The Workers International League FAQ
The Collapse of the USSRThe integration of the economies of the Republics under a common plan was beneficial to all the peoples of the USSR. The advantages were particularly evident in the formerly backward Republics of Central Asia. A Western journalist commented on the remarkable transformation in this area: "Certainly Central Asia has seen a stupendous economic and social transformation in the past 70 years. In 1917 these steppes and mountains were inhabited by a virtually illiterate population, living in romantic but often abject poverty. Today, in Tashkent (population two million) the old silk route is transected by a Moscow-style metro, and a 200-acre botanical garden miraculously evokes, in what was once semi-desert, the illusion of a Buckinghamshire woodland." (The Observer, 30/3/86.) But this was only one side of the picture. The Stalinist regime created a whole series of miniature bureaucracies in the Republics which accurately reproduced all the negative features of the original from which they were copied. The national bureaucracies in the Republics gathered increasing power into their hands thanks to the successive measures of decentralisation pursued under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Decentralisation without the check of workers' democracy led to a flowering of unprecedented corruption. For example, one local bigwig in Turkmenistan, Gapurov by name, was pensioned off at the Turkmen Party Congress in December 1982. "Under him cadres were often promoted to leading posts on grounds of personal loyalty, family ties or birth place," reads a report of the Congress. "He had created 'a breeding ground for nepotism, flattery and careerism, created an atmosphere of laxity and back scratching, and gave rise to servility and irresponsibility'." (Financial Times, 27/3//86) This was not untypical, but Gapurov was unlucky to be found out. Venal, inefficient and oppressive, these local bureaucracies also displayed the same chauvinist tendencies that are an inevitable feature of all brands of Stalinism. In order to bolster their own power and privileges, they leaned on the local chauvinists. Arrogant, narrow-minded and without a shred of internationalism, they deliberately played up to nationalist sentiments. Local bureaucracies battened themselves onto national grievances seeking to develop their power basis. The consequences of this were disastrous, as we saw later with the vicious fratricidal wars fought out between Azeris and Armenians, Georgians and Abkhazians, Trans-Dniester Russians and Moldovans, the national hatred against the Russian minorities in the Baltic States, and so on. Gorbachov at first attempted to keep the USSR intact by blaming the policies of the Stalinist era for deforming Lenin's "unique" creation of a federal state in which national and cultural rights had been granted to peoples deprived of them under Tsarist rule. He stated he would reassert Lenin's nationalities policy, including the basic right to "self-determination". However, Gorbachov claimed it was simplistic to describe self-determination solely as a right of secession (a right already "guaranteed" to the Republics theoretically by the 1977 Soviet constitution). He described it more in terms of a "process of affirming national dignity, developing language and culture, consolidating political independence and advancing economic and social progress". Gorbachov warned: "It should be borne in mind that more than 60 million people (21 per cent of the total population) live outside their national republics as a result of economic, social and demographic processes and inter-ethnic migration. Naturally it is impossible to solve any problems without taking into account the legitimate interests and rights of fellow citizens." In practice, Gorbachov's line had nothing in common with Lenin's. It echoed the opportunist position of Otto Bauer and the "Austro-Marxists" who, before the first world war advanced the slogan of "national-cultural autonomy" as an alternative to Lenin's policy of the right to self-determination. What was really required was a genuinely voluntary union. But this was only possible on the basis of a regime of workers' democracy. With the slow-down and deepening crisis of Stalinism, together with the "reforms" under Gorbachov which partially lifted the bureaucratic central control, centrifugal tendencies were inevitably released which burst forth with extreme force, breaking apart the old Soviet Union and opening up a period of ethnic and nationalist turmoil. In order to further their own interests, some of these conflicts were stirred up by the local bureaucracies, basing themselves on nationalism, eager to assert their independence from Moscow. The breakaway of the Baltic republics gave the others the green light. One by one, the Republics came out in favour of independence. Once the fear of Stalinist terror had diminished, the crisis of Stalinism led rapidly to the break-up of the USSR in December 1990. The speed with which this occurred is sufficient proof of the unsoundness of the previous relationship. This was the final punishment for decades of national oppression by the Moscow bureaucracy. Whereas Lenin's careful policy on the national question resulted in the adhesion of almost all the oppressed nationalities to the revolution, the abandonment of Lenin's policy under Stalin and his successors had the opposite effect. As soon as they had the opportunity, they broke away from the Union. The move towards capitalism and the unleashing of all the pent-up tensions prepared the way for terrible bloody conflicts within the former Soviet Union. Take for example the bloody conflict which erupted between the Azeris and the Armenians after the break up of the USSR. After the Revolution, good relations were established between the two peoples. So much so that when in 1923 the leader of the Azeri CP offered to return Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia, the offer was declined. The issue appeared irrelevant. Only after decades of Stalinist misrule, when every local bureaucracy attempted to strengthen its base by appealing to the nationalist sentiments of the most backward layers of the population, was the basis laid for the return of the old demons. Moreover, the break-up of the USSR gave rise to acute economic problems given the extreme interdependence of all the Republics after decades of centralised planned economy. As a result, both centrifugal and centripetal tendencies are at work. Only the Ukraine has a relative economic basis for independence, but even there, the Ukrainian economy is still tied by a thousand links to that of its powerful neighbour. Decades of Stalinist repression has produced a powerful urge of the peoples to be free from the yoke of Moscow, but, as Gorbachov remarked, the populations of all Republics are mixed. The chauvinists of each Republic display the most brutal intolerance towards the national minorities in their own states, who, in turn, are terrified of becoming oppressed minorities in small newly "independent" Republics. The Baltic nationalists combine a vicious chauvinistic attitude to the Russian, Polish and other nationalities with the most obsequious kowtowing to Western imperialism. They have even denied them the basic democratic right to vote. These "independent" Baltic states were semi-colonies of Britain between the wars, before falling under the control of Nazi Germany. Their economies were tied to Russia and Comecon. They will find it extremely difficult to export to the EU because of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In the field of industry, they will not be able to compete with the West. Their nominal independence, as we shall show, is a delusion and a sham. Experience has shown that the break up of the USSR in which the economies of all the republics were linked together, signifies a disaster for all the peoples. The situation is not viable. Sooner or later one way or another, they will be reunited with Russia. If this is done on a capitalist basis, the national oppression will be enormously intensified in what will then be an imperialist relationship. But the experience of "standing on their own" has been so disastrous that even a great proportion of the people of the Ukraine, with gritted teeth, would probably prefer to go back. Only a regime of workers democracy would guarantee genuine freedom for all the republics in a free federation with a common plan of production, in which control would be in the hands of the working people, with the fullest autonomy and a guarantee of the right to self-determination. When Gorbachov's reforms seized up, there was a lurch into deeper crisis. In the same way, Tsarism for generations swung from repression to concession and back again. But a return to the untrammelled repression of the Stalin era was ruled out. The enormous power of the working class made that impossible. The bureaucracy was compelled to tread warily, for fear of provoking an explosion. However, the options before the bureaucracy were extremely limited. The impasse of the bureaucracy created widespread disillusionment in the working class. By the late 1980s, powerful illusions in the market arose among certain layers, especially of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia, but also even sections of the working class. But the bureaucracy was still divided. The Ligachev wing wanted to keep the old structures intact, and fiercely resisted the agrarian reforms which were intended to undermine the collective farms and promote private farming. The internal antagonisms grew more intense as the crisis deepened. At this stage Gorbachov still had not made up his mind to go over to capitalism. As late as the 7th November 1989, in an interview from the Lenin Mausoleum during the celebrations of the anniversary of the Revolution, Gorbachov called for a return to the "Leninist ideals of 1917". However, the situation was slipping out of his hands. Soon after, Gorbachov admitted that "we have temporarily lost control of some levers of economic management". The old system was collapsing, but nothing was being put in its place. Such a situation could not last. A sudden switch to a market system, he warned, would produce "riots in the streets" and the government's downfall. All kinds of half measures were being tried as the regime twisted and turned. On the 13th November 1989, Gorbachov's leading adviser, Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Abalkin presented his plans for a transition. He wanted the USSR to adopt a "mixed economy", with some state enterprises transferred to other forms of "socialist ownership" (although not into private hands, as Abel Aganbegyan suggested). The economy was sinking deeper into crisis. Gosplan, the central state planning agency, was warning that due to the collapse of central planning, production could slump between 30-70 per cent. At the same time, in the time-honoured manner, Gorbachov tried to put the blame on his predecessors. The Central Committee in December 1988 announced the removal of the names of Brezhnev and Chernenko from street signs, plaques and monuments. Brezhnev's works were to be removed from public libraries. Rehabilitation of dead victims continued to take place. Izvestia reported that the Supreme Court had dropped all posthumous charges against Trotsky's son Sergei, who had been murdered in 1937. But the question of Trotsky's rehabilitation remained taboo. On the other hand Bukharin enjoyed a certain vogue, since his theories could be used as a convenient justification for a pro-capitalist policy. The workers' patience was exhausted. In July 1989, a wave of industrial unrest gripped the USSR, centred on the coalfields of the Donbass and Kuzbass. 12,000 stopped work at Mezhdurechensk and took control of the town. They demanded better living conditions, higher wages, increased holidays, better working conditions, etc. They also demanded complete economic independence for their mines so that the profits could be invested locally. This kind of demand was confused, reflecting in part the frustrations of the provinces at the lack of attention from Moscow and the chronic lack of investment. It is an undeniable fact that the consciousness of the Russian masses was thrown back a long way by the long nightmare of totalitarian rule. Even among the miners, particularly their leaders, there were some illusions in capitalism. They had not yet enjoyed the pleasures of a market economy and some of them thought that it would enable them to sell their coal on world markets. Such illusions were mixed up in a peculiar way with ideas of workers' control of the mines. Despite this, the move towards capitalism did not come as a result of pressure from the population. More than 40 per cent of respondents to an opinion poll held at this time said that they would prefer a return to more centralised economic management and only 25 per cent wanted a market-orientated system. The voices in the bureaucracy in favour of a capitalist solution became ever louder and more insistent, especially among the economists. This trend gathered ground throughout 1989 and in the first half of 1990. The government of the Russian Federation under Yeltsin was clearly dominated by the pro-bourgeois wing of the bureaucracy. This wing came forward with a programme of complete capitalist restoration. On the morning of the 19th August 1991 tanks appeared on the streets of Moscow and other cities. This attempted coup d'état was led by Vice-President Gennady Yanayev (a supporter of Ligachov's Stalinist faction), the prime minister Valentin Pavlov and the minister of defence Yazov. The coup leaders announced on the radio that it was staged "due to Mikhail Gorbachov's inability to perform his duties for health reasons", and a state of emergency was being introduced to overcome "the profound crisis, political, ethnic and civil strife, chaos and anarchy that threatens the lives and security of the Soviet Union's citizens". In fact, Gorbachov had been placed under house arrest in the Crimea after refusing to relinquish the presidency. The coup was not unexpected. The Soviet Union had been buzzing with rumours for months. George Bush even telephoned to say he had heard rumours of an imminent military take-over. As early as December 1990, the Soyuz group of parliamentary deputies had pressed for military action against the break-away Republics, to be followed by the declaration of a state of emergency across the country. The attempted coup represented a desperate gamble by a section of the bureaucracy to stop Gorbachov from signing the Union Treaty. The Treaty, which was due to be ratified on the 20th August, was the result of long negotiations, begun initially in response to demands from the Baltic states, Georgia and Moldavia, to leave the Union. The plotters were terrified of further power passing to the Republics, especially the Russian Republic under Yeltsin. Yanayev and the old guard were attempting to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union and re-establish the power of the military caste. However, the coup proved to be an abortive attempt from beginning to end. Boris Yeltsin, who was in the presidential building of the Russian Republic (the so-called White House) took advantage of the situation to rally all "democratic" forces against the hardliners. Within a few days the coup d'état had collapsed. This coup, however, was not defeated on the streets as was later claimed by some. The mass of workers were indifferent. Yeltsin's call for a general strike fell on deaf ears. According to The Guardian's Moscow reporter (22/8/91): "Most people were too apathetic, cynical or just plain frightened of the consequences to obey Mr Yeltsin's strike call." The five years of perestroika ended up in a mess of empty shops, queues, shortages, spiralling inflation, chaos and the threat of hunger. This resulted in a collapse of support for Gorbachov (down to a 14 per cent approval rating) and a growing rejection of the whole pack of "reformist" politicians. The bureaucracy was split. One section wanted to maintain the status quo, or even go back to repression, as under Brezhnev. The other wing, representing the nascent bourgeois, wanted to go down the capitalist road. However, the mass of workers saw no fundamental difference between the hardliners and the pro-capitalist counter-revolutionaries around Yeltsin. His call for a general strike against the August coup was publicly backed by Margaret Thatcher who appealed to the Russian workers to support it. As it turned out, it was a total flop. Reuter's correspondent issued the following estimation: "Yeltsin's appeal for strikes was meeting with a patchy response. In the Soviet Union's biggest coalfield, the Kuzbass, whose miners had previously shown themselves willing to use their industrial clout as a political weapon against the Kremlin, only about half the workers downed tools. In Vorkuta coalfield of Siberia, only five of the mines were to respond positively to Yeltsin." (The Guardian, 22/8/91.) The old CPSU was a gigantic network for patronage and an arm of the state. Only through the Party was it possible to "get on". The Party was responsible for the appointment of 600,000 key jobs and a further one million reserve jobs in the state and industry. Membership of the Party was thus a necessary path to a successful career. In the early days of the Soviet Union, access to prominent positions in the state was still open to talented children of working class families. This was a major difference with the West. But as time went on, this was increasingly less the case. The best jobs were reserved for the children of bureaucrats. This itself was a symptom of the senile decay of Stalinism, a kind of arteriosclerosis. At the top stood the Soviet elite, increasingly divorced from the reality of the life of the working class in society. After repeated purges, the content of old Communist Party had been completely transformed to the point where it had nothing in common with the Bolshevik Party except the name. It was really not a party at all, but an organ of the state composed of 19 million members, among whom were undoubtedly a layer of honest workers but in the main consisted of an army of opportunists, thieves, stooges and careerists of all kinds. This had nothing in common with the party of Lenin and Trotsky, which had been destroyed in the Purges. The process of transforming the party into a bureaucratic tool had begun after Lenin's death, as Edward Crankshaw points out: "Immediately after Lenin's death this process was accelerated. In the process of building up his own position and packing the Party with people who could be relied upon to support him, Stalin, as First Secretary and very much at grips with Trotsky, proclaimed the so-called Lenin Levy. This was in effect a mass enrolment of new members designed to swamp Stalin's opponents. Thus at the 12th Party Congress in 1923 membership stood at 386,000; a year later, at the 13th Congress, it had risen to 735,881. By 1929, with Stalin supreme and preparing to liquidate his senior colleagues, this figure had doubled: there were 1,551,288 Party members. "The next development was a most astonishing change in the composition of the membership. Between 1930 and 1934 the Party ceased to be a workers' organisation. In 1930 actual workers formed nearly 49 per cent of the membership; in 1934 this proportion, as reflected in the Party Congress, had dropped to 9.3 per cent. Hand in hand with this went the virtual monopolising of the Party by the rising boss class. Thus in 1923 only 23 per cent of all the factory directors in the Soviet Union were Party members. By 1936 the figure was close on 100 per cent. And so it went on, until in the year of the German invasion of Russia there were nearly three million Party members, most of them engaged in administration of one kind and another." (Edward Crankshaw, op. cit., pp. 63-4.) And the author correctly concludes: "When we reflect that the old Party had been almost wiped out by Stalin during the purge years of the middle thirties, the Party functionaries all down the line were used regularly and deliberately as scapegoats for the mistakes and excesses of the higher leadership, it is clear that the postwar Party was very different from the body through which Stalin climbed to supremacy and had not the faintest resemblance to the original Party of Lenin." (Ibid., p. 64, my emphasis.) These elements were held together not by conviction or ideology, but by the Party's link to the state feed-bag. Once this link was destroyed, it disintegrated overnight. As the political arm of the bureaucracy, it was shattered by these events. Whole swathes of "Communists" deserted the Party for openly bourgeois or nationalist groupings, as rats swarm off a sinking ship. The restoration of capitalism in the former USSR has been a protracted process, but the traditions of October and the militancy of the Russian working class will return in the future on an even higher level. Recommended further reading:
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