Assessing the Collapse of the Soviet Union

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 of Britain
September 1998