[Militant International Review, No 38, Autumn 1988, p. 7-14]
Peter Taaffe, Editor of the Militant, examines the response of the left of the British labour movement to the tumultuous events unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
The coming to power of Gorbachev over three years ago was undoubtedly a momentous event in the evolution of the ‘Soviet Union’. Gorbachev’s attempt at reforming the Stalinist regime has generated colossal interest amongst the working class in the capitalist West. The concept of ‘glasnost’, (openness) and ‘perestroika’, (restructuring) have almost become part of everyday language.
Recognising the world significance of this process, the MIR and Militant, in a series of articles and pamphlets have sought to provide the advanced workers of Britain and the world with an analysis of these events.
In vain does one look for a similar approach in the speeches and writings of the leaders of the labour movement. Predictably, the right wing regurgitate the morsels thrown to them from the ideological dinner table of the bourgeois itself. Thus Neil Kinnock pronounced in May this year “the West (read capitalist West – PT) should encourage Mr Gorbachev’s liberalisation.” Looking towards Gorbachev’s success, in an interview in New Socialist Kinnock hoped that “‘we actually do see achieved the real liberalisation and modernisation of the Soviet Union”. Kinnock’s chief ideologist, Bryan Gould, has gone a step further. Obviously recognising a kindred spirit in Gorbachev, he compares the left of the British labour movement to the ‘conservatives’ in Russia: “we face some of the same problems Mr Gorbachev does. We have our Ligachevs too – the same conservatism and the same fear.” The Independent, June 4 1988.
Tribune
But, despite this attempt at a neat amalgam, it would be more accurate to say that the right wing display the same morbid fear of the rank and file of the Labour Party as the Ligachevs do to the working class of the USSR. Gorbachev, as well as Ligachev, are in favour of ‘democratic elections’ so long as all candidates are ‘communists’, that is Stalinist bureaucrats. Gould and Kinnock are in favour of ‘democratic procedures’ within the Labour Party in the selection of parliamentary candidates but in Govan have imposed their own shortlist! But it has been left to Barbara Castle, the ex-left winger and a current Euro MP, writing in Tribune in February of this year, to express the real views of Labour’s conservative officialdom on events in Russia and Eastern Europe. She recounts a discussion with a leading Polish bureaucrat and comments: “As I listened, I thought: It must surely be the aim of every sane person to try to prevent disintegration and allow reforms to proceed gradually and progressively. Then they will stick.” She approvingly quotes Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Security Adviser to President Carter: “For the West this situation creates a historical setting for an enlighted policy on East-West issues. Massive revolutionary outbreak in the region is not in our interest… gradual change, on the other hand, is desirable. It should be facilitated and it is feasible.”
Militant has commented many times that the capitalists are as terrified as the Stalinist bureaucracy of a movement of the working class of Eastern Europe and the USSR in the direction of workers democracy. This is confirmed by Brzezinski’s statement. But Castle demonstrates that in the final analysis the right wing of the labour movement, in fundamentals, share the outlook of the bourgeoisie on events in the USSR. But a survey of the press and the statements of leading left spokesmen reveal similar illusions in Gorbachev mixed up with theoretical confusion and bewilderment.
Tribune, still naively considered by some as a ‘left’ journal, has not had one serious analytical article this year on the events in the USSR. Instead its readers are fed a diet of titbits, usually contained in book reviews without any serious attempt to explain what is happening in the USSR. Even Tony Benn has displayed a lack of clarity on the nature of the regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR. His description of them as ‘socialist’ is to besmirch the concept of socialism and to confuse leftward moving workers as to the character of these regimes. Similarly, according to the January 1987 New Socialist, Michael Foot, when leader of the Labour Party, persisted in inviting ‘Soviet representatives’ to the Labour Party Conference “because the USSR, in spite of its errors and everything else, is socialist”.
Only Eric Heffer alone of leading left spokesmen sheds a little light on what is happening in the USSR. He pointed out that: “The group he (Gorbachev) represents in the Communist Party leadership in the Soviet Union wants to open things up more. While that would not mean a democratic society, it could help open the way to those who are fighting for such a society. In that sense it is very important indeed.” As somebody who was expelled from the British ‘Communist’ Party and who has been influenced by the Marxist analysis of Russian society, strongly represented in the Liverpool labour movement including in his own constituency of Walton, he does not hesitate to describe these regimes as ‘Stalinist’. Eric Heffer is located on the side of the working class of these states: “It is interesting to note that out of every workers’ upsurge in the Stalinist states, there is always the call for workers’ councils, for workers’ control and for democratic bodies.”
Contrast this with the stand of the leadership of the Scottish Trade Union Congress. They are trying to re-create, on a smaller scale, the infamous Anglo- Russian Trade Union Committee which played such a pernicious role in the derailment of the 1926 General Strike. The STUC, according to the Morning Star on August 15 1988, announced an agreement “between Campbell Christie, General Secretary of the STUC, and Gennady Yanaev of the All-Union Central Council of Soviet Trade Unions, AUCCTU, setting up a joint committee to be called the Scottish- Soviet Trade Union Committee. It will promote joint social and economic interests”. Such a move will do nothing to assist the workers in the Stalinist states who, as the events in Poland have demonstrated, view ‘Soviet trade unions’ as the equivalent of company unions in the capitalist West, even less representative of their views than the EETPU in this country. This agreement indicates the baleful influence the ‘Communist’ Party exercises on the labour movement.
And yet it is precisely in the ‘Communist’ Party – in all three of them that is – in which the greatest ideological confusion now reigns on the subject of the USSR. Gorbachev’s real aims since coming to power and the meaning of the recent Party Conference have revealed the most glaring contradictions in the position of these organisations. There is not the semblance of an explanation as to why Gorbachev has been forced to proceed in the seemingly ‘audacious’ manner in which he has done so. He himself described Russia as being in a ‘pre-crisis’ situation on the eve of his assumption of power. It was the absolute impasse of the Stalinist regime which provoked Gorbachev’s attempt to carry through what he claims to be “a revolution without shots”. In the past Stalinism was a relatively progressive factor in the development of science, technique and the organisation of labour, the productive forces. Now, at least in the USSR and in Eastern Europe, it is an absolute fetter on further progress.
Why Gorbachev?
There is no disputing the huge historical achievements of nationalisation and a plan of production, notwithstanding the attempts of the bourgeois commentators in the West to denigrate them. But these advantages have been vitiated by the monstrous incubus of the bureaucratic elite that dominates Russian society. Almost 20 million strong, it is numerically greater than the entire working population of South Korea! Any relatively progressive role which it played in the past in supervising the borrowing of industry and technique from the capitalist West and laying the foundations of a modern economy, has now been exhausted. Completely stultifying and clogging up the pores of society, the bureaucracy in the Stalinist states, as with the capitalists in the West, is now an obstacle which prevents further real progress in the development of society.
The signs of decay, including a significant slowing down in the development of the economy, was evident under the Brezhnev regime. Some of the capitalist countries of the West, such as Japan, have recently outstripped the economic growth of the USSR. Corruption on a gargantuan scale flourished under Brezhnev. This has now been officially revealed in a series of sensational trials, such as the recent one involving Brezhnev’s son-in-law. The openly Stalinist wing of the bureaucracy, it has now been revealed. resuscitated a dying Brezhnev who was almost a zombie for six years. Like the Supporters of Franco who kept him going on a life support machine at the demise of his regime, the Stalinist Mafia wished to postpone the day of reckoning by hiding behind Brezhnev. Even the former KGB chief, Andropov, when he assumed power, understood the necessity of reforms in order to stave off an impending catastrophe.
The access of the secret police to all layers of society probably convinced them, more than any other section of the bureaucracy, of the bubbling discontent just below the surface of society. Not only was the USSR not “catching up and outstripping the capitalist West” within 20 years, as Khrushchev had promised in 1961, but it was threatening to fall further and further behind. For example, recent figures have revealed that the life expectancy for men was actually falling in contrast to the trends in other advanced industrial countries. The untrammelled rule of the bureaucracy has produced unparalleled ecological disasters and was failing to deliver the ‘quality of life’ which the mass of the Russian and USSR population was demanding. It is against this background that all the measures of Gorbachev, Andropov’s protege, must be viewed.
Gorbachev does not represent some qualitatively new force to ‘de-bureaucratise’ Russian society. Like Khrushchev in 1953, he represents an attempt at ‘reform from the top’ in order to prevent revolution, political revolution, from below. But there are a number of crucial differences in the background against which Khrushchev acted and the situation which Gorbachev faces today. Society in the USSR, and the Russian working class in particular, has undergone a colossal development since 1953. There is not just a highly educated and mighty industrial proletariat, with perhaps the highest cultural level in the world, but one which has completely lost its terror of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Khrushchev’s attempts at ‘liberalisation’ were very carefully circumscribed, the struggle against the old Stalinists restricted to the ranks of the bureaucracy itself. Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Russian ‘Communist’ Party was in secret and the speech has not been distributed in the USSR to this day.
But such is the inertia of Russian society now and so resistant to change is the bureaucracy, particularly the middle layers, that Gorbachev has been compelled to conduct an open struggle. Hence ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’. In an attempt to cut down some of the swollen privileges of the middle layers of the bureaucracy he has been compelled to lean on the lower layers of the bureaucracy and even on the working class. But this has in turn conjured up forces which represent a mortal threat to the rule of the bureaucracy. There have been the tumultuous events in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, which represent one of the biggest mass movements in history, with wave after wave of strikes and demonstrations in the past ten months. Also, in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia the national question has re-emerged with mass demonstrations rivalling those of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia.
Gorbachev has described the situation in Russian society as one gigantic ‘debating chamber’. We caught a glimpse of this in the events leading up to the extraordinary conference of the ‘Communist’ Party which took place in June. Demonstrations of 50,000, 100,000 and 150,000 took place, sometimes in football stadiums, to ‘send off, that is to pressurise, delegates to this conference. The intervention of the masses, although still in its elemental stages, has in turn produced turmoil within the bureaucracy.
Morning Star
Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow Party Chief, while never going completely outside the limits set by the bureaucracy, nevertheless reflected some of the pressure and discontent of the masses. He did something unprecedented for the bureaucrats, by riding on public transport in Moscow! He sacked a whole layer of the most corrupt officials and policemen. And he expressed dissatisfaction with the ‘slow pace of reform’, attacking in the process Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, for her lavish lifestyle. This brought him into collision not only with the most openly Stalinist ‘conservative’ wing of the bureaucracy, represented by Ligachev, but with Gorbachev also, who attempted to adopt a middle position. But the manner of Yeltsin’s dismissal from the Politburo in December 1987 showed that behind this veneer of ‚liberalisation‘ the Stalinist regime remained intact. He was compelled a degrading ‘confession’ worthy of Stalin’s times. He subsequently complained that he had only done this because he was drugged and dragged from his hospital bed! Yeltsin has since openly called for the removal of Ligachev from the Politburo.
But it was Ligachev and the ‘conservative’ wing of the bureaucracy who emerged if anything stronger from the recent ‘extraordinary’ conference. Even here, at a conference of the charmed elite, the huge difficulties confronting the bureaucracy, particularly the Gorbachev wing, found some expression, if only in a muted form. But Gorbachev hit back at the hastily convened Central Committee at the end of September. Gromyko, the former President, has been pensioned off, while Solomentsev was also eliminated from the Politburo. Chebrikov was removed as head of the KGB, and given a relatively minor post dealing with ‘legal reform’. Ligachev, on the other hand, was relieved of his position as ‘party ideologist’ and given the bed of nails of agriculture.
It is clear that Gorbachev, who has now become President as well as party chief, was waiting for such an opportunity to strike back at the conservatives. His latest moves were triggered by the hostile reception which he had received during his Siberian walkabout. These events were a forceful reminder to Gorbachev of the frustration and growing impatience of the Russian working class with the concrete results of his ‘reforms’. As commented earlier, it also demonstrated that the working class have lost their terror of Stalinism. Failure to push ahead with these reforms, which were being undermined and frustrated by the bureaucracy, threatened even greater mass discontent.
Gorbachev seized on this to steamroller these measures through the Central Committee. But the manner of his victory speaks volumes as to the real nature of the Gorbachev regime. The Central Committee met precisely for one hour. Only two speakers were allowed: Gorbachev himself and Gromyko who was at least permitted to say ‘goodbye’, unlike in the past when he would have been sent to a Siberian power station or something worse. The decisions of the Central Committee were unanimous, as was the Supreme Soviet which rubber-stamped Gorbachev as President. This means that the real decisions were taken behind closed doors. So much for glasnost. These changes, however, which were largely anticipated by the June Special Conference, have not fundamentally altered the situation in the USSR.
Needless to say the organ of the ‘tankies’, the Morning Star, was swooning in delight over the conference. On June 28 its’ editorial declared: “Socialism is the future”’. It then gave a thinly veiled apologia for the crimes of Stalinism: “Socialism has not had an easy birth, childhood, or adolescence. There was no shortage of those who wanted to strangle the life out of it because they correctly saw it as posing a threat ultimately to their privileges and wealth … The emergency measures introduced at the beginning to cope with the urgent problems posed by intervention and backwardness were initially intended to be temporary, but they came to acquire forms which persisted long after the need for them had passed away. The result was to build up an accumulation of negative influences, and these came to act as a brake on development, creating ultimately what has been described as a pre-crisis situation.” Thus in one phrase, ‘negative influences’, the crimes of Stalinism are explained away.
Despite the minor ‘aberrations’ of the slave labour camps, the millions who perished through Stalin’s blunder of forced collectivisation, the decapitation of the Red Army through the purges which left Russia enormously weakened at the time of Hitler’s attacks, not to say the slaughter of Lenin’s closest comrades-in-arms and the annihilation of the last remnants of the Bolshevik Party in the 1930s purges, the Morning Star can still happily describe this regime as ‘socialist’. All these crimes are still ascribed by the Morning Star to one man, Stalin. Their correspondents reporting on the special conference, Roger Trask and Kate Clark, approvingly quote Georgi Arbartov, director of the Institute of US and Canadian Studies: “We have to look at our history… many of the mistakes could have been avoided if Stalin had retired in 1934, and Brezhnev in 1974”. There is no question that Stalin was probably insane, particularly towards the end of his days, but the crimes of his regime could not be ascribed to just one man.
Stalin
As Trotsky pointed out, in his brilliant analysis of the rise of Stalin and of the system of Stalinism, Stalin merely personified the growth of the bureaucracy in Russia. This in turn was the product of the lag of the world revolution and the cultural backwardness of Russia. If Stalin had died in 1934 some other would have been promoted from the ranks of the bureaucracy who in fundamentals would have carried out a similar policy, perhaps avoiding some of the more monstrous crimes attributed to Stalin himself. The same process would have developed if Brezhnev had been removed from the scene in 1974. The emergence of Gorbachev has not fundamentally undermined what one delegate to the conference correctly described as the ‘caste of untouchables’ which dominate the party, the state and the army, the summits of Russian society.
The columns of the Morning Star are full of glaring contradictions on the character of the regime in the USSR. Thus on July 5, 1988 an editorial declares: “Socialism and democracy are inseparable from one another’’. Yet in their communique from Moscow Kate Clark and Roger Trask declare: ‘For the first time in memory, a delegate spoke from the tribune against one of the proposals in the Party General Secretary’s report.” Why had no delegate spoken against the General Secretary in the past? It is no accident that this question is never posed by the Morning Star. They are fully aware that to have done so under Stalin or the regime of his successors would have probably resulted in the arrest and transportation to a labour camp for the said delegate. Even under Brezhnev such outspoken views warranted incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. And this is described as socialism! Is it possible to think of any better way of denigrating the very idea of socialism in the eyes of the British workers? The Morning Star supporters are trapped in an historical timewarp.
It is in the monumental works of Leon Trotsky that a thoroughly scientific explanation is to be found of the character of the regimes that now exist in the USSR and Eastern Europe. For Marx, Engels and Lenin, the beginning of socialism implied a higher development of the productive forces than that reached by the most developed capitalism. This would mean a higher level of society both in its productive output and in the living standards of the population than exists in America, Sweden, West Germany or Japan at the present time. Clearly this was impossible on the basis of the backwardness of Russian society and the isolation of the Russian revolution. Lenin and Trotsky perceived the Russian revolution as an overture to the world revolution. On the basis of world socialism it would have been entirely possible to have completely outstripped the rate of growth and development of capitalist society. But such a task was impossible on the basis of one isolated revolution, moreover in a backward society at that. Trotsky therefore characterised Russia as a transitional regime between capitalism and socialism. The growth of the bureaucracy personified by the rise of Stalin, created an historical obstacle on the road to socialism. This now constitutes a massive roadblock – which will have to be removed – preventing the further real development of Russian society. But Trotsky’s scientific appraisal, and brilliant predictions, of the character of the Stalinist regime, is a book sealed with seven seals as far as the Morning Star adherents are concerned.
Reporting on the special conference the Morning Star on June 29, 1988 came out with the very r-r-r-revolutionary slogan of ‘All power to the Soviets’. This it claimed was the ringing message delivered by Gorbachev to the Conference. And yet it did not occur either to the reporters to the Conference or to the editors of the Morning Star that such a slogan posed for them more questions than it answered. Firstly this was the celebrated slogan of the Bolshevik party throughout most of 1917 and prior to the October Revolution. This was at a time when real soviets, workers’ and peasants’ councils, existed and were vying for power with the various bourgeois coalition governments. A regime of dual power existed in Russia at this time. To employ this slogan in the officially titled ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ at this stage would surely imply that the ‘soviets’ had not hitherto had ‘all the power’. If the ‘soviets’ did not have the power, who did? Was it not the bureaucratic elite that had promoted from its ranks Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and now Gorbachev? In fact, real soviets, organs of management and control of the state and society by the working class, as envisaged by Lenin and Trotsky, were completely emasculated under Stalinism. The state is called ‘Soviet’ in the same way as Napoleon’s dictatorship was still called a Republic!
New constitution
Moreover, under the proposals of Gorbachev, adopted by the special party conference, the ‘soviets’ will not be vested with real power. Gorbachev originally proposed to exclude party chiefs from the soviets, together with the election of a ‘parliament’ and a president through the use of a secret ballot. He clearly wanted to lean on a section of the working class as a weapon to cut down the privileges of the bureaucracy. As Trotsky pointed out in 1936: “In order that this mechanism (the Stalinist system, PT) should keep on working Stalin is compelled from time to time to take the side of ‘the people’ against the bureaucracy – of course with its tacit consent. He finds it useful to resort to the secret ballot in order at least partially to purge the state apparatus of the corruptions which are devouring it.” Gorbachev, while representing and defending the bureaucracy, like Stalin himself, is not averse to leaning on the masses and striking blows against the bureaucracy. Trotsky pointed out that this was one of the purposes of Stalin’s 1936 constitution, ‘the most democratic in the world’. The Spanish Civil War, with the hot flames of social revolution threatening to provoke political revolution in Russia, compelled Stalin to abandon his plans and to launch his one-sided civil war against the last remnants of the Bolshevik Party.
Even Gorbachev’s mild measures were nullified by the decision of the conference to allow party chiefs to sit in the ‘soviets’. Amongst the 5,000 delegates gathered at the conference were 600 ‘Communist’ Party chiefs. It was their pressure which carefully circumscribed Gorbachev’s mild measures of reform. Moreover the conference explicitly shattered the hopes of the ‘liberals’ in the West for a move towards ‘pluralism’. The political monopoly of the ‘Communist’ Party was reinforced in a resolution to the conference. What kind of ‘socialist democracy’ is it that allows only candidates from one party to stand?
As has been explained many times by Trotsky and the Marxists, the outlawing of other parties in the infancy of the Russian workers’ state arose from the exigencies of the civil war and the support of these parties for military measures to crush the young workers’ state. Lenin and Trotsky envisaged them as purely temporary measures which would be lifted with the lifting of the siege of Russia itself and the spread of the revolution internationally. The Stalinist one-party totalitarian regime did not have its genesis in the Bolshevik Party, the most democratic workers’ party which ever existed in history, but in the cultural backwardness of the country and its isolation.
Oliver Cromwell, in order to defend the English bourgeois revolution, was forced to resort to the sword to hold down the feudal counter-revolution, assuming in the process dictatorial powers. Such is the strength of capitalism today, such are the material advantages of capitalism compared to feudalism for the mass of the population, that present day advocates of a return to ‘Merrie England’ would indeed be a source of ‘merriment’ rather than a danger to the capitalists.
The material conditions for socialism in the colossal development of the productive forces now exist in the USSR, particularly if they were part of an integrated world plan. A socialist Russia would permit even pro-bourgeois parties to exist. They would have no attractive power such would be the advantages of a planned economy together with workers’ democracy. Would the British workers tolerate candidates in shop steward or union elections who were only allowed to be in one party? No more does the Russian working class support such undemocratic, not to say totalitarian, measures. Even at the special conference, one or two isolated voices demanding the end of the ‘Communist Party monopoly’ were heard. Once the working class moves against the Stalinist regimes the inevitable demand for the ending of ‘Communist’ (read Stalinist) Party control is raised. Yet the Morning Star slavishly supports the monopoly of the Stalinist elite.
Marxism Today
But things are little better if one turns to the journals of the other ‘Communist’ currents, now reduced to little more than squabbling sects. The ‘Eurocommunists’ claim to represent a big advance on the Stalinists. In the journals Seven Days and Marxism Today can be found some criticisms of Stalinism. Monty Johnstone, leading theoretician of this trend, in Marxism Today in November 1987 subjected Gorbachev’s USSR to some withering comments. Perhaps anticipating Ligachev’s ludicrous claim at the recent special party conference that privileges for the bureaucracy were non-existent, Johnstone writes: “Another issue for concern is the continuation of special stores and other nomenclature privileges, despite the public criticism expressed in the pre-conference letters published in Pravda … after Moscow carried through the shake-up in Kazakhstan following the Alma Ata riots, the press reported that luxury dachas built by party leaders there at party expense were confiscated to provide hospitals, children’s homes and hostels with places for 2,000 people. It was also revealed that hundreds of people employed in Alma Ata university were related by blood or marriage. The existence of such privilege and patronage, which nobody seriously believes are a specifically Kazakh phenomena, is deeply resented. Most people, however, did not see what they could do to change it in Kazakhstan or feel able to act to end it where it still exists elsewhere.”
Then Johnstone provides a key for understanding precisely why the working class does not feel able to act to end’ privileges etc.: “In the local elections … the increasingly criticised procedure of only one candidate standing continued in the great majority of soviets. But in about five per cent of them, on an ‘experimental’ basis, there were more candidates than were deputies to be elected (930 candidates for 740 seats) and some leading local officials came bottom of the poll. I have, however, seen no evidence of contests in which electors were presented with policy alternatives.”
Seven Days and Marxism Today are full of ex-Stalinists who no doubt sincerely recant on their former idealisation of Stalin and his regime. But nowhere in the columns of either the ‘popular’ weekly Seven Days or in the more ‘theoretical’ Marxism Today is any attempt made to draw up an objective balance sheet of the historical and objective causes for the rise of Stalinism. To do so would be to draw on the rich theoretical treasure trove of Trotsky’s writings on this issue. Indeed the ‘Eurocommunists’ fondly hope, like the overwhelming majority of the left leadership of the British labour and trade union movement, that by ‘piecemeal measures Gorbachev can gradually ‘de-bureaucratise’ and democratise the USSR. They recoil in horror at the idea of a political revolution by the masses of the USSR and Eastern Europe to overthrow the bureaucratic elite. In fact a thinly veiled contempt for the independent initiative and mobilisation of the masses against the bureaucracy is to be found in these journals. For example Monty Johnstone in Marxism Today writes: “Due to the paralysis of the independent initiative of the working people brought about by Stalinism, the ushering in of change could only come from above. As in Czechoslovakia in 1968, but unlike Poland in 1980, this was to come from the Communist Party, and was spearheaded by a newly elected general secretary.” Thus the working class of Russia and the rest of the USSR, ‘apathetic and paralysed by Stalinism’, must await liberation from above by an ‘enlightened’ wing of the bureaucracy.
Johnstone and the rest of the ‘Eurocommunists’ act as political attorneys for this ‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy. It is no accident that they have invoked the figure of Dubček as their ideal model for Russia: “If Mikhail Gorbachev had advocated just one of his current ideas on the necessity for reforms and democratisation in Czechoslovakia in 1970 he would have been expelled from the KSČ (the Czechoslovakian Communist Party) and would be working somewhere today as a stoker or a navvy, without his communist conviction or his university education making any difference.”
Dubček
But Dubček represented national Czechoslovak Stalinism, as Gomulka before him had reflected the Polish variety. In no way did he aim to challenge the fundamental basis of Stalinism. But his attempt at ‘reforms’, as in Russia today, inevitably led to the masses coming onto the political arena. This threatened to detonate similar independent movements of the masses throughout Eastern Europe and eventually in the USSR itself. This was the background to the intervention of Russian tanks and his removal in 1968. Dubček has recently stated his belief that Gorbachev would never have authorised the 1968 military intervention in his country. But as Neil Ascherson, writing in Marxism Today correctly pointed out: “For my part, I will wait and see for a few years before feeling able to agree with him.”’ The hopes of Dubček and Marxism Today look a little naive, to say the least, against the background of the recent deployment of troops in Nagorno-Karabakh!
Gorbachev is a consummate, and intelligent, representative of the bureaucracy. His ‘reforms’ are an attempt to breathe new life into the system. He does not stand for the abolition of privileges. He has merely attacked the ‘illegal’ privileges and corruption of a part of the bureaucracy. Indeed he is for even greater ‘legitimate’ rewards and privileges for the elite. The resolution on ‘perestroika’ accepted at the special conference makes this clear: “We must make people much more interested in the best end result, to utterly overcome equalisation tendencies”. A gulf separates Gorbachev and those he represents from the approach of Lenin who insisted on clear maximum differentials of no more than four to one for skilled personnel.
One of the real indications of the transition towards socialism will precisely be the “equalisation tendencies within society’. It is true that even a democratic workers’ state would not be able to introduce the maxim, ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. This would only be possible on the basis of a society of superabundance, a socialist society. But the first act of a democratic workers’ state would be the immediate slashing of the privileges of the bureaucracy. In place of the ‘differentials’ whereby the gap between the bureaucrat and the worker is as wide if not wider than under capitalism, there would be a return to Lenin’s clearly defined maximum differential (which could now even be less than four to one).
Inequality
Monty Johnstone agrees with Gorbachev’s position. In his denunciation of nomenclature, mentioned above, he makes the qualification that it is “a quite separate question from increased income differentials now being promoted to stimulate production”. From reports which have appeared in the Russian press it seems that the working class, passive and indifferent according to Johnstone, does not entirely agree with him. Indeed the authoritative Moscow News, precisely at the time of the party conference when Ligachev was claiming otherwise, showed that the criticism of the privileges of the bureaucracy is of volcanic proportions. It revealed that one in three of the letters it received about the party conference dealt with ‘social justice’ and the privilege system.
Moreover in a poll of Muscovites only 44% “believed their country had a broadly fair system.” Only 23% of those polled thought that Soviet society is definitely ‘just’. According to the article the groups “condemned for undeserved perks” were “in order of severity, officials of the Young Communist League, trade unionists, ministerial and departmental bureaucrats, workers in the party ‘apparatus’, and economic managers”. The list of privileges those questioned condemned as unjust, no matter who benefited from them, included “receipts of goods (including obviously, food) from ‘closed’ and other shops and canteens, 84%; free purchases of books from a ‘special list of subscribers’, special access to theatre and film tickets, 80%; the grant of flats and apartment blocks of ‘improved plan and in better districts’, 67%; the lease of state dachas or construction of personal dachas in prestige areas nearer town, 65%; access to hospitals, clinics and sanatoria reserved for leaders, 60%; special access to rail and air tickets, 52%; and the grant of a car, 44%.”
The discontent of the Russian masses even sometimes creeps into the pages of the Morning Star. Thus on June 17, 1988 a letter from a worker to Pravda was published: “‘Let’s have an end to the permissiveness and impunity which certain leaders enjoy. Because just as before you can still see cars belonging to the city committee (of the party), the city council executive committee and other officials outside the gate of the meat plant, fish farm and trade warehouse. But you don’t meet these elected representatives in the queues.” Is it little wonder that at the time of the special conference a poll conducted by the Institute of Sociology at the Soviet Academy of Sciences of 120 main industrial plants revealed that 73% believed that “instead of real perestroika, we are just having a lot of talk”.
Another 33% blamed local bureaucracies for preventing economic reforms at this level. Even at the special conference the one or two worker delegates who managed to get to the rostrum complained about the lack of food in the shops despite ‘perestroika’. As commented earlier, Gorbachev was assailed in his recent visit to Siberia when workers openly challenged the effectiveness of ‘perestroika’ on one of his walkabouts, revealing both the seething discontent but also the complete loss of fear of the Stalinist bureaucracy on the part of the new generation of workers. Stalin’s open methods of terror would be unworkable in the changed and explosive atmosphere which now exists in the USSR.
But notwithstanding the fond hopes of Marxism Today the bureaucratic elite will not vacate the scene of history voluntarily. Like Gorbachev himself the ‘Eurocommunists’, never mind the Stalinist elements around the Morning Star, perceive bureaucracy as merely ‘red tape’, and ‘inefficiency’. But the bureaucracy is a privileged caste which will fight with all possible weapons to maintain its position in society. It is true that it feels itself to be an excrescence on society. The crisis of its regime is undoubtedly reflected in the open splits within the ranks of bureaucracy which we have commented on elsewhere. (See Militant, 20 May 1988) But as Trotsky pointed out: “No devil voluntarily cut his own claws’. The bureaucracy cannot be removed without a political revolution.
‘That will mean violence’ will undoubtedly shriek the adherents of the Morning Star. On the contrary, with a far sighted and clear leadership the political revolution could be carried through peacefully, or relatively peacefully. In Poland in 1980-81 the masses were driving in the direction of political revolution. All the elements of a programme to overthrow the bureaucracy were contained in the movement around Solidarity. The masses improvised the equivalent of soviets, there were demands for the abolition of the privileges of the bureaucracy, and in the beginning, no member of the ‘Communist’ Party was allowed to sit in the workers’ councils. The Polish workers in effect improvised all the elements of the programme that Trotsky had laid down for the beginning of the political revolution. This included the slogan “for the bureaucracy to be driven from the soviets”. They had even gone a step further and demanded the end of one-party rule.
Roy Medvedev
The terror of the ‘Eurocommunists’ at the prospect of political revolution leads them to cling to the coat-tails of a figure like Gorbachev as a kind of ‘liberator from above’. And as the interview with Roy Medvedev in the August 1988 edition of Marxism Today demonstrates, they end up to the right of even a section of the ‘liberal’ bureaucracy.
Monty Johnstone interviews Medvedev and presumably concurs with his views because there is not a hint of criticism of Medvedev’s statements as he tortuously dissects the different wings of the bureaucracy in order to justify support for Gorbachev. He does not locate Ligachev in the most ‘conservative’ wing of the bureaucracy.
He characterises the Ligachev group as “mostly honest communists and soviet people, but they have got used to the old ways of working … this group embraces the majority of regional and city party secretaries, the majority of the apparatus.” Medvedev concedes that Ligachev represents “‘the strongest group in our party.”
He even admits that “Ligachev warned Gorbachev, and it was an unmistakeable warning: ‘without us you wouldn’t have become General Secretary of the party’ – that is, without the votes in March 1985 of Politburo members Chebrikov, Gromyko, Solomentsev.” And yet his support for Gorbachev leads him to supporting ‘an alliance between Ligachev and Gorbachev’ while attacking Yeltsin. He subjects the latter to the charge of “vanguardism in the party. He doesn’t represent a trend as such but only some individuals. He wants to push perestroika ahead more quickly, more energetically, but this is not realistic.”
In a statement that would be worthy of any right-wing reformist leader of the labour and trade union movement in this country, Medvedev declares “‘Yeltsin is saying much that Gorbachev was saying at the beginning, but there is very little support for this now. Yeltsin’s political collapse is due to not appreciating that if we start going too fast it will lead to the end of perestroika rather than its success. In our conditions it is possible for perestroika to move forward fairly quickly but not by leaps. Politics is the art of the possible.” Thus ‘slowly, slowly, catchy monkey’ is the philosophy of Medvedev who clearly is an apologist for the ‘liberal’ wing of the bureaucracy as the Militant International Review correctly pointed out. (See the review article on Medvedev’s book, On Socialist Democracy in MIR No.19, Spring 1980.)
Yeltsin at least echoed the enormous discontent of the working class, particularly the Moscow working class. Medvedev, and his British counterparts within the ‘Eurocommunist’ wing of the CP, in adopting such a position, put themselves firmly against an independent movement of the working class. If Johnstone and co were transferred to the Stalinist states they would at best play the same baleful role as did the supporters of KOR, like Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, in the Polish events of 1980-81. They acted as a huge brake on the movement of the masses. They are presently advising the Polish workers to ‘cool down’ for fear of provoking Jaruzelski. They look towards a Polish version of ‘Gorbachevism’ to deliver Polish society from the catastrophe which Stalinist mismanagement has resulted in.
Similar social types were at the head of the recent movements in Armenia. After negotiations with Gorbachev they played the role of a fire hose on the Armenian movement. Nevertheless the Stalinist regime is incapable of finding solutions to the explosive national question throughout the USSR.
Despite the promises of Gorbachev, the bureaucracy is incapable of granting the legitimate national demands of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Even the hint at concessions to the Armenians reinforced the national movement in the Baltic states.
Nagorno-Karabakh
Violating even its own constitution, the central Moscow bureaucracy has denied the right of self-determination, with agreed guaranteed rights for the Azerbaijani minority, to the peoples of Nagorno-Karabakh. The resolution on ‘Inter-ethnic relations’ of the recent conference, it is true, speaks about “one of the central tasks is to create conditions for the greater independence of regions, and to carry forward cooperation whereby each republic should have a stake in bettering the end results of its economic activity as the basis of its own well-being and the common prosperity and power of the soviet state.”
And yet precisely such rights are denied to the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite the claims for a ‘multi-nation society’ with full account taken of legitimate national rights, an iron grip is still exercised by the central Moscow bureaucracy.
The liberal wing of the bureaucracy, like Roy Medvedev, and their supporters in Marxism Today, envisage in the USSR a situation similar to bourgeois democracy in the West. But there is an important difference: the capitalists can switch from military dictatorships to democracy and back again. They can tolerate, under certain historical conditions, democratic rights for the working class.
Indeed bourgeois democracy is the cheapest form of rule for them. The capitalists have roots in bourgeois society, they are its ‘trustees’ as Marx pointed out. They play a role in the development of industry. Where the working class has democratic rights and resorts to strike action they do not generally immediately demand the removal of the capitalists.
But the situation is entirely different in the Stalinist states. Once the working class has its own organisations, has freedom to criticise etc., i.e. ‘democracy’ – the very existence of the bureaucracy is brought into question. In Poland there was the immediate demand for the removal of all the privileges of the bureaucracy. Therefore a period of any length with the proletariat having its own organisations and rights is impossible under Stalinism. There can be periods of dual power as existed for 14 months in Poland, but unless the political revolution is carried through a bureaucratic counter-revolution will triumph.
It is possible that certain improvements through decentralisation can be made although recent economic performances are dismal. A certain ‘fund of credit’ will still be extended by the Russian masses to see whether ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ result in any material benefits to them. But eventually it will be borne in on the mass of the working class that it is itself the only agent of renewing Russian society on socialist foundations.
The left of the British labour movement, and particularly the remnants of the ‘Communist’ Party, while criticising this or that aspect of Stalinism, are incapable of carrying through their analysis to a conclusion. To do so would lead them back to the immortal works of Leon Trotsky and the programme that he worked out for the political revolution. Basing himself on the four points of Lenin, Trotsky, in his monumental work, Revolution Betrayed gives us the most modern analysis of the events that are presently unfolding in the USSR and also outlined an alternative programme.
It is true that even in the USSR, Trotsky, the ‘non-person’, is once more the subject of discussion in the press. Some of his books, it seems, have been restored to Russian public libraries. It remains to be seen how far this process will go. But the bureaucracy, including the most liberal of the ‘liberal’ wing, while no longer able to avoid mentioning Trotsky, do it in such a way as to completely distort what he stood for.
Trotsky
One such article appeared in September in Pravda. Entitled ‘Demon of the Revolution’, it was a largely hostile and lying account of Trotsky’s record. But according to The Independent, it “clearly acknowledged Trotsky’s foresight”. It even quotes his commentary on fascism in 1938: ‘Fascism goes from victory to victory and finds its greatest support in Stalinism. Terrible warlike threats are knocking at the door of the Soviet Union and Stalin chooses this moment to do terrible damage to the army (this was the time of the worst military purges – PT). There will come a time when history will judge him.” Even Pravda’s perjured account of Trotsky’s role is forced to concede “‘one must give Trotsky his due. He did not break, like many others, under Stalin’s dictatorship.”
The article, it seems, is also an advance over previous explanations of the manner of his death: “One article a few months ago suggested that he had died in a car crash”. Now however the author of the Pravda article “gives an explicit account of how an agent of the GPU (the forerunner of the KGB) put an icepick through the revolutionary’s head at his home in Mexico City in 1940.” The Independent, 10 September 1988. But even if Trotsky’s writings, or at least some of them, were to be published, the literary Mafia at the disposal of the bureaucracy would be deployed to completely distort and undermine his teachings.
The kind of slanders that will be directed at Trotsky by the new ‘Red Professors’ surfaced in a ‘dialogue’ between leading ‘Communists’ in the September edition of the World Marxist Review. Ramirez of the Mexican CP, approving the rehabilitation of Bukharin, also stated: “I think the same should be done with regard to Leon Trotsky who never was a ‘fascist agent’ or an ‘imperialist mercenary’. We may accept or reject his views, but we cannot deny that Trotsky was a leader of the Bolshevik Party, head of the Petrograd Soviet and the man who commanded the Red Army. I believe an attempt is being made to re-evaluate his historical role properly, but one should move faster to re-habilitate Trotsky politically … Trotsky was politically slandered and then killed.”
But in reply Krasin, rector of the ‘Social Science Institute under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’, states bluntly: “Historians must, of course, adequately re-create his role in the October Revolution. But I don’t think this will mean Trotsky’s political rehabilitation. After all, the concepts he advocated stipulated the establishment in the USSR of what we now call a system of administration by fiat. In other words, paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, there is an inner affinity between Trotskyism and Stalinism; both relied exclusively on coercion and administration by fiat in running the country. I don’t think we can describe this as a positive attitude, for a political rehabilitation calls for just that.”*
Incapable of completely denying Trotsky’s great historical role, they wish to throw dust in the eyes of the new generation in the USSR. Nevertheless the best of the Russian working class, particularly the youth, will find the road to Trotsky’s writings which will be the theoretical weapons that will enable them to carve out a new socialist future.
Even the Morning Star, it is true in a niggardly and tardy fashion, have been forced to comment on the rehabilitation of the Old Bolsheviks murdered by Stalin. Thus on July 11 1988 in an item tucked away on the bottom of the back page, the Morning Star concedes “USSR redeems Bukharin and Rykov”. It has even mentioned the possibility of Trotsky’s rehabilitation. But there is absolutely no explanation of the comments of the Morning Star’s forerunner the Daily Worker at the time of the infamous purge trials which questioned “where is the shame in the detection and punishment of a counterrevolutionary plot, instigated by Trotsky and the Nazis,” Daily Worker, 31 August 1936. JR Campbell, infamous attorney for Stalinism, in the same issue of the Daily Worker, commented: “Stalin’s firmness and the fairness of the party majority who supported him not only saved the revolution; it put the revolution on impregnable socialist foundations. The peoples of the Soviet Union, viewing their transformed country, have every reason to rejoice under the leadership of Stalin … Why was it necessary for anyone to discredit Trotsky. Politically he was never so isolated and discredited as today.” Fifty-two years later very few remember the author of these lines but Trotsky is remembered. He is a towering figure to the working class, and particularly the youth, whose works will be drawn on to transform society.
If the adherents of the Morning Star were genuinely attempting to draw up a balance sheet of Stalinism they would ruthlessly examine their own shameful past, which in turn would reveal the analysis of Trotsky and the Trotskyists as being entirely borne out by the march of events. Only in the pages of the Militant and the MIR can the most conscientious and politically aware workers find an explanation for the tumultuous events which are developing in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Most of the left are either stuck in an historical cul-de-sac or have, with their traditional neglect of theory, abandoned any attempt to explain the processes unfolding in the USSR and Eastern Europe at the present time.
* For reasons of space we cannot reply here to these slanders by this new ‘Red Professor’. We will however reply fully in a future issue. In the meantime we would refer the reader to the book, Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For, by Alan Woods and Ted Grant.
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