The Fall of the USSR and Popular Sentiment

[Ocean Seal]

I remember a while back a member posted some statistics, I believe about how many people wanted to go back to being under the USSR rather than remain as capitalist republics both before and after the fall of the USSR and the numbers were astoundingly high. With about 75% of Soviet citizens saying that they either had it better under the USSR, wished to remain under the USSR, or something of that nature.
So does anybody have the link to that chart or something similar. It will be very much appreciated.

[Spartacus.]

I remember a while back a member posted some statistics, I believe about how many people wanted to go back to being under the USSR rather than remain as capitalist republics both before and after the fall of the USSR and the numbers were astoundingly high. With about 75% of Soviet citizens saying that they either had it better under the USSR, wished to remain under the USSR, or something of that nature.
So does anybody have the link to that chart or something similar. It will be very much appreciated.


IIRC, on the referendum held in 1991, 78% of Soviet citizens voted in favour of keeping the Soviet Union alive. Unfortunately, the party nomenklatura had other plans...

[Ocean Seal]

IIRC, on the referendum held in 1991, 78% of Soviet citizens voted in favour of keeping the Soviet Union alive. Unfortunately, the party nomenklatura had other plans...
Thank you comrade. Just what I was looking for. Just as a question was a referendum ever taken post-USSR to show how many people wanted the USSR back.

[manic expression]

The referendum pointed out by Spartacus. is extremely important to remember. Also, there are plenty of more recent polls which show the same sentiment. Here are four examples with a pro-socialist majority:

Germany (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,634122,00.html)
Hungary (http://www.politics.hu/20080521/poll-shows-majority-of-hungarians-feel-life-was-better-under-communism/)
Russia (http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2009/1223/Why-nearly-60-percent-of-Russians-deeply-regret-the-USSR-s-demise)
Yugoslavia (http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/for-simon-poll-serbians-unsure-who-runs-their-country)

I don't have a chart, but the figures are in those articles.

[Spartacus.]

Thank you comrade. Just what I was looking for. Just as a question was a referendum ever taken post-USSR to show how many people wanted the USSR back.


Referendums are usually taken when there is some important decision to be made, so there was no such thing after the fall. But there were various surveys made that show that majority of Russians look with nostalgy on the days of the SU and were in favour of bringing it back. Interesting, though a bit outdated artcle, showing the actual rise of such sentiments in Russia. :)



The shelves of Moscow bookstores are stuffed with more than 500 new books on the life of the Josef Stalin -- more than half of them are apologist in tone



:thumbup1::thumbup1::thumbup1:



Even more startling has been the public rehabilitation of the Soviet-era intelligence and secret political police, the KGB. Authorities in the city of Tver recently unveiled a monument to former Chekists.
On December 8, the KGB's successor agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), launched for the first time in the country's post-Soviet history a series of awards recognizing literary and artistic achievement in works depicting the agency and its work.
The awards are modeled on similar KGB prizes which from 1978-1989 rewarded artists for the "creation of a positive Chekist image."


:D:D:D



The occasion of the 15th anniversary of the USSR's collapse has also sent into overdrive efforts to revise the Soviet legacy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin led the charge in his 2005 state-of-the-nation address, during which he called the demise of the Soviet Union "the great geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
This year, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov referred to the collapse as "a mistake that could have been avoided."
Vladimir Zhirinovksy -- the outspoken deputy speaker of the State Duma who can usually be relied on to put the Kremlin's thoughts into words -- predicted that in the next decade, Russia would create a new Soviet Union. "There will be no 25th anniversary of the disintegration of the USSR," he told a television talk show.



Russia: USSR nostalgia increasing

http://www.speroforum.com/a/7151/Russia-USSR-nostalgia-increasing


Quite interesting... :D

[bailey_187]

Thank you comrade. Just what I was looking for. Just as a question was a referendum ever taken post-USSR to show how many people wanted the USSR back.

AFAIK, no actual referendum was taken post break up, although there are numerous polls in which the Soviet days come of as being more popular. Some polls however also show that people fear that going back to the Soviet days will cause a civil war.

There was also an election in 1996 i think in which the Communists were poised to win but there are reports of voting fraud, giving Yeltsin his victory. I dont know too much about this though. The Communist Party in Russia is also the second largest and popular party, although their politics are pretty far from desirable - but it atleast shows some attachment to the Soviet days.

[Spartacus.]

There was also an election in 1996 i think in which the Communists were poised to win but there are reports of voting fraud, giving Yeltsin his victory. I dont know too much about this though.


Before the elections, Yeltsin popularity was estimated in single digits, but thanks to enormous amount of propaganda used in months before the elections and the help of American advisors, Yeltsin was able to make a marginal victory; he got 53%, while Zyuganov got 40%. Of course, vote rigging typical for Russian elections, has certainly played a part in it. Americans even made a movie about that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Boris

William Blum has written a chapter about it in his book Rogue State. If you apologize for calling me a "****", I might copy that chapter here. :D

[Thirsty Crow]

IIRC, on the referendum held in 1991, 78% of Soviet citizens voted in favour of keeping the Soviet Union alive. Unfortunately, the party nomenklatura had other plans...
That's what happens when this very same structures destroy any semblance of proletarian democracy in the form of workers' councils which are not subordinate to the party-state apparatus. Who'd think that an empowered working class wouldn't fiercly oppose capitalist restructuring?
To put it bluntly: it's not the sentiment that counts, but action.

EDIT: oh yeah, books about Stalin (half of them apologist, mind you) are quite an indicator of class struggle in Russia. This sovietophilic nostalgia is beyond stupid, frankly.

[bailey_187]

Before the elections, Yeltsin popularity was estimated in single digits, but thanks to enormous amount of propaganda used in months before the elections and the help of American advisors, Yeltsin was able to make a marginal victory; he got 53%, while Zyuganov got 40%. Of course, vote rigging typical for Russian elections, has certainly played a part in it. Americans even made a movie about that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Boris

William Blum has written a chapter about it in his book Rogue State. If you apologize for calling me a "****", I might copy that chapter here. :D

lol ok i apologise but cant guarentee i wont again (probably wont tho, admins are out to get me, black helicopters and all), but dont worry about the chapter, i got the book

[Revolutionair]

Could you still post that chapter? It sounds interesting.

[Spartacus.]

lol ok i apologise but cant guarentee i wont again (probably wont tho, admins are out to get me, black helicopters and all), but dont worry about the chapter, i got the book


I accept the apology... :)



Could you still post that chapter? It sounds interesting.


Of course... :)



Russia, 1996
For four months (March-June), a group of veteran American political consultants worked secretly in Moscow in support of Boris Yeltsin's presidential campaign. Although the Americans were working independently, President Clinton's political guru, Dick Morris, acted as their middleman to the administration, and Clinton himself told Yeltsin in March that he wanted to "make sure that everything the United States did would have a positive impact" on the Russian's electoral campaign. Boris Yeltsin was being counted on to run with globalized free-market ball and it was imperative that he cross the goal line. The American consultants in Moscow scripted a Clinton-Yeltsin summit meeting in April to allow the Russian to "stand up to the West". just like the Russian Communist Party-Yeltsin's main opponent-insisted they would do if they won.
The Americans emphasized sophisticated methods of message development, polling, focus groups, crowd staging, direct-mailing, etc; urged more systematic domination of the state-owned media, and advised against public debated with the Communists. Most of all they encouraged the Yeltsin campaign to "go negative" against the Communists, painting frigtening pictures of what the Communists would do if they took power, including much civil upheaval and violence, and, of course, a return to the worst of Stalinism. With a virtual media blackout against them, the Communists were extremely hard pressed to respond to the attacks or to shout the Russian equivalent of"It's the economy, stupid."
It is impossible to measure the value of the American consultants contributions to the Yeltsin campaign, for there's no knowing which of their tactics the Russians would have emloyed anyhow if left to their own devices, how well they would have applied them, or how things would have turned out. But we do know that before the Americans came on board, Yeltsin was favored by only 6 percent of the electorate. In the first round of voting, he edged the Communists 35 percent to 32, and was victorious in the second round 54 to 40 percent. "Democracy", declared Time magazine, "triumphed."



William Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower; p. 176

[Ismail]

In Albania in 1991 the slavishly pro-US and viciously anti-communist Democratic Party received various means of support both financially and morally from the USA. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_parliamentary_election,_1991 (incidentally I wrote the whole article, and at one point I also cite another book Blum wrote.)

Even though the (by this point social-democratic) PLA won the elections, the Democrats promptly said that they would never work with evil communists and brought the country to a standstill via unending strikes that forced new elections in 1992 in which the Democratic Party came to power.

[OhYesIdid]

oh yeah, books about Stalin (half of them apologist, mind you) are quite an indicator of class struggle in Russia. This sovietophilic nostalgia is beyond stupid, frankly.

In fact, I would argue that it's the sentiment that counts. These people don't really want the gulags back, they want what the hammer and sickle represented. The ideal, if you will. I don't think a communist victory will neessairly bring back Stalin days.

[bailey_187]

In fact, I would argue that it's the sentiment that counts. These people don't really want the gulags back, they want what the hammer and sickle represented. The ideal, if you will. I don't think a communist victory will neessairly bring back Stalin days.

i think its less about the ideal of communism, but more the safty nets and being a superpower

[Thirsty Crow]

In fact, I would argue that it's the sentiment that counts. These people don't really want the gulags back, they want what the hammer and sickle represented. The ideal, if you will. I don't think a communist victory will neessairly bring back Stalin days.
I don't think the victory of the global revolutionary proletariat worldwide would end up in the establishment of a party-state dictatorship over the broadest layers of the working class.
But as a matter of fact, it was the lack of action, and not the sentiment, on behalf of the ex-USSR working class which enabled capitalist restructuring in Russia from the 90s onwards. That's my point. Anyone can cite whatever survey she wants, it does not matter what percentage of the people polled were against the dissolution. What really matters is to determine what the hell happened that the workers remained passive.

[Tommy4ever]

In fact, I would argue that it's the sentiment that counts. These people don't really want the gulags back, they want what the hammer and sickle represented. The ideal, if you will. I don't think a communist victory will neessairly bring back Stalin days.

Quite a lot of the support for Stalin in Russia has more to do with Russian Nationalism and nostalgia for past triumphs and Superpower status (as well as the admiration for Russia's biggest strongman of the 20th century) than a love of socialism and the Soviet system.

[Spartacus.]

That's what happens when this very same structures destroy any semblance of proletarian democracy in the form of workers' councils which are not subordinate to the party-state apparatus. Who'd think that an empowered working class wouldn't fiercly oppose capitalist restructuring?
To put it bluntly: it's not the sentiment that counts, but action.



I totally agree. If only the real world was as simple as fantasies of the ultra-leftists. You make a Revolution, the workers cheerfully take over the means of production, which are democratically controlled through worker's councils, the state is withering away and the burgeous and counter-revolutionaries are quietly sitting and happily watching as they are stripped of their power. If only was that easy... :D

Could you explain me, in concrete examples, how would the independent worker's councils organize a strong government necessary to deal with reaction in the Russian Civil War, how would they solve the grain supply for the cities without the forced confiscation from the peasants, how would they organise army that could effectivelly fight the enemy invasion, how would they organise the production in industry without the coercive measures, how would they fight saboteurs, infiltrators and spies, build an entirely volunteer army without resorting to forced recruitment, how would they repair the damaged industry after the war, how would they fight against those that wish to undermine the Soviet system with the help of foreign capitalist powers, how would they build an industry necessary to repel the Nazi invasion, how would they carry out collectivisation faced with kulak's bitter hostility, how would they carry on the war against the Nazi Germany and win it; and so on...

I hope you understand that your idealism is going to hit the wall once it is faced with objective material reality, and that in a largely peasant, rural and backward country, devastated by almost a decade of constant warfare (WWI, RCW) and surrounded by hostile capitalist powers waiting for the first opportunity to destroy it, there could be no idealised worker's democracy. As someone calling himself a Marxist you should know that political structure of the country is determined by its material basis, not by dreams of ultra-leftists that want to create a perfect society. Thus, some excesses of Stalin reign need to be looked upon in the light of what I said before, not from a position of petit-burgeous idealism. The regime that existed in the Soviet Union was not some abbomination, a product of evil Leninists/Stalinists/CommunistBabyEaters/Whatever, but rather contrary the "Stalinists" themselves were a product of their country and their times. It is quite easy to judge from a XXI century perspective, living in an industrialised and modern country and forcing your own perspectives and wishes onto people that were living a whole century ago in a country with terrible history of despotism and economic underdevelopment. According to the Émile Joseph Dillon, a university professor that spent decades in Russia, this is how the Russian peasant (the backbone of the Revolution) looked like:


The Russian peasant ... goes to bed at six and even five o'clock in the winter, because he cannot afford money to buy petroleum enough for artificial light. He has no meat, no eggs, no butter, no milk, often no cabbage, and lives mainly on black bread and potatoes. Lives? He starves on an insufficient quantity of them.


The agricultural population ... was medieval in its institutions, Asiatic in its strivings and prehistoric in its conceptions of life. The peasants believed that the Japanese had won the Manchurian campaign by assuming the form of microbes, getting into the boots of the Russian soldiers, biting their legs, and bringing about their death. When there was an epidemic in a district they often killed the doctors `for poisoning the wells and spreading the disease'. They still burn witches with delight, disinter the dead to lay a ghost, strip unfaithful wives stark naked, tie them to carts and whip them through the village .... And when the only restraints that keep such a multitude in order are suddenly removed the consequences to the community are bound to be catastrophic .... Between the people and anarchism for generations there stood the frail partition formed by its primitive ideas of God and the Tsar; and since the Manchurian campaign these were rapidly melting away


Now I dare you to try and build a working-class democracy with workers councils running the country using those peasants as your human material. You would end up worst then those doctors mentioned in Dillon's writing. :D

[CommieTroll]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHD5nd3QLTg

[Spartacus.]

But as a matter of fact, it was the lack of action, and not the sentiment, on behalf of the ex-USSR working class which enabled capitalist restructuring in Russia from the 90s onwards.


Capitalist restructuring started already in 1965 with the introduction of the Kosygin reforms. What happened in the 90's was just legitimization of a process that has begun much earlier...



Quite a lot of the support for Stalin in Russia has more to do with Russian Nationalism and nostalgia for past triumphs and Superpower status (as well as the admiration for Russia's biggest strongman of the 20th century) than a love of socialism and the Soviet system.


How would you then explain qiute lot of support for Soviet Union itself, if it was only some kind of Stalin-fetishism present in today's Russia. "Soviet" system had quite a lot good sides, even without Stalin: guaranteed employment, social security, free healthcare and education, pensions and wages with which you could actually live, low-cost housing, low criminal and drug levels and etc. The fact that it didn't fullfill every fantasy of petty-burgeous liberals and ultra-left idealists doesn't mean that it was a failure. That is just western simplification of support present for former socialist countries; if they are nostalgic for them, they probably miss the tank parades and Stalin. :lol:

[Rooster]

Them golden chains of slavery sure do sparkle real nice, don't they, Spartacus?

[Spartacus.]

Them golden chains of slavery sure do sparkle real nice, don't they, Spartacus?


I'm not certain what you wanted to say, but if I understood you correctly, you are accusing me of ignoring the fact that former socialist states were somehow "oppressive" (whatever that meant) and didn't have real worker's democracy and control over means of production (which has some true in it) and as such are not worth supporting. I suppose that you are accusing me of putting material benefits of socialism first, while ignoring the emancipatory and liberating role that socialism should have brought, thus implying that I have perverted understanding of socialism, which (according to me) equals state with welfare functions. Of course, that is not true. All I wanted to say was that for great many people socialism has brought incredible progress which should be mentioned, especially considering the tendency of many western liberal quasi-communists to describe the entire socialist experience as a giant failure, while sitting in their comfortable houses and enjoying their middle-class lifestyle while also posing for communists as a way of searching for their identity. For the vast majority of world oppressed population, things which all socialist countries provided to their citizens, are a distant dream which looks unreal...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_h5L0bq0pIhY/Rs1fOuKgUWI/AAAAAAAAAGU/RLs8ERltg9o/s320/Brazil_slum.jpg


I have a great idea... Since I believe you think that former socialist countries were golden cages for slaves, how about you move in these fancy freedom-houses? After that, you might get a better appreciation of gigantic improvements in human welfare that were made in those "outposts of tyrranies", instead of just sitting in the center of imperialist country, enjoying fruits of imperialist plunder and criticising everything for not being perfect and ideal. :rolleyes:

[Thirsty Crow]

I hope you understand that your idealism is going to hit the wall once it is faced with objective material reality...
Funny that you should mention "idealism" since it is in fact you who are abandoning a strict materialist analysis by means of the revisionist scarecrow. It's also funny that you launch into a tirade but fail to refute my basic contention, and instead engage in meaningless emotional drivel (what else could such a misuse of the term "idealism" represent, along other shining examples such as the modifying "petite bourgeois" which, yet again, you throw around without any sense whatsoever) and flat out strawman "arguments" (oh yes, I definitely proclaimed "Leninists" EVIL; and Stalin ate babies for breakfast).

Once again, do you wish to refute the claim that the lack any kind of proletarian democracy, let alone any kind of a classless social organization rooted in relations of production, contributed to capitalist restructuring, and not anything resembling revisionism within the structures of the party-state?

Oh yeah, by the way, you ought to distinguish between "capitalist restructuring" and "capitalist restoration", since it is the latter term that fits with you idealist ML bunch, unlike the former which implies my view, that "Soviet" society was never socialist, but rather capitalist).

[redSHARP]

Referendums are usually taken when there is some important decision to be made, so there was no such thing after the fall. But there were various surveys made that show that majority of Russians look with nostalgy on the days of the SU and were in favour of bringing it back. Interesting, though a bit outdated artcle, showing the actual rise of such sentiments in Russia. :)



:thumbup1::thumbup1::thumbup1:



:D:D:D





http://www.speroforum.com/a/7151/Russia-USSR-nostalgia-increasing


Quite interesting... :D


interesting. but is this actual support of soviet and socialist economics, or nationalism.

which reminds me, is their any connection to the Nat. Bolsheviks or those "Russia is for Russians" supporters with supporting the former Soviet Union?

[Ismail]

which reminds me, is their any connection to the Nat. Bolsheviks or those "Russia is for Russians" supporters with supporting the former Soviet Union?Yes, some think that the USSR was the culmination of a glorious Russian project ordained by God for Russia to achieve eternal glory.

[A Marxist Historian]

I don't think the victory of the global revolutionary proletariat worldwide would end up in the establishment of a party-state dictatorship over the broadest layers of the working class.
But as a matter of fact, it was the lack of action, and not the sentiment, on behalf of the ex-USSR working class which enabled capitalist restructuring in Russia from the 90s onwards. That's my point. Anyone can cite whatever survey she wants, it does not matter what percentage of the people polled were against the dissolution. What really matters is to determine what the hell happened that the workers remained passive.

What the hell happened was, of course, sixty years of Stalinism passivizing the Soviet working class, who expected the party leaders to tell them what to do, like they always had.

When the party leaders did no such thing, instead going over to capitalism... two generations of Stalinism had chloroformed them, and they passively sat by as the worst defeat the working class has suffered in its entire history, in some ways worse than Hitler's victory in Germany, stomped all over them.

And now we are all paying the price, all over the world. The worst price in the ex-Soviet Union, where the death toll resulting directly or indirectly from the reintroduction of capitalism is by now probably larger than the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Funny that you should mention "idealism" since it is in fact you who are abandoning a strict materialist analysis by means of the revisionist scarecrow. It's also funny that you launch into a tirade but fail to refute my basic contention, and instead engage in meaningless emotional drivel (what else could such a misuse of the term "idealism" represent, along other shining examples such as the modifying "petite bourgeois" which, yet again, you throw around without any sense whatsoever) and flat out strawman "arguments" (oh yes, I definitely proclaimed "Leninists" EVIL; and Stalin ate babies for breakfast).

Once again, do you wish to refute the claim that the lack any kind of proletarian democracy, let alone any kind of a classless social organization rooted in relations of production, contributed to capitalist restructuring, and not anything resembling revisionism within the structures of the party-state?

Oh yeah, by the way, you ought to distinguish between "capitalist restructuring" and "capitalist restoration", since it is the latter term that fits with you idealist ML bunch, unlike the former which implies my view, that "Soviet" society was never socialist, but rather capitalist).

Yah, just a lil' restructuring, from one kinda capitalism to another...

Now that's *pure* idealism. The worst thing to happen to Russia since the Mongol invasion, and it was all just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, according to you.

Life expectancy for men dropping ten years? Wages dropping *in half*? Bloody nationalist mutual slaughters in all sorts of odd corners, killing tens of thousands of people? Total collapse of the economy and the health care system? Pensions for old people no longer big enough to feed their cats?

All just a lil' restructuring.

That's not just idealism, that's downright hallucination.

-M.H.-