I am presently working on my on
version of an assessment of the fall of the Soviet Union .
I have already posted What
the Russian Revolution achieved and why it degenerated and now I am posting this. I hope I can draw some useful
information from that last article and this one. While I may disagree with some
of what is in these assessments, I have found a lot to agree with. They are both
well thought out assessments. So here is an assessment from the Communist
Party of Britain. –SJ Otto
Category: Analysis & Briefings
Published:
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
Introduction
As the culmination of an inner-party discussion, the 41st
Congress of the Communist Party of Britain reconvened in November 1992 and
adopted the resolution Assessing the Collapse of the Soviet
Union . This remains the basis of the party's view of
what went wrong in the Soviet Union - and in
most important respects the other socialist societies of eastern Europe - and
why the attempts to renew and save the socialist system failed. It also
represents a qualitative development in our analysis from the resolution of our
party's Executive Committee in May 1956, following revelations at the 20th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union about the Stalin period,
and the article and pamphlet by former General Secretary John Gollan, Socialist
Democracy - Some Problems (1976); both of these documents were critical of
important aspects of the Soviet system, and self-critical of our own party's
acquiescence.
Now is an appropriate time to reprint this Congress
resolution. The Soviet Union has ceased to
exist as such; it has broken up into separate republics, a process
characterised by ethnic and national conflict, war and discrimination. Boris
Yeltsin's drive to transform Russia into a privatised, capitalist 'free market'
economy and society has run into a ditch; small groups of millionaires and
gangsters control whole sectors of commerce and industry; millions of workers
are unemployed and many millions more receive no
wages; the state is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy despite tens of
billions of dollars from the International Monetary Fund; the rouble has lost
much of its value and people's savings are almost worthless; homelessness,
begging and prostitution are rife. The advisors, investors and
speculators from the capitalist countries have made a killing in every sense of
the word. Thirty million Russians voted Communist in the 1997 presidential
elections, with millions of others turning to extreme right-wing and
authoritarian parties out of desperation ... but Yeltsin has shamelessly used
the power of the state and Western assistance to hang on.
The collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet
Union and eastern Europe also set off a new wave of reaction
around the world. Capitalism proclaimed its eternal victory in the battle of
ideas, the `end of history' had supposedly arrived and a 'new world order'
established. Supported by their respective states, the capitalist monopolies
(notably the transnational corporations or TNCs) reaped the profit from
sweeping privatisation, mass redundancy, cuts in social and welfare programmes
and other attacks on working class rights and living standards.
The imperialist countries kept their nuclear weapons, pushed
NATO eastwards and - led by the US
- assumed the right to bomb and invade any, nation that stepped out of line. At
the same time, rivalries between the imperialist powers and their TNCs have
intensified, demonstrating that capitalism remains a system wracked by
contrrdiction and crisis.
According to our analysis of what went wrong under
socialism, the young Soviet state faced two enormous and fundamental problems:
firstly, it had to try to build socialism in an underdeveloped,
semi-capitalist empire which
still suffered many of the legacies of feudalism; secondly, it had to attempt
this task whilst surrounded by hostile imperialist powers. Despite all the
efforts of Communists and progressives in the advanced capitalist countries,
these powers inflicted three crippling wars on the Soviet
Union : the war of intervention from 1918, the fascist invasion
from 1941, and the Cold War from the mid-1940s.
But we do not accept that the collapse was inevitable due to
the conditions in which the 1917 October Socialist Revolution took place - that
'socialism in one country' was impossible, even in these difficult
circumstances. We certainly cannot accept that building socialism was
impossible in the new situation that developed in eastern Europe and China after
1945.
Nor do we subscribe to the idea that the US Central
Intelligence Agency and its 'front' organisations, in alliance with reactionary
exiles and dissident anti-socialist and nationalist elements, brought about the
collapse. Their long-running efforts may have made things worse, and perhaps
even accelerated the final crisis, but that was only possible because the
foundations and structures of the Soviet system were already crumbling.
Our Congress sought to identify the main errors and mistakes
which enabled this to occur. Some points were
elaborated in an editorial in the Communist Party of Britain's theoretical and
discussion journal, the Communist Review (No. 26, Autumn/ Winter 1997).
For example, concerning the Soviet Union 's
economic and industrial performance: over long periods, idealism and
dedication, the impetus of war and reconstruction, the intrinsic advantages of
economic planning all combined to produce rates of economic growth up to twice
and even three times those of advanced capitalist countries. But from the late
1950s, the level of investment growth began to fall; economic output growth
rates declined dramatically from 1960 as the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the developed capitalist economies
widened.
Fundamental problems of how to secure innovation, to apply
new technology across a wide range of industries and services, to raise labour
productivity humanely in a socialist society which commits itself to full
employment, were not solved.
Quality was sacrificed to quantity, inefficiencies and waste
were overlooked, mistakes were covered up and records falsified as fulfilment
of the plan became the sole measure of performance for each enterprise and for
whole Ministries.
The imposition from above of 'one-man management' in each
enterprise negated any notion of workers' control or self-management.
Moreover, we have to continue to examine a number of
pertinent historical questions in the light of new information: did the
industrial `Great Leap Forward' from 1928 take place because of - or despite -
the reign of mounting conformity and coercion? What precisely was the
contribution made by the collectivisation of the peasantry: did the immediate
and longer-term positive effects outweigh the immediate and longer-term
negative ones, both politically and economically?
There were also serious deficiencies in the treatment of
vital democratic questions.
For instance, the national question was not solved despite
announcements to the contrary. Lenin's advice to compensate the small
nationalities for the historical injustices suffered at the hands of Great
Russian chauvinism, to show the greatest sensitivity to national feelings, was
not heeded. As the party exercised ever-tighter centralised control over the constituent
republics, regions and areas, Stalin's Russian Soviet
Federal Socialist
Republic (the
'autonomisation' rejected by Lenin) was established in deeds if not in words.
The democratic rights and patriotic feelings of many nationalities were
violated by forced transfers of territory and population, by processes of
`Russification' instead of the assimilation of migrant workers into the local
population and schools, and by the restoration under Stalin of some of the
symbols, 'heroes' and insignia of Imperial Russia.
Soviet laws and proclamations concerning the equality of the
sexes did not reflect the reality: women were not fully liberated from the
burdens of unplanned pregnancy or the drudgery of housework. They worked what
we now call the 'double shift' -outside the home as well as inside. The
relatively high proportion of women in parliamentary forums did not progress to
the highest levels; the party and State leadership was almost entirely male
right to the end. Professions where women made much more headway than in
capitalist countries - in scientific and educational work for example - lost
some of their status and income differentials as a consequence.
Therefore a potentially dynamic force for the defence of
socialism - women - was never fully developed.
Nor could the battle of ideas have been waged in the most
effective way in each generation. With the working class excluded from a
genuine mass role in the administration of industry and the state, with neither
the party nor the trades unions winning workers to Marxism and in turn being
enriched by their experiences and class alignment, and with the party
exercising state power as a bureaucratic-centralist organisation,
Marxism-Leninism was distorted into a dogma and adopted as a state religion. It
became associated in people's minds with slogans, formulations and devices to
justify, glorify and misrepresent the status quo. Instead of utilising Marxism
in order to understand and solve the problems of building socialism, with all
the clashes of viewpoint that characterise genuinely free Marxist debate,
theoreticians and political leaders proclaimed the achievement of 'developed
socialism'; indeed, it was even proclaimed under Brezhnev that the Soviet Union
had entered the stage of 'perfecting' developed socialism as the immediate
preparation for the transition to the higher stage of communism.
In relation to the serious violations of socialist democracy
during the Stalin period, there was some debate in the Communist Party of
Britain as to whether the term 'crimes' was appropriate in the Congress
resolution. A minority, as it turned out, felt that it was too strong and could
only help the enemies of Communism. However, the opening up of CPSU, Comintern
and Soviet state archives provides an uncontestable mass of evidence that
enormous and brutal crimes were indeed committed by the party and state
leadership in the 1930s and 1940s; that Stalin bore a heavy and direct personal
responsibility for many of them; and that many thousands - hundreds of
thousands if not millions - of the victims were loyal Communists and Soviet
citizens.
Those crimes were a shameful blot on the proud history of
the Communist movement, and they must not be denied or covered up with the
excuse that great economic and cultural advances were also made during the
Stalin period. Attempts in some quarters to revive the Stalin cult will not
raise our movement's credibility in the eyes of people who are committed to
democratic and human rights and who believe in honesty and truth.
To frankly identify the problems, shortcomings and mistakes
of socialism as it actually existed is not to belittle the great historic gains
of the socialist experience. We certainly did not do so in the past, and we
should not do so now.
As our 41st Congress resolution pointed out, large-scale
industry was developed which - among other things - laid the basis for the
defeat of fascism, thereby saving the whole of humanity from unprecedented
tyranny and genocide. There were massive advances in education and culture. The
frontiers of science were extended in dramatic fashion; sweeping improvements
in health, housing and social services transformed the lives of hundreds of
millions of people. Women threw off many of the shackles forged by feudal and
religious customs and beliefs. Whole peoples acquired a written culture and
national consciousness as the Tsarist `prison-house of nations' was demolished.
Around the world, peoples struggling for national liberation and against
imperialism received invaluable assistance from the Socialist community.
Were we to draw up a balance sheet, the positive features of
the socialist experience would far outweigh the negative ones. But we must
learn the lessons from the problems, the mistakes and the reasons for the
downfall.
Communists can learn from going back to Marxist-Leninist
basics, provided we do so in a Marxist-Leninist way: critically and
analytically.
In particular, the last writings of Lenin on bureaucracy,
co-operation and the national question will repay study. Much of what Lenin
said and wrote is enormously instructive and perceptive. For example, he urged
a combination of boldness and careful training to overcome bureaucratic inertia
- the party's Central Committee should be at least doubled in size by the
election of new members who 'must be people closer to being rank-and-file
workers and peasants'; in addition, between 75 and 100 workers and peasants
should be elected to the Central Control Commission, and given sweeping powers
to check the work of party and state officials at the highest level.
It is significant that Lenin's solution to problems of
bureaucratic conservatism, careerism and party leadership manoeuvring began
with a turn to the working people and their most advanced sections.
But even in Lenin's prescriptions, might there not also have
been the seeds of future mistakes? For instance, when he proposed the merger of
a part of the party's apparatus - the Central Control Commission -.with a
section of the state apparatus (the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate), was
he departing from what should have been an inviolable principle in all but the
most exceptional circumstances, namely the separation of party and state
machinery?
When he advocated federalism but emphasised the role that
'party authority' should play in holding the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics together - should he not have foreseen the danger of a form of Great
Russian chauvinism emerging under this pretext?
These questions and this analysis are presented in a spirit
of Marxist-Leninist inquiry. Having defeated revisionism in the Communist Party
in Britain
in the recent past, we stand firm in our commitment to socialist revolution.
There endures an international Communist movement of which
the Communist Party of Britain is proud to be a part: we have comradely
relations with more than 60 working class parties and national liberation
movements around the world, including the Communist Party of the Russian
Federation. We each have our own ruling class to overthrow - but we are aware
of the important role that international solidarity plays in the economic and
political class struggle.
We are confident that the Communist and workers' parties can
and must play the leading role in making the 21st century the one in which
socialism finally triumphs over moribund, corrupt, anti-human and anti-planet
capitalism. *
Robert Griffiths
General Secretary
Communist Party ofBritain
September 1998
General Secretary
Communist Party of
September 1998
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