[25 March 1988, pamphlet „Stalinism in Crisis“, p. 19-29]
The mighty events in Armenia just a few weeks ago have shaken the Stalinist regime represented by Gorbachev to its foundations. Never before, at least in its own ‘backyard’, has the bureaucratic elite which dominates Russian society faced a challenge on such a scale.
A mounting wave of mass protests demanding the return of the Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in neighbouring Azerbaijan, has engulfed Armenia. Five days of demonstrations, occupations, and mass meetings in the factories culminated in a colossal 1 million people gathering in the centre of Yerevan. The city’s population is 1.2 million and the ‘Republic of Armenia’ has only 3.5 million inhabitants!
At this first whiff of mass demonstrations, the ‘liberal’ Gorbachev immediately put into cold storage glasnost (openness). Foreign correspondents were prevented from visiting the area, in a desperate attempt to suppress reports. This prompted even the Moscow correspondent of the French Communist Party’s journal, l’Humanité, to publicly assail Gorbachev’s spokesperson and to ask what had become of glasnost. But despite this attempt to draw a veil of silence over the events, the reports of Russian dissidents on the spot, of Armenians abroad informed by relatives in Yerevan and some correspondents who were in the city at the time, a graphic picture has emerged of these convulsive events.
Just as Militant had predicted, Gorbachev’s attempt to carry through reforms from above in order to prevent revolution, political revolution, from below, has conjured up forces which represent a mortal threat to the rule of the bureaucracy. The very concept of glasnost has been seized on to air those grievances which have been festering just below the surface. One of the most explosive is undoubtedly the unresolved national problem. Only six months ago, in his book Perestroika, Gorbachev boldly claimed: ‘The revolution and socialism have done away with national oppression and inequality and ensured economic, intellectual and cultural progress for all nations and nationalities.’
The events in Armenia and the bloody repercussions in battles between Armenians and Azerbaijanis within Azerbaijan itself have resulted in more than 30 people being killed, according to official sources. This gives the lie to Gorbachev’s claims that socialism exists in Russia and that the national question has been resolved. On the contrary, the bureaucratic elite have not only failed to solve the national question, but through their totalitarian grip on society, they have guaranteed that it has re-emerged in an aggravated form in the past period. And yet Lenin’s policy on the national question, which Gorbachev claims to follow, is one of the eternal treasures of mankind. Without it, neither the Russian revolution, nor the creation of a federation of ‘United Soviet Socialist Republics’ would have been possible.
Tsarist Russia was a prison of nations. The Bolsheviks defended the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities of Russia, enshrined in the famous paragraph 9 of their constitution. This was opposed incorrectly even by the great Rosa Luxemburg, who believed that this represented a step backwards, particularly in the epoch of imperialism. Lenin fought an implacable struggle against all shades of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. He pointed out that it was impossible to win the confidence of the oppressed nationalities without proclaiming the right of self-determination.
The Bolshevik’s defence of self-determination did not mean that they became evangels of separation. At the same time as proclaiming the right, not the duty, of an oppressed nationality to separate from the oppressing nation, they also conducted a struggle for the union of nations, or states, in a socialist federation.
The Bolsheviks’ opponents accused Lenin of wishing the dismemberment of Russia. But as Trotsky pointed out: “This bold revolutionary formulation of the national problem won for the Bolshevik party the indestructible confidence of the small and oppressed peoples of Tsarist Russia.’
At the same time Lenin fought an implacable struggle against any taint of nationalism within the workers’ movement: ‘In contrast to the bickering among the different national bourgeois parties over questions of language etc., workers’ democracy puts forward the demand for absolute unity complete amalgamation in all workers’ organisations, trade unions, cooperatives, (consumers, educational and every other) to counter bourgeois nationalism of every kind.’ In other words, the struggle for the right of self-determination was combined with a ceaseless war against the slightest taint of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ within the workers’ organisations.
What a contrast to those little sects who claim to support Lenin’s ideas but advocate ‘black sections’ and other schismatic ideas which divide and separate workers instead of uniting them. A gulf separates Lenin’s approach to the national problem from that of his alleged heir, Gorbachev. Lenin pointed out that above all the workers of Great Russia in taking power must scrupulously recognise the right of self-determination, up to and including secession, of the former oppressed nationalities in the former Tsarist empire. Thus the separation of Finland from Russia was accepted by the Bolsheviks. But such sensitivity on the national question was foreign to the bureaucracy which gradually usurped power, personified in the rise of Stalin. This in turn resulted from the isolation of the Russian revolution, its cultural backwardness and the lag of the world revolution.
It was not at all accidental that Lenin’s last political struggle was against the ‘Great Russian chauvinism’ of Stalin and the bureaucratic elite which he represented. This was manifested in particular in the treatment of Georgia at the hands of Stalin and his clique. Stalin was attempting, prematurely in Lenin’s view, to rush through a forced unification with Georgia, in the process trampling on the national sensitivity of the Georgian workers and peasants. One of Stalin’s sidekicks, Ordzhonikidze, actually hit one of the Georgian oppositionists, which in turn prompted Lenin to demand his expulsion from the Party.
These manifestations of Great Russian chauvinism were merely pinpricks compared to the hooligan and brutal repression deployed against different nationalities with the consolidation of the totalitarian bureaucratic regime. Trotsky pointed out that the ‘bureaucratic degeneration of the state rested like a millstone upon the national policy’. Notwithstanding this, the Russian bureaucracy to some extent carried out certain progressive work in the sphere of national policy. But as Trotsky pointed out this was ‘with immoderate overhead expenses’.
New nations were created where none existed before. ‘The bureaucracy’s ‘progressive mission’ consisted in carrying out those tasks which the effete Russian capitalists had been incapable of accomplishing. To some extent even pre-capitalist tasks, such as the invention of alphabets for some more backward peoples, were undertaken by the bureaucracy.
Despite his implacable hostility to the bureaucratic elite, Trotsky pointed out ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of this work of raising up new human strata’. Thus only through the revolution did the Oriots, inhabitants of Siberia, learn how to use a bath! In a matter of decades, areas such as Central Asia have been dragged out of the Middle Ages with a colossal development of industry, science and technique. Tashkent for instance is a big modern city. But in the process the Stalinist bureaucracy never hesitated to trample on the democratic rights of the nationalities of the ‘USSR’.
In the immediate pre-war period this was manifested in particular by Stalin’s treatment of the Ukraine. A quarter of the Ukrainian peasantry were wiped out through forced collectivisation. Growth of national sentiment of the Ukrainian people, under the heel both of capitalist Poland and of Stalin, led Trotsky to the conclusion that it was necessary for Marxists to put themselves at the head of such a movement. He boldly proclaimed the slogan of an ‘independent soviet Ukraine’. By fighting for an independent Ukraine, a soviet one, that is with the domination of democratic workers’ and peasants’ councils, it would be possible to lead the workers’ and peasants’ movement in opposition both to imperialism and the Russian bureaucracy. An independent Soviet Ukraine would be a step towards a socialist federation.
Trotsky’s approach provides a key to solving the national question in Russia today. He pointed out that the very development of Russian society would inevitably bring the national question back onto the agenda, given the domination of the totalitarian bureaucratic elite: ‚The more considerable the development of a given national group, or the higher the sphere of its cultural creation, or again the more closely it grapples with the problems of society and personality, the more heavy and intolerable becomes the pressure of the bureaucracy.’ Today living standards in Armenia are higher than in Moscow and Leningrad.
In Russia the national question is not properly speaking a question of the oppression of one nationality by another, but the oppression by a centralised police apparatus over the cultural development of all nations, starting with the Great Russians themselves.
Stalin’s legacy has left enormous unresolved problems in the national sphere. His insane and paranoiac suspicion that some nations had collectively collaborated with the Nazis led to the monstrous persecution and deportation of the Crimean Tatars, the Volga Germans, the Chechens and the Sudetenland Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War. Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of treason. In 1944 the whole nation was deported from the bountiful Crimea into the deserts and arid lands of Central Asia. Forty six per cent of the Crimean Tatars perished as a result. They nevertheless mounted an heroic and stubborn campaign for restoration of their national rights. After a long, bitter and sometimes violent campaign, a commission headed by Gromyko has been set up to explore the Tatar question once more. Nevertheless, the Tatars in Gorbachev’s ‘socialist’ Russia are denied the right to resettle in the Crimea.
Moreover it is not just Armenia that has recently witnessed nationalist demonstrations and disturbances. So have the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In December 1986, riots broke out in the Asian republic of Kazakhstan, resulting in some deaths, for which two students were shot. Serious riots also took place in the same republic in the city of Tselinograd in 1979. The riots arose partly from a struggle between the Kazakh bureaucratic elite and the central bureaucracy in Moscow. In the process an example of Great Russian chauvinism and the Kazakh population’s bitter hostility to it was revealed.
Top Kazakh bureaucratic gangster Kunayev, in a desperate attempt to maintain his private fiefdom and to avoid the cutting down of his corrupt regime, resisted Gorbachev’s reforms. By bureaucratic fiat he was replaced by a Great Russian, Gennady Kolbin. The Kazakh bureaucracy, obviously leaning on their population, whipped up anti-Russian sentiment which broke out into bloody riots. A similar conflict has taken place in a number of the Central Asian republics. In the process corruption on a Gargantuan scale has come to light.
In Uzbekistan the most extensive example of corruption has come to light in the struggle between the central bureaucracy and the Uzbek gangsters. Pravda has revealed that in this republic of 19 million people, the country’s biggest cotton producer, ‘a vast system of organised crime, racketeers, “underground millionaires” and professional killers’ have operated. Three people, including a former minister, have been executed because of the scandal. A total of £4 billion was skimmed off state funds by padding out annual production figures. The KGB only discovered the extent of the scandal when they found that inflated Uzbek cotton production figures did not tally with satellite pictures of the actual harvest on the ground!
The Liturachanaya [? Literaturnaya?] Gazeta described how a farm boss in Uzbekistan had 15 country houses, a stable of the finest horses, a mobile kitchen with a lamb always ready for slaughter and numerous mistresses. On ‘his’ extensive lands, where 30,000 people lived, this bureaucrat had built an underground administrative complex, using the labour of workers he wished to punish. He had killed and tortured his disobedient ‘subjects’. All of this in the name of ‘socialism’!
The events in Armenia show that national protests will fuse and be fuelled by the resistance to the bureaucracy’s rule. The political revolution in Hungary in 1956, and the upheavals in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and recently in Poland underline this. In all these cases the elements of resistance to national oppression and threats from the Russian bureaucracy fused with a movement to overthrow the bureaucratic elite and establish workers’ democracy. Moreover, as Trotsky pointed out, the nationalism of workers and peasants is often merely the ‘outer shell of an immature Bolshevism’.
The bitter and bloody history of the Armenian people means that they are extremely sensitive to the violation of their national feelings. Between one and a half and two million Armenians were massacred in 1915 under the Turkish Ottoman empire, in the first case of genocide of the twentieth century. In 1922 there were bloody clashes between Armenians, who are of Christian origin, and the Azerbaijanis, who are Shi-ite Muslims of Turkish origin. They resulted in 30,000 Armenians and half as many Azerbaijanis being slaughtered. By 1923 70,000 remained in Armenia while others were forced to flee to Europe and America. The three and a half million who now live in Armenia only account for half the world’s Armenian population. There are 800,000 in the US, 400,000 in France, 250,000 in Iran, 200,000 in Lebanon and 15,000 in Britain. Somewhat perversely the Nagorno-Karabakh (Nagorno means mountainous in Russian) was incorporated into Azerbaijan in 1923, even though 80 per cent of its 160,000 population are Armenians. Given the region’s history, this was bound to be a running sore.
On the basis of workers’ democracy in Russia the population of this area would in all probability have been satisfied with autonomy within Azerbaijan. National hostility would have sunk into the background and eventually disappeared. A democratic workers’ state in Azerbaijan and Armenia and throughout the USSR would allow the population themselves to decide their own state forms.
Lenin pointed out many times that not just the right of self-determination but the widest autonomy, even for the smallest group of people, would be conceded by a workers’ government. But for the central bureaucracy and the bureaucracy of Azerbaijan and Armenia, defence of their privileged position takes precedence over any of the national aspirations of the Armenian people.
The demand for the return of Nagorno-Karabakh is long-standing. But recently two factors have brought the issue to a head. On the one side, by lifting the lid on the pressure cooker of Russian society, Gorbachev has aroused the expectations of the oppressed nationalities. At the same time, the Armenian elite have leaned on their own population in their conflict with the Russian bureaucracy, which has stimulated this national revolt but gone far beyond the limits that they had prescribed.
The present upheavals were prepared by demonstrations and meetings in October 1987. Initially the issue was not Nagorno-Karabakh, but mass protests and demonstrations demanding the shutting down of dangerous chemical plants and a nuclear power station. With the example of Chernobyl fresh in the minds of the population, the fear of another nuclear catastrophe and the bureaucratic hooliganism of the elite on these issues prompted these demonstrations.
At the same time Pravda, as the organ of the central bureaucracy, carried articles denouncing the ‘Party elite’ in Armenia. It particularly concentrated its fire on top bureaucrat Dermirchyan, who was blamed for huge scandals in health care and pollution.
Gorbachev’s creatures attacked the Armenian bosses but were shouted down in a party meeting in October. Pravda’s riposte was ‘they (the party elite) could not believe that a normal, sober-minded person would dare challenge the consolidated ranks of nomenclatura’. The nomenclatura is a list of those deemed suitable for the top bureaucratic jobs. The Armenian bureaucracy demanded in turn the punishment of ‘those journalists’ of Pravda.
Typifying the Russian economy as a whole, Armenia has suffered economic stagnation in the recent period. It is the smallest of the 15 republics in the USSR, but an extra 400,000 jobs are needed in order to absorb migration of the rural population into its cities. The noisy agitation for the return of the Karabakh found enormous echoes both within the enclave and throughout Armenia. Demonstrations began in the Karabakh with mass meetings in factories, workplaces, on the farms, etc. This fused with a mass demonstration from Abovyan, a town near Yerevan, in protest at the opening of a synthetic rubber factory.
Such is the outrage at the air pollution in Armenia, that in 1986 350 Armenian intellectuals addressed an open letter to Gorbachev, calling for immediate action to eliminate serious health problems which they attributed to toxic emissions from chemical plants and leaks from nuclear power stations in 1986. When the demonstrators from Aboyvan reached Yerevan with petitions demanding that the plant should not be opened, they secured a temporary victory. The marchers were then joined by nationalist demonstrators seeking the immediate return of Nagorno-Karabakh. Thus the movement began as a combination of nationalist protest and demonstrations against the arbitrary rule of the bureaucracy. This in turn led to the sacking of the Communist Party chief in the Karabakh for ‘shortcomings in his work’.
On 11 February, the local ‘parliament’ of the Karabakh, that is the ‘soviet’, in effect the hand-picked representatives of the elite, voted by 110 out of 140 for union with Armenia! This triggered work stoppages, strikes, occupations and demonstrations throughout Armenia and particularly in Yerevan itself.
Gorbachev in his attempt to cut down the ‘illegal’ privileges of the bureaucratic elite, as opposed to the ‘legal’ lavish lifestyle of the bureaucracy, has tried to base himself on such local ‘soviets’ as a whip against the middle layers of the bureaucracy. Yet here in the Karabakh the decision of the ‘soviet’, obviously supported by 95 per cent of the area’s population, is denounced by Gorbachev.
Demonstrations which swept Yerevan were under the slogan of ‘One people, one republic’ and ‘Self-determination is not treason’. Such was the scale of the protests that The Times reported one resident commenting: ‘The whole city centre is completely packed, I have never seen anything like it.’ Initially the demonstrators were carrying pictures of Gorbachev. But after his appearance on TV, they threw them to the ground. Gorbachev’s radio and TV appearance calling for calm was an unprecedented development, the first time that he had made such an appeal. Moreover, the local bureaucracy led by Demirchyan, having first of all leaned on the masses, now desperately appealed for calm also. Demirchyan appeared before a mass meeting declaring: “You’re not working, so who will pay your wages? What will your families eat?’, only to be whistled off the podium.
The scale of the movement and the effect it had on observers was reflected in the British press. A Briton from Berkshire commented to The Times: ‘It was one of the most amazing sights I have ever seen. On virtually every road into the city, groups marching under banners have been walking towards the centre of the demonstration, which is outside the Opera. At night, the protestors are being put up in a vast network of private apartments, ready to resume their demonstrations. We know for certain that many have walked for 20 miles or more to get here. And even this morning we could see more groups heading past our hotel, which is about half a kilometre from the site.’
After seeing the film of the demonstration in Yerevan, a US correspondent commented: ‘It is clear that this is not a problem that is going to go away. Those people looked as though they had sensed their own power.’ But the most illuminating comments were made by a Russian dissident, who produces a journal called Glasnost. He was present in Yerevan at the time. ‘With little self organisation,’he pointed out, ‘a million people kept order perfectly. It was an unprecedented week of freedom and democracy for the whole people.’ He likened the demonstrations and mood of the working class in Yerevan to that during the ‘sit-in’ at the Gdańsk shipyards in 1980.
A small organising committee had been improvised in the course of the movement. As with the Petöfi Circle of writers and artists in the Hungarian revolution, this was composed in the main of ‘respected cultural and scientific figures’. The demonstration was exemplary in its discipline and order, ‘Whenever people started jostling and there was a risk of losing order, the demonstrators sat down.’
Alcohol was strictly prohibited. One hundred Afghan war veterans of Armenian origin pledged to give back their medals if Nagorno-Karabakh were not returned to Armenia. Private car drivers shuttled food to the people who were too tightly packed in the square and streets to leave. Money was collected to finance the protests. The police had disappeared from the streets and yet there was no outbreak of crime and violence. The police in fact commented that not one single crime had been perpetrated in Yerevan in the course of the week long protest.
In the face of such a movement it is easy to imagine the terror which must have gripped the Kremlin lords. One false move and a social explosion could have ignited in Armenia which could have triggered similar movements throughout the whole of the region and spread into Great Russia itself.
It is clear that the ‘liberal’ Gorbachev had contingency plans for the use of troops. Airport workers witnessed paratroopers and other troops being rushed into the region. However the use of force in such a situation would have triggered off an uprising. But Gorbachev found support from an unexpected quarter. The very leaders of the moment, such as Sylva Kaputikyan, a poetess, and Zori Babayan, a literary critic, flew to Moscow to meet Gorbachev. They were of a similar social type as the leaders of KOR, who played such a baleful role in derailing the Polish revolution.
They assured the vast crowds in Yerevan after their meeting that Gorbachev had promised that the Armenian claim to Karabakh would be ‘justly solved’. The demonstrations were called off with Gorbachev given a month to settle the issue. Here had been an opportunity, at the height of the struggle, to generalise, broaden and deepen the movement of the masses in Armenia. All that was required was for the movement of the working class and the peasants to be given an organised form.
Committees had sprung up in the workplaces. The outline of real soviets, workers’ and peasants’ councils, had been created. If this had been linked to the idea of the election of all officials and the right of recall, the elimination of bureaucratic privileges, with the average official receiving no more than the wage of a skilled worker – in other words the four conditions that Lenin laid down for a healthy workers’ state in 1917 – this would have marked the beginnings of the political revolution.
This would have meant the beginning of the end of the rule of the bureaucracy not just in Armenia but throughout the whole of Russia. As it is Gorbachev is on the horns of a very uncomfortable dilemma. To grant claims of the Armenian people for the return of the Karabakh would inflame Azerbaijan and lead to a growth of national conflict in the region. It would be vigorously opposed by the Azerbaijani wing of the bureaucracy, whose main concern is to defend their ‘territory’, on which they believe their power, prestige and income is based.
Failure to satisfy the Armenians however, will result in further upheavals in the area. But on a bureaucratic basis it is completely impossible to solve the national problem, either in Armenia or the many other problems throughout the Russian ‘federation’.
It is the will, the desire and demands of the population of the Karabakh which should first and foremost determine whether it should link up with Armenia or not. How to ascertain the will of the population? There is no way except through a democratically conducted referendum or elections to a representative ‘constituent assembly’ which could reflect the will of the masses.
Fifty years ago Trotsky pointed out in Revolution Betrayed that: ‘Cultural demands of the nations aroused by the revolution require the widest possible autonomy. At the same time, industry can successfully develop only by subjecting all parts of the Union to a general centralised plan … Although there can be no once-and-for-all formula to resolve the problem, still there is the resilient will of the interested masses themselves … Only their actual participation in the administration of their own destinies can at each new stage draw the necessary lines between the legitimate demands of economic centralism and the living gravitations of national culture.’
Trotsky’s profound comments retain their full force for Russia today. Not just in Russia but throughout Eastern Europe the national question has re-emerged In Yugoslavia, it is even threatening to break up the country. The dominant Serb-Slovene bureaucracy denies the demands of the Albanian population in Kosovo, even for autonomy within a Yugoslav federation. The right of autonomy and self-determination is enshrined in the Yugoslav constitution, but woe betide any nation that threatens to move in this direction, thus undermining the position of the bureaucracy. The demand for a socialist and autonomous Kosovo, as a step to an independent soviet Albania, is one that would capture the support of the mass of the population in this area.
The Rumanian bureaucracy denies full national rights to the Hungarian minority. The Bulgarian regime has pursued a policy of forced ‘Bulgarianisation’ against the Turkish minority. In every state of Eastern Europe, with the exception of Poland and East Germany, the national question remains unresolved.
In Russia itself, the national question is emerging not just in the backward areas in the east, but even in those with a higher living standard than Russia itself, such as in the Baltic states. There is opposition to ‘Russification’ in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia. Recent demonstrations have been called to mark the anniversary of the infamous Stalin-Ribbentrop pact, in which the bureaucracy in consort with the Nazi regime gobbled up the Baltic states in 1939. In some of these areas there has been large-scale immigration of Russians. The population has expressed no racial animosity to the Russians but to the policy of the central bureaucracy in imposing the Russian language on the peoples of the area.
Obviously in a country, a sub-continent, such as Russia with more than 100 nationalities a common language would be necessary for conducting commerce and relations within the federation. At the same time a democratic, healthy workers’ state would show the most extreme sensitivity to the national languages of each of the republics, in the autonomous regions and nationalities of Russia, giving them parity in all respects with Russian.
The central bureaucracy in Moscow, however, has sought to impose the Russian language on the peoples of the USSR. Thus Latvian ‘Communist’ Party meetings must be conducted in Russian. Such a policy and programme is inevitable on basis of the totalitarian grip of the bureaucracy. But the Armenian revolt shows that the incapacity of the bureaucracy to solve the national question in Russia and Eastern Europe will be one of the factors which will serve to undermine its rule.
In Eastern Europe they have even been incapable of carrying through a degree of unification which has been attained by the capitalist Common Market. Each bureaucracy has to develop its own industry, steel and manufacturing base, upon which its power, prestige and income rests.
A socialist federation, in which the mutual confidence and trust of the working class would be pre-eminent, would immediately eliminate the harmful replication which takes place under the rule of the autocratic bureaucracy. Without any danger of the domination of one ‘nationality’ by another, in a society of human solidarity, an enormous collaboration for the benefit of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia would unfold.
On the basis of their experience, this perspective will be more and more understood by the mass of the populations of Russia and Eastern Europe. The Armenian events signify that Russia is entering the epoch of the political revolution. In 1956 it was possible to use backward peasant troops from Siberia and central Asia to suppress the Hungarian commune on the basis of lies to these troops that they were going to suppress a ‘fascist uprising’.
It was possible to threaten military intervention from Russia against the threatening political revolution in Poland in 1980-1. But it will be impossible to use the troops of Eastern Europe and Russia against a movement of the working class, particularly one that will unfold in the major working class centres of Leningrad and Moscow. The dramatic events in Armenia in the past month signify that the era of the political revolution has opened up in Russia itself.
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