[Militant International Review, No 3, Autumn 1970, p. 34-47]
Every totalitarian regime is by its very nature a regime of crisis, an expression of class deadlock. The Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia, which overturned all the political rights won by the revolution, owed its power after the betrayal of the revolution in the West, to the existence of objective barriers which stood in the way of the realisation of the workers‘ internationalist aims – the isolation of the workers state, and the heritage of cultural backwardness. Despite the dead weight of bureaucratism, the planned economy achieved historically unprecedented advances. But every social and economic advance further intensified the incompatibility of Russia’s political deformations – a ghastly relic of the class oppression of the past – with its social basis, which remains the for Mankind’s future. Every step forward further undermines the foundations of Stalinism and plunges it deeper into crisis. The experience of the last years clearly underlines this.
The 1964 Coup
Brezhnev and Kosygin were brought to power in the coup of October 1964, against a background of emergency. With the seven-year plan (1959-65) drawing to a close, the temporary benefits of Khrushchev’s decentralisation policy had long since been offset by its inherent contradictions. The growing complexity of the economy came more and more into conflict with bureaucratic structure. The rise in the industrial productivity of labour was inexorably slowing down (from 6.5% p.a. in 1956-60 to 4.6% p.a. in 1961-65), and although in comparison with capitalist growth this figure is still consistently superior, productivity remained only „40-50%“ of that of the USA. Between 30% and 50% of production was wasted. 1,600 million roubles worth of productive plant lay idle in the RSFSR alone. Half of all journeys were performed by empty lorries. Sometimes as many as thirty officials’ signatures were required to simple rationalisation procedures, and there were countless instances of delays of three, five or eight years in effecting such plans. Many industrial indices fell well short of target, and agricultural output rose by only 14% in seven years. Continued vacillation in economic and social policy, and the cracking open of the international monolith (in particular, the split with China) had discredited the authority of the CPSU, strikes and local uprisings were breaking out, and the process of disillusion among the youth had begun.*
The new „collective leadership“ hoped to reverse the slide into disaster by adopting reforms that would overcome all the chaos and incompetence inevitably associated with bureaucratism without actual relinquishing any part of the ruling caste’s power and privileges. They intended to achieve this by slightly shifting the emphasis from the state officialdom to the managerial section of the bureaucracy. At consecutive Plenums of the Central Committee and at the 23rd Congress of the CPSU (held in March, 1966), decrees were issued bringing industry under the Liberman system, where managers were to be rewarded according to the profitability of their enterprises. Greater emphasis was to be placed on the production of consumer goods, and glittering promises were made of “a western standard of living by 1970″. More was to be spent on agriculture within the current five-year plan (1966-70) than in the previous twenty years in a massive effort to raise the countryside above the cultural level of the nineteenth century. The emergence of this modest team of efficient faceless technocrats aroused the hopes of the population.
The New Crisis
Today those hopes lie in ashes. Halfway through the final year of the plan, the 24th Party Congress (due to be held in March 1970) has been postponed for at least a year. Fear of public scrutiny forced Stalin in his day to hold no Congress at all between 1939 and 1952, and Mao between 1957 and 1969, but so discredited has the regime become that today it dare not temporise without incurring the anger of the masses. A major factor in its decision to delay the Congress is uncertainty on the principles underlying the new Plan, in the light of the performance of the current one.
Agricultural productivity was to have grown by 40-45 % over the last five years, but today after severe hurricanes and drought the agricultural crisis is worse than before. The 1968 grain harvest was 5½ million tons short of the 1966 record, and in 1969 grain output fell by 3.2% instead of rising by 6.1% as laid down in the plan. This year a disastrous grain harvest is expected, in some regions reaching only 50% of target. Livestock reserves have actually fallen over the last five years, owing partly to the shortage of feed. Brezhnev has admitted to the Central Committee that “farm supplies are falling far behind the growing needs of the population … The situation in grain production still does not satisfy us. The amount of vegetables and fruit being grown is inadequate. As we all know, the demand of the population for livestock produce, especially meat, is not being satisfied by far”. Where Stalin rejected the policy of gradually raising the cultural level of the peasantry and collectivisation by example, and instead indulged in the lunatic adventure of collectivisation at bayonet point his successors, faced with an emergency, adopted long term measures that would take at least a generation to achieve results – and then failed to implement them. The consequence is that with more than 30% of the population working on the land, there is still a chronic food shortage, while in USA „surplus“ food produced by 5% or 6% of the population is destroyed. The Soviet economy pays heavily for agricultural backwardness: every year millions of workers and students are sent into the fields, the prices of food materials stay high, and precious foreign exchange is consumed in importing the balance.
The performance of industry is also disappointing. It is true that if we take the figures for 1968 (the last available), industrial output has risen by 41% since 1964 – compared 25% in USA and 11% in Britain. The national income (net material product) by 34%, which would at first sight look less than the American figure of 38% until one takes into the rate of inflation in the USA – at constant market prices the figure is 22%. Thus the planned economy continues to assert its superiority over capitalist anarchy. But if we examine the dense bureaucratic resistance it has to come up against, we can appreciate the tremendous potential speed of development that could be realised on the basis of workers‘ management.
Wastage and Corruption
We predicted in „Bureaucratism or Workers‘ Power“ that as with every other twist and turn in the past, for a year or two the new (Liebermanist) system will undoubtedly correct certain anomalies and produce impressive statistics. But, again as at every time in the past, initial progress will come to an end as new anomalies are created. As the managers get to know all the loopholes, a spate of swindling corruption will result, mixed this time with the bungling associated with the clumsy multiplicity of supervisory bodies that resurrected from the era of centralised ministerial control.“ This prediction is borne out. The twin evils of wastage and pilfering have not been checked. The desperate attempt by the central bureaucracy to bribe and spur the lesser parasites by combining certain monolithic features with liberal concessions to managers has given them the worst of both worlds. The rate of growth of labour productivity – the crucial index of social advance – has not reached its target. The production of consumer goods is not keeping pace with demand, and contrary to plan imports have risen from Eastern Europe.
In December 1969, Brezhnev sent an urgent letter to the major factories and collective farms, citing the disastrous experience of the Tyumen natural gas on which all the industry of the Urals depends. In 1965 the Government had ordered the building of a compressor station to maintain the level of underground pressure, which was seriously diminishing after years of exploitation. Nearly five years later, work had not started, and the station will now be useless because of the continued reduction in pressure. This deals the key Urals complex a body blow. In the oil and gas industries, a shortage of tubes and lorries is holding back the construction of pipelines, so that for the first time the USSR and Eastern Europe are to import oil from Iran and Algeria. A Soviet press report criticising every aspect of the oil industry significantly complained that “rigs are sited in spots to earn a quick drilling bonus regardless of the likelihood of striking oil“. In March 1969, a major overhaul of the financial credit system was announced, reversing the tendency to decentralise investment, and in June a decree halving the number of sites started in 1970 referred to „chronic delays and wastage“ in the construction industry. A new steelworks was built in April 1969, in Cherepovets, 300 miles north of Moscow, which will depend on ore and coal to be supplied by an overland route stretching 2,000 and 1,000 miles respectively.
The monumental blunders of centralised bureaucratism have been accompanied by the outright fiddling always arising from decentralised bureaucratism. In July 1970, a full-scale investigation was announced into “gross financial abuses“ by the management of a bulldozer plant at Chelyabinsk in Urals, which had inflated its output figures by nearly £1 million. Other plants were also said to be implicated. The Chairman of the State Bank, the Head of the Central Statistical Bureau, and the Minister of Construction, Highway and Communal Machine-Building, were all publicly reprimanded for such “irregularities” in their departments.
Already scapegoats are being sought. The Times reported that the reforms were “working well“ but that they were „suffering mainly from the failings of individual persons who are to be dealt with partly under the new public discipline campaign“. But Stalinism inevitably encourages the of “failings of individual persons“, and the retreat to a new „public discipline campaign“ is a confession that the reforms have failed to inject new life into the anachronistic hierarchy. In 1970, fifty three years after the socialist revolution, such is public morale that failures are blamed on “absenteeism alcoholism“, the police and judiciary are been instructed to „deal more severely with people who refuse to work“ and to „take a more serious view of cases of bribery which before them“, and to remove „loafers“ and other „violations of the social order“. The law courts are increasingly becoming concerned with labour problems, and a new labour code threatens to deprive unsatisfactory workers of housing and holiday services. As the campaign gathers momentum, the KGB has given one of the dreaded names it bore under Stalin – the MVD – and the druzhinniki (voluntary militia) have been brought back from Party to police control, as under Stalin.
The international authority of the Soviet regime has further deteriorated. Relations with China have sunk to the level of bitter and bloody clashes around the common frontier, whereas for Marxists and internationalists the very existence of national boundaries is a relic of imperialism. No clearer proof could be found than these events of the nationalist parochialism of both the Russian and the Chinese Stalinists. Even more catastrophic was the invasion of Czechoslovakia – an event which exposed the true basis of the new, supposedly liberal“ regime, just decisively as the massacre of the Hungarian political revolution in 1956 exposed the superficiality of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. The significant difference is that Stalinism’s hold is now so unstable and precarious that the intervention needed at a much earlier stage. Even the mild reforms of the Czechoslovak Gomulkas and Liebermans threatened to upset the delicate equilibrium, and ignite the powder-keg of criticism in the USSR. This explains the insistence of Shelest, the Ukrainian Party leader, on firm action as a warning to dissident elements at home. Even the Soviet programme for the “integration“ of the economies of Eastern on an authoritarian basis centred in Moscow has come under persistent opposition from Czechoslovak, Hungarian and Polish bureaucracies that a meeting of Communist Parties of the COMECON bloc had to be postponed several times.
The Regime at the Crossroads
Once again the ruling faction of the bureaucracy is gripped in deadlock. One bloc centred around Shelepin (once head of the KGB, in control of the trade unions), Suslov (the hack theoretician left over from Stalin’s time), Mazurov (the regime’s rising star) is reported to have issued a document demanding a halt to the reforms. The growing list of uncompleted projects, the critical shortages, the unusable products, the delays, the corruption, and the wastage, have put the whole new line in jeopardy. A clear symptom of the bureaucracy’s indecision and paralysis of will is the ambivalent attitude to its own traditions. On the one hand, the 1968 edition of History of the CPSU contained only four references to Stalin (three of them unfavourable); on the other, Professor Kopelev was expelled from the CP for warning in an Austrian CP journal that influential pressure was at work to gain rehabilitation of Stalin, a recent war film included a sympathetic portrayal of the wise “Generalissimo“, and Trotsky’s ideas were attacked by name in novel.
The constant zig-zags in economic policy; the repeated re-falsification of history; the sharp lurches in general policy against „the personality cult”, then against „voluntarism and subjectivism“, and no doubt shortly against „petty-bourgeois adventurism“ or some such label; the crescendo of personal abuse between various national Stalinist leaders; the growth of a multiplicity of „national roads“ to socialism; the bloody crimes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia; the tendency towards economic and social stagnation; the blatant careerism and sycophancy at every levels; the propagandists‘ cheap opportunism in playing on every backward prejudice and soiling the banner of Marxism and the October Revolution; all these factors have tarnished the leaders‘ image in the eyes of the masses. And wherever direct channels of popular expression are blocked, the masses‘ aspirations become refracted through the prism of literature. That is why relations between the ruling clique and the writers have always been a crucial issue.
After 1956, Khrushchev deliberately consolidated his position against those diehard Stalinists who by their unsubtle and provocative attitude threatened the survival of the whole caste, by allowing the publication of a certain amount of critical literature. An important example is the novel „One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich“ by Solzhenitsyn, which was based on his experiences in a labour camp from 1945 to 1956. However, the regime gingerly walked the tightrope between complete licence – which could have opened the floodgates to mass discussion and an end to totalitarianism – and crude repression – which would push influential unofficial voices into direct opposition. The new leadership, however, hoped to combine reform with repression. In the context of economic reforms which would raise the masses‘ material welfare, a firm policy towards a recalcitrant minority of intellectuals might for a time be feasible. Kuznetsov (the émigré writer who, incidentally, betrayed some leading writers to the police in order to obtain permission to travel abroad) described literary policy as follows: „If Stalin is on top, then praise Stalin. If they order people to plant maize, then write about maize. If they decide to expose Stalin’s crimes, then expose Stalin. And when the stop criticising, you stop too.“ Against the reality of economic failures, and the growing appetite of the masses for control over the officialdom, this policy was doomed. From the individual plea for artistic freedom, the embryo of a mass opposition has been formed, fighting for a free press, the right of association and demonstration, the implementation of all the rights nominally granted in Stalin’s 1936 Constitution – a programme which will lead directly to the demand for a return to workers‘ democracy.
The events listed below demonstrate that the persecution of the opposition in today’s conditions only accelerated its growth. The leadership has lost the allegiance of a whole stratum of intellectuals, students, writers, scientists. Sections of the bureaucracy itself have been into the wake of the movement – a phenomenon that marked every anti-Stalinist struggle from Hungary to Yugoslavia. But the ominous meaning of these events is only understood too well by the regime: in Russia today as in the dying years of Tsarism, as in Hungary in 1956, as in France in 1968, as the eve of every revolution in history, behind the revolt of the intelligentsia there lurks the spectre of the working class. Discontent among the authorities‘ hired thinkers is the first articulation of the groundswell in society, the expression of the stifled subterranean undercurrents of criticism among the masses.
The following diary shows the growth of the opposition.
The Growth of the Opposition
January, 1967 – number of young writers (Ginzburg, Galanskov, Debrovolsky their typist Lashkova) were arrested for producing the underground publication „Phoenix 66“, which protested at imprisonment of Sinyavsky and Daniel for publishing works in the West. These arrests prompted a public demonstration in Moscow, at which three young intellectuals (Bukovsky, Delanev and Kusherov) were themselves arrested.
May, 1967 – The Congress of the Writers‘ Union was boycotted by the celebrated writers Yevtushenko and Voznesensky and even Ehrenburg in protest at the sentences of Sinyavsky and Daniel. Solzhenitsyn was forbidden to attend even as an observer, but nevertheless he managed to circulate an open letter to delegates, attacking the Union’s leader for complicity in the „medieval anachronism“ of censorship, and for neglecting in the past to defend the six hundred innocent writers who fell victim to Stalin’s purges. More than eighty leading writers publicly associated themselves with his letter. „Komsomolskaya Pravda“, the official daily paper of the Communist Youth published an attack on the theatre censorship.
September 1967 – Bukovsky and the other two appeared at a secret trial. The transcript was leaked out by Pavel Litvinov, a mathematician and grandson of the late Soviet Foreign Minister. Bukovsky had twice been incarcerated in a mental hospital – a ghoulish penalty favoured by the KGB because it obviates the need for a trial. In 1962 he had been thus punished for publishing a clandestine journal, and again in 1965 for organising a demonstration against Sinyavsky and Daniel’s arrest. At this trial, which was held months after his arrest, he conducted a spirited defence, based on the Soviet Constitution nominally guarantees Soviet citizens „the right of street processions and demonstrations“ and secures them their rights by „making available to workers and their organisations printing facilities, supplies of paper, public and streets“ (Clause 125). The judge incessantly interrupted his speech and despite the illegality of his arrest he was sentenced to three years‘ imprisonment.
November, 1967 – The first of a series of trials held in Leningrad, the Ukraine, Sverdlovsk, Tomsk and Irkutsk, of members of an organisation which, although it apparently had some religious overtones, campaigned above all for a „Socialist republic with a freely elected President and Parliament“. At this and subsequent trials in March April 1968, defendants were imprisoned for up to fifteen years.
In the Ukraine there was also the trial of Chornovil, an official of the Komsomol (YCL), for his conduct at the time of the trials of Ukrainian nationalists in Spring 1966. Campaigners against the policy of forced Russification were imprisoned for up to six years, and protest demonstrations were held in Kiev and Lvov. Chornovil had refused to testify against a lecturer, and had written a 20,000-word report of the proceedings. At his own trial, he, like Bukovsky, quoted the Constitution in his own defence, and condemned the practices of the KGB in tapping telephones, opening mail, searching homes, and holding secret trials. He was imprisoned for eighteen months.
December, 1967 – Nearly a year after the arrest of Ginzburg and the others, forty four people including Litvinov and Daniel’s wife signed a petition that their trial be held in public. More than one hundred people, including the mathematician Yesenin-Volpin (son of the popular poet) issued a public protest at the delay in bringing them to trial. 180 intellectuals addressed an appeal to the Supreme Soviet for freedom of Press. Litvinov defiantly sent abroad the transcript of Bukovsky’s defence speech, together with a record of the sinister warnings made to him in private conversation by a KGB official.
January, 1968 – After a year of KGB pressure to extract false confessions Ginzburg and his associates were at last brought to trial. It was held in secret. Relatives of accused courageously passed details of the trial to foreign correspondents at a press conference. Debrovolsky, a convert to Christianity who had been confined in a mental institution and had given way to police pressure, testified against the others, accusing them of contact with the reactionary NTS. In an „appeal to world public opinion“, Litvinov and Mrs. Daniel complained that fake evidence was presented and that evidence was suppressed showing that Debrovolsky a police provocateur. They said that the courtroom was filled with KGB men and druzhinniki, who „shouted, jeered, and insulted the accused and witnesses“. The trial was „in violation of the most important principles of Soviet law … a stain the of our State … no better than the celebrated trials of the 1930s which involved us in so much shame and so much blood that we have still not recovered from them“. All the defendants were imprisoned, and Ginzburg who had in and out of prison since 1960 was sentenced to seven years‘ hard labour. Forty three people signed a protest at the secrecy of the trial, including the writers Aksyonov and Akhmadulina and the scientists Weissberg and Shafarevich, and also Major-General Grigorenko. The latter was formerly at the Frunze Military Academy, and had been dismissed in 1961 for criticising the censorship, courageously opposed to the regime, and in 1964 was incarcerated in a mental hospital for two years. Fifty two more writers protested at the sentences. Litvinov was dismissed from his job.
February, 1968 – A leaflet signed by Litvinov, Grigorenko, Mrs. Daniel and the historian Yakir (son of the famous General who was executed in 1940) was distributed at the international conference of Communist Parties. Ninety nine mathematicians published a protest at the confinement of Yesenin-Volpin in a mental hospital. Twenty two more writers, including the veteran Paustovsky, added their names to the protest at the sentences on Ginzburg and Galanskov.
March, 1968 – Six members of Communist Party were expelled, including Ginzburg’s lawyer and Professor Kopelev (see above).
April, 1968 – There were more than twenty expulsions from the CP in Moscow, Leningrad and Akademgorod. Many people were expelled from the Artists‘ Union – and thus deprived of their livelihood – and the Moscow branch of the Writers‘ Union in a purge of „voluntary defenders of renegades“ investigated twenty two of their members.
May, 1968 – 800 Crimean Tartars arrived in Moscow to demand an inquiry into the plight of their nationality, but were arrested and transported out of the capital. In May, 1944, the entire Crimean Tartar community had been branded with the accusation of collaboration with the Nazis and deported in closed cattle-trucks, in the heat of summer, to Central Asia. Their republic was abolished, their houses demolished, their cemeteries ploughed up, and all their books destroyed: According to their own estimates, 46% of them died of thirst or suffocation on the journey, according to official statistics „only 22%” perished. After the denunciation of Stalin in 1956 they began to agitate for rehabilitation, a demand only finally granted in September, 1967. At that time there were 637,000 Tartars in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and some in Tajikistan. Their rehabilitation followed that of the 750,000 Kalmucks, Chechens, Ingushi, and Karachais (Caucasian nationalities) and the 600,000 members of the Volga German community. When 6,000 Tartars claimed their rights by going to their former homeland in the Crimea, only two families and three bachelors were permitted to settle there. The campaign was renewed. On Lenin’s birthday in April, 1968, a demonstration was held near Tashkent commemorating his assistance in founding the Crimean Tartar republic after the revolution. The demonstration was dispersed by police troops, and there were several arrests. The deputation arrested in Moscow was accused of „anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda“. When General Grigorenko appeared as a defence witness at their trial some months later, was was himself arrested, and this prompted further demonstrations and arrests. Similar demonstrations held by the Ingushi and Meshkhetian peoples.
June, 1968 Yahimovich, Chairman of a Latvian collective farm, wrote to the Central Committee demanding an amnesty for all political prisoners. He was instantly dismissed, despite the fact that he had recently been publicly praised for his work in the press, and expelled from the CP.
July, 1968 – Grigorenko, Yahimovich, the writer Kosterin, and two others delivered a letter to the Czechoslovak Embassy in Moscow supporting the reforms in Czechoslovakia and warning of the danger of invasion. The “Chronicle of Current Events”, a bi-monthly underground journal, began regular publication. Like similar unofficial publications, with even stencils and duplicators inaccessible to individuals, it was produced by “samizdat“ (self-publication), whereby a chain of supporters laboriously types out a few carbon copies and passes them on to friends who make new copies, and so on until circulation reaches into the thousands – mainly of students and intellectuals at present.
It was at this time that another method of criticism came under attack: what the Ministry of Culture condemned as „the artificial modernisation of classical plays, in which the criticism of social defects is re-directed at our society“. In one production of a Molière play, the actors in an unscripted passage fall on their knees before a waxen image of the King imploring him for permission to continue the performance. „We will not even try to guess“, commented the conservative journal Ogonyok, „the allusions which the producer expected to convey during these moments.“ The authorities reacted sensitively to a play about Galileo’s fight against medieval obscurantism, and to another about the struggle against Tsarism which included the lines: „there is no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, freedom of scientific research“.
August, 1968 – The lawyer Gendler and two engineers were arrested for publishing leaflets attacking Soviet policy towards Czechoslovakia. They were imprisoned for up to four years.
Following the invasion, Litvinov, Mrs. Daniel and others demonstrated in Red Square and were arrested and sentenced to long terms of exile. Kuznetsov later declared that „the invasion shocked the whole of the Soviet intelligentsia, the majority of whom opposed to the Soviet regime … Many people in Russia wept during those Days.’
Anatoly Marchenko was imprisoned for a year, ostensibly for technical offence of „visiting Moscow without the necessary residence permit.“ A Siberian building worker, Marchenko had been sent to Potma Labour Camp in 1960, at the age of 23, for „hooliganism“. The impact of his ordeal, and his contact with political prisoners who were starved, beaten and tormented, made him resolved to endure it all for the sole purpose of telling the world that „today’s Soviet camps for political prisoners are just horrific as in Stalin’s time. And everybody ought to know about it.“ During his six years‘ imprisonment he studied Lenin’s complete works, and was told on leaving the camp by an officer: „I see you’ve reading Lenin. Of course in general that’s a good thing, but all the same, with your views I think we’ll be seeing you again.“ On his release, Marchenko clandestinely published his „Testimony“ on conditions in the camp, and also joined the protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. In reality, it was for these actions that he was imprisoned. This was proved by the fact that just before his was due to end in July, 1969, he was sentenced to another three years for „slandering the Soviet system“ while in the camp. Outside the courtroom, Marchenko’s friend Belgorodskaya left a petition for his release in a taxi. For this she was herself sentenced to a year in a labour camp for „Slandering the Soviet system“. There were demonstrations in the court as Marchenko and Belgorodskaya were sentenced.
November, 1968 – The funeral was held of the writer Kosterin, who joined Bolsheviks in 1916 at the age of twenty, and lived from 1937 to 1953 in one of Stalin’s labour camps. In 1968 at the age of seventy two he resigned from the CP „to free myself from party discipline, which deprives me of the right to think“. Having been sentenced to three years‘ imprisonment for his association with the opposition movement, he died in November. Grigorenko used the occasion of the funeral to denounce „the bureaucracy which hides behind the of so-called Soviet democracy“.
December, 1968 – Ninety five intellectuals wrote to the supreme Soviet and two Soviet daily newspapers protesting at the sentences meted out to Litvinov and Mrs. Daniel.
January, 1969 – A 22-year-old youth shot at a parade of Soviet cosmonauts in a futile gesture of despair.
February, 1969 – Grigorenko and Yahimovich were arrested for publishing an open letter on the occasion of Jan Palach’s suicide.
April, 1969 – Rips, a Jewish student in Riga, tried to burn himself to death, but was saved and arrested. The authorities hinted on his nationality, and talked of his „abnormal mental condition“, but an underground leaflet claimed that „his main public protest was against the occupation of Czechoslovakia“. The Jewish radio engineer Kochubyevsky who had been promised the right to emigrate to Israel was imprisoned for three years for „slandering the Soviet state“.
May, 1969 – Fifty four intellectuals signed an „appeal to the United Nations Commission for Human Rights“ expressing anxieties of „a return to the Stalin era when our entire country was gripped by terror“. Although this action indicates their naivety and confusion – it is significant that they made it clear that „none of the people condemned at the political trials we know about had the aim of slandering the Soviet system, let alone of acting with the intention of undermining it“. This was reluctantly confirmed even by the reactionary commentator Crankshaw, who admitted (Observer, 14/1/68) that „many of them are party members and think of themselves as convinced Communists. They are Soviet Patriots. They do not seek to overturn the system, only to improve it.“ For their attempts to forward this appeal, Grigorenko and Yahimovich were again arrested, together with the Tartar Gabay and the artist Kuznetsov The mathematician Burmistrovich was imprisoned for distributing material written by Sinyavsky and Daniel.
June, 1969 – An open letter addressed by Yakir, Mrs. Gabay and eight others to an international meeting of Communist Parties appealing to them to „prevent the sinister ghost of Stalin from darkening our future“. From within the camps Daniel, Galanskov, Ginzburg and three others petitioned the Supreme Soviet to relax conditions. Ginzburg successfully staged a hunger strike for the right to marry his fiancee.
October, 1969 – new letter to the UN was written by Volpin, Gorbanyevskaya, Krassin, Mrs. Grigorenko and Yakir.
November, 1969 – Solzhenitsyn was arbitrarily expelled from the Writers Union, and a flood of new protests followed.
August, 1969 – writer Amalrik openly authorised publication of two books in the West, as a deliberate challenge to the constitutionality of charges that this would provoke
May 1970 – As soon as Lenin’s centenary was out of the way, the persecution started with the detention of the outstanding biologist Medvedev in a psychiatric clinic, after attacking restrictions on communications with foreign scientists. Nine months previously he been dismissed from his job as head of a radiological institute. On June 1st, he was pronounced „normal“ but told he would be kept for a week “observation“. Officials at the Ministry of Health in Moscow ordered that he be subjected to a new examination, and on June 5th a team of doctors arrived from the Serbsky Institute for the Criminally Insane, including the Professor Iunts who had declared Grigorenko „mentally incompetent“. Fifty famous scientists protested at his „forcible hospitalisation for an article on Soviet postal censorship“, and demanded that he be examined by doctors from a civil and not a criminal mental hospital. Solzhenitsyn organised a campaign against this „cruel and arbitrary“ treatment. Finally the authorities had to release him, but he is still unemployed.
July, 1970 – An American television network broadcast a film made up of reels and tapes smuggled out of Russia, made by Amalrik, who was arrested as a consequence; Bukovsky, who had just been released after three years‘ hard labour; Yakir, who has spent years in a Labour camp; and Ginzburg, whose contribution was brought out of the camp where he is still confined. Despite their distaste for the distorted propaganda that the west would make out of this broadcast, they decided that any channel available should be used to bring the world’s attention to their struggle.
The Approaching Political Revolution
Every arrest and every penalty provokes bigger demonstrations and draws more people into the struggle. The movement has embraced Generals and collective farm chairmen. The offspring of the top bureaucrats of the past have lost their faith in the political system – either, like Litvinov, joining the movement of change, or, like Stalin’s daughter, treacherously deserting to imperialism. A Soviet press report in April, 1970, entitled „Disturbed Youth“ expressed concern that the most talented pupils opt out of creative work at the age of fifteen or so. All the leading writers and scientists, especially those under forty, have to some extent been affected by the movement. On every front – economic, literary, historical, external – the bureaucracy is in a hopeless impasse. To continue as at present is unthinkable. To return to the old methods of stark terror is impossible in the context of a sophisticated technological economy which depends on a skilled and confident labour force. And yet in the long term Stalinism is incapable of providing any way forward.
Meanwhile, the bureaucracy has pinned its last hope of concealing its utterly restrictive economic role on the tactic of concluding far reaching agreements with monopolies from the imperialist countries. Deals have been made with Japanese imperialism to develop Eastern Siberia, and with West Germany, Italy and Britain to build productive plant. The vast programme of development involving imperialist firms – in the construction of mines and roads in the undeveloped but potentially tremendously rich expanses of Eastern Siberia, of a whole range of engineering plant (including the biggest lorry factory in the world), of electronic computer factories, of chemical plant, etc., with monopolies like Fiat and Courtaulds sharing the market with the powerful and Japanese companies – will undoubtedly have a beneficial effect Soviet growth. To a large extent the worst effects of bureaucratic bungling and sabotage will be overcome for a period. As the immediate benefits come to an end and the plant is built, however, the bureaucracy will become exposed to a renewed and deeper crisis which will pose an even more urgent threat to its survival. On the basis of more advanced economy, its stifling control will be even more harmful than before.
It is an historical irony that Stalinism has been forced from its dream of „Socialism in One Country“ and an autarchic self-sufficiency, more on to the world market, as Trotsky predicted, while imperialism has moved from a policy of economic blockade of Soviet Russia to an accommodation with a bureaucracy which it knows offers no threat of revolution in the West. While the giant corporations of the West eye greedily the markets of the non-capitalist sector and scramble over one another for lucrative deals, the bureaucracy can temporarily mask its own incompetence by promoting the importation of new techniques into those fields in which the Soviet economy is less advanced. It is fear of the working class – of social revolution in the West and of political revolution in the East – that brings imperialism and Stalinism huddling together. The overthrow of one would immediately precipitate the downfall of the other. That is why, regardless of their mutual economic contradictions, each has a stake in the survival of the other.
Only the programme of October can take society forward. The Bolsheviks‘ safeguards against bureaucratism – no official to be paid more than a skilled worker, no Communist to earn than the average wage, all officials to be elected with the right of recall, no standing Army but an armed people, all people to share in the process of administration, all of functions of the State and the economy to be placed under democratic workers‘ management through Soviet power – these measures on the basis of today’s standard of civilisation could be applied a thousand times more effectively than in the terrible conditions of the first years of the revolution. Then the workers were a tiny proportion of the population, plagued like the peasantry by starvation, illiteracy and disease, working superhuman hours in the struggle to produce subsistence output, decimated by the ravages of civil war and famine, dependent on the old administrators who were hungry for material comforts, increasingly disappointed at the failure of revolution beyond borders of the former Empire. Today the political regeneration of the revolution and the restoration of democracy would release the gigantic potential of society from the shackles of Asiatic despotism.
The apparition of Hungary, 1956, haunts the bureaucracy. In Czechoslovakia the regime installed by Russian tanks has no basis in society, and it has not dared to terrorise the population by means of a bloodbath, in tradition of Hungary. Poland, racked by economic contradictions and no longer after 1956 open to nationalist smokescreens, has witnessed demonstrations by thousands of students and young workers. Thousands of industrial workers in East Germany marched in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yugoslav students in June, 1970, staged a hunger strike in solidarity with a thousand of miners who struck after a 20% wage cut. Nowhere in Eastern Europe, from „autocratic“ East Germany to “liberal” Yugoslavia can be protected from the approaching political storms.
In the USSR the workers have not yet spoken. When they do, they will in the space of weeks and days sweep away the last and greatest obstacle to a world transformation of society. Just as the climb of the bureaucracy on to the back of the workers mirrored, stage by stage, the triumph of counter-revolution in the West, so the sharpening and quickening of the class struggle in the West is striking an echo inside the Stalinist World. The Russian economy has outgrown the fetters of Stalinism. A new age is dawning East and West.
* For details see “Bureaucratism or Workers‘ Power”
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