History Of The Ussr

[kaaos_af]

This an old speech I made for a Resistance Socialist Youth camp thing... I wrote it with Comrade Ashleigh Mayes RIP (some of you may remember her)..

Info from this could come in useful for future essays. As it is it is flawed, taking heavy info from Trot and brezhnevite sources. It was also written when I was an idiot Trot who had a pic of Lenin on the wall... aaa how naiive I was....





The October Revolution, which took place in November 1917, was a great victory for the international working class, and was the first successful socialist revolution. Yet in 1991, the USSR collapsed, after decades of oppression, bureaucracy and imperialism. This report shall aim to increase comrade?s understanding of the causes of the failure of the socialist revolution and the subsequent retreat into totalitarianism that the USSR took, leading to its eventual collapse.

The October Revolution represented to the western capitalist ruling class a terrible threat to its wealth and privilege, marking the first time the working class had succeeded in taking state power in a country. Under the direction of the United States, some fourteen capitalist countries, including Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Australia, Italy and Turkey, invaded Soviet Russia on the request of the Russian Tsarist White armies, claiming to be making an attempt to liberate the Russian people from the terrors of Bolshevism. In 1918, some 13 000 American soldiers were involved in the attempt to "strangle at its birth" socialist Russia, as British Minister of War Winston Churchill put it.

The White armies were eventually defeated, and the Americans and their allies withdrew in 1920, leaving soviet Russia in a state of economic collapse "unparalleled in the history of mankind" as one historian put it, with the 1920 national income less than one third that of its 1913 figure and industrial production less than one fifth of the prewar level. Estimates suggested that up to 10% of the Russian working class had been killed in the Civil War, and, according to Comrade Tony Cliff of the Socialist Worker's Party in Britain, "The population of the cities had shrunk. The most revolutionary workers had joined the Red Army in defence of the revolution. Others, driven by lack of food and fuel, had returned to peasant villages. Between the end of 1918 and the end of the 1920 epidemics, hunger and cold had killed nine million Russians (the war was a whole had claimed four million victims)". Moscow's population alone had fallen by 50%.

The success of the revolution, according to Comrades Lenin and Trotsky, depended entirely on the successes of other revolutions around the world. At the Third Congress of Soviets in January 1918, V.I. Lenin said that "The final victory of socialism in a single country is impossible. Our contingent of workers and peasants which is upholding Soviet power is one of the contingents of the great world army". Trotsky also stated that "Without the direct state support of the European proletariat, the working class of Russia cannot remain in power". The revolutions in Europe, however, such as those in Hungary, Austria and Bavaria, were failures, and the second socialist revolution wasn't until 1921, in Mongolia, which itself was impoverished and could not aid Russia in any way.

Worse still, between the civil war, famines and epidemics, many of the most revolutionary workers had been killed and the industrial working class was almost halved. The surviving militant workers who had led the 1917 revolution were now needed in the factories, as cadres in the army or as commissars to keep the administrators operating the state machine. They were replaced in industry, for the most part, by peasants from the countryside, who had little or no understanding of socialism, let alone socialist traditions or aspirations. Although the capitalist intervention had failed to destroy the revolution, it had succeeded in decimating the most political aware and militant class in Russia. Without revolutions abroad, and deprived of resources, "the Soviet institutions started to operate independently of the class they had arisen from" (1).

The "workers and peasants who fought the civil war could not govern themselves collectively from their places in the factories. The socialist workers now spread the length and breadth of the war zones had to be organised and coordinated by a centralised governmental apparatus independent of their direct control" (2). This structure, which was meant to be temporary until the working class could be rebuilt and politicised, could only be "held together unless it contained within it only those who whole-heartedly supported the revolution- that is, only the Bolsheviks"(3). Groups that were opposed to the Bolsheviks, such as the Mensheviks, who advocated a retreat from the direct democratic aims of the revolutions, and the Social Revolutionaries, who employed terrorist tactics when they came into opposition to Bolshevik policies, were cracked down upon.

According to Chris Harman, "the Bolsheviks had no choice. They could not give up power just because the class they represented had dissolved itself while fighting to defend that power. Nor could they tolerate the propagation of ideas that undermined the basis of its power- precisely because the working class itself no longer existed as an agency collectively organised so as to be able to determine its own interests. ...the soviet state of 1917 was replaced by the single party state of 1920 onwards."(4)

The Kronstadt uprising of 1920 further antagonised the situation. In 1917, the sailors of the Kronstadt fortress at Petrograd had been one of the main driving forces of the revolution. By 1920, however, they had been replaced by peasants who were not aware of socialist politics and the condition of the revolution. Demanding the expulsion of Bolsheviks from the soviets and a free market in agriculture, the Kronstadt sailors were calling for nothing less than the destruction of the socialist aims of the revolution. The Bolsheviks had been the sole party that had unwaveringly supported soviet power, and all the best militants were attached to it. "Soviets without Bolsheviks could only mean soviets without the party which had consistently sought to express the socialist, collectivist aims of the working class in the revolution." The suppression, according to Trotsky, "should be seen not as an attack on the socialist content of the revolution, but as a desperate attempt, using force, to prevent the developing peasant opposition to its collectivist ends from destroying it."

The uprising, however, cast into doubt the leading role of the working class in the revolution. The working class' leading role was maintained not by the superior economic mode it represented , its higher labour productivity and collectivity, but by its physical force, wielded not by armed workers but by a party linked only indirectly to the working class, unlike in 1917. The revolution no longer was 'the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority', but at the stage where it involved the exploitation of the country by the towns, maintained through armed force.

In order to prevent the threat that the revolution may be overthrown by peasant insurrections, the revolution was forced to adopt the New Economic Policy in 1921. It aimed to reconcile peasants to the regime by encouraging economic development through a limited range of freedom to private commodity production. The state and the state-owned industries were to operate as just one element in an economy governed by the needs of peasant production and the play of market forces. Despite the fact that the state was controlled by a party with socialist aims, Russia?s claim to be socialist could no longer be justified in the NEP period, as the workers did not exercise power and the economy was not planned.

With the state under the control of the Bolshevik Party, it would have seemed that the direction of its policies would be socialist. However, the Bolshevik Party had changed a great deal since 1917. In the 1917 February revolution, all those in the Party were committed revolutionaries, but by 1922, after four years of civil war and isolation from the masses, these comrades constituted only a fortieth of the membership of the Party. The Party had been forced to increase its size in order to control all soviet-run areas, and, furthermore, when it was clear that the Bolsheviks were winning the civil war, many people with little or no socialist convictions joined the Party. Thus, the Party was not entirely socialist any longer, with only its leadership being a part of a clear socialist tradition.

The crisis of the state apparatus further contributed to this problem. Without assistance from an industrialised country, like Germany, and people able to replace the Tsarist bureaucrats who had operated the state apparatus before the revolution, the Bolsheviks had been forced to employ thousands of the former tsarist bureaucrats themselves to keep the government functioning. Despite the aim to direct these people?s work in a socialist direction, old attitudes and habits, particularly those towards the masses, often prevailed. In March 1922, Lenin stated to the party congress that "What we lack is clear enough. The ruling stratum of the communists is lacking in culture. Let us look at Moscow. This mass of bureaucrats ? who is leading whom? The 4,700 responsible communists, the mass of bureaucrats, or the other way round? I do not believe you can honestly say the communists are leading this mass. To put it honestly, they are not the leaders but the led." He even went so far, by the end of 1922, to describe the state apparatus as being "borrowed from Tsarism and hardly touched by the soviet world". As early as 1920, he had argued that Russia "is a worker?s state with bureaucratic distortions". In the hostile environment, many comrades aspirations did become corrupted, and many began to exhibit authoritarian habits.

Under the NEP, with the working class still weak and demoralised, the Party had to deal increasingly with the petty-capitalist, small-trader 'kulaks', as they were called. Many Party members were more influenced by their tangible relationship with the kulaks then their intangible link with the small working class. More importantly, the influence of the old bureaucracy had strongly penetrated the Party. Isolated from the class forces that would sustain its rule, "the Party had to exert over itself an iron discipline". Formal factions were banned in an effort to maintain cohesion in the Party, but this degenerated swiftly acceptance of bureaucratic modes of control within the Party. With an entire layer of the Bolshevik Party now directly involved in the bureaucracy and many of its leaders holding governmental positions, the bureaucratic methods and outlooks, especially those inherent to bureaucracies, such as careerism, began to emerge significantly in the party.

Before he died, Lenin strongly denounced Stalin. In late 1922, Stalin proposed that all non-Russian soviet republics be incorporated into the Russian Soviet Federative Republic as autonomous regions. Lenin launched a counterproposal, calling for a union of equal republics, all with the right to secede from the union if they so wished. The Georgians too were strongly opposed to Stalin's proposal. Stalin responded to them by sending Grigory Ordzhonikidze, who physically assaulted a Georgian comrade. Learning of the incident, Lenin accused Stalin of adopting the perspective of the "bourgeois and tsarist hotchpotch" bureaucracy and of being a "Great Russian chauvinist", against whom the non-Russian soviets would have no defence. In Lenin?s ?testament?, written in January 1923, he stated that "Comrade Stalin, having become General-Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands, and I am not certain that he knows how to use that power with sufficient caution." He also stated that "Stalin is too rude, and this fault, entirely supportable in relations between us communists, becomes insupportable in the office of General-Secretary. Therefore, I propose to the comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position". Unfortunately, this testament was suppressed until Nikita Khrushchev made his famous 'secret speech' at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in February 1956.(5)

Even as the economy recovered and the working class began to grow with the NEP, the bureaucracy continued to grow. In 1922, 65% of managing personnel were officially classified as workers. A year later, only 36% were workers: a complete reverse of the year before. The managers began to emerge as a privileged group, receiving higher salaries and better conditions than most, and the ability to hire and fire workers at will. Simultaneously, unemployment grew, with one and a quarter million unemployed in 1923 and 1924.

In the period of the NEP, the Party had to deal with different and even antagonistic social classes. Concessions had to be made to the individualistic aspirations of the peasants, while at the same time building the collectivist aims of socialism. These divisions in society that the Bolsheviks had to deal with led many sections of the Party to "define their socialist aspirations in terms of the interests of different classes."(6) Out of this crisis, three clear currents emerged, the left, right and centre of the party.

The Left Opposition was the most uncompromising faction in the Party, adhering closely to the Bolshevik socialist tradition and led by Trotsky. It's main points were that "it refused to redefine socialism to mean either a slowly developing peasant economy of accumulation for the sake of accumulation" and to "subordinate the world revolution to the chauvinistic and reactionary slogan of 'building socialism in one country' and "It retained the view of worker's democracy as central to socialism." (7) The Left Opposition, however, despite having a socialist programme for working class action, were faced with an apathetic and dispirited working class that was still to weak to carry out any of the action that was being proposed. The Left Opposition stood primarily for the internal development of industry and for the international spread of the revolution, which would act as a means by achieving this development. They also stood for prioritising industry over agriculture and for a sharp increase in workers democracy.

The Right was made up of those in the Party who believed that concessions could be made to the peasants without any detrimental affects, and wanted the party to change its programme especially for the peasants. This did not have an ideological reason behind it, but was a result of the fact that the members of the party Right directly benefited from cooperation with the kulaks, capitalist farmers and traders who had arisen under the NEP.

The Centre, led by Stalin, concerned itself primarily with maintaining cohesion in the party. It opposed the Left proposals of subordinating the country to the towns, but was not willing to act in support of the peasants to the degree that the Right was calling for. It acted mainly in the defence of the bureaucracy, and in keeping the party stable. In 1928, Stalin adopted the Left's call for industrialisation at the expense of the peasantry, under the name of collectivisation. Both the Left and the Right now realised that Stalin was quite capable by this time of surviving without the rule of either the working class or the peasantry.

While the Left based itself on attempting to build policies that would empower the working class and the Right on bowing to peasant pressures, the Centre Stalinist faction was based completely in the bureaucracy. The Soviet state was by this time completely dependant on the bureaucracy. Without a working class to lead the revolution, the party controlled state and industry, and it was the party that had inherited the gains of the revolution. In this volatile situation, maintaining cohesion in the party was a priority, and the bureaucracy provided a method by which to do so. With party unity, and thus the survival of the Soviet state, depending on the Stalinist bureaucracy, Stalin was the clear victor in the struggle for control.

With the bureaucrats opposing all policies that may have disturbed their positions, groups challenging the power of the bureaucracy, such as the Left Opposition, were repressed. Aligning itself with the Right, the bureaucracy took a conservative pro-peasant turn. This concealed the fact that the bureaucracy was not acting, supposedly, in the interests of the revolution, but to transform itself from being a class in itself, to a class for itself, destroying all opposition in its wake. Despite these actions, which were for a large part unconscious, the undercurrents of revolutionary socialism remained, and while the concept of worker's democracy had been done away with, the possibility that socialism could be restored still existed, under the right circumstances, such as industrial recovery or revolution abroad.

Since the civil war, the bureaucracy had controlled industry, the police and the army, in the absence of a working class leadership. It was a slow and gradual process over the years that brought these forces into line with the bureaucracy's intentions. But it was in 1923 that the first obvious shift to counter-revolution was made. In 1923, the bureaucracy turned its full might against Trotsky's Left Opposition to protect its interests. Rational argument was replaced with systematic denigration and the bureaucracy used its power to remove Left sympathisers from their posts. Following his death, the bureaucracy built a cult around Lenin, elevating him to nearly god-like status, while simultaneously inventing the term 'Trotskyism', claiming it to be a tendency opposed to Leninism, despite the fact Lenin had described Trotsky as being "the most able member of the central committee" in his last testament. In this manner, the bureaucracy defended its actions. Stalin arose as the main representative of this bureaucratic layer.

Following Lenin's death in January 1924, a 'triumvirate', consisting of several leading members of the Bolshevik Party, including Zinoviev, took control of the party. Zinoviev came into opposition against the party centre, which was led by Stalin. As the head of the party in Leningrad, Zinoviev used his position in control of the city bureaucracy, to work independently of the central bureaucracy?s apparatus, and was fully supported by the Leningrad party. Realising that the Leningrad bureaucracy?s independence could prove to be an obstacle to its interests, the central bureaucracy engineered Zinoviev?s fall from power. When Zinoviev's opposition was defeated, all sections of the party in Leningrad, with a few minor exceptions, came into full support of Stalin's policies, demonstrating the extent of the bureaucratisation of the Party. Now in full control of the soviet bureaucracy, Stalin used his position to promote those loyal to his apparatus to leading positions in the now renamed Communist Party and to assign oppositionists to remote areas.

In 1928, by now in full control of the party and state, the Stalinists were now deporting revolutionaries to the far eastern wastelands of Russia, Siberia. This proved to be insufficient in suppressing the revolution completely, and eventually the Stalinists were able to achieve even what the Tsarists had been unable to do: the systematic elimination of the revolutionary cadre of 1917 and its supporters. The Right Opposition split from the party in 1928, led by Bukharin, in protest against the Stalinist counter-revolution, but found themselves with even less power than the Left Opposition had had in 1923. In 1928, shortages of grain in the cities had led Stalin to adopt the very proposal the Left Opposition had proposed in 1923: that of swift industrialisation and the collectivisation of the country. Bukharin condemned this, privately, stating that Stalin represented a "Trotskyist danger" and worked behind the scenes with many others to defeat Stalin's agricultural policy.

Once again, splits had formed at the highest levels of the Communist Party. Some of Stalin's fiercest supporters, such as Kalinin, Yagoda, Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov, were rumoured to have become sympathetic to Stalin's opponents. The problem of the kulaks had led to fresh divisions, with some sections, at the July 4 meeting of the Central Committee, calling for collectivisation, others calling for further concessions to be made to the middle class peasants and others calling for a middle road. Stalin, while maintaining his opposition to Trotsky's Left Opposition position, actually exceeded the Left Opposition's 1923 calls, and proceeded with the violent and radical collectivisation of the peasants, actually killing off many kulaks, while the Left had called only for the subordination of countryside to the towns. Comrade George Novack of the Fourth International explained that the left turn had been "taken in panic, [and] did not represent a renewal of the revolution, but rather an attempt by the bureaucracy to save itself from further aggressions on the part of openly restorationist elements. In the course of this struggle, the working class in the Soviet Union was prostrate, bound and gagged, and a new aristocracy crystallised."[*1]

The 'Left' turn, in reality, was an attack on the peasants, not just to get rid of the kulaks, but to bring the entire of Russian society, the cities, towns and the country, under the full control of the bureaucracy. While adopting some of the agricultural proposals of the Left, Stalin had achieved the reverse of what the Left had been calling for. He had completely destroyed peasant's and worker's power in all of USSR. The subordination of the countryside to the towns was not so much an economic move, but an effort to subordinate the working class to the bureaucracy. Not just kulaks suffered, but all whole villages of peasants. "The 'Left' turn of 1928", as Comrade Harman pointed out, "finally liquidated the revolution of 1917 in town and country".

Shortly before the 'Left' turn, in July, 1928, Bukharin expressed his fears to Kamenev, saying "Stalin's line is ruinous for the whole revolution. It can make us collapse... The differences between us and Stalin are many times more serious than all our former differences with you. Rykov, Tomsky, and I agree on formulating the situation thus: 'It would be better if Zinoviev and Kamenev were in the Politburo instead of Stalin." Kamenev later said, during the same conversation, "Stalin knows only one method... to plant a knife in your back." By 1929, the Right Opposition had been defeated and Bukharin expelled from the party .

In forcing the collectivisation of the Soviet Union, Stalin caused a great deal of pain and suffering to the peasants. By the mid-1930's, most of the agricultural land in the USSR had been collectivised, with some twenty-five million individual farms replaced with a quarter of a million collective farms. In 1932 to 1933, seven million peasants died in a great famine caused by the policy, proving the fact that this was not an effort to improve the food situation in the USSR, but for the bureaucracy to take full control over the economy. Comrade V. Shubkin summed the situation up in 1988: "Stalin decided to eliminate the NEP prematurely, using purely administrative measures and direct compulsion; this led, speaking mildly, to pitiable results. Agricultural production was disrupted, in a number of districts of the country famine began." Comrade Danilov, a Soviet historian, stated in 1987 that "The use of methods alien to socialism not only contradicted its objectives but also led to their distortion... The treatment of the cooperative of peasant households not as an independent objective of the socialist reconstruction of society, the achievement of which had its own internal logic and its own criteria of success and failure, but as a means of solving other problems, was a violation in principle of Lenin's cooperative plan and involved other distortions."

The collectivisation of the peasants coincided with the establishment of the first Five Year Plan, which aimed at industrialising the USSR and began in 1928. The Five Year Plan was a success, but came at the expense of even greater curtailments of worker's rights. Mass arrests, imprisonments and executions began in the 1930's. Although all serious opposition had been removed, the bureaucracy continued to eliminate its enemies. The surviving Marxists in the party, including Sergei Kirov and Ryutin, continued to speak against Stalin, and while these comrades survived, the bureaucracy still was not completely secure. Kirov was assassinated in 1934, and evidence does point to Stalin's involvement in the crime. The bureaucracy used Kirov's death to justify a giant purge that saw many of the last Marxists wiped out. In 1936, Kamenev, Bukharin, Yagoda, Rykov and Zinoviev were executed after ridiculous show trials, accusing them of a variety of crimes, such as sabotage, espionage and taking part in Trotskyist conspiracies. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a close friend of Stalin's, committed suicide on, what is now believed to be Stalin's orders, following the execution of Ordzhonikidze's brother.

In his 1956 speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev pointed out the fact that the vast majority of people killed in the purge in the 30's were communists, citing the example of the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party in 1934, to which 139 members of the Central Committee attended. By 1938, 70% of the Central Committee comrades who had attended the Seventeenth Congress, 98 comrades in total, had been arrested and shot, with another 1108 delegates to the 17th Congress (out of 1966) also having been arrested by that time. In total, its is not certain how many people perished in the purges from 1936 to 1940, but the number is somewhere between 100 000 and 7 million, depending on who you believe- KGB records or the bourgeois media, but what is certain is that some hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, died. According to Comrade Vashti Kenway of Socialist Alternative, "80% of the original Bolsheviks from the 1917 revolution were liquidated by 1934."

As early as 1928, the revolution had been destroyed, with the taking of power by the Tsarist-inherited bureaucracy. Without a strong working class, the bureaucracy had managed to take power without even having to enter into a struggle with the workers to do so. By 1940, the last of the original Bolshevik leaders and their supporters had been eliminated, leaving no opposition to the rule of Stalin and the bureaucracy. By the time the working class had recovered, well after the Great Patriotic War, in which over 20 million Soviet citizens had died, the Stalinists were quite prepared to use military force to repress them when they rose against Stalinism and in favour os socialism. The first time was in 1953, when, according to Comrade Novack, "The East German working class almost in its entirety- certainly all the energetic elements in it- set out to get rid of the hated Stalinist regime. The regime had no strength at all. It was merely a group of frightened bureaucrats, as shown by its panicky reactions. It couldn't even rely on its own police forces. What saved the regime? Was it American imperialism? No. Was it the lack of strength within the East German workers? No. They had the forces to get rid of the regime. The sole objective factor which prevented the political revolution of the East German workers from being victorious was the presence of the occupying forces of the Kremlin."

This willingness to suppress the working class was again demonstrated in Budapest in the 50's, Cherkassk in 1962 and Prague in 1968. Yet, when uprisings occurred in favour of capitalism in the 1980's, the Stalinist bureaucracies seemed to mysteriously vanish, putting up no resistance whatsoever to the insurgencies. To the contrary, the Stalinist bureaucracies actually helped overthrow Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, disbanded the last socialist institutions in Eastern Europe, and spearheaded the privatisation campaigns of the 90's, transforming from Stalinist bureaucratic ruling elite to Capitalist corporate ruling elite almost overnight.

A few months before the 1953 East German uprising, in March, Stalin died. "The new Russian leadership publicly admitted that enormous "mistakes" had been made. For the first three years it heaped the blame for these on (Stalin?s police chief) Beria (who was executed) and a "gang of anti-socialist spies" who had "infiltrated" the state machine. But then in 1956 Khrushchev denounced Stalin himself (although in secret) at the 20th Congress of the CPSU, and in 1962 made part of the denunciation public by removing Stalin's body from the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow."[*2]

It was widely believed that these sudden shifts would bring forth socialist reforms. The uprisings in Eastern Europe were certainly calling for such reforms. A likely explanation for the reforms is that the economy Khrushchev inherited from Stalin was showing more and more signs of imminent crisis, and that without reforms, there was a very real threat of revolution. The bureaucracy's aim was to industrialise the USSR by raising the level of the productivity of labour, the agricultural productivity of which in 1953 had not even reached a fifth of that of the United States and industrial productivity in 1956 half of that of the US. It was going about achieving this task, up til now, through coercion, with little interest in raising the standards of living, which served only to increase the resistance of the people, however silent that resistance may have been. With the threat of the productivity rate declining, it is likely that the bureaucracy realised that productivity depended on the masses' standard of living, and as such, that standard was raised.

What followed was a genuine relaxation of the terror inflicted by the bureaucracy on the working class. Purges were eliminated and most labour camps were shut down. It also was an effort to normalise the rule of the bureaucracy. In Stalin's time, even the privileged bureaucracy had not been safe from the terror. Between 1938 and 1940, 24% of the technical specialists in the bureaucracy had been executed or imprisoned. However, these reforms were limited. The KGB continued to be a major force in the USSR, and the workers still had no way to exercise any form of collective power.

The USSR continued to remain an obstacle to the world revolution. The USSR had maintained a firm grip on the global communist movement, consistently preventing the communist parties of the world from taking a leading role in the struggle against capitalism in their countries. The Yugoslavian and Albanian communist parties succeeded in taking power independently of the USSR after World War II, and were followed later by China, Cuba and Vietnam. In China, the communist party emerged victorious despite Moscow, which almost shipwrecked the Chinese CP. Yugoslavia split with Moscow in 1948 following Stalin's attempts to impose policies that would have benefited the USSR's capital accumulation at Yugoslavia's expense. The People's Republic of China split twelve years later when the USSR concentrated all of its investments on itself in an effort to catch up with the USA, instead of helping the PRC develop new industries. Even when the USSR's allies in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea were being steadily defeated by the Americans, the USSR turned its back to them. What this represented was the fact that "the international Communist monolith has crumbled", as Tony Cliff put it.

Khrushchev was deposed by the Politburo in 1964, as his reforms had produced no economic results and had only succeeded in disturbing a good part of the bureaucracy. Leonid Brezhnev succeeded him by manipulating the unease to his advantage, using bureaucrats tired of all the changes to put him into power. Brezhnev rewarded the bureaucrats who had helped him into power by consolidating their positions in the bureaucracy. The Brezhnev era was one of extreme "bureaucratic stability, in which only death removed many top bureaucrats from office. When Stalin died in 1953 the average age of politbureau members was 55 and of Central Committee secretaries 52; by the time of Brezhnev?s death the average had risen to 70 and 67."[*3]

In the 1970?s, the economy began to slow down. The result of having so many aging bureaucrats in head office was that the bureaucracy was almost completely unwilling to tackle this problem. Nikolai Ryzhkov reported to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986 "Both in the centre and the localities many leaders continued to act by outdated methods and proved unprepared for work in the new conditions. Discipline and order deteriorated to an intolerable level. There was a fall in exactingness and responsibility. The vicious practice of downward revision of plans became widespread."

The bureaucracy's pride for its achievements under Stalin and Khrushchev gave way to cynicism under Brezhnev. Cynicism led to heavy corruption. In Brezhnev's own family, his daughter was suspected of involvement in a scandal concerning stolen diamonds and his brother-in-law, the deputy head of the KGB, in covering up for her [*4]. The national leaderships of the Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian and Armenian Soviet Socialist Republics were accused after Brezhnev?s death of covering up for criminal activities. This cynicism was matched by mass alienation. Drunkenness rose to record levels and the productivity level remained only 55% of that of the USA.

Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov. Andropov, as the former secret police head, was aware of the attitude of the masses and managed before he died, after only 14 months in office, to shift the balance of power somewhat. The CPSU appointed another Brezhnevite, Chernenko, to the post of General-Secretary to reverse Andropov's few reforms, but he died after 13 months in office. He was replaced by Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev immediately set out a wave of reforms, called perestroika, calling for a "peaceful revolution", and the removal of corrupt local leaders and inefficient managers. Reform-minded economists were encouraged to enter industry and agriculture. The aim of perestroika, as Comrade Doug Lorimer wrote, "was to overcome the structural crisis caused by bureaucratically centralised planning by replacing 'command' system with an NEP-type policy of limited privatisation and state-regulated market mechanisms."

This economic reform was followed by political reform. Some exiled dissidents were allowed back to the USSR, there was renewed criticism of Stalin, Bolshevik leaders executed under Stalin, such as Bukharin, were rehabilitated and independent discussion groups were tolerated. The electoral system was reformed, with more than one candidate allowed in many areas. There was talk of allowing factory managers to be elected directly by the workers. The working class needed time to properly re-enter the Soviet political process, and perestoika's weakening of the totalitarian control of the bureaucracy were the first steps towards this. The bureaucracy realised this, and backtracks began to be made.

In 1987, when Boris Yeltsin, who had been appointed head of the Moscow party, delivered a speech attacking those who were obstructing perestroika, and was subsequently sacked, after the Moscow party voted unanimously to pass a resolution "qualifying his statement as politically wrong". Gorbachev himself attacked Yeltsin, claiming that he had "adopted high-sounding statements and promises from the very beginning which were largely nourished by his inordinate ambition and fondness for staying in the limelight". Yeltsin, instead of defending himself, delivered a confession stating that "I must say that I cannot refute this criticism ... I am very guilty before the Moscow City Party organisation, I am very guilty before the City Party Committee, before the Bureau and, of course, before Mikhail Gorbachev whose prestige is so high in our organisation, in our country and throughout the world." ?A confession straight out of the Stalin era.

At an event marking the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev delivered a speech not calling for a speed up in perestroika, but instead warning of the "dangers" of "going too fast". This was not an accident. Gorbachev?s reforms rested completely on the CPSU, which was completely controlled by the bureaucracy with only a handful of Marxists in it, to carry out the reforms. To hold the CPSU together, Gorbachev had to compromise with the bureaucracy, namely by not challenging its privileges. However, the bureaucracy, fearing a split in its rank that may have allowed the workers to form organisations independent to it, and the inevitable dissent that would come about as a result of worker's self-organisation, attempted to wheel back perestroika. Lorimer pointed out that perestroika had been "implemented in a political context in which the Soviet working class did not hold political power and its socialist consciousness had been seriously eroded by six decades of bureaucratic rule."

Again, Lorimer writes; "the disintegration of the "command" economy accelerated the social crisis in the Soviet Union at a more rapid pace than the limited political reforms allowed the working class to recover allowed the working class to recover from the experience of Stalinism. As the crisis deepened, decisive sections of the bureaucracy, recognising that there could be no return to the old "command" system, opted for a course towards the only alternative that would allow them to preserve their privileges?the restoration of capitalism with themselves as the new capitalists owners."

Throughout the enter process of perestroika, Gorbachev's leadership depended on the Communist Party, instead of the independent self-organisation of the Soviet masses. This was Gorbachev's major mistake. When the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe began to collapse and with the emergence of pro-capitalist politicians there, almost all of them former Stalinist bureaucrats, many bureaucrats in the USSR, mostly "administrators of the central ministries, planning ministries and big state trusts, joined the lower-level administrators, technical functionaries and the intellectual elite that formed the social base of the 'democrats' led by Boris Yeltsin, in opting for capitalist restoration." They saw this as the only way to "secure their material privileges in the face of the disintegrating "command" system. [*5]

In August 1991, Gorbachev was deposed in a coup. A group of eight men formed the Emergency Committee. In an interview with Comrade Renfrey Clarke for Green Left Weekly, Comrade Andrei Kolganov, a former member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, stated that he thought "the immediate factor which convinced the conspirators to oust Gorbachev and seize power was the danger to their own authority posed by the forthcoming signing of the Union agreement, and the associated prospect of elections for new all-Union organs of power and for the post of resident of the USSR. They naturally felt that under those circumstances they couldn?t retain their posts." The Emergency Committee did not wish to return the USSR to the old command system. To the contrary, they didn't even mention socialism and declared it would "support private enterprise, granting it necessary opportunities for the development of production and services. Its aims were to ensure that the spoils of privatising state property would go straight to the central bureaucracy. Yeltsin's group, however, wanted these spoils to go to bureaucrats controlling the republican and municipal apparatuses as well as the technical and intellectual elites.

Yeltsin launched a counter-coup. The Emergency Committee sent troops to arrest him, but, unlike Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968, the troops refused to when they encountered limited resistance from armed supporters of Yeltsin. The character of Soviet society had changed too much in the perestroika period for a military repression, and, on top of that, the military had never played an independent political role and never saw itself as being able to decide the fate of the people. The Soviet masses failed to mobilise against the coup as they saw that neither the Emergency Committee not the Yeltsinites had much to offer them, although in October 1998, about 37 million protested against the Yeltsin regime across Russia [*8]. The bureaucracy itself was extremely divided over the coup, with most adopting a "wait-and-see" position. The Emergency Committee crumbled without the military?s support. Yeltsin used the opportunity to dissolve the CPSU and install himself as the Russian leader. Ukraine broke away from the USSR in December 1991 and a week later, the Byelorussian leader, Shushkevich, Kravchuk of Ukraine and Yeltsin met in Byelorussia to dissolve the USSR.

The present regimes in the USSR are not all that different from those of the former Soviet bloc. The same bureaucratic elite continues to dominate and has abandoned the defence of socialist property forms in favour of open capitalist restoration. This represents a new turn in the counter-revolution that began in the 1920's, as the bureaucracy has now almost completely succeeded in the "usurpation of the political power of the Soviet working class." The ruling elites have been met with resistance, and they understand that in order to restore capitalism they have to "recreate highly centralised, authoritarian regimes", as "capitalist restoration and popular democracy are fundamentally incompatible". Polish president Lech Walesa of Poland was quoted in the September 18 1991 edition of Wall Street Journal as saying "Very often I have doubts whether evolution from the communist system is possible... [perhaps Poland needs] tough, strong, revolutionary methods ?and fear?to orient the economy". Vladimir Putin in Russia certainly has been cracking down hard on civil liberties.

The destruction of the USSR has visible results.

-In 2004, in Moldova, 40% of young people were living in poverty.
-About half a million young people in Eastern Europe aged between five and fourteen in 1989 are no longer alive according to UNICEF, in Russia, Belarus and Lithuania.
-Suicides of men aged 15 to 24 have doubled between 1990 and 2000.
-In Russia, an estimated 3 out of every 4 people grow some of their own food to survive.
-Russian female life expectancy dropped from 74.5 to 72.8 years, male life expectancy dropped from 64.2 years in 1989 to 59.8 in 1999.
-The Georgian average life expectancy dropped from 72.2 years in 1989 to 64.2 years in 1999.
The increase from 1990 to 1999 in the percentage of people living on less than $1 a day was greater in the former Soviet bloc than anywhere else in the world and the number of people living in poverty in the former Soviet Union rose from 14 million in 1989 to 147 million even before the 1998 crash of the rouble [*6].
-In 1990, Ukraine was ranked in the top ten countries in industrialisation and production. But by 1999, it had sunk to 151st in the world for economic production in the world, the standard of living had fallen by ten times[*9] and the unemployment rate close to 40% in 2001 [*10].
-It is estimated that the workers of Russia were owed back $4 billion worth of wages in 1998. [*7]
-In Poland, 5 million people, or one quarter of the 2001 Polish population, were unemployed in 2002 [11].
-In Bulgaria, only 8% of people polled in 2003 reported being satisfied with their standards of living [12].
-Russian Labour Minister Alexander Prochinok admitted in 2003 that it?s a fact that 36 million Russians now cannot afford to eat every day. [13]. In 2003, an estimated 50 000 Russian women were forced into prostitution every year [14] and about 70% of the Russian population lived under the poverty line [15].

The counter-revolution that began in 1928 is close to completion. Popular opinion is still firmly in favour of communism, however distorted, with opinion polls showing a rise in nostalgia for the USSR, new statues being erected of Soviet leaders such as Brezhnev and Stalin and the government being forced to adopt more things reminiscent of Soviet days, such as the Soviet national anthem, the red star as the military?s symbol and Victory Day as a national celebration. However, the Russian communists continue to pose no real alternative in the polls, and Putin, however unpopular he may be, remains in power with increasingly authoritarian powers. Belarus is making steps back towards a Soviet style system, definitely against the west and against the breakup of the USSR, but not socialist. President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus said earlier this month, on the 23rd, that there had been no reasons for the USSR to disintegrate, and that Shushkevich, Kravchuk and Yeltsin should have been arrested by the army while they were signing the documents for the break-up of the USSR in Belarus. The breakup of the USSR is a tragedy for the Eastern European, Soviet and Mongolian people, with a number of dictatorships having risen in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

[RebelDog]

It was a long read but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Its a good marxist analysis. Why post it if you think its flawed? I liked it.

[RevolutionaryMarxist]

Very Well Written, and a Excellent sum of a long history and analysis in such a short space.

[stevensen]

where is the marxist analysis in this article? i think the reasons for the collapse of the union is far too complex to be addressed in a single article. for the record the statistics of the republics post the union are informative.