Militant: Introduction (to the pamphlet “Stalinism in Crisis“)

[pamphlet “Stalinism in Crisis“, p. 1]

Since Gorbachev’s first statements about glasnost in 1986, and his speech at the February 1987 Communist Party congress, the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union has been in turmoil. More significantly, the divisions and splits at the top have been the signal for the biggest movement of the working class since the revolution of 1917. The official daily, Pravda, reported: “The entire Armenian people of the city of Stepanakert goes out daily to demonstrations and meetings. The workers have no intention of returning to their jobs until the issue [of the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh] is resolved.’ At the same time in Kuibyshev, 1000 miles away, 10,000 demonstrators gathered to call for the dismissal of a local Communist Party leader. On the Black Sea coast 5000 Tatars were on strike demanding an autonomous republic.

In Estonia a huge meeting of 100,000 met to ‘wave-off the delegates from the area to the Special Communist Party Congress at the end of June 1988, with clear instructions as to what was expected of them.

Gorbachev may succeed temporarily in subduing the present movement with promises of reform, but nothing will ever be the same again in the USSR. For decades the bureaucracy has relied on the passivity of the working class for the continuation of its rule. Now the working class of the Soviet Union, the most powerful in the world, has been aroused. Banners seen on the streets of Moscow reflect aspirations which go far beyond Gorbachev’s intentions: ‘Socialism not Stalinism’ and “People’s Perestroika’. At the same time there have been reports of people involved in the new opposition groups who are ‘very radical, expelled from the Party for Trotskyist sympathies’. Even if many of the opposition groups at this stage are dominated by intellectuals and lack a clear programme, their new-found confidence is a reflection of the more profound opposition to the bureaucracy among workers.

The crisis and divisions within the bureaucracy, and the movements of the workers, are an indication that a new epoch has begun in Eastern Europe – that of the political revolution – which will culminate in the struggle to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracies and to restore genuine workers’ democracy in the tradition of the Russian Revolution of 1917.