"Soviet Millionaires" by Reg Bishop

[Kléber]

This is a 1940's pamphlet produced by affiliates of the CPGB about "self-made" rouble millionaires in Soviet society, which applauds them as indicative of Soviet economic success. Keep in mind that the average worker earned 150-300 roubles a month, while official salaries and privileges had been growing since the late 1920's.

While it is entirely supportive of the Stalinist regime, I hope this document will help dispel the fantasy that social inequality and features of the profit system were absent from the USSR under Stalin and only introduced by the caprice of the Khrushchev regime one unfortunate day in 1956.

http://cominternist.blogspot.com/2010/06/soviet-millionaires.html



THE news that there are Soviet "millionaires" - men and women who have been able to invest a million roubles or more in the country's War Loan - has come as a great surprise and, indeed, with a sense of shock to many people to whom the very word "millionaires" represents an evil influence in society.

Many of these "millionaires" are collective farmers. The emergence of Soviet collective farm millionaires means that Stalin's promise in 1933 that the Soviet Government aimed at making collective farmers well-to-do is on the road to fulfilment.

The very term "millionaire" is misleading, for there are many kinds of millionaires. Before the war one could be a millionaire in sterling, in dollars, in francs or any other currency. The possessor of a million pounds was nearly five times as wealthy as the possessor of a million dollars, and the latter was more than 25 times as wealthy as the possessor of a million francs. The possessor of a million Rumanian lei or Turkish piastres had still less money.

In other words, a rouble millionaire has not the wealth of a sterling millionaire. Even were a rouble millionaire to be possessed of as much money as a sterling one it would still not necessarily be either anti-social or anti-Socialist, because the atmosphere of social inequity which surrounds a millionaire is due not to the measure of his wealth but to the method of its acquisition, and his use of it to exploit others.

In all countries the law smiles upon the acquisition of wealth, but in all countries legal barriers are erected against certain methods of becoming wealthy. In a capitalist country, a man who acquires wealth by robbing a bank or by selling shares for non-existent gold-mines is arrested, tried and sent to gaol if found guilty. In the Soviet Union, a man who becomes wealthy by robbing a bank is also sent to gaol, but the socialist nature of the Soviet State requires it as equally immoral to acquire wealth by the exploitation of the labour of others, or by speculation; that is to say, buying in the cheapest market to sell in the dearest.

These methods are held to imply as great, or even greater, moral obliquity as robbing a bank, hence, whereas it is reasonable to suppose that in a capitalist country millionaires have acquired their status by means of the exploitation of others, or by tricky, though strictly legal, financial manipulations, in the Soviet Union the millionaire has acquired his roubles by his own toil and by services to the Soviet State and people.

[The Author]

in the Soviet Union the millionaire has acquired his roubles by his own toil and by services to the Soviet State and people.

Ah, the "American Dream" being more successfully pursued by workers in the Soviet Union than in the United States. The irony.

The detail of wage inequality and the differences between collective workers and state workers in terms of pay and how much they earned is nothing new. Wage equalization had been tried and turned out to be a total disaster. As Marx said, "right, instead of being equal, will have to be unequal." A person working in the coal mines or almost breaking their back working on the farm is entitled to much higher pay than someone driving a taxi or writing newspaper articles. The concept of the profit motive more along exploitation was introduced in the 1950s when enterprise managers were given the ability to "compete" after fulfilling quotas by selling off the surplus in order to gain profits, and to determine how workers were to be paid. The state no longer had the full power to pay laborers as before. Ideological upbringing died out slowly in the 1950s and was complete by the 1980s, as material gain was the only thing in the end that mattered. There were differences in the status of workers of different types throughout the USSR and the Socialist Bloc- that had always been the case. What this article disproves is the fact that these "ruble millionaires" did not break the backs of millions of workers or scam people through pyramid schemes or corruption or crime, but got their wealth from their own work, satisfying their material incentives and devoting themselves to the revolutionary cause. Social inequality as is defined in the capitalist social system was non-existent in the socialist system.

[Ismail]

I hope this document will help dispel the fantasy that social inequality and features of the profit system were absent from the USSR under Stalin and only introduced by the caprice of the Khrushchev regime one unfortunate day in 1956.Nice strawman, but the Liberman reforms were in the 1960's. No one claims that 1956 was the year the Soviet economy became state-capitalist; it was the year revisionism triumphed in the CPSU, which paved the way for state-capitalism under Khrushchev's dictates and expanded upon by Brezhnev, etc. In the 60's and 70's it was decreed that profit, not the betterment of society, was the aim of Soviet enterprises.

Unfortunately the Soviet millionaires under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were the new bourgeoisie and exploited workers. They weren't workers themselves. See:
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap6.html
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap7.html

Can you demonstrate that these workers became capitalists after becoming "millionaires"? (Since they certainly weren't before then, and they do not seem to have actually ever been influential in the rise of revisionism and state-capitalism).

[pranabjyoti]

Actually, the whole essay lies on the basic misunderstanding of economics. Wage is nothing but and expression of social relations and the wage of workers working on a particular industry or service will depend on the level of its productivity. If the level of productivity is higher than average productivity of that country, then the wage will be higher and vice verse. it's a very basic economic theory and FORCEFULLY TRYING TO DISOBEY IT WILL JUST END IN DISASTER, AS HAPPENED IN THE INITIAL DAYS OF USSR. For wage equalization, it's necessary to bring up the productivity level of the less developed sectors and industries. But that's a long process, INSTEAD BLAMING ON STALIN IS AN EASIER WAY.
The first way to increase productivity and life of the most poor is the collectivization programme. By collectivization, productivity of agriculture (in the yardstick of both land and labor) had been increased dramatically and that's in my opinion the best way to equalize wage and income.

[Kléber]

The detail of wage inequality and the differences between collective workers and state workers in terms of pay and how much they earned is nothing new. Wage equalization had been tried and turned out to be a total disaster.
There's a difference between pay inequality within the 1:10 scale which legally existed in the 1920's, and such massive inequality as developed from the abolition of the maximum salary (partmaximum) into the 1930's, when the rich could get bonuses of 40,000 roubles - more money than an ordinary worker could hope to see in his or her lifetime. The notion that one worker can work a thousand times as hard as another worker is nonsense; you dismiss it out of hand if you hear it from a Von Mises or Ayn Rand nut - why apologize for it under Stalin? There is no excuse for such vast social inequality, while people were starving and being shot for stealing individual pieces of grain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Spikelets), even if it happens under a glorious red flag.

And then there is the fact that Lenin considered even a 1:4 pay scale to constitute a "bourgeois" differential harmful to socialist equality. This is why he said "If we pay 2,000 [roubles a month] ... that is state capitalism. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/apr/29.htm)"


As Marx said, "right, instead of being equal, will have to be unequal." A person working in the coal mines or almost breaking their back working on the farm is entitled to much higher pay than someone driving a taxi or writing newspaper articles.The richest people in Soviet society were part of the technocratic elite: bureaucrats, politicians, army officers, scientists etc. Not coal miners. And don't even bring up Stakhanovism because that fraudulent sham doesn't make up for social inequality any more than the fact workers can win the lottery in a bourgeois country. See these wage charts (which hide the fact that top officials made way more than their reported or legal income):


BASIC WAGES. (p. 8)

Soviet basic wages in the engineering industry are divided into eight categories, which, taking the lowest category as 100, range up to 350. Here is a table of indices of average earnings in various industries in 1938 - taking linen textiles as 100:

Linen textile ... 100
Confectionary ... 106
Food industries ... 106
Timber ... 110
Woolen industry ... 111.5
Clothing ... 113.5
Cotton ... 114.5
Paper making ... 122
Cement ... 123.5
Leather ... 124.5
Fur industry ... 124.5
Boot and Shoe ... 137
Printing ... 141.5
Chemical industry ... 150
Iron mining ... 153
Coal mining ... 159
Machine building ... 161
Heavy Metal ... 161
Automobile ... 162
Oil extraction ... 163.5
Power House workers ... 164.5

These figures can be modified of course by the situation of the particular plant and other local conditions, and are only intended to give a comparative average.

The hours of work also vary according to the conditions of work. In normal pre-war days miners and others engaged in unhealthy or uncongenial labour worked only six hours as against the normal seven. Since 1938 there have been other changes - coal-mining wages for instance have been brought up to the level of the very highest paid industries.

Taking 100 as the index once again, how do the above wages compare with the salaries paid to technical and supervisory staffs? The following is roughly how the salaries operate in engineering :-
Draughstman ... 350-600
Foreman ... 500-600
Junior engineer ... 500-600
Senior engineer ... 600-1,500
Director of small enterprise ... 1,000
Director of big enterprise ... 1,000-2,000
Director of Trust ... 2,500 upwards

A scale with similar emphasis upon skill, experience and responsibility could be applied to research workers, scientists and other technicians of that character.


http://cominternist.blogspot.com/2010/08/wages-and-prices-in-ussr-excerpts.html


The concept of the profit motive more along exploitation was introduced in the 1950s when enterprise managers were given the ability to "compete" after fulfilling quotas by selling off the surplus in order to gain profits, and to determine how workers were to be paid.Competition between workplaces and production units, as well as bonuses for managers and administrators, were a facet of the Soviet system from the very beginning, since the isolated workers' state was never able to fully overcome the capitalist mode of production and establish socialism within its own borders. Capitalist elements of the economy did not appear in the 1950's nor did they assume a more sinister character because Khrushchev was in charge.


Ideological upbringing died out slowly in the 1950s and was complete by the 1980s, as material gain was the only thing in the end that mattered.Evil "revisionist" ideology isn't the reason the USSR collapsed any more than Protestant ideology was the cause of the capitalist revolutions in Europe.. It was actual objective material forces that brought the Soviet state down and led to capitalist-minded thinking on the part of the richest and most privileged members of Soviet society. The acquisition of wealth and political power by the ruling bureaucracy, at the expense of the proletariat, expanded until there were no more gains of the 1917 revolution left to abolish.

Let's assume you are right, USSR was a functioning socialist (democratic) country and yet simultaneously the only thing keeping the country together was the subjective influence of great Stalin; once he died, it all fell to bits and capitalism was restored overnight via palace coup and the fall of Beria. This raises serious questions about just how democratic, accountable or popularly-based a system this Stalinist "socialism" was in the first place, if the death of a single person could bring it all crashing down.


Social inequality as is defined in the capitalist social system was non-existent in the socialist system. Right. Starvation as defined in capitalism is non-existent under socialism too. Instead there's "excess mortality due to agricultural stockpile conditions."


Nice strawman, but the Liberman reforms were in the 1960's. No one claims that 1956 was the year the Soviet economy became state-capitalist; it was the year revisionism triumphed in the CPSU, which paved the way for state-capitalism under Khrushchev's dictates and expanded upon by Brezhnev, etc. In the 60's and 70's it was decreed that profit, not the betterment of society, was the aim of Soviet enterprises.
What I still don't get about this analysis is which came first, the chicken or the egg? Revisionism or the elusive Soviet bourgeoisie? And furthermore, what other solution could there than that which Trotsky proposed - a radical turn to Soviet democracy? Aside from perhaps praying for the second coming of Jesus Stalin.


Unfortunately the Soviet millionaires under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were the new bourgeoisie and exploited workers. They weren't workers themselves. See:
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap6.html
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap7.htmlI don't see, because the Soviet elite never gained the power to privately own industrial enterprises under Khrushchev or Brezhnev, at least not qualitatively more than local managers and party bosses had already exhibited effective control over areas of the economy under Lenin and Stalin.

According to the British-Soviet Society in 1946, Soviet enterprises were already independently profiting, investing, and gainfully rewarding their directors, under Stalin:


PROFIT SHARING. (p. 14-15)

Soviet industry is distinguished from all others by the active part that the workers, through their trade unions, take in its direction. The Soviet worker, no matter what the nature of the job, no matter what his wages, no matter what his capabilities, finds himself a de facto shareholder in the enterprise in which he works, with his trade union delegates functioning in the role of his representatives on the Board of Management. This confers upon the workers rights and a share in the control. It does not give them a right to participation in direct money dividends, but it does ensure that they benefit substantially from a successful year's working.

Every Soviet industrial undertaking operates as a separate unit, and in working out its plan for the year with the appropriate ministry a specific annual profit is estimated. Out of that profit two per cent. goes into what is called the Director's Fund. If, at the end of the year , the profit exceeds the estimate, 50 per cent. of the surplus goes into the Director's Fund, and is used by him for improving the social amenities (kindergartens, creches, libraries, etc.) attached to the plant, subsidising the canteens, and in the payment of additional bonuses. The remaining 50 per cent. goes back to the ministry and is used for further capitalisation, reduction of prices, and so on.

Such is the position in large-scale industry, but in agriculture, and in the handicraft artels (working co-operative groups) which flourish in the minor industries, it is more convenient to remunerate the labour by direct dividends rather than by wages.

Collective farmers and members of co-operative handicraft groups are, in effect, working shareholders whose earnings depend directly upon the yield of the undertaking. One section of agriculturists, however, are in the same position as industrial wage-earners. They are the workers on the State farms, largely experimental in character, who are paid wages and bonuses. This also applies to the workers on the Machine Tractor Stations, which are State-owned.

The collective farm is a producers co-operative, in which each member is a shareholder and is remunerated proportionately to the yield of the farm; proportionately, however, not to the amount of land, stock, tools or money originally invested when the farm was started, but to the quantity and quality of work performed.

An annual balance sheet is drawn up, and the proceeds, in money and in kind, are distributed as follows:-

a) to the State, by way of taxes
b) to the Machine Tractor Station for the use of machines and services
c) Cost of seed, fertiliser, tools, etc.
d) upkeep of farm buildings, etc.
e) Communal expenses.
f) Social and cultural expenses.
g) Repayment of loans.
h) Reserves.

What remains of money and produce is the net profit of the collective and is divided among the embers according to the value of the work each has performed.

In order to make possible the just distribution of these proceeds, Soviet law recognises a unit known as the labour-day. The value of this unit does not depend solely on the quantity of work performed, but equally on its quality, its skill and the degree of energy required. It is necessary for a shepherd or cow-herd to put in more time on the job than a tractor driver or a field labourer, to earn the reward of one "labour day." A "labour day" does not necessarily represent one day's work - a person can earn payment for two or more "labour days" in one day.

http://cominternist.blogspot.com/2010/08/wages-and-prices-in-ussr-excerpts.html


Can you demonstrate that these workers became capitalists after becoming "millionaires"? (Since they certainly weren't before then, and they do not seem to have actually ever been influential in the rise of revisionism and state-capitalism). I can't demonstrate that because they weren't technically capitalists, but neither were Khrushchev and Brezhnev.


For wage equalization, it's necessary to bring up the productivity level of the less developed sectors and industries. But that's a long process, INSTEAD BLAMING ON STALIN IS AN EASIER WAY.
Except that Reg Bishop and his pamphlets are actually pro-Stalin.

[Dimentio]

I know about a story about a Swedish construction worker who lived in absolutely shoddy conditions. He wore clothes that were falling apart and lived in a house without electricity. His neighbours gave him their excess clothes.

And the guy had a fortune of about 2 million dollars...

Or take this example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/7538261/Family-feud-over-fortune-of-Swedish-tramp-who-made-millions-from-tin-cans.html

[RED DAVE]

Many of these "millionaires" are collective farmers. The emergence of Soviet collective farm millionaires means that Stalin's promise in 1933 that the Soviet Government aimed at making collective farmers well-to-do is on the road to fulfilment.
Can you demonstrate that these workers became capitalists after becoming "millionaires"? (Since they certainly weren't before then, and they do not seem to have actually ever been influential in the rise of revisionism and state-capitalism).The OP is deceptive. It refers to "farmers." And the image, of course, is some former peasant with aq red cap riding on a kolkhoz tractor. The truth is that the "rouble millionaires" are much more likely to have been the manager of a collective farm selling off the surplus. There is no way under the collective farms that an individual member of a collective farm could have become a "rouble millionaire" by dint of their own efforts. Either they were selling off the surplus, harvested by others, or, somehow, they were employing others and exploiting their labor.

Capitalism was already present in the countryside, supported by the state.

RED DAVE

[The Vegan Marxist]

Nice strawman, but the Liberman reforms were in the 1960's. No one claims that 1956 was the year the Soviet economy became state-capitalist; it was the year revisionism triumphed in the CPSU, which paved the way for state-capitalism under Khrushchev's dictates and expanded upon by Brezhnev, etc. In the 60's and 70's it was decreed that profit, not the betterment of society, was the aim of Soviet enterprises.

Unfortunately the Soviet millionaires under Khrushchev and Brezhnev were the new bourgeoisie and exploited workers. They weren't workers themselves. See:
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap6.html
http://www.oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap7.html

Can you demonstrate that these workers became capitalists after becoming "millionaires"? (Since they certainly weren't before then, and they do not seem to have actually ever been influential in the rise of revisionism and state-capitalism).

I wouldn't even call the Soviet Union, anywhere between Khrushchev to Gorbachev, 'State-Capitalist', for the majority of the means of production remained collectively owned between the workers & the State. Revisionism was embraced during those times, yes, but revisionism doesn't imply that capitalism has been restored. It's rather a road to capitalism. Capitalism was never Russia's economy until after Gorbachev brought the last blow to the Soviet Union.

[RED DAVE]

I wouldn't even call the Soviet Union, anywhere between Khrushchev to Gorbachev, 'State-Capitalist', for the majority of the means of production remained collectively owned between the workers & the State.And how could the workers collectively own the means of production, except through the State?

If they didn't control the State (unless you think they did), they had no "ownership" of the means of production. If you think they did, show us how this was accomplished through concrete institutions.

RED DAVE

[Uppercut]

And how could the workers collectively own the means of production, except through the State?

If they didn't control the State (unless you think they did), they had no "ownership" of the means of production. If you think they did, show us how this was accomplished through concrete institutions.

RED DAVE

Not everything in the USSR was state owned. You had cooperatively run housing, workshops and distribution centers that operated without the state, and were run entirely by those who worked there.

Even so, in the state owned enterprises, the workers' unions had their role in determining the direction of the shop they worked in. Yes, the prices of the goods that were sold were generally set by the state, but how they sold them and how the structure of the shop would operate was mostly left up to them and their elected manager.

And don't forget about the local workers' and soldiers' soviets.

[The Vegan Marxist]

^ Exactly. The means of production remained away from the exploitation of man by man. No one can considerably consider the Soviet Union as being Capitalist.

[Uppercut]

^ Exactly. The means of production remained away from the exploitation of man by man. No one can considerably consider the Soviet Union as being Capitalist.

Well, I was talking about the USSR before the Kosygin reform, something I should have pointed out. Unions were harassed and in some cases workers were put down and forced in psychiactric wards, as Bill Bland points out in "The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union". Soviet Psychiatrists rebelled against this and were themselves admitted into hospitals.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that many "enterprise management" schools were opened up in the 1950s-1960s, encouraging specialization in the field of enterprise management that resemble business schools in the capitalist countries.

I'd post a link right now but I'm using my Aunt's macbook and don't know how to right-click. (Yeah it's pathetic).

[The Vegan Marxist]

Well, I was talking about the USSR before the Kosygin reform, something I should have pointed out. Unions were harassed and in some cases workers were put down and forced in psychiactric wards, as Bill Bland points out in "The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union". Soviet Psychiatrists rebelled against this and were themselves admitted into hospitals.

EDIT: I'd also like to point out that many "enterprise management" schools were opened up in the 1950s-1960s, encouraging specialization in the field of enterprise management that resemble business schools in the capitalist countries.

I'd post a link right now but I'm using my Aunt's macbook and don't know how to right-click. (Yeah it's pathetic).

Even with reforms taking place within the Soviet Union, this didn't mean that the Soviet Union was now capitalist. It only implies they were on the road to such.

[Kléber]

I know about a story about a Swedish construction worker who lived in absolutely shoddy conditions. He wore clothes that were falling apart and lived in a house without electricity. His neighbours gave him their excess clothes.

And the guy had a fortune of about 2 million dollars...

Or take this example:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/7538261/Family-feud-over-fortune-of-Swedish-tramp-who-made-millions-from-tin-cans.html
Haha.. well, a rouble millionaire was definitely not as wealthy as a dollar or pound millionaire. There were also less opportunities to spend money in the USSR. But there was a luxury goods economy for the elite that took off in the 1930's and contributed to Soviet economic decline from the 1970's.

A good book examining how the Soviet luxury economy grew from the mid-1930's, and the privileged castes engaged in more consumption of more exquisite and exotic goods, is Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin's Russia (http://books.google.com/books?id=43PHk33qOMEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=caviar+with+champagne&hl=en&ei=BpiBTIqjLpHEsAOcr5z2Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false) by Jukka Gronow.


Well, I was talking about the USSR before the Kosygin reform
The Kosygin reforms did not qualitatively change anything about the social system of the USSR, and moreover, they were rolled back under Brezhnev.


Unions were harassed and in some cases workers were put down and forced in psychiactric wards, as Bill Bland points out in "The Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union". Soviet Psychiatrists rebelled against this and were themselves admitted into hospitals.Funny how you inflate the relatively benign methods of Khrushchev into a holocaust of orthodox Stalinists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Party_Group), but you see absolutely no problem with Stalin's clique wiping out an entire generation of revolutionaries in the purges of 1937-8.


I'd also like to point out that many "enterprise management" schools were opened up in the 1950s-1960s, encouraging specialization in the field of enterprise management that resemble business schools in the capitalist countries.
As history and the wage data presented above show, the Soviet Union had already preserved a layer of high-paid, elite bureaucrats from the moment of the 1917 Revolution; first as a holdover from the old system that was considered a necessary evil in order to administer the state and the economy, to be viewed with suspicion. However, in conditions of economic devastation and the decimation of the proletarian revolutionary vanguard during the Civil War, the managerial-technocratic elite ended up merging with the corrupt party "nomenclature," cliques of officials which had formed behind the scenes during the lean years of War Communism, to become a new ruling caste with an ever-increasing amount of political and economic power, with independent political interests that put it in opposition to the interests of the working class. The legal barrier which prevented bourgeois or "specialists" from influencing the Bolshevik Party, the party members' salary limit (partmaximum) was attacked from 1928 and abolished in 1931. The bureaucratic caste won out and massacred the proletarian vanguard in the Stalinist mass killings of 1936-41, not the Khrushchevist demotions and brainwashings of 1956. It gradually accumulated wealth and power over subsequent decades, at the expense of the Soviet workers and the Soviet Union itself, then finally abolished public industry and became an outright capitalist class in 1991. The Soviet workers' state was forced to adopt "state capitalism" (the term used by Trotsky and Lenin) by its backwardness and due to its isolation, but these capitalist elements ended up destroying the revolution from within.


Not everything in the USSR was state owned. You had cooperatively run housing, workshops and distribution centers that operated without the state, and were run entirely by those who worked there.

Even so, in the state owned enterprises, the workers' unions had their role in determining the direction of the shop they worked in. Yes, the prices of the goods that were sold were generally set by the state, but how they sold them and how the structure of the shop would operate was mostly left up to them and their elected manager.
But when this happens in Yugoslavia, it's "revisionism."

[RED DAVE]

And don't forget about the local workers' and soldiers' soviets.Yeah, I won't forget them. Too bad the Russian working class forgot them for any effective puspose by around 1930.

Do you really believe that (a) the Russian working class controlled production in the USSR and (b) they therefore let it go around 1990 (or 1960 or whenever) without a fight?

RED DAVE

[pranabjyoti]

Yeah, I won't forget them. Too bad the Russian working class forgot them for any effective puspose by around 1930.

Do you really believe that (a) the Russian working class controlled production in the USSR and (b) they therefore let it go around 1990 (or 1960 or whenever) without a fight?

RED DAVE
If there was no WWII, they certainly wouldn't. But the bleeding of WWII make the working class of USSR too weak to resist the petty-bourgeoisie insurrection. I am pretty sure that without WWII, THERE WOULDN'T BE ANY 1989. Khrushchev and co came into power with the help of newly strengthened petty-bourgeoisie class and eventually, as per the natural character of petty-bourgeoisie, they slowly turned into capitalists.
Basically, people like you think about USSR to be something totally isolated from the rest of the world and just love to ignore the imperialist attack, sabotages and ultimately the destructive WWII.