselves before their
imperialist rulers by showing how fervently they now opposed the
"Soviet Vietnam."
Against the liberals and their "left" hangers-on, we raised the
slogans: "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" and "Extend gains of the
October Revolution to Afghan peoples!" Against all the demagogy about
"Afghan national rights," we explained that Afghanistan was not even a
nation but an extremely backward country inhabited by diverse and
mutually hostile ethnic groups. The only possible basis for social
progress in Afghanistan at that time was the extension of Soviet
military and political power. The Red Army intervention cut against
the grain of the nationalist dogma of "socialism in one country." Our
internationalist line, while aimed primarily against the CIA-backed
mujahedin, at the same time promoted political revolution against the
Kremlin Stalinists.
Contrary to the imperialist Big Lie campaign, the Soviet armed forces
were winning against the CIA's mujahedin. It was not out of military
necessity but for the sake of Gorbachev's hoped-for strategic
"partnership" with American imperialism that the Soviets pulled the
last troops out of Afghanistan in 1989. Gorbachev's policy in
Afghanistan gave a green light to dumping Soviet-era "socialist and
national liberation" pretensions. What we heard in the USSR at this
point was outright racist Russian chauvinism like, "Afghan 'blacks'
are not worth the blood of our Russian boys." These types were fed up
with the massive Soviet subsidies to Cuba, Vietnam, East Europe and
Moscow's Third World capitalist client regimes.
Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze later conceded that
surrendering Afghanistan was the key to what followed globally: "The
decision to leave Afghanistan was the first and most difficult step.
Everything else flowed from that" (Washington Post, 16 November 1992).
Indeed, after Afghanistan Gorbachev threw East Europe to the
imperialist wolves as well. Finally, he oversaw the destruction of the
USSR.
As we declared in 1990 in the first issue of our Russian-language
Byulleten' Spartakovtsev (Spartacist Bulletin): "Far better to have
fought imperialism through an honorable fight in Afghanistan than to
have to now fight it within the borders of the Soviet Union" (see
Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 45-46, Winter 1990-91). Days
before Gorbachev pulled out the last Soviet units, the Partisan
Defense Committee, the class-struggle legal and social defense
organization associated with the SL/U.S., sent a 7 February 1989
letter to the Afghan government offering "to organize an international
brigade to fight to the death" to defend "the right of women to read,
freedom from the veil, freedom from the tyranny of the mullahs and the
landlords, the introduction of medical care and the right of all to an
education." Though this offer was declined, the PDC and fraternal
defense organizations allied with other sections of the ICL raised
over $44,000 to aid civilian victims of an all-out mujahedin offensive
later that year against Jalalabad, the Afghan city closest to the
CIA's guerrilla bases in Pakistan. Those emergency funds were gathered
from working people throughout the world, including of Muslim origin.
They rejoiced when the attack on Jalalabad was defeated!
But our campaign had an even greater significance. It signaled that
the banner of communism trampled in the mud of Afghanistan by the
defeatist Stalinists had its true champions in the Trotskyists! It was
at that moment in 1989 that the international Spartacist tendency
became the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).
Our Fight Against Counterrevolution in the Soviet Sphere
The International Communist League intervened at the crucial moments
in East Germany--the German Democratic Republic (DDR)--in 1989-90 and
in the Soviet Union in 1990-92. We put forward the program of
proletarian political revolution to overthrow the decomposing
Stalinist regimes as the only possible way to defeat the powerful,
imperialist-backed forces of capitalist counterrevolution. Today, we
need to make a special effort to put ourselves back into this period,
before the defeats that followed, in order to appreciate the reality
of the revolutionary opportunity that opened up, and how the ICL
seized upon it.
In the summer of 1989, the Soviet Union was shaken by the miners in
the first ever nationwide strike. Their strike committees resembled
soviets, running whole cities. That same summer, Soviet president
Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing and saw the Chinese deformed workers
state's People's Liberation Army beginning to melt in the face of an
incipient political revolution triggered by the mass protests in
Tiananmen Square. Workers, soldiers and students together were singing
the "Internationale." It began to look like Hungary 1956, where the
pro-socialist working class had erected soviets and briefly shattered
the Stalinist regime.
Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping drowned the nascent proletarian political
revolution in blood. But within a few months, the spectre of political
revolution was back, in East Germany. As mass protests besieged the
discredited Stalinist bureaucracy, we threw our international
resources into the fight for a red Germany of workers councils based
on political revolution in the East and socialist revolution in the
West.
Our daily Arprekorr (Workers Press Correspondence) called for the
founding of workers and soldiers councils, like those in Russia in
1917. Workers from large East Berlin factories came to ask us how to
do that. Because of our propaganda, units of the East German army
formed soldiers committees, some of which circulated Arprekorr. It was
these units the panicky Stalinists dissolved. We published
internationalist greetings in several languages reaching out to
workers from Vietnam, Cuba and Poland in the DDR and to Soviet
soldiers and officers stationed there. ICL comrades were addressing
meetings of hundreds of Soviet soldiers and officers with our
Trotskyist program. (For further details, see "Revolution vs.
Counterrevolution in Germany, 1989-90," WV Nos. 730 and 731, 25
February and 10 March 2000.)
The signal event of our intervention in the DDR was the 3 January 1990
united-front demonstration against the desecration of Berlin's Treptow
Park Soviet Soldier Memorial by German rightists. The demonstration
was essentially in defense of the DDR workers state and against the
drive for capitalist annexation by the West German imperialists, the
heirs of Hitler's Third Reich. The impact of our appeal was such that
the ruling Stalinist party, the SED/PDS, was compelled to join in
building this demonstration of a quarter of a million workers and
soldiers initiated by us. Lothar Bisky, a leader of the SED/PDS, told
us, "You have the workers."
I and another comrade were in Leningrad a few days later when the
issues of the main Communist Party daily, Pravda, and the Soviet Army
daily, Red Star, came out with coverage of the Treptow demonstration.
Both papers hailed the demonstration, and the Soviet Army paper ran a
prominent photo of our signed Trotskyist banner reading "Down With
NATO! Defend the Soviet Union!" over our hammer, sickle and four!
The mass ICL-initiated protest awoke Gorbachev, Soviet foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze & Co. with a start from their illusion in
a gradual transition to capitalism in the DDR. Here's what Gorbachev
himself said in an interview on German TV on the tenth anniversary of
those events:
"We changed our point of view on the process of unification of Germany
under the impact of events that unfolded in the DDR. And an especially
critical situation came about in January. In essence, a breakdown of
structures took place. A threat arose--a threat of disorganization, of
a big destabilization. This began on January 3 and [went] further
almost every day.... This was, as you know, like a torrent of fiery
lava: the current was flowing." [our translation from TV transcript]
Gorbachev recounts that when West German chancellor Helmut Kohl
visited Moscow shortly thereafter, the Soviet leadership urged him to
swallow up the DDR immediately. In his own way Gorbachev recognized
and feared that our Trotskyist program of proletarian political
revolution and socialist internationalism was beginning to attract
mass support among the East German (and from there, the Soviet)
working class.
It was under the impact of Tiananmen, the Soviet miners strike and
Treptow that Gorbachev endorsed Boris Yeltsin's plan for a 500-day
forced march to capitalist restoration in August 1990. At the same
time, the terminal disintegration of the Kremlin bureaucracy also made
it possible for the ICL to openly establish our direct presence in the
USSR. We began massively distributing our first leaflet, "Soviet
Workers: Smash Yeltsin/ Gorbachev 500-Day Plan!", and published the
first issue of our Russian-language Byulleten' Spartakovtsev
(Spartacist Bulletin), titled "What Is Trotskyism."
I'll give one dramatic example of how we fought to mobilize the Soviet
proletariat on the basis of a revolutionary internationalist program
and perspective. That was at the October 1990 Soviet Coal Miners
Congress held in Donetsk, Ukraine--the heartland of the mass strike
wave the year before.
There were only two of us, but politically it was the ICL on the one
side and, on the other, U.S. and British embassy representatives, the
AFL-CIO's Freedom House, the Russian fascist NTS and, last but not
least, the scab British "Union of Democratic Miners" (UDM), an
anti-Communist outfit formed and financed in an attempt to break the
great British coal strike of 1984-85 led by Arthur Scargill's National
Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The Soviet miners had raised huge funds in
solidarity with the British miners and their union during the strike.
This Soviet aid was a powerful countermeasure to the red-baiting
campaign against Scargill and the NUM conducted by the Tory government
of Margaret Thatcher and the British ruling class in general. Now the
"AFL-CIA" types were pushing Soviet miners to repudiate their past
support to Scargill and demanded the NUM hand over the money to the
scab UDM!
But the ICL spiked this attempt and caused a sensation. At the
congress of 900 delegates, we sold over 600 copies of Byulleten'
Spartakovtsev and we exposed the scab role of the UDM. Various
delegations took back whole stacks of our bulletin. We played a
crucial role in the decision of the congress not to pursue the UDM's
appeal to join in denouncing Scargill. The remarkable thing about this
was that the bourgeoisie was represented by every spy agency and
fascist around, but the proletariat's historic stake was represented
by the ICL alone. Our singular role demonstrated that our program had
an impact vastly, even explosively, out of proportion to our tiny
size. We counted on the power of our Trotskyist program to have this
same explosive impact across the USSR.
August 1991: ICL on the Last Barricades
The introduction of economic competition and other market mechanisms
served to intensify regional disparities between industrially more
advanced and more backward areas and to embolden reactionary
separatist forces in the better-off republics, like the Baltics.
Openly bourgeois movements sired by Gorbachev had won elections during
1990 in Russia, the Baltics and other Soviet republics. They sought to
gain as much control as they could over the local militias, armed
forces and budgets. The leading figure in this camp was the head of
the Russian republic, Boris Yeltsin, formerly one of Gorbachev's chief
lieutenants, who had split from the Kremlin leader to the right.
Opposing Yeltsin and the pro-Western "democrats" were the so-called
"conservatives" or "patriots" of the Stalinist bureaucracy based in
the military-industrial complex and CPSU apparatus. Contrary to the
propaganda of Western imperialism and its Russian camp followers, the
"conservatives" were not committed to preserving a collectivized
economy, much less to restoring the old Stalinist order. Rather they
wanted to preserve a USSR-wide state formation while introducing
capitalism more slowly and in a way that benefited themselves.
Gorbachev, now officially president of the USSR, swung between the
"democrats" and "conservatives."
On August 20, 1991, a new Union Treaty was to be signed granting far
greater control over economic policy and the armed forces to the
constituent republics of the USSR. It was to prevent this new treaty
that the day before a group of Gorbachev's lieutenants declared they
were taking power in the Kremlin in the name of the State Emergency
Committee (EC). Throughout the day, tanks and armored personnel
carriers rolled into Moscow. I went among them and talked to the
soldiers. It turned out that none of them had the slightest hint of
what they were there to do. As soon became evident, neither did their
commanders.
Yeltsin responded by denouncing the EC as an attempt to restore the
"Communist" system and moved to organize a countercoup, setting up
barricades around the White House, the Russian presidential
headquarters in Moscow. Yet the EC made no move to arrest Yeltsin or
otherwise obstruct his efforts to mobilize whatever forces he could
against them. Moreover, Yeltsin was throughout in open communication
with U.S. president George Bush Sr., who became the co-organizer of
Yeltsin's countercoup.
In an effort to gain the acceptance of Western, above all American,
imperialism, the EC issued a proclamation which made no mention at all
of "socialism." Rather they pledged to continue Gorbachev's course,
that is, to promote private property and to honor all of Gorbachev's
foreign policy commitments. Domestically, the EC declared martial law
and told the workers to stay home. When Bush, nonetheless, made it
clear that Yeltsin was his man in Russia, the EC rapidly
disintegrated. Yeltsin and his henchmen quickly moved into the
resulting power vacuum.
The ascendancy of Boris Yeltsin's capitalist-restorationist forces in
August 1991 was a pivotal event determining the fate of the Soviet
Union. There was no longer a central Soviet government presiding over
USSR state organs or over the governments of the constituent
republics. These now began declaring their independence from the USSR.
But the final undoing of the October Revolution was not yet a foregone
conclusion. Only those who were politically desirous of washing their
hands of the now-fractured workers state were in a hurry to
immediately write off the USSR.
The ICL, on the contrary, uniquely raised the alarm, distributing tens
of thousands of copies throughout the Soviet Union of our August 1991
statement, "Soviet Workers: Defeat Yeltsin-Bush Counterrevolution!"
This was the first anti-Yeltsin communist protest in all of the USSR.
It began:
"The working people of the Soviet Union, and indeed, the workers of
the world, have suffered an unparalleled disaster whose devastating
consequences are now being played out. The ascendancy of Boris
Yeltsin, who offers himself as Bush's man, coming off a botched coup
by Mikhail Gorbachev's former aides, has unleashed a
counterrevolutionary tide across the land of the October Revolution."
But we insisted that the battle was not yet over. We called upon the
Soviet working class to mobilize against the still-weak Yeltsin regime
before it was able to consolidate a new capitalist state apparatus
amid the fractured state structures of the former USSR:
"While Yeltsin & Co. now see a clear field to push through a
forced-draft reintroduction of capitalism, the outcome is not yet
definitively decided.... The Soviet proletariat, whose capacity for
militant action was dramatically shown in the miners strike of the
summer of 1989, has not been heard from. Opposition from the factories
against the ravages of capitalist assault could throw a giant wrench
in the works and prevent the rapid consolidation of counterrevoltion."
[emphasis in original]
In this historic statement, we said a call for workers militias "to
smash the counterrevolutionary Yeltsinite demonstrations was certainly
in order." We called for the formation of workers councils to fight
the plunder and destruction of the planned, collectivized economy; for
soldiers and officers committees to prevent the army from being used
to attack workers' interests; for multinational workers defense guards
to ward off communalist butchery and anti-Communist terror; for a
return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky through the forging of a
Trotskyist party and linking the struggle in the USSR to the class
struggle internationally.
In sharpest opposition to the ICL, almost every "far left" group in
North America and West Europe supported and hailed the Yeltsin-Bush
countercoup in the name of defending "democracy" against Stalinism.
The British group then affiliated to the anti-Soviet reformists of the
International Socialist Organization exulted: "Communism has
collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing"
(Socialist Worker, 31 August 1991). Posing to the left of the ISO is
the small League for the Revolutionary Party, which stated that
"revolutionary workers would have...tactically lined up in a military
bloc with Yeltsin to defeat the immediate threat to workers'
interests" (Proletarian Revolution, Fall 2002). Catherine Verla, a
leading spokesman for the international pseudo-Trotskyist current then
led by Ernest Mandel, the United Secretariat, likewise asserted: "It
was necessary to unhesitatingly oppose the coup and, on these grounds,
to fight at Yeltsin's side" (Inprecor, 29 August 1991).
Supporters of a number of "left" groups, like the British Workers
Power, literally stood on Yeltsin's counterrevolutionary barricades.
The Russian affiliate of Peter Taaffe's British Socialist Party and
Committee for a Workers' International even crowed in its newspaper
Rabochaya Demokratiya (October 1991) of sabotaging efforts by workers
to mobilize against Yeltsin and Bush's "democrats," warning of
"the danger of support to the putschists by workers organizations that
did not share the principles of the 'democrats'--the rule of private
property and capitalist power. And that is exactly what happened...at
several factories the workers even tried to organize defense
detachments in support of the putschists.
"From the morning on, all of our members explained to workers at their
enterprises that the positions of the Emergency Committee did not
coincide with their interests. In addition to this, they connected up
with worker activists of other organizations, in order to prevent
hasty actions."
In mobilizing internationally to fight for a Trotskyist party in the
Soviet Union, we acted on Trotsky's injunction:
"But in the event of this worst possible variant, a tremendous
significance for the subsequent course of the revolutionary struggle
will be borne by the question: where are those guilty for the
catastrophe? Not the slightest taint of guilt must fall upon the
revolutionary internationalists. In the hour of mortal danger, they
must remain on the last barricade."
-- "The Class Nature of the Soviet State" (October 1933)
Our Lenin-Trotsky Fund, collected from around the world, made it
possible for our Moscow Station to bring in reinforcements, engage in
mass literature distribution and translations, secure office
facilities--all in the effort to spur the proletariat to mount a
political revolution against the capitalist-restorationist regime and
revive the Soviet Union as a workers state. This fund also made it
possible for our Prometheus Research Library to bring to the Soviet
workers the first ever Russian-language version of Trotsky's 1928 The
Communist International After Lenin, the key founding documents of
world Trotskyism in opposition to "socialism in one country."
Our Fourth Internationalist banner was there for all to see at the
Revolution Day celebration in Moscow on 7 November 1991. The
demonstration was banned, but some 100,000 Muscovites--mostly
workers--came out in defiance. So fearful were Yeltsin & Co. of a
confrontation that the ban was lifted at the last minute. Our
intervention that day was spectacularly successful. The ICL's Moscow
Station sold thousands of pieces of literature, including our call to
defeat Yeltsin-Bush counterrevolution. Nobody was more shocked at the
turnout than the Stalinist "patriot" organizers, who cut it off
mid-way when the ICL demanded the microphone in Red Square. The
Stalinists knew about the Spartacists at Treptow!
Another important test was Yeltsin's murderous assault on the Soviet
Red Army Day march in Moscow, 23 February 1992. The elite OMON militia
forces boxed in the demonstrators, beating one Soviet general to death
right there in public. The pavement of Moscow's main street ran red
with blood. The message was clear: a new master was blooding his
attack dogs. Partisans of the Soviet state, opponents of private
property forms, could be demonstratively lynched in the land of
October. We immediately issued a new leaflet calling for "Workers and
Soldiers Soviets to Stop Capitalist Restoration!" We warned the moment
was growing late; the would-be bosses were taking the streets of
Moscow away; and that White tsar Boris was bent on a decisive
massacre, a new Bloody Sunday.
It was right in this period, on 9 February 1992, that our leading
spokesman in Moscow, comrade Martha Phillips, was murdered at her
post. The authorities stonewalled while we tried in vain to find out
who killed her. She paid the ultimate price to plant the flag of the
ICL on the last barricades in defense of the gains of October.
Yet working-class resistance--strikes and protests--to the Yeltsin
regime, even after it had introduced economic "shock therapy" in early
1992, was sporadic and ineffective. Furthermore, the "hardline"
Stalinist opposition repulsed and demoralized the multinational Soviet
proletariat by making a political bloc with Russian fascists and other
right-wing nationalists, the so-called "'red'-brown coalition." We
exposed these anti-Semitic Great Russian chauvinists for what they
were to anti-Yeltsin workers and youth, devoting the entire issue of
Byulleten' Spartakovtsev No. 3 (Spring 1992) to the fight for a
Leninist party that was a tribune of the people, combatting every form
of national chauvinism, anti-Semitism, and anti-woman and anti-gay
bigotry roiling the brown tide of capitalist counterrevolution. We
also, uniquely, mobilized in defense of the besieged foreign students
of Moscow's Patrice Lumumba People's Friendship University after
Yeltsin's police murdered an African student in August 1992.
When the air traffic controllers went on strike that same month,
Yeltsin demonstratively launched his first full-scale, frontal attack
on the Soviet trade unions. The ICL put out a leaflet rallying to the
union's defense. Tellingly, the ex-Stalinist has-beens joined their
fascist-monarchist partners of the "'red'-brown coalition" in opposing
the strike.
When by late 1992 the counterrevolution in Russia had been
consolidated, we analyzed the main factors underlying the fateful
political passivity of the Soviet working class:
"In the name of building 'socialism in one country,' the
Stalinists--through terror and lies--methodically attacked and eroded
every aspect of the revolutionary and internationalist consciousness
which had made the Soviet working class the vanguard detachment of the
world proletariat....
"Atomized and bereft of any anti-capitalist leadership, lacking any
coherent and consistent socialist class consciousness, skeptical about
the possibility of class struggle in the capitalist countries, the
Soviet working class did not rally in resistance against the
encroaching capitalist counterrevolution. And as Trotsky noted in The
Third International After Lenin: 'If an army capitulates to the enemy
in a critical situation without a battle, then this capitulation
completely takes the place of a "decisive battle," in politics as in
war'."
-- WV No. 564, 27 November 1992, reprinted in Spartacist pamphlet How
the Soviet Workers State Was Strangled (August 1993)
The Ravages of Counterrevolution
A half decade after the counterrevolution, the desperate and
despairing condition of Russian working people was movingly expressed
in a letter from a rural village cited on a Russian trade-union Web
site:
"We are dying in the direct meaning of the word. The collective farm
is hardly breathing. For a year we have been paid no wages. No money
has been found to buy fuel for sowing. Everybody sits at home
depressed. Many get cancer and other diseases. We are perishing like
flies."
By 1997, the real value of the average wage in the Russian Federation
had fallen by almost 80 percent, of pensions by almost 70 percent.
This was accomplished by "shock therapy" freeing price controls and
setting off an inflation rate as high as 20,000 percent in 1992! I
remember the horror on the faces of co-workers as the ruble lost half
its value in one month. Before my eyes they became paupers. But even
having a wage presumes one has a job, and who did? According to a
September-October 1998 study sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency,
only 50 percent of Russian adults were employed and only a quarter of
the so-called "employed" got paid with any regularity.
Some 75 percent of the population of the Russian Federation was now
compelled to grow some or all of their own food, moreover, in a
society that was 70 percent urban. Individual garden plots sprang up
along commuter train lines around every city, providing the major
source of food for the urban population. Every Sunday evening the
commuter trains headed back into Moscow were full of bone-tired
workers, including those with college educations, hands cracked and
dirty from scratch-gardening, too tired to think except perhaps when
talk turned to farming tips. A nuclear power plant engineer in my
neighborhood quit his job to guard his potato patch! An educated urban
proletariat had reverted to scratch subsistence farming.
In the period between 1960 and 1980, a massive construction campaign
had provided (for a nominal rent and utility charges) every urban
family with its own apartment with modern amenities, usually including
a telephone, central heating, electrical power, water, sewage and
local public transport. All this was considered a right of Soviet
citizenship. A truly historic achievement.
But in 1991 all municipal construction halted, and for the next five
years housing rotted, looking more like dark caves than comfortable
homes. Municipal water pipes began to burst, at times turning whole
city intersections into boiling mud pits in which people fell to
horrible deaths. The basic problem was that the service life of the
heating grid was designed for only 20 years. Breakdowns have increased
exponentially, and in 2010, less than seven years from now, the entire
national heating grid in Russia will face complete collapse.
Many bourgeois ideologues in the West blame the unprecedented economic
collapse of post-Soviet Russia on the criminal behavior of its new
capitalist operators (the "oligarchs"), who looted the productive
wealth of the former USSR and then transferred their ill-gotten gains
to Western banks. But the basic underlying cause is the destructive
logic of the capitalist system itself. As we explained in a 1994
article titled "Post-Soviet Russia: Immiseration and Chaos":
"The employment of labor clearly demonstrates the fundamental
difference between the capitalist system and a collectivized economy,
even one subject to pervasive bureaucratic mismanagement and
parasitism as was the former Soviet bloc. The aim of a capitalist firm
is to maximize the return on the money invested in that particular
company. Managers therefore seek to maximize output (if it can be
sold) while minimizing the cost and employment of labor. Hence, you
can see in North America and West Europe mass unemployment coexisting
with brutal speedup for those workers fortunate enough to have jobs.
Some people are forced to beg in the streets while others are forced
to work 10-12 hours a day.
"The aim of a collectivized economy is to maximize the output of
society as a whole by utilizing all available resources, both labor
and the means of production. Moreover, Soviet-bloc governments
prevented unemployment by not laying off workers even if their
additional contribution to production was less than the wage paid
them. That was far better than having them live on welfare or beg in
the streets, risking unrest. As a result, industrial enterprises in
East Europe and the ex-USSR were grossly overmanned by the standards
of capitalist profitability....
"Now with the capitalist counterrevolution, production costs in
post-Soviet Russia are being driven into line with those on the world
market through a massive contraction of industrial capacity and an
even greater slashing of the industrial labor force."
-- WV No. 595, 4 March 1994
Over the past five years Russia has experienced some modest economic
growth, mainly as a result of the higher price of oil on the world
market. Russia's role in the world economy is now similar to those
Third World countries critically dependent on the export of a few
products. Oil, natural gas, oil products and metallic ore make up
almost two-thirds of Russia's exports by value. What little productive
investment is taking place is overwhelmingly concentrated in these
extractive sectors.
However, the basic economic infrastructure and manufacturing industry
continues to deteriorate, starved for capital investment. In 2002,
more than two-thirds of the equipment in use in the Russian Federation
had been in place for 15 years and almost a third for 20 years. The
average age of Russia's industrial plant is three times that of North
America's, West Europe's and Japan's.
Furthermore, with capitalism based on social inequality and the need
to extract ever-greater profits from the working class, the "improved"
economic performance in the past few years has not mitigated the
terrible impoverishment of the Russian people and its resulting social
pathology. Thus the life expectancy of Russian men continues to fall
while infant mortality continues to rise.
A Demographic Holocaust
In the Soviet Union, the entire population--children in school, adults
at work--were required to undergo annual screenings for diseases such
as tuberculosis (TB). But as a Russian journalist commented in
Izvestia (16 April 2002): "The universal preventative examinations
that were regarded as one of the great achievements of Soviet medicine
died along with Soviet medicine itself."
The number of HIV cases in Russia last year was estimated to be
between one and two million. A recent study by the World Bank
projected that by 2020, up to 10 percent of Russia's rapidly shrinking
population would be infected. Primarily spread in Russia via drug
users' dirty needles, a growing avenue for the spread of HIV/AIDS has
since become prostitution. By 1999, 14 percent of prostitutes in
Moscow were infected. The helpless age (10 to 14) of some of the
prostitutes and the piggish johns who pay extra for unprotected sex
guarantee its continuing rapid spread.
As much as poverty and drugs, a major factor behind the explosion of
AIDS in Russia is the reactionary ideological filth pushed in place of
health education. There is an explosion of HIV/AIDS in Irkutsk, a main
Siberian city on the Afghan drug route. But the chairman of the
province's Committee on Youth Policy rails against the "moral
degeneration" of "'safe' sex and sex education classes." The Russian
Orthodox church campaigns against the use of condoms; fascists march
against their use to promote Russian procreation. In fact, they are
promoting the extermination of the Russian people.
Most ominously, the AIDS epidemic is intersecting a TB epidemic. One
medical specialist warns: "When the HIV epidemic hits the pool of
latent TB infections, there's going to be an explosion of MDR-TB
[Multiple Drug Resistant TB]. TB and HIV are like gasoline and a
match." Studies now find TB in 70 percent of Russia's homeless, 20 to
30 percent of the prison population and 40 percent of refugees from
the war in Chechnya and other areas. Soviet prisons were plenty
brutal, but they were not hothouses for plagues. Now each year 30,000
former prisoners with active TB and 10,000 with MDR-TB are being
released into the general population with little or no medical
follow-up.
The Brutal Oppression of Youth and Women
The overall degradation of Russia's populace is compounded by the
special oppression of youth and women. A leading Russian pediatrician
estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of children are healthy. Child
malnutrition is now the norm, and by 1999 from 15 to 45 percent of
children in the Russian Federation under the age of 15, depending on
the province, were diagnosed as mentally retarded. As of last year,
there were an estimated several million "orphans" in Russia--more than
were left in the wake of World War II! These orphans' parents are
mostly still alive; they were abandoned. The character of Russia's
orphanages can be measured in the fact that one-third of those who
grow up in them become alcoholics and 10 percent commit suicide within
a year of leaving.
But only a third of Russia's castaway children are even in orphanages.
The others live in cellars, attics, abandoned houses and in larger
cities by seeking shelter from the cold in sewer systems. Such youth
are a modern-day reappearance on the Russian landscape of the
bezprizorniky. These were the packs of wild children who emerged from
the ruins of World War I and the Russian Civil War, preying in gangs
on the towns and descending like wild dogs on rural villages. In 1921,
the Soviet government formed a commission headed by the Bolshevik
leader Feliks Dzerzhinsky to spearhead a nationwide campaign which
saved several million bezprizorniky, giving them full lives as Soviet
citizens. This chapter of Soviet power and the saving of the
bezprizorniky remain a point of pride to this day.
Contrast this to what capitalist counterrevolution in Russia and the
other former Soviet republics offers its castaway children. Petty
theft by boys in Kyrgyzstan is punished by up to half a year in
prison, often in solitary confinement, with no education or even
parental visits. In Georgia, "repeat offender" youth can be jailed up
to three years without any trial. And what does it mean for a youth to
be in the general prison population? It means rape and other sexual
assaults. This unspeakable barbarity is made worse by the level of
AIDS among prisoners.
In 1993 Women and Revolution published an extensive article titled
"From East Berlin to Tashkent: Capitalist Counterrevolution Tramples
on Women." Today I will limit myself to something new that has
proliferated in the decade since that article was published, the
international sex trade. From Russia alone it is estimated that
160,000 women each year are trafficked to Europe and Asia. They are
drawn by ads offering work, or simply kidnapped. Once delivered, their
passports are taken from them and they are terrorized into submission.
The profits from this sex slavery out of Russia match even those of
its drug business--about $7 billion annually. The women and girls are
sold several times over, each time upping their buy-out ransom. A
particularly horrific example came to light late last year when
Swedish police questioned a 13-year-old Russian girl who reported
being kept in a locked van as a sex slave for two years, driven by
Russian pimps from one city in Europe to another.
Chechnya and Other Nationalist Bloodbaths
We've talked about what the return to the capitalist profit system has
brought. The other major catastrophe has been the reimposition of
bourgeois nation-states across the territory of the former USSR.
Here it's necessary to emphasize that the Bolsheviks came to power by
championing the struggles of the scores of nationalities trapped in
what Lenin called the tsarist "prison house of peoples." This was an
integral part of the Bolsheviks' struggle for world socialist
revolution leading to a communist society in which the rise of
international productive forces brings about the dissolution of all
nation-states. The Bolsheviks could not have won influence over
Russia's multinational working class, to say nothing of the urban
petty bourgeoisie and rural peasant masses, without being the best
champions of the just causes of the oppressed Polish, Ukrainian,
Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian peoples. This proletarian
internationalism was reflected in the composition of the Bolshevik
Central Committee: Lenin was a Russian, Trotsky a Jew, Dzerzhinsky a
Pole, Shaumyan an Armenian, Stalin a Georgian, Stuchka a Latvian, and
so on.
The nascent Kremlin bureaucracy demonstrated its first alien political
impulses through the Russian-centered apparat's chauvinist disregard
for the rights of minority peoples. Lenin launched his final political
struggle in late 1922-early 1923 against Stalin's bureaucratic abuse
of the Caucasian peoples. As the degeneration of the Soviet workers
state deepened, the bureaucratic caste went further toward Great
Russian chauvinism as a political-ideological glue for its brittle
rule.
But even this was held in check by the need to preserve the USSR as a
vast multinational state. In marked contrast to capitalism, the
centrally planned collectivized economy made possible an allocation of
resources which brought about a relative equality between the various
national republics making up the USSR. This resulted in the rapid
socio-economic and cultural development of the most backward peoples
of the former tsarist empire (e.g., in Central Asia) and also eased
historic national tensions (e.g., in the Caucasus).
The progress of the Tajik people in Soviet Central Asia, in contrast
to their ethnic counterparts across the border in Afghanistan, is only
the most striking example. In the Caucasus, centuries-old blood feuds
among the patchwork of geographically interpenetrated peoples were for
the first time abated through the struggle to root out the sheiks,
Cossack atamans, landlords and mullahs, and to establish a new life
based on economic modernization and rising living standards. At the
same time, Soviet industrial development created a historically new
pattern of ethnic interpenetration, this time of proletarian
populations in industrial and mining centers across the USSR. Workers
of different nationalities frequently intermarried. They and their
children began to no longer think of themselves as Ukrainian or
Armenian but rather as Soviet.
The forces of capitalist counterrevolution--from Russia and Ukraine to
the Caucasus and Central Asia--have used nationalism (often linked to
religion) as their main political-ideological battering ram. The
capitalist law of the jungle dictates that each capitalist state must
have one dominant nationality. All the historic ethnic patchworks
which had begun to weave together into a common Soviet pattern were
now torn asunder. Over a hundred armed national, ethnic and religious
conflicts have erupted across the former Soviet bloc, bringing death
and destruction to millions.
By far the biggest bloodbath brought on by the capitalist
counterrevolution in the former USSR is in Chechnya. Yeltsin's
colonial-style invasion in 1994 was about asserting the Kremlin's role
as regional cop in the Caucasus and gaining control of the Caspian Sea
oil fields. The Chechens were also to be made an example of because of
their special history of heroic wars in the 19th century against the
Russian tsarist conquest of the Caucasus.
The ICL forces in Russia at the time called for the military defeat of
Yeltsin's colonial-style invasion without giving any political support
to the bourgeois-nationalist regimes of Dudayev, and later Maskhadov,
in Grozny, Chechnya's capital. We called for the right of the Chechen
people to decide their own fate, explaining the roots of the war in
the capitalist counterrevolution. We also raised the urgent need to
defend the peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia and all non-Slavic
foreigners against racist pogroms and police persecution throughout
Russia.
Yeltsin's invasion completely destroyed Grozny. But the Russian army
was still militarily defeated by the Chechen forces. In 1996, Moscow
accepted an armistice which gave Chechnya de facto independence. Then,
in the winter of 1999, new Russian prime minister and soon-to-be
president Vladimir Putin launched a second war against Chechnya. In
part this was intended to spike the plans of the various
bourgeois-nationalist regimes in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region,
acting in concert with Western oil companies, to build new oil
pipelines which would exclude Russia. The second Chechen war was also
an attempt to divert popular outrage in Russia and a sense of national
humiliation provoked by the U.S./NATO terror bombing of Serbia, a
historic Russian ally, earlier that year. Putin ran for president by
reasserting Russia's military "power" through a renewed genocidal
onslaught against Chechnya. In response the ICL called for the
military defense of Chechnya's hard-won independence against Russia.
This war is still going on, and it is a ghastly picture of the
barbarism capitalism has brought to the Caucasus. Whereas in
Afghanistan in 1979-89 the Soviet Red Army's presence made possible
the beginnings of a modern urban infrastructure with universities,
hospitals and factories built along Soviet lines, Putin's Russian army
in Chechnya has now reduced virtually every single city and town there
to rubble! Russian forces have to date killed over 100,000 Chechens,
that is 10 percent of the population.
For New October Revolutions!
The global toll of the USSR's destruction must be torn from the tissue
of lies of the so-called "death of communism," and be put where it
belongs: in the proletariat's indictment of the capitalist system in
its death agony. As the revolutionary Marxist leader Rosa Luxemburg
said at the beginning of the imperialist epoch, mankind's crossroads
lead to socialism or barbarism.
The October Revolution took socialism out of the realm of theory and
put its potential before us in concrete terms. The Trotskyist program
of world socialist revolution is the only way that this potential can
be realized, unlocking the planet's human and material resources,
opening a dawn of prosperity. And the alternative, a descent into
capitalist barbarism, is now visible in far greater detail.
Consider the future effects of a counterrevolutionary destruction of
the People's Republic of China, a bureaucratically deformed workers
state. If the capitalist slavery, plunder, disintegration and wars
that have devastated the former Soviet bloc were to descend on China
with its population of over a billion, the Russian catastrophe will be
multiplied many times over. All of East Asia will become an arena of a
renewed struggle between the imperialist powers--centrally the U.S.
and Japan--for the redivision of markets and spheres of exploitation.
More generally, if socialist revolution does not intervene, heightened
interimperialist rivalry will sooner or later lead to military
conflict, very possibly dragging humanity into a nuclear holocaust.
On the other hand, a victorious proletarian political revolution in
China or a socialist revolution in one of the capitalist countries
will have an electrifying effect on workers around the world, as did
the October Revolution of 1917. The desperate and besieged toilers of
Russia, who today fight for their very survival, will once again take
their place in the struggle for world socialist revolution.
These are the stakes! We know that those under our banner today are
few. We are but an international, revolutionary Marxist propaganda
group. Our Marxist worldview and program is based on the understanding
that capitalism has created its own gravedigger, the proletariat. It
exploits and brutalizes the working masses, and mobilizes them for
slaughter in nationalist bloodletting and imperialist wars. Billions
of toilers around the world are forced to seek a way out. The
demoralizing effects of defeats such as the destruction of the Soviet
Union will be overcome. New generations--less schooled but also less
scarred--will enter into the struggle.
The tide will turn our way again, as it did at Treptow in January
1990. Our resources in the DDR at that point were truly small. But the
power of our program, its unique capacity to render the proletariat's
deepest material longings into a historically conscious force--into a
Leninist vanguard party with a mass base--that program is what enabled
the very small forces of the ICL to begin winning over
socialist-minded workers and soldiers in East Germany. The
imperialists, social democrats and Stalinists were all fearful that
the proletariat had begun in the course of an incipient political
revolution to rally around the ICL's banner of a Red Germany.
The political and organizational stages that we will have to pass
through in the rapids of the coming class struggles are not knowable.
What we do know, and what is given, is that future workers revolutions
must have a Bolshevik political arsenal; its cadres must be educated
in the experiences of the October Revolution, the early Communist
International, Trotsky's Fourth International, and our own ICL. That
is a fact! New gains will be won only by those who proved able to
fight to defend past gains. As reformist and centrist opponents of
Trotskyism seek shelter and fortune on the cheap among social
democrats, Stalinist has-beens, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
nationalists and the like, the ICL tenaciously fights to uphold the
banner of new Octobers. Join us!
Tom S.
"RedRedRed" <redred...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:7243d956.0405...@posting.google.com...
> Twelve Years After Counterrevolution in the USSR
>
[Longggg lunacy snipped]
Should be re-titled - "Why lithium is the greatest invention in history."
Michael Bernstein
> news:7243d956.0405...@posting.google.com...
> > Twelve Years After Counterrevolution in the USSR
"Tom S." <tms...@qwest.net> wrote in message
news:f4Xmc.1438$hy5....@news.uswest.net...
> [Longggg lunacy snipped]
>
> Should be re-titled - "Why lithium is the greatest invention in history."
Typical Communist scum. Most remain ignorant to the day they die. A small
few come around, like me, to the just and true political philosophy.
http://tinylink.com/?E1JNwYDx7T
_______________
Michael Bernstein thinks in political essentials.